Tenchu Wrath of Heaven aka Tenchu 3 aka Tenchu oh no how tf am I lost again

The two Tenchu games on the PS1 were some of my favorite games growing up. The quasi-fantasy feudal Japan setting was cool, the presentation was poetic, the music (at least in Tenchu 1) was amazing , I wanted Ayame to step on me ... but I always got the feeling that perhaps because of hardware limitations the actual stealth aspect of the games was somewhat middling.

Wrath of Heaven marks the series' first foray into the 6th generation. Gone are the tank controls and fixed behind-the-back camera - movement is a lot smoother and the camera can be controlled freely via the right analog stick and shoulder buttons, so it's no surprise that the stealth aspect of the game is now... still B-tier at best? (Insert 'Gru looking at board' meme here). After a bit of thinking I think I can put into words why Tenchu's stealth mechanics fall just short of excellence, but I'll have to refer to some of my other favorite stealth-based games first.

Metal Gear Solid is probably the gold standard of 6th-7th gen stealth games. The AI guards are dumb and gullible, but they respond to noise and even footprints in the snow, and often have complex patrol paths that intersect with each other. The player is given the perfect tools to interact with this challenge: a handy radar which shows enemy position and line-of-sight, and a simple top-down camera view which gives you maximum information with a minimum of fuss. Mark of the Ninja - another of my favorite stealth games - is a 2D platformer with simple graphics and a similarly dynamic AI. While anything onscreen that your character can't see (what's behind a large box, for example) is shrouded in shadow, enemy footfalls appear on the screen as soundwave-lines, which always gives you a very good picture of the space you're in, and the position of your opponents relative to you.

The Tenchu games, on the other hand, make it really difficult to get your bearings. You'd think that Wrath of Heaven's free-moving camera would make it easier, but it moves too slowly to simulate turning your head back and forth, it's not quite snug enough to give you a good character's-eye perspective, but also not quite wide enough to give you a sense of the space you're in. The level designs don't help, often being poorly-lit and labyrinthe and leading to you trying and failing to get your bearings and enemies spotting you before you even know you're there...which I'm fairly sure isn't how the whole ninja shtick isn't supposed to go. But my issue with this isn't that it's difficult; it's that in order to keep the difficulty fair, the game compensates for the problematic camera angles and lack of a radar with utterly braindead AI. Tenchu's stealth component often simply boils down to staying outside of an enemy's line of sight and the slaughtering them when they turn around. And while the slaughtering part is undoubtedly fun and satisfying, the game isn't able to iterate on the stealth mechanic in the way the best stealth games do, because it doesn't give you the tools to respond to much beyond the simplest guard AI patterns. MGS guards break their standard pathing to investigate noises, and actually respond to footprints in the snow - meanwhile the mooks in Wrath of Heaven sometimes stare straight at you for full seconds without going into full alert mode, and will spot a comrade's fresh corpse riddled with katana wounds, circle cautiously around it for a whopping ten seconds before declaring (verbatim) "ehhh, forget it." How do these guys dress themselves?

So, okay, the stealth part is kinda mid. But the stealth kills are cooler and more graphic than before, the combat more satisfying, the vibes generally better, the bosses more interesting (and challenging bastards too!) But one thing makes the whole experience compare unfavorably to the first two Tenchu games and that's the fact that the levels were designed by Satan. Well...more like designed by Cthulhu, because some of them don't seem to be even Euclidean. Unlike the previous games in the series where most maps had a clear destination and multiple ways to get there, many of the maps here are needlessly labyrinthe and loop back on themselves in the most confusing ways. I spent so long dicking around the Buddha Temple mission - every time I thought I had found a new passage that would bring me further in the level, it would just loop me back to where I was before. I eventually died when I accidentally fell into a bottomless pit, nearly a full hour after I had killed the last enemy.

Wrath of Heaven is the best-feeling Tenchu game so far when you're actually doing ninja stuff - you know, twisting a guard's head 180 degrees, fighting a creepy giant wooden puppet with a machine gun that dabs, that sort of thing. But in between those moments of awesome, it's way too much of a chore. I remember completing it when I was like 18, again this year, and that's about enough of that for me I think.

I beat Tenchu Wrath of Heaven and all I got was this fascination with slender dark-haired women with round faces and catlike features

пиздец кривая игра, тупейший ИИ (тупее в стелсах я если честно не видел), наркоманский левелдизайн с пропастями после которых приходится перезапускать двадцатиминутную миссию, и т.д.
с середины начинается какая-то долбоебская ебаторика с летающими головами и куклами-карликами с мечами, но в общем-то игра мне зашла

проходил за рикимару, за бабу стало влом играть, думал там новые уровни, а там те же по большей части
до этого в тенчу не играл, мб первые две части получше, посмотрим