Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z

everything in Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z shoves the player away

Don't be afraid to crank it down to easy mode for a dumb, fun first playthrough.

Yaiba succeeds admirably because it does what so few intentionally "so bad it's good" games do: It makes everything work.

For those that thought this would be a chance to play a Ninja Gaiden that wasn't too hard, stay a far away as possible. Yaiba isn't worth losing a controller or your sanity over.

With the amount of great action games on the market there is simply no reason that you should give Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z a try. It is a shoddily made, awful mess.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z sullies the name of the franchise. It fails both on a gameplay level and on a comedic level, and really doesn't offer anything worthy of its price tag.

Yet another misstep for the Ninja Gaiden franchise. An attempt to offer something wholly different fails to pay off.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a terrible disappointment. The heart and soul that made Ninja Gaiden so popular has been sucked out, leaving a shallow husk of a game. It’s best not to mess with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z — it’s already been zombified.

The monotonous clear-this-room-to-move-forward progression speaks volumes as to how much thought went into the structure of Yaiba's core mechanics.

As for myself, it's just another reminder of why grindhouse style media never caught on; It's vacuous and tedious… just like Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z.