Ninjala may be a fun game about ninjas beating the crap out of each other, but it has had an unfortunate history of adding features that don't sit well with the fanbase.
- The game's parry system has been very controversial among the playerbase since day one. While there are some people who are perfectly fine with it, a lot of players find the mechanic annoying at best and outright unfair at worst. This was especially prevalent when the game first launched, with a lot of people disliking it for being a Rock–Paper–Scissors-based system. Some people have even denounced playing the game altogether because of the parry system, believing that it makes the game more luck-based than skill based and thus unfair. Its reception has softened a bit since then, but it remains a common complaint even to this day.
- The Gumball Machine, the game's gacha system, is another controversial element. While it's understandable given the game's free-to-play nature and is thankfully only cosmetic-based, the Gumball Machine is disliked by the community for obvious reasons. Add on the fact that it's one of the only ways of getting weapon skins (which are consumables in this game, unless you have the season pass), that there are exclusive outfits only obtainable via the machine for limited intervals, and how players are starting to oppose loot boxes throughout gaming in general, and you have many fans indifferent at best and fuming at worst.
- Fuel was added to the fire when two more Gumball Machines were introduced. These ones are far more tolerated however, since they use Gumball Machine Coins and Silver Ninja Medals instead of Jala, so players don't need real money to have a shot at them. The Silver Medal count is still very high though, at around 1000 per pull, and Gumball Machine Coins are very rare with no consistent way to obtain them outside of the Season Pass or Featured Battle and the occasional giveaway or tournament reward.
- Things reached a boiling point during the Monster Hunter: Rise collaboration during Season 5. Normally, the standard Pickup gacha (which has an exclusive outfit) is 100 Jala a pull. (Roughly 1 US dollar, or 100 Japanese yen.) But during the collaboration, not only were all of the collab outfits (with the exception of a single t-shirt outfit) based on Rise's armors exclusive to the Gumball Machine bonuses, but cost 200 Jala per pull, TWICE the amount as usual, and the outfits still had the low 5% chance of appearing. You'll have to spend an average of 12,000 Jala (roughly $120 US dollars) to get all three of them; if you pay real money for this Jala quantity, it will cost you significantly more than Monster Hunter: Rise itself! Needless to say, fans were not happy about this, and lead to even further criticism towards the gacha. Thankfully their next collaboration did not make the same mistake and had the outfits available at the main shop, though each collab event since has still had at least one outfit (usually an antagonist character) looked behind a 200-Jala Gumball Machine.
- The Ninja Lab. Introduced in Season 9, it was pretty much hated from the second it was announced. The feature allows players to upgrade their weapons with various buffs using Ninja Medals and a new item called Research Points, which can give players who use it an unfair advantage and make it difficult for new players to catch up, while also putting the already unbalanced meta into further chaos. The only saving grace is that this feature can be disabled in room battles, is always disabled for official tournaments, and individually players can also turn it off for themselves altogether from the options menu if they wish to do so.
- Despite the overwhelming backlash, Season 10 upped the ante by expanding the Ninja Lab, allowing players to upgrade their weapons even further, making attacks up to about 15% stronger. Additional special moves were also added, but they can only be accessed by completing almost the ENTIRE Ninja Lab tree for any given weapon type. This means that, if a player wants to unlock all Special attacks for every weapon, they'll have to spend a ridiculous amount of Research Points to get to them. And just to rub salt on the wound, additional avatar and equipment slots are also locked behind this feature.
- Someone did the math and found that to complete everything in the Ninja Lab or all weapon classes, you need 27,210 Research Points. This is BEFORE Season 10 added more to the tree. For comparison, the largest bundle pack you can get is only 6,000 Research Points, and you barely get any research points outside of that and the pass. Yikes.
- While all this is bad on its own, it got worse when special Jala bundles including Research Points where revealed to be available for purchase once per season. Research points are scarce on their own and only obtainable from the Ninjala Pass in limited amounts and events, but the packs can give you huge amounts right away. Given that the Ninja Lab allows players to get stronger and gain an edge over other players, this more or less made the game pay-to-win, which the developers promised the game wouldn't be before the game came out. Naturally this made fans feel betrayed by the developers, and Season 10 doubling down on the Lab and adding to it despite fan backlash made the fanbase even angrier.
