Several new E3 videos for Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, including its debut trailer, have been posted by Tecmo Koei. The game is developed by Team Ninja and Comcept, the company by Megaman creator Keiji Inafune that also made Soul Sacrifice.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a radically different take on the Ninja Gaiden franchise with regards to its choices of music, tone, and visual presentation.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a tale of revenge, revolving around a ninja who has come back from the dead as an android after losing a duel with Ryu Hayabusa. As he seeks out revenge, however, he fights through hordes of zombies just for practice.
Because the trailers focus heavily on the zombie-aspect of the game, we don’t know what other challenges or rivals — other than Hayabusa — that the main character will face.
Looking at the gameplay, the core principles seem to remain the same — you roam around a 3-dimensional environment and hack your way through multitudes of enemies. The action is very fast, there are multiple types of weapons to use, and the combos look as brutal as ever. You might also notice that the fighting style is more brutish, as opposed to refined. This character stomps heads, tears through limbs, and deals tons of environmental damage against his undead foes.
Compared to the more brooding tone of the original Ninja Gaiden, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z demonstrates a more comical sort of edginess through its choice of writing and graphical style. The game favors a more comic book style of visuals over a realistic design, and the dialogue sounds campy enough to be from a B-Movie. The violence is given an extra push in this cartoon romp, as the bloodshed and gore stand out more than its original series counterpart, which was still incredibly gory.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z will release on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in the first quarter of 2014.
