Game Spotlight #27: Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (1998)
Long overdue for a spotlight here on AcquiredStardust, Ash takes a look at a formative game in her childhood with Acquire's 1998 Tenchu: Stealth Assassins! Nothing like the sudden announcement of a spiritual successor to give you the push you need to stop procrastinating, right?
1998 is remembered as an all-timer year for video games as a whole, and it's a pretty frequent focus for our content. It's actually the year we've written about the most so far, and when you look at the slate of releases either coming to the west for the first time or seeing an initial release in Japan, it's easy to see why. 1998 was also the year that is remembered for launching the stealth genre into the mainstream through the trifecta of Metal Gear Solid, Thief: The Dark Project, and the subject of today's spotlight: Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. It's a game synonymous with the fall-winter months for me, and not a year goes by I don't replay it.
We've previously talked a lot about how time and tide plays tricks with our perception and memory. Now so far removed from the revolution in video games that was Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid, the original Playstation is remembered in part as being a haven for games inspired by it in the last few years of its lifecycle. The two big titles most often held up as examples of this phenomena are Syphon Filter (1999) and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, and this is where people tend to fall into a common mistake that comes with time and tide wherein we tend to condense time and forget that it was lived just as much in real-time as we're presently living our own lives. We forget the days, weeks and months between events. We forget smaller, less significant or less quality works and instead create a highlight reel in our mind focused only on the best of the best that any given time period has to offer.
In doing so, plenty of conversation about Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid traditionally has centered around the games being rivals of sorts. The games have been pitted against each other for decades across forums and social media with people choosing sides based on whether they enjoy the different takes on stealth gameplay and stories. While often compared by gamers contemporaneously as well as with hindsight, they are dramatically different games in almost every way, and while Tenchu is indeed influenced by the works of Hideo Kojima, it is actually his earlier Metal Gear titles that never made it to the west during their original release windows that inspired it.
Lost in the comparison between the two titles is not only the fact that Tenchu actually released months before Metal Gear Solid, but just how unique Tenchu is, ending up quite a bit more like From Software's massively popular Soulsborne masocore titles than Metal Gear Solid. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
Plucked from the obscurity of the mid-late 90s indie game scene in Japan, Takuma Endo's Acquire Corporation wins a game design contest held by Sony Music Entertainment Japan which secures Acquire a game development deal. Originally conceptualized as a ninja game set in a then-present time, difficulties properly conveying that vision to Endo's team result in the shift to Sengoku-era Japan as what would eventually be released to the west as Tenchu: Stealth Assassins begins to coalesce. Taking shape as something of a ninja simulator with the stated goal of reintroducing ninja to the world as a vulnerable, fallible human figure as opposed to one with incredible combat skills and supernatural abilities, Acquire's Tenchu: Stealth Assassins is equal parts deliciously of its time and staggeringly forward thinking.
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins plays out across eleven stages with two different playable characters. Each stage is preceded by narration that helps set the mood and establish the stage's goals before loading into the item selection screen upon which the player will be able to choose from a wide selection of tools from health-restoring potions to shuriken and poisoned bait to lure unsuspecting enemies with. The playable characters, Rikimaru and Ayame, are Azuma ninja with sharply contrasting personalities and gameplay styles.
While the goals of each mission remain the same regardless of which character you choose, how you play the character and how that character interacts with the world make the game's eleven stages feel quite different. Rikimaru is the more durable and damaging of the two, a stoic and honorable man wielding a ninjato sword who metes out hard justice (the titular "tenchu", a phrase in Japanese roughly translating to "divine judgement") because it must be done, whereas Ayame is a ruthless killer dual wielding short swords with a cold and sarcastic personality that makes her easily one of the worst human beings (we say this affectionately) in all of gaming nevermind on the Playstation.
Each character is granted access to the same array of tools to aid in the completion of stages and has a surprisingly large set of actions they can perform natively. In addition to the basic combo string performed by hitting the attack button several times in succession (three for Rikimaru and five for Ayame) players can utilize directional attacks performed by hitting the attack button in combination with left or right, a lunge attack performed by double tapping forward and hitting the attack button, and a jumping attack performed by (you guessed it) hitting the attack button in the air. Movement is similarly well fleshed out with multiple options including the basic running, strafing, crouching, rolling and dashing in any of the four cardinal directions.
Additionally there is also a longjump performed by hitting the jump button out of a forward dash, as well as being able to backflip off walls for repositioning in combat by jumping towards a wall and hitting the jump button once more. Blocking non-projectile attacks can be done by holding down when an attack comes your way. It is an incredibly rare case of tank controls, usually thought of as rather archaic and a hallmark of this era of gaming, complimenting the design of a game incredibly well rather than hindering it. The game does feel a bit stiff, but it moreso feels precise which is an important factor in the magic behind its gameplay.
Said gameplay is as deep as it is in practice as it is on paper. Enemy characters have a similar level of depth to their attacks and movement, and they are able to quickly overwhelm the player if they spot you and it is for this reason that stealth is very encouraged. Remaining unseen by enemies will allow you to perform one of several situational stealth kills to instantly dispatch non-boss enemies depending upon the angle from which they are approached.
While stealth is encouraged it is not strictly necessary, and something that sets Tenchu apart from many other stealth games is mastering the admittedly difficult and exact controls very quickly allows the player to become a very competent combatant. While Acquire very much accomplished the goal of making ninja feel more human and vulnerable it is quite feasible to take on crowds of enemies in head to head combat with finesse and strategy. Rather than remaining the hunted, Tenchu affords the player the opportunity to become the hunter provided they can master it.
Players are able to clash with oncoming attacks using well timed attacks of their own (also the only way that arrows are able to be neutralized beyond dodging them) and enemies are also able to hit each other, a factor that clever players will surely utilize. This makes your positioning and timing important in encounters where you may be forced to deal with enemies rather than sticking to the shadows and it feels incredible to be as vulnerable as you are and still come out on top without a scratch.
Although I've characterized the game as being a bit stiff (you would be hard pressed to describe a game with tank controls any other way), the animations are all beautifully fluid and very impressive for the platform. Acquire's usage of a motion capture team including Ninja Warrior/Sasuke competition favorite Sho Kosugi still makes the game's animations hold up really well to this day.
Unlike the video gamey despawning corpses and infinite guards who will pursue you indefinitely if you do not hide seen in Metal Gear Solid, each of Tenchu's stages features a finite number of enemies who can be dispatched, leaving behind corpses that don't fade out of existence inexplicably, often helping the eerie atmosphere of the levels. One of the other problems that I had with Metal Gear Solid was also tied to some of its other immersion-breaking video gameyness, particularly that dying was often a very quick reset in bad situations and not punished enough.
This is not the case in Tenchu, with restarting entire stages as a punishment for death being pretty rough considering the game's potential difficulty as well as eating away at your finite number of equippable items that are only increased by achieving a high enough ranking in completed levels.
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins' eleven levels are another point of departure from Metal Gear Solid. Largely conveying an episodic plot across an indeterminate timeline, the level design is impeccable with vast, dense and detailed environments that do a good measure of environmental storytelling. There is an incredible usage of the 3D design that simply is not there in Metal Gear Solid, which still operates often with a top-down perspective on a 2D plane with not much being different if the game had been entirely 2D, with the third dimension largely being relegated to creating a lived-in, realistic feel for the game's setting rather than meaningfully using it from a gameplay perspective. Tenchu's stages primarily feature large outdoor environments with several interiors encapsulated within them, all containing an impressive level of verticality.
Many buildings can be scaled either through jumping or using the grappling hook, and it is also possible to find lower levels of elevation that also take you to your goal in many stages. Each of the eleven levels is large enough to facilitate the deep gameplay systems and allow for a shocking degree of freedom in how you approach completion, with each stage also having three different enemy layouts which adds to the non-linearity of progression as well as the on-your-toes tension. Although Metal Gear Solid's Shadow Moses Island is nearly unmatched in terms of quality and how realistic it feels, Tenchu's opts for a fairly different style and achieves what it sets out to do wonderfully.
Finishing a stage will award you with a title from Thug to Grand Master depending on your performance, with Grand Master unlocking a powerful item for your character's arsenal depending upon the stage it was achieved in. Most items have obvious gameplay uses from being able to disguise oneself as an enemy character to slip by patrolling guards (who's presence is kept track of by a meter with different symbols and numbers to denote enemy distance and alert status) or even a suit of armor that in addition to making your character more durable also changes their model to reflect its donning, with both characters' suits of armor looking very different to each other.
The open-ended nature of the game can also be a double edged sword, with players able to drag alerted enemies into boss battles making for giant chaotic brawls. Each boss also has a small cutscene that triggers if they defeat the player, a very cool touch that's easy not to notice and something that many other games don't bother with.
Mitigating the game's general high degree of difficulty that borders on masocore is the inclusion of several cheat codes that blow the game wide open from a health restoration code that even has interesting applications for resetting player hitstun and animations for further combo potential, to allowing players to access the incredibly robust debug menu which has an insane suite of features such as being able to load items into the player's inventory on demand with some of them being normally unobtainable (including a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure reference tucked away where no one would've otherwise seen it) as well as being able to place enemies, which can be set to be controlled by a second controller functionally making Tenchu: Stealth Assassins a multiplayer game.
Somehow as of yet undiscussed is the soundtrack composed by Noriyuki Asakura, most famous for his work composing the soundtrack to the 1996 anime adaptation of Rurouni Kenshin, and it is best described as a stroke of genius. Interesting selections of instruments accompany Asakura's signature sound which could've easily been at home in that anime. Tenchu's soundtrack easily has my vote for one of the greatest of all time, and while all of the tracks are very unique, stylish and of exceptional quality, nowhere is the Asakura factor felt more heavily than the opening cutscene of the game featuring a vocal track called "Add'ua" sung in the West African language of Hausa.
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins is indeed a rather difficult game, especially to master fully. So much so that after publishing and developing rights were passed around after the disappointing sequel Tenchu 2: Birth of the Assassins (2000), Tenchu eventually ended up in the hands of From Software who published several games in the series and originally intended to make 2019 masterpiece (and story for another time) Sekiro a reboot of sorts to the series before pulling back on that idea and settling for creating a new IP instead. This footnote unfortunately characterizes much of the tangled web of development history that the series underwent.
Acquire would eventually get the chance to work on Tenchu again (to say nothing of their other projects, some of which you may see pop up here sooner or later) with 2009's Tenchu: Shadow Assassins on the Wii which received middling reviews (as did the other non-Acquire Tenchu titles).
The real heartbreaker about this an interview with Endo from 2009 where he comments on the story that was meant to be with the series, thwarted by being handed over to another team after Activision pulled the rug out from under them in 2000, mentioning that he was hoping that Shadow Assassins would set up a trilogy of games, which ultimately wouldn't come to fruition likely due to the lukewarm reception and sales of Shadow Assassins. Acquire would never have the opportunity to work on another Tenchu game after this.
Coupled with the swerve of Sekiro not actually being a Tenchu reboot, the series has largely been mishandled and was a victim of the Japanese gaming scene downturn of the mid-late 2000s along with countless other franchises despite being very popular in its day, with its impact today mostly felt through Masashi Kishimoto's megahit manga Naruto (which started publication in 1999) with central character Kakashi Hatake bearing an uncanny resemblance to Rikimaru in both appearance and backstory.
Tenchu would never again be quite as good or impressive as Stealth Assassins. Despite the lack of continued success for the series and being passed around and passed over multiple times, for one brief moment in time Acquire was able to bang out one of the heaviest hitters of 1998, a year legendary for its incredible lineup of titles and a constant fixture of the content we post here on Acquired-Stardust. Indeed not just one of the best of the year but one of the best on the platform, and I'd go so far as to argue that Tenchu is one of the best games of all time.
Although tempting to compare the two (and indeed I have), it is well worth the celebration on its own merits rather than treating as a mere alternative to Metal Gear Solid, not the least of which because the final product resembles Sekiro much more so than it does a Kojima title. Perhaps if it was released today, even in its 1998 form as an indie game, it would've seen even more success that endured far longer than it did.
As fate would have it, Acquire announced a spiritual successor to Tenchu at Sony's State of Play event yesterday titled Yakoh: Shinobi Ops and while it certainly looks tonally close to their work on Tenchu, it remains to be seen whether the zoomed out, top down perspective will create the same tension and immersion as the over-the-shoulder perspective from Tenchu. Just as well is the potential lack of music done by Noriyuki Asakura, a vital element of Tenchu's enduring charm. We remain cautiously optimistic about Yakoh, and we can only hope it will allow Acquire to regain the acclaim they'd garnered with their 1998 first at bat home run.
A gem hidden among the stones, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins is undoubtedly stardust.
-- Ash
