One Ninja Vs. An Entire City
FromSoftware's attempt at making a Ninja Gaiden killer. It was first released for Xbox 360 on April 7th, 2009, and then ported to PC on October 31st, 2009.
In 2015 an infestation of mutagenic parasites develop in Tokyo. A special group of international operatives was called in to stop them, but only one survived without being killed or infected. You play as the sole-surviving member of the team and ninja, Ken Ogawa, fighting off the hordes of strange mutants infesting Tokyo with the help of group director, Agent Michael Wilson.
It features many over-the-top elements and is generally quite fun to play, but was overshadowed by most other releases at the time.
Tropes used in Ninja Blade:
- Action Commands: The game took a critical drubbing because of its over-reliance of Quick Time Events to do anything; jumping out of windows, killing bosses, walking down a hallway, etc. It also has Anti-Frustration Features specifically for the QTEs. First, the player can adjust the difficulty of them independently of the combat difficulty. Secondly, the longer QTEs have sequences inside them, so if you fail a command, you just go back to the beginning of the current sequence.
- Badass Normal: Michael Wilson, Senior who not only managed to break himself free but managed to take on his superpowered captor with his raw bravery.
- Bilingual Dialogue: Averted. When Ken Ogawa speaks to an English speaking character, he'll speak to them in English and vice versa.
- Black Dude Dies First: African-American ninja Andy is the first named character to die.
- Blade Run: Used in conjunction with a Ninja Run to trigger the finishing move on the second to last boss.
- Body Horror: The parasites are not kind to many of the bodies they possess. Special mention goes to the infected girl in the opening, whose flesh seems to melt off as she mutates.
- BFS: The Stonerender Sword and Moonlight Sword
- But Not Too Foreign: Ken Ogawa is half-Japanese, half-American. It's also reflected in his name.
- Cosmetic Award: Including a clown suit.
- Coup de Grâce Cutscene: Every time you deplete a boss's life meter.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Mission 7.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: It took some help from having special blood, and an Archnemesis Dad who was Fighting from the Inside all along, but Ken Ogawa ends up slaying the core consciousness of the parasites.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Both Kanbe Ogawa and Kuroh Sakamoto are incredibly powerful humans that owe their abilities to their mastery of certain Supernatural Martial Arts. Once infected by the parasites, they both become even more powerful. Moreso in the case of Kanbe whose physical and mystic abilities are amplified to ludicrous levels.
- Evil Is Hammy: The parasite hosts that speak on the behalf of the Hive Mind really love their Evil Gloating.
- Face–Heel Turn: Kuroh Sakamoto and Kanbe Ogawa—Ken's rival and father, respectively—in the first damn chapter.
- Good All Along: Kanbe Ogawa who turns out to have deliberately allowed himself to be infected in order to find the core of the parasitic consciousness.
- Fan Disservice: Three words: tentacle monster panties.
- Field of Blades: Where you fight the Final Boss. It doubles as a Battle in the Center of the Mind.
- Giant Enemy Crab: The Carrion Claw is a giant mutant crab that you dismember limb by limb.
- Giant Spider: The second boss, Arachne.
- Gotta Catch Them All: The Shinobi Moji.
- Highly-Visible Ninja: Well, riding a Striker on live TV sure qualifies, if crushing giant spiders with a demolition ball or stopping a crashing plane only with bare hands wasn't enough.
- Large Ham: Any infected character that speaks takes this one up to eleven.
- Mythology Gag:
- One of the secret weapons you can unlock after finding all 8 Shinobi Moji is The Moonlight Sword, which has appeared in nearly every single From Software game since its debut in King's Field (including the Armored Core games, where it was a laser blade instead of a normal sword.)
- Also, from the manual, Special Agent Michael Wilson is the father of the President from Metal Wolf Chaos.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: Apparently, true ninja don't even need parachutes when diving out of a plane.
- Press X to Not Die: One-third of the game, approximately.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The mutants and other infectoids are all created from hookworms infesting humans...and, in some cases, even machinery, as the Slime Chopper demonstrates.
- Rule of Cool: Riding a missile shot by a mutant-infested helicopter right back at it, leaping hundreds of stories in the air only to harmlessly land because of some improbable acrobatics, fighting giant worms the size of skyscrapers...and the list just keeps going on.
- Shoo Out the Clowns: After Andy dies in the intro, the entire game becomes increasingly dark.
- Super-Soldier: Ken's special blood and abilities were stated by Kuroh to be the result of genetic engineering and laboratory experimentation since before his birth. It's never confirmed if he was lying.
- Taking You with Me: Kuroh Sakamoto, to Ken after their duel courtesy of a bomb in his gut. It doesn't work, as Ken leaps clear before the explosion.
- Token Minority: Andy Walker, the African-American man of the team.
- Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: This whole mess takes place in Tokyo, and a big deal is made out of how catastrophic it would be if it had to be nuked to stop the parasitic outbreak.
- The Tokyo Fireball: in the bad ending.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The parasitic worms that infect humans invoke this... only with the sorts of freakish mutations you'd find in the more dangerous creatures from the Resident Evil series.
