Wasted potential
Ninja Gaiden Z opens up with a thrilling cutscene depicting the nefarious demon ninja Yaiba Kamikaze taking on series favorite Ryu Hayabusa in a picturesque duel amidst a bamboo field. The encounter doesn't end well for Yaiba, losing not only the fight but half his body in the process in a perfect "you don't know you're already dead" freeze frame moment. This initial high octane encounter with irreverent humor and flashy visuals sets the tone for how the rest of Z plays out - colorful, over the top and holding nothing back. It's a shame that the actual gameplay fails to match the pace as the tiny kernel of promise in this otherwise flawed side story fails to materialize.
Ostensibly a character action game, Ninja Gaiden Z is mechanically all over the place. Yaiba now outfitted with cyborg limbs has access to a wide range of attacks and combos conveniently mapped to each corresponding color coded face button. There are combo strings, dodges and counters much like a typical character action affair plays out. Sadly the structure of the game more often than not forces your hand in how to approach your adversaries. While you have access to various combinations of your Sword, Flail and Fist, tougher enemies will block or blow through your offensive with relative ease forcing a hasty retreat and hit and run tactics. The beginning levels are deceptively fun as the game throws basic fodder for you to experiment on and relish in the ensuing carnage of flashy combos and gruesome executions. The moment element based "elites" enter the fray your options begin to shrink away and you're forced into a very specific dance. Yaiba is a game cleverly built around rock, paper, scissor mechanics tied to subweapon. There are several elements like fire, electricity and acid that combine to make unique and often devastating effects. Shooting acid at an electric enemy will entomb them inside a crystal that you can then easily shatter with your robotic fist. Combining electricity with fire will result in a wild firestorm that rages through the map killing anything in it's wake. These combinations don't necessarily make sense but in order to survive you'll need to learn how to make them work to your advantage as elite enemies are sponges for basic attacks. Yaiba also doesn't feature any sort of healing items in the game world. The only way to regain health is to execute enemies, which incidentally is also how you acquire their elementally tinged weapons. In any other game this would be an interesting risk reward situation - health through aggressive play - but in the case of Yaiba all roads eventually lead to frustration. You'll often be swarmed with two or more types of elites that take a long time to bring down with regular sword swipes but they in turn can melt through your health in seconds. With only elites on the field your only option to replenish health is to take down said elites, and so you begin cheap hit and run tactics to just get that one execution. It's just not balanced really well where very often you're backed into a corner of no return, and even the longest multi wave encounters only checkpoint at the very beginning.
All things considered, Ninja Gaiden Z is a rather short game. With only 7 primary missions and a final end boss stage there isn't all that much to it. Yaiba makes his way through a zombie outbreak constantly on the trail of Hayabusa in stages that range from ruined cities, sewers, secret labs and even giant mobile bases. The levels themselves are rather straight forward with a few environmental puzzles introduced early on and an emphasis on arena combat in the latter parts of the game. There are health and elemental buffing collectibles to be on the lookout for as well as a skill tree that seems somewhat bare bones for this type of game, leaning towards alleviating the games inherent annoyances like the "ability" to win button mashing mini games easier than actually interesting or useful abilities. The few story bits you can find are best left unread and much of the general plot is D-grade camp that misses way more than it lands - although one could argue it never lands at all. Yet despite all these faults I do think somewhere deep inside there was a good game there that didn't get the attention it needed to thrive. Yaiba has a ton of cool combos at his disposal but the combat seems unbalanced and frustrating. Everything seems to favor style over substance as at times there is so much happening on the screen that simply finding yourself in the carnage is a challenge. The presentation is actually rather interesting with cell shaded thick outlines and a cartoony aesthetic that mixes visceral attacks with cartoon quirkiness quite effectively. While acrobatically scaling sheer walls and swinging your way from point to point using your bionic arm is mechanically executed through basic Quick Time Events, it still manages to look really cool thanks to the cinematic framing of the camera. Executions are always fun and ripping your enemies apart only to use their leftover bits as special weapons similarly never gets old. Dying to an enemy on the fifth wave of an arena encounter and having to start from the very beginning very much does. Getting nearly one shot killed from full health by basic elites at the tail end of the game is similarly tiring. The final boss features several phases, a few insta-kill attacks and waves upon waves of enemies that force you to kill in specific ways to advance your way to the end.. and should you die at any point you are forced to start from the very beginning and worse yet are even forced to listen to the small boss-speech as an added insult to injury. Bosses are constantly recycled throughout the different areas and there are a whopping TWO of them. The overall story is not even worth mentioning and side characters are grating in their attempts at humor, although Miss Monday despite her vampy appearance did eventually grow on me by the end.
Yet... I still actually hunkered down and finished this game. The final boss took me over 3 attempts and each time I had to go through every single phase, yet I still kept going for whatever reason. There is something alluring in this over the top presentation that I think could genuinely work if a lot of nuts and bolts got tightened down. As it stands Yaiba is an exhausting game that is hard to recommend to either fans of the Ninja Gaiden franchise or character action game enthusiasts.