FromSoftware's Worst Game — Ninja Blade

y'all remember demon souls no no not the remake the original this is the game that put from software on the map in terms of mainstream appeal and led to their explosion in popularity in the gaming scene now believe it or not i'm actually a huge fan of front soft i know i know you never would have guessed but yeah ever since demon souls they put out banger after banger after banger if fromsoft is releasing something you can almost be sure that it'll be game of the year now primarily for curiosity's sake i've been digging through the games that fromsoft made before demon souls because there's a solid 15 years where they were making games non-stop but none of them ever really caught on and that brings us to the game mentioned in the title of this video ninjablade this was the very last game fromsoft developed before demon souls and it actually released just one week before demon's souls came out i think this creates an interesting what if scenario where what if demon souls never released outside of japan what if it never caught on what if somehow ninja blade became more popular this technically could have happened we may be living in dark times but it would be a lot darker if we were waiting on ninja blade 5 instead of ellen ring you know so let's go back to 2009 and check this game out but you know i only know one way to go back that far in time yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] before we jump into me explaining all the problems i have with this game let me give a brief story overview so in the distant future of 2015 some sort of zombie parasite outbreak has erupted in tokyo this is probably a bad thing as there are now giant worms flying hydras and zombie helicopters just going at it so it's up to you the rookie ninja ken ogawa to somehow save the city before it gets nuked as a means of limiting the spread of parasites things are going okay until your dad turns out to be secretly infected and then he stabs you no worries though you walk it off in a couple hours then you just sort of run around killing various zombies and monsters and that's what you do for the rest of the game so yeah now you're all set alright so here's the deal this game has a lot of quick time events now i want to repeat that this game has a lot of quick time events i think it has more than i've ever seen in any game aside from maybe the that david cage makes like honestly if not for the rest of the game i might consider this some next level satire or something but no in an interview one of the producers of the game said the main reason we use quicktime events is to maintain the flow and continuity of gameplay we wanted to engage players to participate in the cutscene and not watch passively look i understand the logic but i just don't think it works that way when your quick time events are used so constantly and so haphazardly if used sparingly at key moments i think they can sometimes intensify an experience it can heighten tension and really get the blood pumping but that's not what's happening here instead of intensifying anything it mostly just serves as an annoyance and implementation stands as a relic of the mid to late 2000s where it was very much the hot thing to do all that being said i'm still generally not a fan of quicktime events but i did want to at least acknowledge that there's a right and a wrong way to do it and ninja blade does it the sloppy wrong way and look if you're going to insist on putting quick time events in your game like this at least make it funny if you fail i'm going to die don't see what ninja blade does where it just rewinds and makes you do it again by the way every time one of these sequences starts it cuts to a close-up of your character's eye like he's having some sort of that's so raven vision i just want to point this out because it's the exact same shot every time so if you decide to play this game look forward to that but i don't want to be misunderstood here while i find all this kind of irritating the cut scenes themselves that are going on in the background are actually often funny as hell like the game commits so hard to being over the top and stupid that it stops being bad and loops back around to actually being good i mean in how many games can you ride a motorcycle up the side of a building that being said the game does have some very awkward melodrama here and there that falls flat so the overall experience is pretty inconsistent alright i'm gonna break the gameplay down into pros and cons pros you have this one move where you can ride your sword like a surfboard cons everything else no but for real the combat movement of this game is just a mess so let me explain so first off the gameplay here is very much in the style of devil may cry and god of war it's an actiony button-mashing hack and slash however it really does feel like a poor imitation of these games due to how clunky it feels moving around somehow feels both slippery and sticky like your character is covered in jelly or walking through slime or something like even from the footage alone you can probably tell how off it looks on top of that most of your attacks have pretty long animations that can't be cancelled this feels very out of place for a game like this especially when most attacks won't stagger enemies so you end up getting hit mid-swing quite a bit in fact i feel like two of the three weapons you get are fundamentally broken for this reason you get a katana smaller dual wield swords and a big greatsword but the greatsword is by far the best because you can actually stagger enemies so you won't get hit mid combo together this all amounts to a sloppy imitation of better games in the genre with balancing so poor that most of your moves are actually useless so what does every third person melee focused hack and slash game need that's right an on rails turret section the devs really thought you know this game needs not one not two but five turret sections where our ninja character is just on a machine gun a couple of these stretch on for almost 10 minutes and oh my god they're awful like seriously what is this it genuinely feels like they sat around in a boardroom and had a conversation like so what's popular right now call of duty okay gears of war okay battlefield okay i got it let's just see what all those games did and throw in a turret section but for real it really does speak to their confidence in the base gameplay that they felt they need to add sections like this to spice things up and keep people's attention and hey i get it sometimes if i feel like i'm losing people i'll do the same thing like a really unnecessary edit to draw people back in when designing a boss for any game but especially action games it can be really tricky to make it good you have to balance a lot of tough questions is the difficulty fun how are attacks being telegraphed is the spectacle of the fight itself engaging now i don't want to pretend that designing a boss is easy by any stretch but almost all of the bosses of ninjablade exhibit one of what i would consider the worst design choices you can apply to your boss and that's what i like to call the waiting game what i mean by this is that the boss will continually swap between two states in its first state the boss is invincible and you as the player simply need to dodge in its second state the boss is vulnerable and it basically waits around for you to hit it at its core i almost always hate this design approach because it's too static and switching between only defense and only offense is simply less engaging and dynamic than if you had to balance both at the same time as an example of something better take basically any boss in the soul series the pace of the fight is dictated by the player and how aggressive they want to be you have to find openings on your own rather than simply waiting for the designated time where the boss will let you hit it back to ninja blade these fights drag on with bosses that have more health than they really ought to and the experience itself devolves into monotony where you spend 80 of your time just waiting and dodging very easy attacks it's just not fun but you know what is fun this little fact so there's this giant spider boss right i thought it looked sort of familiar and it turns out i was right because it's actually the same base model as the armored spider boss from demon souls but they just put more spikes on it kind of weird kind of neat man this game is just really ugly right like i just needed some place in the video to say this like damn there's just not a lot of charm to this game's whole vibe the color palette the textures the enemy designs it's just a lot there's this lack of polish and overall very janky feeling that permeates the entire game and don't even get me started on the ninja outfit customization like alright you can wear the clown outfit but is it really worth it if it makes your eyes bleed let's circle back to what i mentioned at the beginning of this video with how ninja blade and demon souls released basically at the same time the timing of this is interesting because i feel like they're polar opposites not only in terms of quality but also design and ambition demon souls was unique boundary pushing and thanks to miyazaki it took lots of risks its qualities like these that made me such a fan back in the day on the other end of the spectrum you have games that play it very safe and mainly try to emulate popular trends of the times and ninjablade kind of epitomizes that philosophy most of the game feels like it was just grabbing random game trends of the times and hoping they stick so it's not just the overall quality and execution of ninja blade that i find frustrating it's more so that it feels uninspired and soulless and this is painfully obvious when it's measured against demon souls alright i normally wouldn't highlight a bunch of technical issues like this but there's just so many that i think it paints a pretty funny picture i played the pc port version of this game because i wanted a higher frame rate than the xbox 360 version but oh man that might have been the wrong call so this happened literally every time i did this pull swing move enemies would get stuck in the ground pretty frequently what the hell is even happening here this whole section is just broken i think running along and up walls was incredibly inconsistent and only worked about half the time attempting to skip any of the cutscenes would sometimes just crash my game anytime i quit the game from the main menu my whole computer would crash sometimes the audio would cut out entirely such as on the final boss fight all sounds and voices just stopped aside from the sound of some wind blowing here's another funny story i played this game on my wireless xbox controller and one time i took a break get some food so i turned off my controller right when i got back and turned it on again every single button got remapped for some reason suddenly pressing the a button paused the game i had to dodge using the d-pad and i could only attack using the start button it was just so on brand with the rest of the experience of this game i couldn't help but laugh even better i couldn't just quit and reload to fix this i had to finish the mission like this because for some reason there's no mid-mission checkpoint or save feature quitting would mean i'd have to completely restart the mission i had other issues too but i think this probably gives you an idea of the type of experience i have i swear this game is cursed alright i'm giving mission 7 of this game its own section because i just need a space to like vent this is very possibly the worst level of any game i've ever played i think one of the things i hate most about games is when there's something that just feels like an absolute waste of time for no reason other than to just pad out the length of the game that's exactly what this mission is so this level is literally just a bunch of previous levels and bosses combined like they reuse the same maps and enemy layouts and everything and you even re-fight multiple bosses alright gang let's see who's behind this mystery it was just parts of missions one through six all along and yeah on top of that there's no context the game doesn't even attempt to justify why you'd be revisiting these places or why these bosses are suddenly alive again even multiple quick time event set pieces are reused this level just adds nothing to the game and i felt myself just wasting away it even has a turret section when it comes to shorter single player games like this i've just never seen such blatant padding and i don't know maybe they had a mission quota with microsoft or something like i genuinely think they had a week left to work on this game and were like oh we need another mission guys it's in the contract so you know what cathedral from code vane you have been dethroned as worst video game level we have a new king in town with ninja blade mission 7. i'm sure all of you are extremely eager to know how this game ends so let me fill you in alright remember how i said your dad was infected and he betrays you turns out he infected himself on purpose so that he could gain access to the parasite hive minds and with that he could learn where the alpha hive was located or something so he does this but then finally loses control and you have to kill him this is a very anime fight with acrobatics and some good old-fashioned naruto cloning but eventually of course you win but wait your dad gets absorbed and turns into a giant monster version of himself so then you have to fight this version of himself too with some extremely riveting gameplay and another turret section yes and i want to remind you that this is where my audio just completely bugged out so all i heard were some wind sound effects the entire time finally you beat the giant dad no don't say that you finally beat your dad but it's not over so you for some reason climb inside his mouth and then fight another version of him in some sort dimension or something i don't know man i kind of tapped out at this point but then finally you kill him and this solves everything with the parasites just melting away so don't worry now you know the thrilling conclusion you're welcome [Music] when i saw those credits roll i let out a sigh of relief i was done and the nightmare of playing this game was finally over but that wasn't true i wasn't done yet i knew there was one big secret that i needed to get footage of but the problem is that to do this i needed to get all the collectibles i missed to unlock this secret door and even worse i needed to fully complete each mission to get credit for these collectibles i couldn't just pick up what i missed and then quit back to the menu all this is just a long way of me saying i suffered quite a bit to get this clip for you guys so please enjoy i'll let it play out in its entirety [Music] [Music] so yeah if you had any doubts this was actually a from soft game there you go the moonlight greatsword and i think it's just genuinely hilarious that they turned picking up this sword into an elaborate quick time event bravo this whole sequence just epitomizes what this game is going for also you can actually use the sword which is actually pretty neat it becomes the final upgrade of your greatsword and you can even do special charge attacks that look very similar to how it looked originally in king's field from 1995. is this the worst game i've ever played no and i'd probably give it like a 3 out of 10 if i had to give it a score but it is still shocking to me that this was developed by fromsoft and that's the thing right if not for the fact that fromsoft developed this game i wouldn't be discussing it because it's simply an aggressively mediocre ninja action game that was pretty dated even for the time it came out when i think of fromsoft i think of a developer that takes chances with games like kingsfield dark souls and securo if they ever miss the mark with something in their games it's usually not because they're playing it too safe ninja blade feels like it just tried to play it super safe with what was popular at the time and the result is an incredibly unmemorable experience this game came out the same time as demon souls so again thankfully we're in this timeline where miyazaki is the president of fromsoft instead of some alternate hellscape where all we got is ninjablade 5 or something if you do actually have any interest in looking into this game on your own i highly recommend just skipping the actual game and instead just looking up a compilation of all the cutscenes because they're by far the most entertaining part ninja blade is no doubt a mess but there still is something sort of quaint about looking at it all these years later thank you for watching and check out my last video if you want to hear me talk about a far more interesting fromsoft game kingsfield you know what's maybe a better use of time than playing some 3 out of 10 game from 11 years ago learning a new skill so thank you skillshare for sponsoring this video take a look at what i made thanks to a class i took wow incredible i learned some of the skills to do this after taking the motion graphics class taught by gustavo torres on skillshare with any class you'll take they'll walk you through the whole process step by step and make it pretty easy to follow if you want my personal recommendation of what to learn i'd recommend checking out some classes on any type of software if you've ever been curious about learning video editing after effects animation or really anything there's some genuinely good resources here if you've ever felt that itch of wanting to express yourself more creatively skillshare honestly isn't a bad place to learn the skills to do so if any of that sounds interesting check out the link in the description and the first 1000 people will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership and yeah that's it thank you guys so much for watching dammit

Channel: Iron Pineapple

Views: 3,021,778

Keywords: dark souls, ninja blade, soulslike, iron pineapple, souls-like, fromsoftware, fromsoft, gameplay, funny, review, guide, king's field, demon's souls, skillshare

Id: qsqiwlRo7f4

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020