Toronto Thumbs

REVIEW
Ninja Blade

Jamie had been yapping my ears off about Ninja Blade since well before the game was released. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a point in time where he would continually ask for more work, especially in slow news periods. Now that’s he’s buried under a pile of games, crumpled-up press releases, and mugs of days-old coffee, it is poetically bitter that he had to give up reviewing Ninja Blade just so he could concentrate on other stuff.

But his loss is my gain. From the time the game arrived to when he finally released his grip of it, all I could hear from his side of the office was a whole lot of slashing, gunfire, and screams (his screams, that is). I resisted the urge to see what the fuss was about because I wanted to experience the game with as fresh a perspective as possible when it came time for me to play it. My curiosity piqued when I began to realize the hype for the game had all but died down in the week leading up to its release. And then there were the whispers – people telling me that the hype died down because the game isn’t all that good.

Well then I had to play it. If reviewers condemn a game, I immediately become interested in it. In fact, I tend to be more interested in games that people seem to have a hate-on for than the ones that garner clichéd praise. It’s true! I think it’s fun to see what could possibly make people so angry as to write themselves an incoherent mess (note that I need no incentive to do this). As long as I’m being perfectly honest with you, I should also reveal that I hate reading reviews for games before I’ve actually played the games, because I find that they skew my expectations. I realize the idiocy in this, because that’s one of the reasons people read reviews in the first place.

Ninja Blade is a game that I feel I have always wanted, and one that I might have actually tried to create, had I the time and the inclination to do such things. The game successfully takes two of my favourite things – Ninjas and Zombies (the virus-based kind of zombies that do creepy shit) – and marries them together in what is likely one of the most hilarious ways possible. To say that Ninja Blade is over-the-top would be to underestimate its genius. I’m talking about it on the presentation level, here. Try watching someone play this game. If you like ninjas and zombies, your mind will be blown. Ninja Blade is to ninja games what Gears of War is to shooters: so much dumb fun that it becomes its own caricature. From Software has put together an enjoyable ninja simulation that packs in more action than a Big Mac’s got calories.

And like a Big Mac, the more time you spend with it, the more disgusted you are with yourself for liking it so much. And like a Big Mac, it falls apart constantly, forcing you to resort to feeling awkwardly obligated to keep it all together when all you want to do is shove the whole thing into your gaping maw and be done with it. What starts out here as a fun, brainless romp in the tabi boots of a ninja eventually devolves into an exhausting experiment about the tolerance threshold for repetition. As if this is a bad thing. Like I already said, ninja simulation!

As the lone survivor of a team of ninjas tasked with putting an end to a malicious outbreak of parasitic Alpha Worms (which incidentally happens at the Alpha Site - coincidence? I think not!), Ken Ogawa has his work cut out for him. The game begins with the typical cinematic set-up where your team’s duty is established. When the ninjas are taking turns jumping out of a military plane, the team leader (who is also Ken’s father) holds Ken back long enough to pass on the mysterious Ninja Blade, a weapon that is only used by the player near the story’s end. Upon jumping out of the plane, the real fun begins – though this also happens to depend on your personal definition on what fun actually is.

Ninja Blade makes use of quick-time events. That is, little movies that require the user to input specific button commands at certain times to forward the plot of the movie. A lot of games do this now, and as I recall the first one I played that did this was Resident Evil 4. That game made good use of it by switching up regular movie clips with quick-time events, which in turn kept the player alert as to when corresponding input would be required. In Ninja Blade, the stages are littered with quick-time events. Some have exaggerated that the entire game is made from them, but this isn’t the truth. The problem with the QTEs in Ninja Blade is that apart from having to constantly re-watch failed scenes, there is no real penalty for missing an input. So if Ken is supposed to swing his sword across the face of an enemy, but you miss the button, the clip simply stops, rewinds, and then plays out again, giving another chance and ninja stardom. There’s never any concern that Ken will die during these clips, and in fact there is nothing he can do but succeed – there simply isn’t an optional cinematic that plays out upon missing a prompt.

That aside, however, these little movies look absolutely fantastic. The action sequences they depict are nothing if not overly aggressive to the point of outright parody. The camerawork in them is also amazing. Seeing Ken jump onto a missile and then use it like a mid-air surfboard which he navigates back to the enemy is a treat, and this is only one such example of how hilariously insane the stunts are. There’s even a motorcycle stunt that would make Akira fans blush. But herein lies the double-edged sword: While I was playing, I was concentrating too much on seeing which buttons I had to push next, so I couldn’t really take in the sights as much as I would have liked.

Outside of these interactive cinematics, the game’s fighting system feels great despite its simplicity. Ogawa has three different sword types at his disposal. Each sword does its own special stuff. The lightest weapon is a two-bladed instrument of death, with each blade having wire cables running out from their handles. This enables Ken to swing them around like nunchucku to eliminate enemies within a wide radius, but it also allows him to access platforms that are far away if they have sections that the swords can hook onto. The medium sword is obviously the most balanced of the three. It dishes out a good amount of damage and is quicker than the heavy sword but not as quick as the grappling ones. The heavy sword is my favourite of the three. It has armour-busting potential, which allows it to take out shield-toting enemies as well as bosses with exoskeletons. It can also be used to bust holes in unstable walls.

In addition to the swords, Ogawa’s got long-range attacks involving wind, fire, and lightning. The game lore refers to these as ninjitsu, but seeing as he relies on the giant shuriken on his back to activate the attacks, I’ve naturally been calling it the wind, fire, and electric shuriken. There’s one point in the game which is almost Metroid-like in that our hero finds himself without the benefit of ninjitsu and must reclaim them all one by one by defeating certain bosses – but more on that in a bit.

Fallen enemies often explode into red blood crystals that are accumulated to purchase upgrades to any of the weapons, and each weapon has several levels to it. Over time, the game’s difficulty ramps up, and weapons of greater power become a welcome asset. The stages in Ninja Blade are notably long, and I tended play only one mission per sitting, save for the last time I played in which I completed three in a row. Unfortunately there are no save opportunities during the missions, so unless you want to re-play a mission (and who does THAT anymore?) it’s best to finish one before ending your gaming session. While the game is a blast to play for the most part, there’s nothing I hate more than having to retread old ground again just because I failed to defeat the boss the last time. It’s this hatred that made the game’s seventh mission a pain in the ass. Rather than have its own environment, this stage incorporates segments from a handful of previous stages and also drops in versions of older bosses. This is the stage where you must retrieve your lost ninjitsu (which I like to call “How Ogawa Got His Groove Back”). Adding insult to injury is the pithy achievement award upon the stage’s completion. It’s called “Déjà vu.”

If you’re a fan of ninja games, you should at least give Ninja Blade a try. It’s not your typical martial-arts only title – and the bosses are oftentimes more like something you’d see in a recent Resident Evil title: One is a freaking hydra – ON A PLANE, no less! And the variety of combat types keeps things exciting. You’re not just running around as a ninja cutting dudes in half. There are a lot of sequences involving automatic weaponry on military vehicles – both in air (choppers, planes) to ground vehicles (armoured cars). The aforementioned hydra fight takes place on a crashing cargo jet while you’re running along that very jet’s wings. It’s downright insane.

Ultimately, however, Ninja Blade got the better of me and became so tedious that I had to call it quits – and this was at one of the last boss battles after trying to defeat him a few times, including one instance of fighting him for a half hour straight and still only getting half his life off. I know I’ll eventually go back to Ninja Blade, but I also know it may not be for a while.

Posted in Reviews, Xbox 360 |