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

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

I just recently got to playing this. Wrath of Heaven plays just like the PS1 titles, but with major improvements to the gameplay, especially to the movement. Instead of the tank controls you had on the PS1, the player is now freely able to move in any direction. The stealth system is a bit improved aswell, and the combat is infinitely better, even if there's usually no need for combat, except boss fights.

Wrath of Heaven rewards exploration and stealth killing by giving you more combat moves per level the more stealth kills you get. And more advanced equipment if you achieve "Grand master" on a level.

The graphics actually hold up, and no this is not nostalgia goggles speaking, wrath of heaven has detailed graphics and some pretty shadowmaps/lighting effects. They certainly showed Japanese architecture and captured the aesthetic well. The characters look much better with the new animations and model/textures. The soundtrack is still good as ever, from ominous oriental ambience to catchy and badass music.

The voice acting on the other hand stayed as mediocre as ever. Some voice actors do a great job and some try too hard.

The story also is improved, you won't see terrible writing you saw in the PS1 original tenchu, but it still has its silly moments.

Definitely a must play for anyone that enjoys stealth games or is a Tenchu fan.

Flickering between shadows, an obscure shade materializes. Blinking into perception, the ephemeral assassin strikes. A blade stained in sanguine cherry blossoms stains snowfall in glistening crimson. Sharp yelps, silenced as quickly as they are shouted, pierce the twilight sky, a sonic arrow sighted at the heavens. If the way of the samurai is, in essence, an introspection of death, the way of the shinobi, Ninjutsu as a whole, is an enactment of that introspection, a realization of inevitability. Lacking the grace and posturing of direct combat, the ninja of the Sengoku period are the nameless knife slicing through the thick of night. Further divorced from the reality of unrelenting warmongering, the fictionalized ninja is the innominate justice befalling the unjust.

Of course, even further separated from reality, what we see is less enactments of judgment or backstage saviors of the forgotten. Stealth, mechanically and narratively, becomes unceasing patience punctuated by uncontrollable bloodlust. But as much as I want to take a nuanced approach to that, a balanced reading on the act of killing within stealth games, Tenchu doesn’t really seek to hold that discussion. Morally-just and heroic ninjas do Huge Violences on fucked up and evil baddies. It’s as simple as stories go, and considering the game boils down to an arcade-ification of the traditional stealth game, it works wonders. Running with the feudal setting, the generally goofy dubbing, the casual ultra-violence, the vibe of the 90s OVA cuts through the surface, leaving me with this dumbass grin on my face the entire time I’m playing.

The world of Tenchu, now thousands of miles away from the heavy reality of dynasty warfare, is a perfectly polished arrangement of brutal playgrounds. Setting off with an overwhelming amount of quirky toys to torment the local guard population, you are tasked with flawlessly carving a swath of mean-spirited cruelty through Japanese villages, industrialized fortresses, and at least one truly fucked-up graveyard. Whether via bear traps, hook shots, by your own hands or by the paws of one ostensibly good boy, the name of the game is Very Cool Murdering, a hellacious hecatomb of dim-witted mall-cop-tier ronin, oni, and kunoichi. A conductor to an orchestra of “whose footprints are these?” and “it must have been the wind”’s, your silent slaughter is sung not in harrowing heartlessness, but in callous cackling, a sing-song “GGs, shake my hand” to soldiers born to die.

If I wanted to, I could expand into the nature of stealth games, the glorification of bloodshed, the senselessness of perpetual warfare, the meaning of righteousness in a world defined by the unjust, but God, who gives a shit about that. This is Tenchu; the game where an old dude gets three balls and turns into a snake before you, Samurai McFuckedUpEye, open said eye and become Samurai McSuperSonic. The depth of what the shinobi represents in fiction, the nature of violence in games, a thousand topics on what we “require” in action games could be discussed, but to leverage true depth at Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven is like spearfishing in a drainage ditch. Just… be a silly little ninja. Pull off stunts that shouldn’t work, reward yourself with one of the best pop-offs of the 2000s, respectfully look at Ayame who is very cool and my best friend. It doesn't have to be that deep, and that's perfectly fine.