Man.
Inafking's kinda gone off on the Zombies tangent for a while now.
Sure, it worked well for the Dead Rising games, but there was something different at play
there.
It was less about mindless carnage, and more about... well, inventing something delightfully
absurd, like a lawnmower blade affixed to a Servbot head, and THEN indulging in the
mindless carnage.
There was stealth in places, there was a sense of resourcefulness about the entire experience.
But here... no, you're getting none of that.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is about killing zombies, finding more zombies to kill, killing those
too, and occasionally stopping down to make a lewd remark to your navigatrix whose bra
is totally showing because of reasons.
And then you kill more zombies.
One day, you're a schmoe going blade-to-blade with Ryu Hayabusa.
Y'know, the dude from Ninja Gaiden.
As is wont to happen to those who step to the man, you get your ass and various body
parts removed and handed to you.
But since you're a tenacious bastard, you just refuse to die... either that, or the
biotic appendages you're outfitted with just refuse to let you.
So you get your vengeance, your shadowy overlords get what they want, and... then you're putting
down zombies in Russia.
Much as this game tries to make sense, it's not very good at it.
I suppose it's partly because when you're slaying this many zombies, "sense" is just
a pale stand-in for "violence" and ultimately suboptimal to the whole experience.
Kind of a shame, but in the moment it's the last thing you're worried about.
The first things you're worried about include such topics as "Man, that's a lot of zombies,"
"Oh I triggered an execution on that one, better hit that for a health powerup," and
"Holy Moses does this camera suck hard."
Pretty thoroughly.
The problem is, as rough and frustrating as the controls often are... they're still not
bad enough to make you stop playing.
And so you'll just continue, pressing on, as the visual style grates on your eyeballs
like it's zesting a lemon.
Apparently the game's main "stylistic choice" is to keep wireframe outlines of everything
on the screen as the actual view is obscured by dust or explosions, resulting in some kind
of Vectrex Psychobilly Freakout that...
well, given this website's audience, would probably meet with a fair level of appreciation.
To go along with the moderately broken visuals, the audio occasionally meets with some strange
issues, like egregious mixing errors or what sounds like badly-recorded dialogue.
Kinda unfortunate, as the soundtrack itself isn't all that bad.
Yaiba isn't going to give you a Ninja Gaiden-tier action experience, nor is it going to give
you a Dead Rising-tier zombie survival experience.
What you are going to get, though, is a bunch of T&A and blood and gore masquerading as
a video game... which, by now, shouldn't be all that shocking.
And you're going to get a deep feeling of regret when you realize just how long you've
been playing it, because your id has completely taken over and you just can't stop slashing
zombies and laughing uproariously.
This is not a game you're going to be proud to like, but if you're in the right state
of mind - like, half a bottle of Jaegermeister into the evening - you're not going to stop
yourself from having fun.
You might need a shower afterward, and a period of sobbing not unlike Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura,
but you'll have fun.