What does being a well endowed bottle chopping cosplayer have to do with ninja training? Who cares, it doesn’t need to make sense when you can dress up a manga girl in a maid’s uniform complete with cat ears and have her karate chop through bottles. Did I mention that the bottles are filled with milk and upon chopping them causes milk to splash all over your ninja girl, covering her in wholesome milky goodness? Yeah, that’s not suggestive at all.

Gameplay

Ninja Chop’s gameplay is extremely simplistic, in fact I would go so far as to say you simply can’t unintentionally fail at it. Its only mechanic is that of the chop gauge, which acts identically to the job mini games’ in Fable II. The gauge comprised of a fixed line, a pulsing line, and a fail range. A fixed line indicates when you must time your chop. When the pulsing line aligns with the fixed line you hit “A” to execute your chop. Each time the pulsing line bounces back and forth your fail range will shrink, basically acting as a timer by decreasing the acceptable margin of error as you go.

While chopping your way through bottles in Ninja Chop, you’ll earn experience. The experience awarded is based on the number of bottles successfully chopped in a single pass, the more bottles chopped the more experience awarded. When all five bottles are chopped in back-to-back chains a significant experience bonus will be awarded. Achieving chains of varying length will greatly expedite the process of leveling up.

So here’s where the game gets interesting. As you level up you’ll be awarded new articles of clothing. There are several full outfits ranging from a traditional school girl’s uniform to a nurse’s outfit complete with hat. All of which can be equipped so that you can splash “milk” all over your ninja girl’s new garb.

There are 100 levels and a handful of items, but to be honest the offerings seem pretty skimpy. The game feels overly simple and took only 50 minutes to play through the first time. To escape being just a novelty game it really needed about 50 or 100 more levels with a similarly expanded wardrobe. Even with its variable difficulty and tracking of longest chop chains, I don’t see the game having much of any replay value.

Audio Visuals

The graphics of Ninja Chop are pretty decent with a few caveats. On the positive side of things, the environments are quite interesting, featuring a traditional looking Japanese courtyard surrounded by trees. One of nicer touches in the game is the changing of the environment’s season. In spring the cherry blossom trees are in full bloom and will then change after a few chops to the lush green trees of summer. However, the trees themselves appear to be part of a 2D texture on a simple 3D model with some foliage attached to it to fake depth, the result is a somewhat peculiar looking landscape.

Our lady ninja’s character model is probably the single most important part of the game, since the whole point is to dress her up. While the model is adequate, it leaves a little to be desired as her proportions seem less than anatomically correct. In addition to the character models oddities, the animations are at times just as strange, for example her skirt seems to defy gravity of its own accord. That could be a selling point, I suppose, if shimapans had been an unlockable item.

Audio, it’s there, she squeals like an anime girl, nuff said.

Summary

Zerozerozero’s Ninja Chop is 240 Microsoft Points, and is painfully close to being worth it. Unfortunately, you’re simply left wanting more from just about every aspect of the game. To be honest, you can garner nearly all the enjoyment there is to be had from the game by playing the demo. So I suggest doing that and then going and spending your $3 picking up Soulcaster instead.