Rittai Ninja Katsugeki Tenchu
By Matt Warner / March 15, 2009
The game that was good enough to spawn an entire series of mediocre ninja stabby games remains the best one by a mile, simply because it's the most stripped-down. Pick one of two ninjas and take to the rooftops like Batman in feudal Japan, except without the compunction against wholesale slaughter of the guilty. In this case, the 'guilty' are defined as anyone who can fight back. Hooray!
And that's pretty much the whole game. No deep subplots, complicated super moves, or anything else. Your only job is to kill things. You enter a stage with a basic map and your prerequisite "Ninja Sense" that tells you roughly how close someone is to you (though not the direction), and how alerted they are to your presence. "?" means they don't know you're there. "!?" means they're alerted by something (dead bodies, for example) or are actively looking for you after having lost sight of you. "!" means they've spotted... something. They'll come over to investigate if they can, but if they don't see you for a while they assume it was the wind and forget about it. "!!" means you've been spotted plain as day and they are coming to cut you good.
You're ranked on each stage, and can re-enter stages you've cleared, or clear them with the second player (this changes some of the boss fights, but mostly it's the same game). Play it right, and you will never have to engage in actual combat except for the boss fights. It's quite possible to make it through the entire game without being seen by normal guards even once. It's also incredibly satisfying to do; the final stage in particular is brutally hard to play "right" and requires some near-shooter-style memorization as well as judicious use of all the ninja tools you've hopefully been earning through the game. Most people just get frustrated and charge in like it's an action game, which is fine but not very ninja-like. Pull it off properly, though, and man oh man is it cool.
The stage design here is excellent. You're given a grappling hook that can pull you up onto nearly any surface, and most of the game consists of you running along the rooftops, waiting until a victim is alone, silently dropping down behind them, slitting their throats, and vanishing back up to the rooftops again before anyone's the wiser. It's insanely fun, and did the whole 3D stealth thing exactly six months and eight days before Metal Gear Solid hit the scene. You'll find yourself replaying favorite stages over and over, trying to kill everyone without being so much as glanced at. Nothing is as badass as a well-played Tenchu ninja.
A few cons: While the music is extremely excellent and mood-setting, the graphics have aged as gracefully as a Gene Simmons time-lapse. This game looks like shit beaten with a stick and then run over with a truck. Textures are blurry, tearing is abundant, and tiling is obvious and all over the place thanks to the weird lighting system. Eventually you stop caring, but for those used to modern stuff seeing something like this from the primordial era of 3D is sort of staggering. It looks really bad.
The plot and difficulty are also wildly uneven. You start out in a fairly realistic setting, but halfway through the game things dramatically shift gears and go right for the supernatural, which can be sort of off-putting.
Extra Bonus: The US version, amusingly, had more blood added in, not taken out as usual. It also has more stages and stage layouts. The fighting system, however (such as it was, which admittedly wasn't much), has been gimped, since you can simply mash the button for attacks in this version, whereas in the Japanese version each strike must be timed right to set off the full flurry of moves. Bosses also have different weapons; some dialogue has been removed, etc. On the other hand, the 180 degree reverse roll found in the US version is absent here. So which version is the best? Actually, neither of them. Go for Tenchu: Shinobi Gaisen instead.