Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (PS3) – ugly to look at, listen to, and play

GameCentral reviews what has a good chance of becoming the worst game of 2014, although it’s actually even worse than that sounds.

We assume most people don’t normally get to experience truly awful games. They might ignore reviews for the latest blockbuster but no matter how disappointing they’re usually not the very bottom of the barrel. But Yaiba is, and it has a relatively high profile name attached to it. Which means there’s a reasonable chance that a lot of ordinary gamers might end up playing it. They have our deepest sympathies.

Of course the writing was already on the wall for this spin-off as soon as Californian studio Spark Unlimited was announced as the developer. As the creators of Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty and Legendary it’s hard to imagine a less safe pair of hands for any franchise, least of all the storied Ninja Gaiden. The recent Lost Planet 3 did show some signs of competence but Yaiba is a career worst, and given the rest of Spark’s portfolio that’s very bad indeed.



Before we start though we should say that we’ve never been big Ninja Gadien fans and were seemingly some of the few that quite liked Ninja Gaiden 3 – despite fan complaints that it had been dumbed down. As a result we should be amongst the least appalled at how little Yaiba resembles an actual Ninja Gaiden game. And it’s true, we don’t care that it ruins the name of a long-running franchise. But that’s the very least of its crimes.


In trying to list the things we hate about Yaiba the most it’s probably the lead character which comes out on top. A revolting pastiche of every negative video game trope imaginable, he’s a foul-mouthed, painfully unfunny cyborg who manages to make Kratos seem like Nathan Drake in the charisma steaks. His profanity-filled dialogue is especially unbearable and seems to have been written by a committee of 14-year-old boys after a particularly hate-filed session on Xbox Live.

At the start of the game Yaiba’s left arm and eye are sliced off by Ninja Gaiden regular Ryu Hayabusa and the pair are drawn into a plot revolving around petty revenge and the cure for a zombie plague. (Hence the ‘z’ in Ninja Gaiden Z.)

The intent with all this was presumably to create a more Western-friendly game, which certainly explains the presence of zombies. But it suggests that the lessons which series overseers Team Ninja took away from Ninja Gaiden 3 is that the franchise just wasn’t dumbed down enough. And that what Western gamers really wanted was a game in which incognisant enemies can be slaughtered by the dozen just by mashing the face buttons.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (PS3) – if you can’t even make out what’s going on in this screenshot don’t worry, neither can the camera

What will really infuriate fans is that the game is still based around blocking and counterattacks, at least for the non-cannon fodder zombies. But it works in such a sloppy, ham-fisted way that you can’t even have fun just with the mindlessness of it all. What the game really wants you to do, when fighting fire-breathing or electrified zombies, is to use an elemental attack taken from an opposing type – like a sort of zombified Pokémon battle.

That’s actually quite a neat idea on paper, even if the elemental match-ups don’t really make any logical sense. But it involves finding the right one, whailing on it with a button-mashing combo and then performing a tedious QTE sequence. All for a few seconds of power-up that you’ll invariably waste looking for the enemy you were originally after in the eye-straining blur of the zombie crowd.



It’s not the lack of lock-on or Yabia’s inherently imprecise fighting style that’s that problem though, but rather the hatefully incompetent camera – which seems even less pleased to be involved in the game than you are. It seeks every opportunity to look around for something else more interesting to do, and while we can sympathise with that it does make the game almost unplayable at times. When it’s zooming in and out of the fixed screen views Yabia is constantly either obscured by the mob or by a zombie that’s waiting for you to perform a QTE on it.

In fact the game seems to be designed specifically to make it as difficult to tell where you are on screen as possible. Even ignoring the camera the ugly, garish cel-shaded visuals frequently turn the whole experience into a random mush of colour and movement – like someone ate a whole packet of Starbursts and threw up on the TV.

There’s nothing else to complicate the mindless violence beyond some insulting non-puzzles – that almost always involve throwing a zombie at something the camera won’t quite let you see – and some free-running platforming sections that require only a single button press to navigate, thereby making Flappy Bird seem overcomplicated by comparison.

Given Spark’s reputation it’s easy enough to blame all this on them but Team Ninja are credited as co-developers and Capcom alumni Keiji Inafune is the producer. Why they have such a low opinion of their target audience we don’t know, but they seem to assume them all to be as stupid and brutish as the game’s main character. But even blaming Yaiba’s vileness on cynicism, rather than simple incompetence, this is still a work of awe-inspiring ineptitude.


If it was intended as a meta-statement on Japanese publishers using third-rate Western developers to defile their once great franchises then the point is well made. If it was intended to be an entertaining video game it’s not so much the competency of all involved we worry about, but the sanity.

In Short: 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.

Pros: The elemental attacks are an interesting idea, even if their implementation isn’t.

Cons: Awful on every conceivable level, with sloppy, repetitive, skill-less combat and an absolutely terrible camera. Ugly, confusing graphics and an even more repugnant main character.

Score: 1/10

Formats: PlayStation 3 (reviewed), Xbox 360, and PC

Price: £49.99

Publisher: Tecmo Koei

Developer: Spark Unlimited, Team Ninja, and Comcept

Release Date: 21st March 2014

Age Rating: 18

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