Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven

PS2 review by Jim Smith - Saturday 26th April 2003

At the beginning of a video game review I love to reminisce, I guess I'm showing my age, but I've always thought ninjas are cool. In the 80s ninjas were bought to the mass market by those God damned turtles, and also that dodgy TV series starring Lee Van Cleef, either way the western world has never looked back. Do you remember Enter the Ninja? What about American Ninja and it's various sequels? No? Okay then, I guess its just me who watches bad Kung-Fu movies. There was a time, though, when ninjas were the staple cannon fodder of cheap side scrolling beat 'em ups. Everyone remembers Mega Drive Shinobi, but what about classics like Gang Wars, Rolling Thunder and Bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja? No? Okay then, I guess I'd better get on with talking about Tenchu.



When Tenchu first graced the shores of the old Playstation it was something of a revelation, being the first stealth game on the old grey box. Yes, the first; believe it or not that old gem came out before Metal Gear Solid and for my money was (gulp) the better of the two titles. Whereas Metal Gear was heavily scripted, Tenchu was fairly open; it said 'Here's your level, here's your objective, get to it'. Creeping along the floor, sliding along walls, one-hit stealth kills. All these things seem like money for old rope now, but back in its day this was a real eye opener. And that grappling hook? The first time I used it I thought I was Spiderman.

Playstation Tenchu wasn't perfect, though, far from it. The character animations were blocky and the close combat engine was shaky at the best of times. The buildings were sometimes so badly spirited you'd occasionally just fall off if you were too close to the edge and the enemy AI was just plain rubbish. But, if you had the patience to dig deeper than the rough exterior, you found yourself a solid and satisfying game engine lurking underneath.

Take the old first level. When you start, you're outside a compound that you have to infiltrate. So, like a good little ninja, you grapple up the wall and scurry along the edge to get to a good vantage point and purvey the layout. Once you've clocked everything, the plan was always to take out the guards one by one, and those pesky dogs, until the path was clear to stroll up to the final boss battle. Position yourself, drop down for the kill and then jump back up again out of harms way, repeatedly for a long nail-biting hour. Five years ago that was amazing, and imagine my even greater surprise when I realized you could do the very same level by guiding your ninja undetected to the end game in only a few tense minutes of roof hopping and walk away with a Grand-Master rating. Wow, no nonsense proper ninja stuff.



That was the beauty of Tenchu; it had a ropey game engine but my God was it fun. How does Tenchu Wrath of Heaven compare? Well surprisingly, it's about the same.

Wrath of Heaven has been developed by K2, a team made up mostly of the coders that originally created the original game and have obviously lost no enthusiasm for it. Side stepping the shambles that was the fan boy sequel of Tenchu 2, they have gone back to their roots and tried to recapture the essence of the original. Unfortunately though, they appear to have carried across the very same problems that plagued it.

Like the original, you undertake the very ninja like duties of proceeding around different levels, carefully killing of any enemies that stand in the way off you and your goal. The goals vary from level to level. Sometimes you have to look for someone in specific to off, sometimes you just have to find an item or whatever. To help you on your quest your main tool is the ki meter. This is sort of like your ninja radar and gives you a pretty good idea of where all the guards are. When the orb is green you're safe and the guards haven't spotted you, when pink they are alerted because of something you've done (they hear you run through water, freak when they find their dead colleagues, stuff like that) and when it's red you've been spotted. The number in the globe acts as a danger rating; the higher the rating the closer you are to being discovered. This is really useful since it means you can creep around and watch how the rating changes as you move in order to get an idea of where the nearest guard is before you've even seen him. So, with a bit of patience, cunning, keeping your eye on your ki meter and a spot of luck, you can usually stealthily slice your way to the end of the mission in no time. Let's face it, stealth kills rule, and each character has several in this game depending on which direction your victim is facing when you pounce. My only problem here is that the prerendered scene that ensues swings the camera around a little too much for my liking and they often disorientate me. Thank goodness you can just skip them by just pressing 'O'.

Stealth kills are vital though since for every stealth kill you pull off you are awarded a kanji symbol. Get nine of these and you earn a new skill. At the beginning they're not all that, the first is a simple high kick combo, but they go crazy later on. They even include things like ninja vision which can zoom in and out over large distances, a cling to the ceiling skill (Spiderman again, I told you so) and even a feign death move. These skills are great fun and add to the prestige of getting the stealth kill in the first place.



Sometimes ninja wits and funky skills aren't enough, though, and that's where the bewildering array of ninja items come in. Blow guns, bows, invisibility scrolls, smoke bombs and the ever-popular poison rice, to name but a few. Your ninja's got a bigger bag of tricks than Penn and Teller. However, you have to be very careful how you use them since sometimes patience is a virtue. On one of the earlier levels you come across two guards in a cavern, who face directly at you while chatting. I wracked my brains for a while and tried a few of the above mentioned items to get past. A couple of them worked too, but if I'd only waited a few more minutes I'd have seen that the guards eventually get bored talking shit (who doesn't?) and both go there separate ways. In Tenchu, all is not always as it first seems.

Like the inclusion of an extra playable character. Should you complete the game with the main characters that have stayed from the original game, you get to play as some kind of brawling doctor bloke. He fights with his fists doing stealth kills with funky pressure point knowledge. This is a welcome addition and boosts the incentive to see the game through to the end. So far it all sounds pretty good don't you think? Me too, and I have to admit I really like this game a lot, but there are an inevitable list of things which sour the playing experience.

The graphics of Tenchu never pushed the old Playstation and it is obvious that Wrath of Heaven doesn't push the PS2, there are simply many other action/adventure titles out there that look better. Actually, when I say that this game doesn't push the PS2, that's what you'd think rather than see since this game does suffer from the odd bit of crawling frame rate. I always think it's inexcusable for a game to suffer from slow-down and it smells of a rush job. This happens for many reasons, but it's usually a combination of commercial pressure from the publishers and coders spending too much time tweaking character models and environment details and not optimizing their code. I'm guessing that's what happened to the team K2 here. Sometimes it's easy to not see the wood for the trees and shoot yourself in the foot. Shame.

Equally the combo system is woefully inadequate. Suffice to say if you don't land the stealth kill, you're in for a tough battle, especially against some of the bosses, who will hurt you, so stack up on health drinks to replenish you life meter before the level starts. The baddies here have no problem lining up to you and guarding your well executed combos, even to the point where they step back and lunge in when you're combo is finished. In the mean time, you're trying to block one guy while swinging the camera around to see where everyone else is. All in all it's frustrating to say the least.



Thankfully, though, you just need to run away, wait a few seconds and the guards cool off and go about their business. Apparently this stuff must happen to them all the time because you can slice them to within an inch of their life and kill their buddy right in front of them and they still go back about their business if you stay out of sight long enough. This is crazy, I really thought they'd toughen up the guards AI for this one, but no. There are harder adversaries later on, the other ninjas you get to kill are quite tough to sneak up on I'll admit, but it still doesn't excuse bad AI. Sometimes it feels simply unfair, hell I often found myself feeling sorry for them? Jesus, what am I saying?

And then there are these bottomless pits. Never ever jump into something you can't see the bottom of in Tenchu or you might just find there isn't one, and that's game over. Can you believe it? I thought they'd gone with the likes of Super Mario World. The trick, I guess, is not to dive in headfirst to a level, which brings me to my last major gripe.

Thing is, your first run through each level has to be painstakingly slow or you're dead meat. This is all in a day's work for your friendly neighborhood ninja, but it can take hours to find your way around, and there are no opportunities to save. No really, the idea is that this is a ninja simulation and as such you're required to keep your concentration for the duration, so you better be mindful of those bottomless pits or your next step could be your last. Your task isn't made easier by the unwieldy camera which really slows down the task or learning the lie of the land. This isn't a problem unique to Tenchu, in fact I'd say it is the most common problem with all PS2 action adventure titles, it's just that observation is at the core of the Tenchu game ethos and so these failings feel much more obvious here.

All in all, though, and as you can see though by the up and down nature of this review, Wrath of Heaven is a real mixed bag, pretty much like the original was albeit without the wow factor that came with that title five years ago. It has big problems, but it also has some mighty big pluses, and I think you've already made your mind up whether or not you're going to like this game. Me, I love it, I really do, and despite it's quirkiness I rate it much more than Metal Gear Solid 2 mainly for it's openness, but I still can't give it more than an eight, and that's a generous eight considering this game's shortcomings.



Make no mistake I'm a huge Tenchu fan, but this game would only have scored a seven were it not for the inclusion of a hilarious two-player cooperative mode. The first time I played this, my mate just didn't get his head round the concept of the stealth kills and just waded in, screaming at me to help him. No way, this is Tenchu Stealth Assassin, not Tenchu I'll take you all on. So we went back to PES2. However, I had a go at this with another mate and we lapped it up, both covering each other while we back stabbed and stealthily sliced our way through level after level, grinning from ear to ear. Um, until about four in the morning. Needless to say, I was a bit pointless at work the next day.

Be warned, however, that this is not an after the pub game by any means. This is definitely more of a coffee and cigarettes title, which is a welcome change you got to admit. Here's hoping this isn't the last ninja simulation we get to play since titles that provide a different kind of challenge, even a frustrating one like Tenchu here, are too few and far between.

Oh, and on one final note, Tenchu does have one very cool feature. You can turn all the language to Japanese and have English subtitles for added Kung-Fu movie authenticity. Crazy...

Thunderbolt score: eight out of ten

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