|
Holding my breath as I creep around corners, slowly making my way up higher and higher in the lofty heights of this Japanese castle, and silently drawing closer to the paranoid feudal lord who sits surrounded by guards, dreading my arrival. The idle talk of his patrolling men drifts through the air. Bored guards idly chatting with the seductive kunoichi, a lone soldier complaining about hunger...only to be silenced by the tip of my blade. His body shoved into a dark corner before I hurry onwards.
The bright lantern light of an alert guard blocks my progress. The lord is only a floor above now, and past this man is the only route to reach him. Hiding just around the doorframe, I toss him a mushroom I had picked off the ground only a little while before. I really should have checked what sort of fungus it was beforehand, because the guard screams and panics, drawing his sword and dashing about madly to fend off invisible foes. A commotion that is quickly overheard by his lord and the dozen guards protecting him, who all rush downstairs with drawn swords heading directly towards me. I ran.
The only game to ever make me feel like a ninja
Developer Acquire created the Tenchu franchise through their own sweat and beer, but sadly they didn't own it, and ended up losing control after the second in the series, resulting in mediocre results at the hands of a different developer. Though maybe it was a good thing, because it drove Acquire to further develop and improve every single aspect of their former series until they had crafted something that transcends just being a game, and becomes an all-consuming experience.
The player slips into the black tobi socks of Goh, a man who had the misfortune of having his memories drained into a large jewel that shattered in a half dozen fragments, scattering to the winds. Finding a single one of these fragments gives him haunting visions of smoke and blood, of half-remembered faces and ironclad monsters. Now he must regain his memories by tracking down the rest of these stones, and the painful revelations that await. Eventually he'll be joined by the sexy kunoichi Kinu, who carries a chain with a very nasty collection of metal on the end meant for mangling foes. While in a second play through, the player can unlock skins, and so assume the guise of nearly every other character in the game.
The presentation of Shinobido is slick from the start. The menu is no static backdrop, but shows Goh sitting peacefully in his small shack in the wilderness, while choosing a menu option like checking out his supplies will have him stand up an open up his hidden cupboards, or examining a mission will have him unroll a scroll from one of the arrows shot by the minions of his perspective clients. It doesn't really add to the gameplay, but small touches like this permeate every aspect of the game to make the world seem more alive. Much like the game's physics model. It's no Half-life 2, but bodies flop around when you drop them in dirt, crates teeter over when you bump into them, and upsetting a stack of cannonballs will send them rolling off in all different directions. Normally, it won't matter very much, though you might want to grab the body of the guard you killed on the roof before it slides off and lands on the ninja below. That sort of thing tends to upset even the most steel-hearted of assassins.
|
