Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins (2000)

Beat all 3 character stories. I started off with the girl, since I liked her better in the first game. However she was significantly less effective in this game and I really should have started with Riki. The first thing I noticed was the improved controls; circle for a dedicated block and dodge button like the first game should have had. There was a turn while sneaking from moving diagonally, which was an improvement over no turning at all. It was restrictive, slow and had a tendency to not work when there was stuff to bring up on. Sneaking around assassinating enemies was easy and somewhat fun. It was too easy actually because the level design often had enemies spread out enough to not overlap at all. Despite the better combat controls though, the combat in this game was somehow worse than the original. The enemies moved around more and the characters seemed to clip through each other during attacks. Way too often the enemies got behind me, and the god awful turning speed for both character and camera made it very difficult to recover. There was the back flip to jump over enemies, the stealth flip to switch facing, and the reverse attack to hit and face behind, though these did not always fix the problem. It was also more difficult to land hits with enemies being more on the ball with blocking. While I did like the depth and high skill ceiling of the combat system, the bosses did way too much damage to stand much of a chance on a blind run. Add to that no checkpoint save before bosses and all that slow stealth gameplay went to waste, and did not give much chance to practice open combat. After a few levels I was getting frustrated so I cheated infinite items to get ninja armor, revive and whatever else I wanted. I also used the full heal cheat as needed; whatever it took to not have to redo a level. To be fair, I kept my items to what I probably would have had legitimately and beat many levels without needing the cheat. I typically brought a mix of blow guns, grenades, shuriken and healing potions. Though a walkthrough said smoke bombs were the way to go vs bosses.

The girl got 5 expert, 4 ninja, thug on the final level, and novice on the level with with the white tiger boss. I did not like the steeper requirements for grand master ranking. In the first game it was enough to never be spotted, which encouraged leaving enemies alive. Here, you had kill most if not all enemies, which defeated the spirit of a stealth game. Riki was a much stronger character who fared much better in open combat with better range and damage. Some of his levels were confusing though, and took me longer than necessary to figure out where to go. He got: 1 master at demon mountain, 1 expert, 7 ninja, thug in the temple of dreams, and novice on the final mission. Then I did Tatsu and did not like him as much as Riki. He had less range and damage, but his moves seemed to hit more often. I did not like how he fought unarmed, only using his sword for stealth kills. I hated his fail on detection mission to capture slaves; like a bunch of peasants with bamboo spears could beat him in open combat. I kept failing that, including a few times from failing to hit a sleeping enemy. So I lowered the difficulty from Normal to Easy and left it there. He got grand master rank on that mission, which was the only possible rank in a kill all fail on detection mission. Outside that he got 1 expert, 1 ninja, 3 thug and 1 novice.

Then I played around with the mission editor, beginning with the premade levels. I beat all except 4 because I was getting tired of the game and did not want to spend too much more time. I lost the training steal mission because I foolishly attacked the boss in his tiny room, and the camera was nearly non functional in such close quarters. I chose not to try again because that level was a maze that was not fun to navigate. I found most of these levels far more difficult to navigate than necessary due to the complete lack of map for this mode. I failed the training level which had mandatory stealth. I could beat it with enough practice but I hate fail on detection so God damn much. I also failed the other mandatory stealth mission but it was only because I was watching the boss from the roof to master his patrol route when I went too close and was spotted. Close enough to winning. I failed the rescue mission with the old master in a cage and the big dumb boss outside like an ogre. The old man kept dying and I could not figure out why. Maybe there was a switch that the enemies could trigger when they were alerted. I beat the rest of the levels, which were pretty good at showcasing what could be done with the editor. The only 1 that stood out was the European castle where I fell to 2 tricks. The first was a hallway with several suit of armor decorations, only the last 1 in the back was an actual enemy. I had no trouble fighting him, but that was a good trick. The other was an optical illusion where it looked like a normal doorway going into a room, but in reality the room was much lower than the doorway, concealing the pit right past the entrance.

Then I made my own level to get a feel for the editor. There were a lot of tileset options though the items and people available in each were limited. There were hard limits on number of people and decorations that could be placed, so I had to scale down my level. The game also had difficulty spawning in all people when there were multiple in the general area. So the actual options for making custom levels were much lower than the size of the map would imply. My level was called Cashole and was about sneaking into a castle from the toilets to assassinate the lord. I wanted to put in a tunnel to show how you got in, but the castle tileset did not allow negative elevation. I put in pits covered by slow trap doors to represent the toilets. Outside this room was a 2 tile hallway with a room directly across having 2 guards standing at a large table. This was a dining room and right next door was the kitchen. I had 1 woman moving around in there cooking while another periodically brought food to the table. Both of these rooms were flavor and not meant to be entered. The kitchen also had a doorway into the hall and you had to sneak past both rooms to reach the other 2 ways to go. Straight lead into the throne room, which had 4 guards; 2 spearmen on either side of the doorway, 1 of whom went on patrol up the northern corridor, another spear beside the opposite door out of the throne room, and another that I set to go from the entrance (which was the black void on the edge of the map) to the toilet. I found that this guy would not spawn for a while so it gave the impression that he came from outside the castle to use the toilet. I designed 3 different ways to reach the lord, as easy, normal and hard. The easy way was to not enter the throne room and proceed up the northern hall. There was a small storage room to hide in, then a series of bedrooms with only a maid moving around them. The bedrooms were another flavor red herring area that did not need to be entered. The hallway looped around with 1 guard on patrol, then led to the lord's room. 2 sword guards stood outside his door, though 1 did occasional patrols to the nearby treasure room for a quick peek. This part was meant to be difficult but sometimes the treasure guard did not spawn. The lord's room had screens along 1 side with a woman that patrolled behind them, spending most of her time standing in front of the lord. The normal path was a hidden high passage next to the throne, meant to represent a secret way for the lord to get to his room. I fiddled around with traps to make this route as difficult as possible. It was a narrow L shaped corridor with a pressure plate directly below the entrance, which triggered a 2 high arrow trap. 4 more plates made it impossible to get past without getting shot at. The best way through was to jump on top of the arrow trap, since I could not put a plate on top of a trap, and being careful not to overshoot into a pit. The branching corner of the L had a pit covered by a fast trap door, followed by a safe spot. So best case, far jump from the trap then again at an angle to get to the safe spot. Next was a 2 tile pit that had to be far jumped over, and another 5 plate arrow trap. The exit required the grappling hook so another 2 to 3 shots before reaching the 2 guards outside the lord's room. Past the 2nd arrow trap was another pit that led into a larger pit room with access to the northern hallway; just another flavor room. The hard way was to continue past the throne room into a training room with 4 guards, where it was pretty much impossible to sneak past. Then was a barracks with sleeping mats and 1 guard, who would be asleep if that was an option in the editor. Beyond this was the lord's room. In my playtesting, the normal path did the best with fewest kills, mainly because the lord's guards did not spawn. Though this was assuming I did not mess up and die to a pit. The easy route had an unintended trick just before the lord's room where the 2 wide hallway narrowed to 1 tile just before the guards. This gave a good spot to hide but also concealed the treasure guard, making it very difficult to know when it was safe to take out a guard. I kept getting into fights there. I was not able to sneak through the training room at all, instead I lured them to the throne and hid in the high alcove. This direction gave full view of the treasure guard but it was still very difficult to take out either guard without the other knowing. The money boxes in the treasure room made a decent place to hide, though 1 guard climbed up with me. I messed up and got killed by the boss, but it was enough to know that route was possible and the most difficult.

In some ways this game was better than the original, such as controls and presentation. This game's story flowed more coherently even though it did not make sense until the very end. The enemy ninja faction wanted to take over the nation from the peasants and nobles because they are sick of living in the shadows? Then don't be a ninja? And they spare the good ninjas hoping they will join. But the very end revealed it was planned by demons to create chaos and bloodshed. Overall I preferred the first game with its simpler combat and better level design. Many of the levels here were about getting from point A to B at the other end of the map, rather than a more open level with the target somewhere in the middle. The mission editor was a huge boon for replayability with potentially infinite play. I downloaded a collection of 300 player made levels but it remains to be seen how difficult it will be to get them working on my PSP, and if I even want to play more of this game. I do wish the editor was not so limited with better performance for more enemies and objects. Mixing stuff from different tilesets, multiple bosses, loadouts and placed equipment would have been amazing.

8.0/10