Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z

This game might just be too odd for its own good. The story is a bit ridiculous, the gameplay repetitive beyond comprehension and overall quite lacking. The hacking and slashing part works fine, though an unhealthy amount of frame drops and weird camera angles make for an overall very frustrating experience.

There are some decent things going on in Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. The cel-shaded art style is appealing, the dialogue and cutscenes are occasionally entertaining, and even the combat is fun at times. But the frustrating camera, aggravating controls and a nonsensical story that only briefly touches upon the themes of the series, weigh this spinoff title down too much for it to be enjoyable.

Most of the game feels like a cheap slog through enemies that won’t die.

I can't believe what a disaster this game is. [June 2014, p.64]

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z does not appeal neither to fans of Ninja Gaiden or those who enjoy the genre. Finishing a game is, normally, mostly fun, Ninja Gaiden Z transform this into a painful task.

Ninja Gaiden Z is an exceptionally intriguing spin-off in premise alone. The thought of playing as someone who actually hunts the series’ protagonist is original, but the execution just isn’t there.

They wanted to give the IP as much space as possible from this train wreck, and I’d suggest you give yourself the same.

A clueless game that has lost sight of what made its digital ancestors genre classics, cheapening itself by unwisely choosing style over substance.

Yaiba is a Ninja Gaiden spin-off, but it can't be compared to the other games of the series in terms of gameplay quality. Absolutely not.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is putrid, crass and brash. It makes no apologies for this, and if you’re in tune with the kamikaze ninja protagonist then the game’s style will carry you much of the way. Unfortunately, though, Yaiba’s chaotic nature has led to a combat system that throws away the usual finesse of its father franchise for something so anarchic it frequently borders on unplayable. At times this direction is inspired, but it’s often just frustrating to the point where you have to wonder if it’s deliberate.

Every so often, 8-year-old me--the part of me that thinks that asking everyone what word starts with "f" and ends in "u-c-k" is funny--got a kick out of Yaiba's exploits. Most of the time, however, I could only wish that Ninja Gaiden Z's striking art style had been applied to a better canvas.

Ninja Gaiden Z is a disappointing entry in the Ninja Gaiden series filled with repetitive enemy encounters, cringeworthy pervy jokes, and frustrating, unbalanced gameplay. This is not the ninja game you're looking for.

It's an unforgivably sloppy game. But even if it wasn't broken, it would still be fairly rubbish. [May 2014, p.76]

The whole game just feels a bit budget, from the way that linked executions aren’t linked at all, merely canned animations played one after the other, to the short length and ugly UI elements. It’s a spin-off, and it sure feels like one.

It's not Ninja Gaiden. It's not what anyone was hoping for. It's not worth your time.

Yaiba is guilty of the most heinous crime: creating difficulty not with precision combat, but with myriad borked design calls and some utterly broken camera work.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z definitely qualifies as a disappointment. On the surface this is a flashy, stylized action game, but it takes very little digging to realize there’s little substance underneath.

I can’t think of any way that Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z could have been worse.

With humour too dumb to even be offensive and one-note gameplay blighted by clumsy design, it's really only possible to cede Yaiba a couple of plus points: wading into zombies with a katana is moderately amusing even in this shonky form, and some of the jokes might raise a smile if you've recently suffered a head injury.

Yaiba fails miserably in everything it set out to do.

Avoid at all costs. Ninja Gaiden as a series is now, unfortunately, completely dead.

Basic combat is dismal, turgid stuff, yet accounts for almost all the action.

Not just the worst game of the year but such a wretched failure of an action game that it’s in the running for the worst of the generation.