You’re a ninja. It’s your job to kill people for money and honour. That’s all you really need to know when booting up Tenchu Z; most narrative cohesion falls by the way-side in nonsensical, very anticlimactic cutscenes and texts. The ninja creation process gives you some degree of personalisation, but when compared to other character creation tools out there today, the options are comparatively limited. Pick a male or female primary ninja, add hair and ninja get-up, then hit the missions.
The opening tutorial mission fills one with hope. It’s a lengthy, informative quest through a batch of different traps and enemies, and your skills are rewarded accordingly upon completion. What makes the tutorial so playable is the fact that each scenario is designed to make the current skill as easy as possible to execute. For example, learning stealth kills combined with wall-hugging techniques is easy, thanks to the basic wall + enemy structure, and you’ll really feel like a stealth assassin. Out in the big wide game, however, the same move can indeed be performed, but the overall flimsiness of the engine and level design make it exponentially more difficult, and therefore frustrating.
Rooftop ragtime.
Flimsy is the key word here, as everything from control, to AI, to animation comes up sloppy. To really get a feel for being a ninja with superhuman martial arts abilities and scalpel-like accuracy, a quality engine with precise movements and superb collision detection needs to be working overtime. You’ll find nothing like that here. Your character will frequently jerk around when attacking, and skip frames all over the place in a strange attempt to blend your command with the environment restrictions and enemy position. Trying to execute accurate commands becomes such a mixed bag that eventually you will simply charge in to the enemy, approximate your suitable distance and mash buttons to get one of the kill attacks to register. Add levels into the mix, ie. jumping from rooftops or swinging underhangs adds even more confusion and sloppy gameplay to an already flawed system.
A variety of weapons are at your disposal, but are used sparingly. It’s not that you can’t use them whenever you want, but it’s always much easier to simply creep up and bust out a stealth kill. Hmmm, there’s a guy standing there with his back to me. Should I throw a primitive explosive device or shuriken at him with the huge chance that it will either miss or alert nearby guards to my stupid attack, or simply walk up and stab him in the face? Mr. Stabby is the only way to go.
You fail at stealth.
There are plenty of missions to be found, but most feature very simple seek and destroy objectives. You’ll occasionally find a decent rooftop chase, or inventive environmental task, but most of the time it comes down to assassinating the evil merchant, punishing the greedy landlord, or recovering bombs. There isn’t really any penalty for not being stealthy, but attracting too much attention will cause too many open combat situations – which ordinarily would be loads of fun, but you’ll end up battling the camera and combat engine just as much as your dim-witted foes. It helps that these criminal masterminds seem to forget about your presence if you simply duck under a building or leap out of sight, so any wrong moves (and there will be plenty) can be corrected by simply running away, then poring over each building as silently as possible to find the correct target.
It’s a one-two punch of mediocrity as the graphics fail to meet any reasonable expectations for such killer hardware. You’ll see shiny surfaces and a bit of foliage detail, but the characters and solid objects are pretty bland, and the animations are downright bad. There’s graininess to be found pretty much everywhere, and most extraneous effects like water splashes are better left unseen. Tenchu Z doesn’t feel much like a next-gen ninja experience, and it certainly doesn’t look like one either.
Let it be said that Tenchu Z is a long game. There’s fifty missions to complete, but sadly this is deceptively long. Despite the fact that the missions appear to take place as one travels across a map, the exact same levels repeat themselves over and over, with slightly different objectives each time. For example, one mission requires you to kill some old woman in the Restaurant level, and once you’ve found which building she is in, it’s light out. No more than two missions later, we find ourselves back in the Restaurant to kill some evil guy who happens to be in a different building. The enemies are the same, the level is the same – it’s totally lame.
There's nothing left to say.
So, now what? Let’s just forget about this game, right? Wrong. Most players will pick this one up, fiddle around in the first two or so levels, and say “this sucks”. It does suck, but in an odd way, Tenchu Z seems to grow on you. If you gives it enough time, you’ll find you become more and more familiar with the combat and stealth engine, and actually have a bit of fun running around each level, jumping over rooftops and performing many, many stealth kills. It would be fun to try other types of kills, but sorry – Achievements rely on racking up those stealth kills, so that’s the way we shall be playing!
Long story short – Tenchu Z is a game worth playing, regardless of how average it is. It’s surprising how easily one can become addicted to ploughing through each level, becoming more and more deadly with each passing minute. Eventually though, the fun of being a stealth assassin wears out thanks to the repetitive levels and similar objectives. Definitely worth a rental, and we can only hope it gets played to overcome the level of initial frustration, but goes back to the store before the redundancy of the whole thing sets in. That’s the best way to approach Tenchu Z, and it can be enjoyed by all with a little bit of patience and a little bit of highly alcoholic sake.
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