OVERVIEW: 3rd-person Beat-em-up, single-player only
LENGTH: 5-6 hours (this lowered the overall score)
STORY: (7/10) - The protagonist is unapologetically villainous, so it's more interesting than usual. I like most of the little visual gags (character intros), though Yaiba isn't above toilet humor. There's nothing great here, but for the most part the story is unobtrusive to theOVERVIEW: 3rd-person Beat-em-up, single-player only
LENGTH: 5-6 hours (this lowered the overall score)
STORY: (7/10) - The protagonist is unapologetically villainous, so it's more interesting than usual. I like most of the little visual gags (character intros), though Yaiba isn't above toilet humor. There's nothing great here, but for the most part the story is unobtrusive to the gameplay. The exception is that one 5-second clip right before the second main fight with Hayabusa, mostly because I had to watch it 1000 times.
GRAPHICS (7/10) - Cel-shaded, with very garish colors. I like it, and it certainly stands out among grey-brown modern realistic games. That said, there's almost no destructibility to the environment, and none of the characters have ragdoll physics. We've had ragdoll physics in beat-em-ups ever since Spiderman 2 on the Playstation 2, and it has always, always been better than the canned animations, no matter how good they are, so every time I see a game without real physics it feels like a step backward. The screen tends to get chaotic and cluttered, but I like that (I also like the dust-of-war effect in Battlefield:Bad Company 2; I think dealing with the visual overload is part of the fun; maybe that's just me). One nice feature is how the context-sensitive items, your abilities, and QTE prompts are color-coded to the Xbox buttons; i.e., the whip-chain light trail is red because you press "B" to do it and B is the red button, so when you have to mash B the prompt will glow red. One wierd thing is that the indicator for mashing the chain button is a fist (but red), which is the same exact diagram the game uses for when you're supposed to mash the strong punch button (but orange); I died several times before I realized that; the game already uses different diagrams for "dash" and "sword", would it have been so hard to draw one more diagram for "chain"? Another criticism is that there's no indicator distinguishing which (and when) I can grab and throw an enemy and which ones won't let me grab them.
CONTROL (9/10) - I play alot of beat-em-ups, but have never tried a 3D Ninja Gaiden game before, so I can't exactly compare Yaiba to NG2. But Yaiba controls wonderfully. "X" for the fastest melee sword attacks best for damaging strong enemies when they expose their weak points, "Y" for stronger punches that can punch through blocking enemies, "B" for the God-of-War chain attack that has the best range and is the only attack that can hit electricity-shielded enemies, and "A" to dash to avoid an incoming attack. Shoulder buttons to grab, block, or execute an enemy (executions regain health, or for elite enemies will give you a limited-ammo weapon that temporarily takes the place of your chain attack). This works really well, since each attack button is equally effective/important depending on the situation, and it feels indescribably faster to switch just by tapping a different button (whereas in a game like the 2013 DMC: Devil May Cry it was much slower to have to hold down a shoulder button to switch between the devil/angel/normal weapon, much less tap the d-pad to switch one out). Combos are based on switching back and forth between the different kinds of attacks in surprisingly intuitive ways (for example, if you switch between strong punch and chain attack, you end the combo with a stronger but slower chain attack). There's no lock-on, which I like. Combat is kind of like a souped-up Dynasty Warriors but with enemies that actually attack you instead of standing there dumbly, so you have to manage crowds, get your hits in, and dash out of the way before the elite enemies pound you into the ground. There's also an element system consisting of fire, bile and electricity, (i.e., bile + electricity = crystalized-frozen enemy, fire+electricity = storm that consumes enemy), and since enemies can hurt each other, much of the later half of the game is all about tricking the bigger enemies into killing each other by timing your dashes. Throw in the standard rage mode, and you get a combat system that rivals any other 3d beat-em-up. The god-of-war system is probably still better overall, but not by much.
The fixed camera works most of the time (one or two areas where it leads to cheap deaths).
For some reason, much of the game is devoted to context-sensitive-button pressing platforming. While I appreciate that it correlates intuitively with your normal attacks (dash to "jump", strong punch to punch through a barrier, chain to hookshot), without a dedicated jump button, this linear "platforming" just seems like it's mocking me; I would have preferred they just move the character in a cutscene rather than have me barely-control it.
GAMEPLAY (8/10) - Game progression is mostly great, with the exception of one super-cheap bossfight (round 2 vs Hayabusa) just because he could kill you in 3 hits. Otherwise, the game improves and rewards skill pretty evenly. I would love a sequel.… Expand
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden ZYour Score0 out of 10User Score
