Amazing game, but doomed to be misunderstood by western audiences. Just like a certain other series made by Acquire.

It also took me a bit to properly get into the controls, figuring out how the game wants to be played, how to spot enemy positions and how the A.I. works, but once you do, it's a fantastic time. The context unsensitive grappling hook is an amazing tool and playing around with your ninja tools (poisoned rice balls ftw.!) is lots of fun.

Unlocking new items by getting good ranks in the levels is a great idea and incentivizes replays and careful play. I also like the fact that enemy positions aren't the same everytime and instead gets shuffled around from three different layouts.

Also that music ...

The thing that drags it down a little is the unfortunate fact that there are forced boss fights that aren't really fun to do ... It gives combat items like grenades and mines a reason to exist and they aren't a huge offender, but I'm never looking forward to them. Losing against the final boss after a long level and then losing all your progress is terrible. I recommend just spamming grenades to bypass that guy altogether.

The other problem I have is that the A.I. can act pretty erratically. Their behavior is mostly predicatble (as it should be in a stealth game) but there are often cases when guards are randomly turning around on their patrol path or not properly returning to where they should be after they find a body. It can result in unnecessary alerts, which subtract from your final score everytime. Thankfully the ranking system is pretty forgiving about alerts when you're killing a lot of enemies, but there were some moments of irritation on my part because of it.

Still, due to most levels not being overly long it's very replayable, even though the unskipable cutscenes can be grating. (Turbo mode on emulator be blessed)