Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven

"Savour the pleasure of stealth killing your enemy with just one slash of your blade"

Stealth, stealth, stealth, this game is all about stealth. The original Tenchu created the ultimate ninja simulation game in which your character has to rely on his/her agility, cunningness and patience to stealth kill a whole bunch of enemies. The feeling of stealth killing your enemies is exhilarating and satisfying. Just imagine your enemy turning his back to you, and then you run out of the shadows to end his fleeing life in just one slash from your blade. Ahh, you got to try it to know how it feels.

However, the second Tenchu is a total letdown featuring blocky looking characters who look like they are wearing diapers when they move and are as agile as the snails. Not to mention a number of redundant stuff added in which only serves to hinder the gameplay instead of enhancing it (Sheathing your weapons in order to run faster is ridiculous and dampening the fun factor).

Fortunately, this game, Tenchu: The Wrath of Heaven manages to redeem this series by retaining the essence of the first game, adding in some cool stuff from the second sequel, like a hidden third character and a storyline, tweaking up the quality of the graphics, adding more combos, moves, stealth kills and ninja items. This is one game that is absolutely addictive and enjoyable.

Story 6/10 – The story in this game is simple and basic. Set in the feudal Japan, you are a ninja who serves Lord Gohda, a just and kind lord. However, this world is filled with evil and ambitious beings who are involved in immoral dealings and seek to rule the world. So it is up to Gohda’s ninja, that is your character, may it be Rikimaru or Ayame to infiltrate the enemies’ lairs to see that justice is done.

There is nothing groundbreaking in the story but at least the story is coherent and serves the purpose of integrating the missions into the storyline. The details and questions will all be answered in the story and the ending brings a good closure to the game, so the player will feel more satisfied at completing the game instead of seeing some lame ending implying “To be Continued” kind of scenario (In case, some of you are wondering which endings I’m referring to, well, they are Soul Reaver’s and BloodRayne’s ones). Also, the story gives perfect reasons for the ninjas to go around slaying the bad guys without making one feels bad about it.

The veterans of the Tenchu series will have no problems keeping up with the story but for those who are new to the series, they may have difficulty understand some parts of the story since a lot of references are made to the storyline of the previous two games. It will nice if there is an option to read about the background stories of Tenchu.

Gameplay 9/10 – Assuming the role of a ninja, you will have proceed around the different levels carefully, kill any enemy that stand in the way and get to your goal. The goal can varies from getting an object, looking for someone, to punishing some evildoers for their evil deeds. You have a ki meter (a green colour orb with a number in the middle which can changes to pink with the sign ?! or a fiery orb with !!) to judge the state of mind of your enemy so you will know whether any enemy is near by and whether they are aware of your presence. Green orb implies that the enemy is just guarding the place and he/she is not aware of your presence and the number represents the distance your enemy is away from you, you can only do stealth kills when your enemy in this state. Pink orb indicates that your enemy becomes alert because they hear some suspicious sounds, like the screams of their comrades who spotted you, water splashing or seeing the dead bodies or their comrades. At this point, they will start looking around for you, so it is best to hide fast when this happens and wait until their ki meter becomes green again. The fiery orb means that your enemy has spotted you and he/she will proceed to chase you and attack you. When you are under attack, take note of your lifebar which will deplete when you are slashed by your enemy, Fortunately, there are health drinks that you can bring to replenish your lifebar and ninja rebirths to resurrect your ninja if he/she dies. So you have to rely on your ki meter, stealth and wits to finish the mission. Sometimes, the enemy may be constantly facing the direction you are at or there are more than one enemy patrolling an area, so you have to figure a way to get around that, either by taking another route to sneak from behind to stealth kill your enemy or use certain items, like the blowgun, invisibility spell, chameleon spell or poison rice to aid you.

At the end or starting point of each level, you may or may not face a boss. The wonderful thing about the gameplay is that you can choose the method, way and path to get to your goal because the levels are so huge with many paths present for the player to choose from. You can choose to hide at a corner, observe your enemy movements and then move in for a stealth kill when the unfortunate, clueless baddie turns his/her back to you. Patience is needed here if you choose to stealth kill your enemies, but the rewards are great; it is very satisfying to succeed in executing a stealth kill since the stealth kills are very cool looking, like slitting your enemy's throat, plunging the blade through the top of the skull to the throat (there is an option to turn off the stealth kill sequences if you want or cut it short by pressing ''O'' during the sequence), and you can get lotsa goodies when you finish the mission, more on that later. If you are the gungho kind, you can just go right up to the face of your enemy and engage in a combat with him/her. However, your enemies are not dummies waiting to be slashed by you, they can block, attack when you are vulnerable, jump to get behind you for a good whopping, that is to say, they are not easy to defeat. Of course, you have an arsenal of ninja gadgets to aid you in your battles like, smoke bombs, grenades, fire spells and many more.

Talking about the ninja gadgets, there is a huge array of them to help you to fight or evade your enemies, some examples are invisibility spell, dog bone (to call for a dog to help you attack the enemies), the all-time favourite poison rice, caltrops, ninja armour, etc, etc. These items help you in your missions and they also add the feel of playing as a ninja. To make things more interesting, some of these awesome gadgets can only be unlocked if you get the ranking of Grand Master in the levels. In order to get the ranking of Grand Master, you will need to get 450 points or above in which the points are computed by the number of stealth kills you have made and the number of times you have been spotted. One thing I like about this game is that there are many enemies present in each levels, so you can still get Grand Master without killing every single one of them and being spotted zero times. This game allows more room for screw-ups unlike Tenchu 2, which is an exercise in frustration.

New combos and moves are added to this game and some of them proves to be very useful in the missions. Some great ones are shoulder thrust/somersault kick which knocks down your enemy while you make your escape or take the time to take a health drink or throw some smoke bombs or grenades at your enemy, ninja vision in which you can zoom in on far away places (yes, you can even see enemies who are so far away that your ki meter cannot detect them yet, no more fogging effects as in Tenchu 1 and 2), cling to the ceiling and feign death. These combos and moves can be earned on each different levels when you highlighted all your nine kanji symbols. One kanji symbol will be highlighted whenever you make a successful stealth kill, thus encouraging the player to practise stealth in this game.

More variety of enemies are now available for slaying, your usual guards, animals and ninjas are sill in the game with the addition of shikigami, wooden robots, undead samurais, decapitated heads, martial arts experts and many more. All of them requires different ways of approaching to stealth kill them, like the ninja is more sensitive to his/her surroundings, so if you run too close to him/her, he/she will be alerted, so you have to be fast in executing the stealth kills. Certain enemies like the undeads requires special blades to kill them, so it depends on the player on whether if he wants to bring the special blade along (this blade will deplete your lifebar though) or evade the undeads completely. The variety of strategies involved in getting around the missions makes this game mind-simulating and challenging.

The biggest problem I have with the game is the presence of bottomless pits which causes instant death when your ninja steps or jumps into them. Not even the ninja rebirth can save your ninja from untimely death. Not to mention, when your ninja is doing a stealth kill, he/she may doing some posing after that causing him/her to step into the pit. Also, sometimes, it is hard to see the pits, so it is common to accidentally jump into a pit. This causes quite some frustrations since you have to do the whole mission again, but once you are familiar with the layouts, it is easy to avoid falling into the pits.

Controls 7/10 – The controls are decent, for a ninja simulation game. Your ninja can jump, attack and use items at a touch of a button and he/she moves around with the use of analog stick. The grappling hook, blowgun and crimson blade can be easily used to aim at a target by just holding down the triangle button, and moving the crosshair with the left analog button, and then release to shoot at the target. Stealth can be executed by holding down R1 and the camera will be adjusted easily with the L1 button and left analog stick to get a good view of your targets. Item selection can be done using the digital pad and also, L2 which is great for use in the heat of a combat since you don't have two thumbs to move the analog stick to make your ninja run around avoiding your enemy's attack, while choosing the item with the digital pad. The combos are easy to pull off and the buttons are very responsive. The controls are definitely very good when it coming to hiding around and performing stealth kills.

However, the flaws of the controls manifest themselves when it comes to combat with the enemy. Though there is an lock-on button on the enemy now to make things better but the camera still hampers with the attacking of the enemy. Most of the time, when my ninja is run around, I can hardly get a view of where is my enemy, I will need to turn my ninja around to face the enemy and then press L1 to move camera to get a view of the enemy. This is troublesome and waste precious time while I could have proceeding to attack the enemy already. many players may find the boss fights to be the toughest part of the missions, aside from bottomless pits.

Sounds 8/10 – The opening music is very beautiful and suits the settings of the Feudal Japan. The background music does well to set the mood and momentum for the different levels. The voice actings are decent and suits the personality of the characters well. One great option is that you can change the language to Japanese to get an authentic Japanese feel and the subtitles do not change so that you can understand what is going on.

Graphics 7/10 – The levels are amazingly beautiful, littered with details, from the Japanese paper lanterns, kimonos, paintings, drapes full of Japanese flavour, Buddha statues, the mist coating the floor of the cemetery, the crystals formed on the walls of the cave, the bamboos swaying in the winds to the snow flakes. The characters including the enemies, look pretty good with intricately detailed faces, nice-looking hair and realistic body movements. The different enemies move differently from each other, the guards take bold steps, while the ninjas move sneakily around and the female ninjas sway their hips when walking! There are also nice little effects present in the game like the mist coming out of the characters' mouths when in cold weather, water splashing when running over the water and the gleaming light of the blades.

The opening movie looks great, though I think that the face of Ayame could have done better, she looks like she had not sleep for a year in the movie. Also, during the fighting scenes in the movie, the characters looks more like showing off their acrobatic stunts than fighting.

However, some flaws are obvious in the graphics department. The character models have some jagged edges and their feet sometimes disappear when on the slopes. Also, if you look carefully, you can see that the characters are not holding their weapons, it looks more like the weapons are poke through their hands. When the ninja hangs on the a ledge, if you moves the camera to a top down view, you will discover that the ninja's hands are not holding on to the ledge! These are minor flaws though, flaws that will not hinder with the gameplay.

Conclusion: If you have patience, it is highly likely that you will love this game, the ultimate ninja simulation. If you are a fan of this series, this game will not disappoint.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/31/03, Updated 03/31/03