The result is a production with the same sweaty desperation of a Count Floyd bit, but without any of the important self-awareness.
#YAIBA NINJA GAIDEN PC BOX ART SERIES#
In our modern times - and thanks to a certain billion-selling series by PopCap - the "zombie joke" is now just as corny as your balding uncle explaining that skeletons can't reproduce because of their Hollow Weenies. As a result, Gaiden Z never has to try that hard, since it's drawing from a pool of broad and overused ideas we've seen done to death in recent years. Thankfully, it doesn't make the mistake of taking itself seriously, but, regardless, Yaiba's central premise feels like it was chosen based on the most popular trends in gaming over the last decade: zombies, Russians, and revenge.
Though its up-front edginess may struggle to give a different impression, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z has an extremely safe, focus-tested feel. In contrast, Yaiba feels kind of joyless it wants to throw around four-letter words and blood-spewing body parts, but the madness seems low-key and reined in - though, thankfully, the combined forces of Spark Unlimited, Team Ninja, and Keiji Inafune's Comcept were not cynical enough to slap on a film grain filter in an attempt to brand Yaiba as a half-assed tribute to grindhouse cinema. 2009's The House of the Dead: Overkill - and the recent, typing-focused remake - completely committed to its offensive, low-budget goal of recreating the gore-laden '70s horror exploitation movie, and did an amazingly offensive job by pushing shocking absurdity to its absolute limits. That said, it didn't take very long for me to understand I'm not exactly the ideal audience for Ninja Gaiden Z - but with the game's 17-and-up rating of "Mature," I'm not sure who is.īefore I paint myself as a pearl-clutching prude, it's important to note that immaturity can be done right. Characters spout curses with the naive glee of kids just learning that, yes, they can say these big people words, too.
Along with the heaving bosoms, shredded torsos, and generally Juggalesque designs, Yaiba has a real fascination with profanity - that of the "mom's just a few rooms away, so let's not get too rowdy" variety.
It's not just Yaiba's visuals that flooded my brain with memories of wasting valuable money just to see Spawn give a cybernetic gorilla what for from start-to-finish, my entire demo session was dripping with the same pissy, upstart attitude that once stood as the mission statement of the House Todd MacFarlane Built. With the protagonist's garish, tattered outfit and arbitrarily assigned mechanical parts - Kano called and he wants his red robo-eye back - this reboot of the quarter-century-old series has somehow transformed Ninja Gaiden into an unmistakable facsimile of early '90s Image comics: The heavy metal, teen-friendly brand that sought to reinvent the medium by giving young creators control of their characters, adding a bunch of superfluous lines to everything, and never getting a book out on time. When I sat down to play Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z for the first time, the calendar told me it was 2013 - but for all I knew, I could have been warped back to 1993.