Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984) has relatively sparse scoring, but when an alert is raised a short percussion loop is played that adds some atmosphere and tension.
By the time Hideo Kojima developed the Metal Gear series for the MSX family of computers, 2D stealth gaming was entering its first wave of real maturity. Where Silas Warner paved the way for military action stealth to be a genre unto itself with Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, Metal Gear solidified the concept, polishing some critical aspects of Warner’s efforts with more detailed graphics, a better point of perspective and a refinement of item management and use. Not satisfied there, Kojima used the rapidly improving technology being incorporated into home consoles to push his series further. 1998’s Metal Gear Solid was a monumental game not just for Kojima as a creator, but for game players as well. The translation of Metal Gear’s mechanics into the 3D worlds capable of being rendered on the Sony Playstation is one of the most successful examples in a field of games that failed miserably at it. The core of Metal Gear was there in Metal Gear Solid, just more fully realized.
While ‘98 was a landmark year for military action stealth, that year also saw the release of another stealth action game, one that slightly predated Kojima’s masterpiece, and that established a nice divergent path while holding many of the same principles. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, developed by Acquire, set out to fulfill a need not yet met: allowing players to assume the role of a ninja. Of course, there were pure action games featuring ninja protagonists made before this. What would the NES be without Ninja Gaiden or the Sega Genesis without The Revenge of Shinobi? But those games were classic side-scrolling action titles. Tenchu acts much more like a ninja simulator. Rather than running through stages, cutting enemies down with quick strikes from your katana, players are tasked with carrying out assassinations in heavily fortified strongholds. The point of the game is to be quick, efficient, kill only those necessary, and do so without being detected.
Tenchu is a pretty remarkable title, though being released for the Sony Playstation platform means it has one very obvious drawback: digital only control. The Dual Analog controller did exist by the time of Tenchu’s release, but developers were still making games with the launch controllers in mind, since it was the only controller model packaged with the system. Tenchu’s manual even specifically mentions it’s not compatible with the analog controllers. Unfortunately, navigating a 3D environment with only digital inputs can be a difficult task. Like many Playstation developers, Acquire used a somewhat lenient version of tank controls. Pressing right or left on the D pad turns the player’s character, while pressing forward moves them in whatever direction they are facing. Pressing down backs the player up slowly. In games like Resident Evil, tank controls complemented the fixed camera perspective, which meant players didn’t have to reorient their inputs upon entering new rooms with a different viewpoint on the action. Holding forward would move the player forward no matter what. In Tenchu, the camera stays behind the player, or tries to, for the majority of the play experience. While it’s fairly easy to steer the player character where you want to go, it’s even easier to lose your sense of direction and become lost, necessitating the inclusion of a map for each level.
Another consequence of the digital input is that the game takes on a much slower pace because of it. Since turning around requires you to rotate the character 360 degrees, there’s a healthy amount of wait time that games with analog control were able to almost completely eliminate. It can be hard getting used to after playing modern 3D action games/ It’s not a total detriment, as the slow pace does reinforce the patience players must have to move through levels successfully undetected. Guards patrol set paths at a leisurely stroll, so there’s an awful lot of crouching down and waiting for the right moment to strike. Having to wait for your character to change direction doesn’t seem like much of a burden compared to that. Of course, in the event a guard sees you, the restricted movement becomes much more of an issue.
It seems that Acquire put quite a bit of thought into the limitations that a standard Playstation controller would impose. As a countermeasure to losing your way or being unable to easily escape into the shadows if spotted, Tenchu has a dedicated button for controlling the camera. Holding R1 locks the player in place and allows them to look around by going using the D-pad. This can be used to survey the landscape before deciding where to go. You can look above or below you to scout out guards from the safety of a secluded corner or rooftop. While you only get about 180 degrees of vertical and horizontal movement from any one position, it’s a mechanic that becomes key to good play. It is by no means a perfect solution, but it does the job so the bigger annoyances of actually moving about can be mitigated through good observation and planning.
While the digital inputs hinder the fluidity of gameplay, Tenchu offers a number of stealth specific mechanics which enhance the experience considerably. The normal camera position, situated behind the player, takes a fairly close up view. While this feels like a hindrance at first, the narrow scope seems designed to force players into taking the premise of the game seriously. Since you can’t see very far into your periphery, you’ll probably think twice before taking action, and go over all your options.
To that end, the first tool in the player’s arsenal with regard to staying invisible is crouching. The game’s levels are designed with objects that can be hidden behind so guards can be approached safely. The roofs of buildings usually have two tiers to them, a ledge that can be grabbed onto, but also a taller peak that can be used to stay out of sight of patrolling troop on the ground, but also those that like to hang around on rooves like you. It’s a basic maneuver but it can mean the difference between alerting two or three guards or sneaking up to dispatch them all one by one. The ability to roll while crouched means you can move along at a decent pace and reposition yourself easily without making a lot of noise or putting yourself in an enemy’s line of site..
Since rooftops are commonly the safest and fastest way to move about the various levels, it helps that you can grab ledges and hang from them. This comes in handy when there are guards patrolling above you. Since guards need a direct line of sight to detect you, hanging from a ledge can keep you safely out of view, even when mere inches away. When up again flat walls you can press yourself up against them and sidle along. Upon reaching the edge, the camera will automatically peer around the corner to reveal potential threats.
Not all ledges or rooftops can be reached from the ground, so players are constantly equipped with a grappling hook. It acts very similarly to that of the Bat-man, where the player tosses it at the ledge they want to climb and they are then propelled through the air by some unseen force that saves them the trouble of actually climbing. Considering Tenchu takes place in 16th century Japan, the mechanics of the grappling hook don’t make much sense, but it is a very satisfying tool to use. That’s good, because it’s all but required for success in nearly every stage of the game.
Perhaps Tenchu’s most innovative contribution to the stealth genre is the Ki meter, which acts to alert the player of nearby guards and enemies. The display uses the question mark and exclamation point in varying combinations to indicate certain statuses. A single “?”, for example, indicates that a nearby guard is unaware of your presence. A “!!” means you’ve been spotted and are being actively hunted down. Along with the status indicator, there is a number in the Ki meter which indicates the proximity of enemies to the player. The higher the number, the closer the enemy.
(I think he sees me.)
The counter proves to be considerably more useful for players since obstacles can be difficult to look around at times and the draw distance in the game means anything farther than a few feet away is lost in a void of black. Being able to track an enemy’s relative position, even when out of sight, is an invaluable asset. The status alerts are helpful, too, but vocal cues of enemies generally serve the same purpose, offering a bit of redundancy in design. The only major gap in the Ki meter is that it only tracks one enemy at a time, presumably the one that the game deems to be the most immediate threat. Guards tend to operate in clusters of two or three, so going in for the kill on one guard can mean exposing yourself to others. While not an inherent flaw with the game’s design, it does mean players have to be especially mindful of a good deal of the level at any given time, which can make the game’s action move along more slowly than one might really want.
On the more superfluous side of the game’s mechanics are its consumable items. Most of the items increase the player’s arsenal. There are projectiles, such as shuriken or grenades, traps that can be placed for unsuspecting guards, like caltrops, poisoned rice balls, or mines, as well as more defensive oriented items. While these tricks can be an amusing distraction, they aren’t always very useful. Caltrops, intended to be a hindrance to pursuers, are slow to drop and force the player to stop running, limiting their effectiveness. The shuriken add a nice ranged option, but don’t deal all that much damage and can be tricky to aim using the D-pad due to their curved arcs. The mine and rice balls need to be placed in the path of a guard, which means getting close enough to them to where it makes much more sense to just sneak up behind them for the easy kill.
The most useful item, by far, is the healing potion. While the whole point of the game is to avoid detection, and thus, taking damage, healing potions fully restore your health, so players who are particularly sloppy in enemy encounters can rest assured that they can make steady progress through the levels without too much risk so long as they have a stash of them. The other defensive items include smoke bombs, used to blind enemies for quick escapes, and colored rice, which can be dropped to mark the path the player is taking through the level. Both of these items are great, in theory, but throwing a smoke bomb wastes valuable time, and if you throw it poorly, it won’t have the intended effect. The best choice is usually to just turn around and run away or scale a rooftop as quickly as possible. For the colored rice, Tenchu essentially eliminates any use for them since it provides you with a map of the level which can be brought up at any time using the Select button. Using the map doesn’t even pause the action, so it can be used frequently without slowing down gameplay.
(No health potions available? I’m screwed.)
The use of items is restricted by how many different items you can take with you and how many total items you can carry at any given time. Only four types of items can be selected, which is reduced to three since you’ll always want to carry the healing potion, if available. Item limits make a great deal of sense, but they put players in a situation where, odds are, only three are ever going to be chosen, and maybe only two of them will be used on a regular basis. Tenchu also makes the point of punishing the player for dying by making any items selected for that level unavailable for your next attempt, steepening the difficulty curve significantly. This can make some of the later levels particularly difficult and frustrating. While the items add a lot of potential variety and strategy to the game, ultimately they fail to be as useful as one would hope. They show just how ambitious a game Tenchu really was, but end up being one of the weakest areas of the game.
The game’s second major weak point is its combat. First, it’s important to convey just how satisfying it is to perform a silent kill in this game. Closing in undetected on an unconcerned guard is fun, and there is a great emotional reward to running behind them when they are turned around, pressing the Square button and watching the short cutscene of the player use their bladed weapons to do some bloodletting.
(Tenchu really earns its M rating.)
Outside of perfectly eliminating opponents, combat can be pretty rough. When you face guards one on one you are robbed of the element of surprise. Your attacks can and will be defended constantly. The weapons used against you will often have longer reach and take away a lot of health. To top it off, you’ll often have to fight multiple targets at once, multiplying the challenge many times over.
On the bright side, defending works well, especially against single opponents. This is accomplished simply by pressing down when facing an enemy. Your retreat doubles as a block in these situations. It does require that you be facing the opponent, however, so if you find yourself in a small space, the camera can cause problems by changing the angle as you get near a wall or obstacle. There are a surprising number of attacking moves available to the player, too, which suggest that engaging in combat is a viable strategy.
It’s somewhat true early on. Enemies have low health, don’t have very clever AI and are spread out enough that you can fight them individually without too much risk of triggering other guards, so long as you don’t run around too much. The game also features boss fights, which require the player to at least be competent at straight forward fighting. Playing in a more run and slash style ends up producing diminishing returns, however, as enemies become more difficult and numerous while your strength never increases. Combat in Tenchu, despite the robustness of its implementation, often works against the stealth aspects to heavily emphasized by the rest of the game,. The fighting controls just aren’t smooth or satisfying enough to make general combat worthwhile, thanks in no small part to the specter of digital only inputs.
In a lot ways, combat in Tenchu feels like a way to broaden the appeal of the game. While Acquire clearly had to implement some form of combat mechanics to deal with players getting caught, they are the least refined component in a game where the central mechanics feel considered and well realized. Perhaps this choice was a deliberate one, a subtle way of the developers to tell players that, sure, you can skate by for a while if you just want to kill things, but you won’t make it as a true ninja. Despite all that, though, Tenchu stands out in a very large and crowded library of Playstation games. It had high production value that featured detailed environments, interesting and quality character animations, voice acted character dialogue and cutscenes (though the quality of the voice actors is more than questionable). For 1998, this game was awesome. While subsequent games in the series iterated and improved upon the mechanics introduced in the first game, Stealth Assassins holds its own remarkably well, and stands pretty much alone in the ninja niche of stealth games. If you’re willing to take the context of what gaming in the late ‘90s was like, you can’t do much better.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein has a lot more focus on the espionage aspects over the action. Now you die much quicker and guards "Capture" much easier just by getting close enough. But you also have more defense, such as 5 different passes that require a lot of luck, and bribes that take a lot of searching for cash. and the old standard gun. There's supposedly a dagger for stealth kills, but I've yet to find it, and wouldn't want to risk getting into capture range.
Aside from that the gameplay is pretty close to the original, though this time you also have to find a time bomb and set it outside of Hitler's conference and escape before detonation. A bit too much map memorization for my taste, especially since maps are so huge and killing enemies is much more difficult this time around. Plus the whole random generation, though it doesn't change between deaths unless you want it too.
It's to be applauded for the innovations in stealth gameplay, Metal Gear wouldn't catch up for decades, You can even drag bodies around, in an early 80's game to top it off.. It's very much the "Alone in the Dark" to Metal Gear's "Resident Evil"... And yet it shares shockingly little with the more famous Wolfenstein 3D line of First Person Shooters that ID based off these 80's stealth games.
