Beaten: Tenchu Z (360)

It's so damn cool to see From Software become one of the industry's giants over the last decade, as the prolific Japanese company had largely flown under the radar in the USA up until they created the Dark Souls series in the 2010s. I was way ahead of the curve in 1996 when I started playing their first US release, King's Field, on the Playstation, and have been trumpeting their amazing skill at gamecraft ever since.

Now that they are finally recognized by millions of fans after a decade of cranking out unique and amazing "Soulsborne" games (yes they created a subgenre of gaming on their own), everyone got excited when they announced a modern entry into one of their old franchises, Armored Core. They cranked out a lot of these games starting back in the late 90's and through the early 2010s, so when they announced a new Armored Core game, a lot of their fans were asking what that series was all about. It's armored mech combat. I got a taste of it when I played their other mech game, Chromehounds, a few years ago.

I've been sitting on Armored Core 4 (for the 360) for a long time so I went give it a try, caught up in the hype surrounding the release Armored Core 6 later this year. However, next to it on the shelf was Tenchu Z, a stealth ninja franchise they also were prolifically releasing during the same time frame as Armored Core.  Note that From Software was just the publisher for Tenchu games after 2004, not their creators. I decided to try that franchise instead, knowing that their 2019 release, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, was a spiritual successor to Tenchu. So much catching up to do!

Anyway, Tenchu Z.  A quick tutorial walks the player through the gameplay and introduces them to the game mechanics, and then it's off to complete 50 missions and a final boss fight. Stealth gameplay is encouraged but not required, as there is a seemingly deep combat system in the game as well. I went the stealth route, holding down the R1 button (no on/off toggle) for 95% of the time I was in the game.

The player is dropped into a fairly large area, usually a small town or a fortress, with one of several goals. Most of them are assassination assignments, some are find the package, and others say to kill everyone on the map. One difficult mission was to follow some guy through the town without being seen.

The camera is wonky, the controls sometimes fight the player (especially in aim mode by clicking the right stick), and the story is superfluous. However, the game was a lot of fun in spite of its shortfalls.  Standard stealth gameplay had me watching the patrol routes, sneaking up behind guards, and disappearing quickly once spotted.

Crouching, rolling, and use of a grappling hook were all essential to success in these missions. There are a lot of items the player can use, but some of them seem really useless for stealth. Many of them open up once you get to a certain part of the game, and once I unlocked the blow dart thing, that was all I used for the rest of the game. I stopped carrying healing items as they were not required for stealth gameplay.

Enemy AI is pretty standard. They see you or a body you left in the open and they freak out and attack, but if you run away and hide, they quickly forget that there is anything going on and go back to their route, never getting upset again regarding the visible corpses around them.

There are dogs that bark and chickens that cluck, alerting enemies, but I found delight in shutting them up with throwing stars. A few times, I unloaded several stars at what I thought was a dog in the distance, only to reveal that the creature was a cat, that was just background graphics, sitting there nonchalantly as cats do, unharmed by anything. Cute.

For a game that is stealth centric, I found it quite odd that there were two or three boss fights where the player could not sneak up on the boss for a stealth kill and had to face them head on. At least, the boss fights were not in an enclosed space, and the whole level I had cleared to get there was available to use hit and run tactics sucessfully.

Like all From Software (in this case as a publisher) games, there are strange design decisions but fun gameplay. With 50 levels, the assignments get repetitive, and many maps are reused frequently. For most of the game there are no enemies on the rooftops, which made things easier. I can recommend this game to stealth game fans, but only those who are ready for the usual From Software idiosyncrasies and patient enough to endure the graphical, control, and camera issues common in games from that time.