Red Ninja: End of Honor

"The red-headed stepchild of Ninja Gaiden and Tenchu..."

Never been a big Splinter Cell fan, despite getting the chance to play it... something about techno-stealth just didn't really appeal to me. Big, BIG fan of the Tenchu series, which for me really set the bar in terms of stealth-kill games, death animations, and the whole ninja environment. Also a huge fighting game fan, including what little of Dynasty Warriors I've dabbled in. Enough about me, on to the game.

Saw Red Ninja back when it first came out, but the box didn't really entice me enough to justify spending $45 buying it. Put it off and put it off until I picked it up for $15 just about a week ago. I'm naturally suspicious of any game whose cover features a scantily clad, busty woman with a sharp blade... call me a cynic, but I've been around video games for far too long to believe that this one isn't being marketed to my crotch.

The manual does a decent job of explaining the gameplay and setup, but it's no great shakes. One of my biggest peeves with the game is the lack of a Tips section to save all of the messages that you pick up from the "ninja butterflies"... c'mon, how many of us have hit A instead of X by accident and then needed to review the tip halfway through the next level? This is definitely an issue for the first-time player.

Stealth system? What stealth system? There's no point in this game to being quiet, unless you're going for ranking. Except for the ten-to-fifteen-enemy-gangbangs that you see in every level after the Noh theater, Kurenai is perfectly capable of handling any guards thrown at her by entangling someone and then running away in a circle. I've yet to see the block button do any good (I mean, really, what's the point of blocking when the archers can hit you anyway?). Holding down B to stealth walk doesn't move fast enough, and the guards hear you any time that you don't creep up on them slower than molasses. Perhaps I haven't mastered the thumbstick nudge yet (but, being a veteran of both Halo games, Ninja Gaiden, and more sniper levels than I'm comfortable admitting, I doubt that), but the stealth and detection systems in this game need a major tweaking. The guards are either ridiculously easy or impossible to sneak up on, and you're only required to make stealth kills in a couple of situations (the Noh theater, for example). Even pressure plates can be triggered by dragging a headless corpse onto them.

...the camera. Oh God, the camera. When it's not rushing through Kurenai's body, it's getting stuck at some pre-set angle that you can't move it out of. Easily, the camera angles in this game are the absolute worst aspect of playing, save for perhaps the layouts (I'll touch on that in just a minute). Having played Ninja Gaiden a few times, I'm no slouch to adjustable camera angles and re-centering or to tricky bits of maneuvering, but I've wanted to tear my hair out quite a few times because of being unable to adjust the camera when peeking around a wall or when I need to hit a wall just so for the wall run.

Along with the camera, the controls in general are choppy and mechanical. There's either no finesse required, or you have to have such a precise touch that you might as well take up safecracking. Response times are sluggish, and Kurenai's range of movement is severely limiting. The physics are unrealistic (I bounced off a wall and grabbed the ledge beside the wall, not the ledge across from it), and your ability to interact with your environment just plain hurts. Wall-running, in particular needs a great deal of work: as it stands now, the system for wall run has a great deal of potential, but needs polishing if it's going to be effective.

Nowhere does this half-baked control setup hamper you more than in combat. If you're too far away from your target, you melee attack. If you're too close, you get chopped to pieces by your enemies' katanas, which vastly outreach Kurenai's little dagger. The Tetsugen's range needs to be increased - if it can dangle you from a post a hundred feet overhead, you should be able to throw it at an enemy twenty feet away. When dealing with multiple enemies, dragging the Tetsugen around is the order of the day, but you don't have enough free space to run around your selected target! This wire weapon has an enormous amount of potential, but it's unfortunately limited by the choppy controls and ultra-basic combat system. This game was released after Ninja Gaiden and Tenchu, but doesn't learn anything from either of their systems. The "special items" that you pick up are worse than useless except for the health potions and the hook head for the Tetsugen.

The maps are tiny and near-impossible to decipher, and the "paths" that the game charts out for you are incredibly annoying if you get even slightly sidetracked. A "You Are Here" blinker on the map would be helpful, or perhaps one of Akemi's butterflies that knows the path to your immediate objective...

My final verdict on Red Ninja: it should have been kept in development for another year and improved. The gameplay is sluggish, the combat system varies between button-mashing and impossible, the stealth system is non-existent, and the stages are overly complex to be in line with the rest of the game. The story is interesting, but the technical aspects of the game need some serious addressing to catch up to speed.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/06