Update: When Yasai Ninja first came out, it was broken. We gave it 1/10 because of that. The developers have managed to rectify many of the mistakes in the game including the frame rate and sounds but the combat is still lacking. They acknowledged that the game shipped in an incomplete state when it became available to us. It’s still hard to hit enemies and the game suffers from significant screen tearing. While the game has made massive improvements, it has a long way to go to be one of our recommended titles. We’ve bumped up the score to 3/10 on November 10 but it still needs a lot of work.
Initially, I thought Yasai Ninja would be a cute little hack and slash game intended for younger audiences. I was wrong. It’s not cute, it’s the slowest hack and slash game I’ve ever played and I couldn’t really even tell you who this game is meant for because it’s just so dull and abysmally bad.
Yasai Ninja attempts to be a hack and slash game, but fails miserably. The combat is so poor that I was unable to finish the game. In most hack and slash games you’re supposed to combine combos to effectively take down enemies. Yasai Ninja decides to have one main attack, press X to strike. You press X to attack enemies but the animation for the attack is so long that you can’t mash X multiple times to string together one long fluid attack. No, after each attack your character sheathes his sword, slowing you down significantly.
In hack and slash games the attacks are supposed to feel satisfying and make you feel powerful, whether it’s through animations or sound or the vibrations in the controller, that’s how it should feel. In this game, the animations are awful, there isn’t any sound effect when your weapon makes contact with the enemy, and it just feels dull and I felt bored. There are literally two sound effects in the game, the sound of you unsheathing your weapon, and the sound of the splash of the water you may fall into. There’s music in the game, but it’s literally the same two tracks looped over and over again.
The mechanics are not the only terrible things in this game, the game has massive technical issues. Let’s start with the camera, something extremely important in the game. If a camera is broken in a game, the game doesn’t function properly and therefore ruins the experience. Yasai Ninja has this issue. The camera will constantly get stuck on objects, as if it’s a physical object itself, and will prevent you from looking around a corner to see an enemy or water that could drown you if you walk into it. This is a massive issue because it can cause you to die and than you’ll have to restart that section because the checkpoint system is horrendous. There is a “puzzle” at the start of the game that consists of you jumping over areas of water to get to a room that has a lever to unlock a door to progress through the level. If you fall into the water you’ll have to restart the entire section and pull all the levers again and kill all the enemies with the mind numbingly boring combat.
Not to mention, the camera isn’t the only thing that can get you killed, your AI partner can too! When jumping across the water onto platforms, your AI partner will teleport (keep in mind he has no superpowers or anything, he literally just appears in front of you) on to the platform which can sometimes block the place you’re about to land on and you’ll bounce off him into the water. Then you’ll have to restart the entire section! If you leave a level without finishing it even if you’re right at the end, the game doesn’t save your progress. Next time you launch the game you’ll have to start the level all over again, this is where I decided I was done playing the game.
The game suffers from terrible frame rate in combat and the in-game cutscenes where there is little dialogue, very little is happening in this game for the frame rate to be dropping. Don’t even get me started on the pop-in, it’s worse than Superman 64 where the draw distance was so bad they covered it up with kryptonite fog. There’s barely anything ever on screen, so for it to have this much pop-in is just beyond me.
Yasai Ninja is a terrible attempt at a hack and slash game with lots of technical issues and poor combat. This is by far the worst game I’ve played on Xbox One and one of the worst games I’ve played in recent memory. It’s so bad I couldn’t even finish it. Do not buy Yasai Ninja. We waited for weeks hoping that the problems would be fixed by the developer but it hasn’t happened yet.
The fact that this title is $20 is unbelievable. I beseech the developers to fix the camera, frame rate issues, and the issues with the AI companion first and foremost. For that reason this title will have to get the lowest score ever given to a game on our site. It’s an unfinished product that severely needs more development time.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.