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REVIEW BY PINCHIE MCPINCH
"The way of the Ninja."
It is the late 16th Century, and in the province
of Utakata the wide-spreading effects of the
recent civil unrest in neighbouring areas are
being deeply felt. The ruling House of Ichijo,
strengthened with the protection of the
esteemed Asuka Ninja Clan, seeks to maintain
peace despite the chaos escalating in
surrounding provinces. This ongoing
partnership between Ichijo and the Asuka
comes to a swift and sudden end when the
Asuka Clan's village is attacked and obliterated
in a single night with no survivors accounted
for. With the Asuka village and Ichijo's alliance
in ruins, rival feudal lords quickly take the
opportunity to try to seize power in Utakata.
Following close behind them are other ninja
clans, hoping to fill the void left in the wake
of the Asuka's destruction and take their part
in the creation of a new order.
The darkness conceals a ninja racing his way
across the rooftops of the town. This ninja is
Goh, often referred to as Crow by those who
don't know him closely. The ironic twist to this
is that he doesn't know himself - he awoke a
few hours ago near a ruined village with no
memory of whom or where he was. He has
been informed that Lord Ichijo of Utakata is
his master, and so he races to confront him
and discover the truth about his past.
So begins Shinobido: Way of the Ninja, without
a doubt one of the finest stealth action games
ever to have graced the Playstation 2. The
premise of the game is simple: three rival
factions - Ichijo, Akame and Sadame - are
attempting to seize total control of Utakata. By
enlisting the paid help of the local ninja clans
they each hope to eliminate their rivals and
emerge the victor, but the ninja don't
necessarily have to follow one lord or lady -
they go where they will for their own reasons.
As Goh you choose which tasks you will accept
from a faction leader; these range from
completely eliminating the enemy from an
area, stealing valuable items from a rival
faction, assassinating a strong foe or even
hunting bears. In between you will find other
missions such as assaulting armoured carts or
rescuing kidnapped girls. Which missions you
choose to accept and which you refuse are
entirely up to you. Will you ignore all of Lady
Akame's missions in favour of Lord Ichijo's and
Lord Akame's? Will you attempt to play the
faction leaders off against each other as you
continue your foremost task of discovering
your past? Will you simply take whichever
mission pays best at the time? You decide.
The structure of the game is effectively simple.
You choose which mission you'd like to attempt
from a selection of requests sent by the
faction leaders. If you succeed in your selected
mission their trust in you - given as a
percentage - increases, and you are awarded
an amount of gold for your efforts. However,
if you fail in your task, your trust goes up only
a tiny amount, and you receive no monetary
reward as well as losing some objects from
your inventory. Of course, if you are caught
attacking a faction leader's troops or assets
then their trust in you will drop significantly,
and this is why a ninja must be stealthy at all
times.
Stealth is the skill that allows the ninja to
appear to be a fleeting shadow on a moonless
night. With your stealth you can sneak up on
an enemy, slit their throat and dispose of their
limp body without alerting their allies. You can
steal a valuable object from an enemy
stronghold without them knowing who to
blame, which is vitally important if you want
to maintain a level of trust with each faction.
If you oppose a rival lord or lady's troops and
none of them survive to tell the tale then you
cannot be blamed for the deed. You must work
well to achieve your tasks undetected though,
as enemy soldiers have a habit of sending one
of their number to raise the alarm, and this
spells doom for the idea of working silently.
The enemy usually doesn't miss too much
unless their food supply's been cut off or
stolen by a mystery ninja in a previous
mission, so you must take every step with care
because you never know what might lie over
the next rooftop.
That's the real beauty of this game. It really
doesn't play the same way twice unless you
make a real effort for it to do so and don't fail
any missions while attempting to do so. By
stealing a few huge boxes of rice from one
faction you will find they're pretty hungry and
not too focussed in later missions. Factions
can even gain new weaponry, and you have
some control over which factions gain these
upgrades. Will you help transport the bow and
arrow plans for Lady Sadame or will you help
Lord Akame steal them from right under her
nose? The real question becomes 'Who do you
want to be shooting bows at you in later
missions?' and it's this control over the
evolution of the story that adds such immense
beauty to Shinobido: Way of the Ninja.
Control over the character isn't always so
beautiful. The main trick to effectively working
with the controls of Shinobido is two use both
analog sticks. The player runs towards the
camera, so it's far more precise to rotate the
camera with the right analog stick and run
forward with the left analog stick. Using the
left analog to rotate the player is far too
clunky and makes movement extremely
frustrating. When approaching enemies you can
use L1 to lock onto and cycle through nearby
targets, freeing up your right hand to use the
attack buttons. I found this dual-analog
control method to be a lot more precise, and
that oversensitivity and clunkiness of the left
analog for player rotation is really this game's
only downside in terms of controls.
In other ways, the control system eventually
pleasantly surprised me. The first of the 'mini-
missions' playable outside of the story mode
was three attempts at 'triple jumping' -
zigzagging upwards between two close walls
with a series of jumps. I spent twenty-five
minutes trying to figure out how to do it
before I realised that I was over-complicating
it. There was no need to be using the left
analog stick to control each jump.. I simply
had to initially jump into the wall then just
keep pressing X to jump. No tricky directional
controls required, and it's this sort of
simplicity of complicated movement that really
adds to the fun of the game as a whole.
Growing wild around Utakata are a plethora of
herbs and mushrooms which can be picked,
and with the eventual aid of a cooking pot can
be combined and boiled up into some
extremely powerful concoctions and eventually
up to ten cooking pots at a time can be
brewing away. Many items can be put in an
alchemy mixture, and either extracted into a
single (hopefully powerful) item or used to fill
a number of spheres to be thrown or bottles to
be drunk from. Sushi can also be soaked in
your mixture and used to tempt the starving
enemy troops. This means that the aspiring
ninja alchemist can make a large amount of
very, very powerful explosive grenades or
health potions on the cheap - much cheaper
than buying them through a shop. Other
negative effects can be brewed into an alchemy
mixture, such as rendering an enemy
unconscious or confusing them. Conversely,
each negative effect has a positive effect such
as speed or strength. The best thing is that you
retain your items and alchemy mixtures over
subsequent play-throughs of the game, so you
can take all the time you need to pick the
herbs and mushrooms needed for your perfect
sphere of death. Just make sure to stand back
when you throw it.
The enemies who survive will take revenge,
though. Out in the mountains Goh's shack
resides in the middle of his garden, but it's
not as hidden as you might hope. Often
barbarians or betrayed factions will attack your
garden between missions and steal your
precious items if you can't prevent them from
doing so. Luckily you don't have to run around
killing each one by hand, as powerful friends
enjoy bestowing you with gifts for yourself and
your garden such as pit, spike or fire traps,
enraged bears, cannons that shoot enormous
spiked balls or even some of their own
guardsmen to aid you in your effort. You place
these items and characters in your garden and
edit the landscape with an intuitive editing
system and eventually smile as every barbarian
is incinerated, perforated, weakened, crushed
and eventually falls to their untimely death at
the hands of your evil designs. It's just too
fun.
The rich ninja also has a wide selection of
combat weapons to choose from. Between
missions a variety of offensive and defensive
items can be purchased from the shop.
Shuriken, land mines, wind-up toy lizards with
timed explosives, poisoned sushi. The list goes
on, and varies throughout the game. Health
potions end up being cheaper to make with
alchemy, but it's some time before you have
initial access to the cooking pots on your first
play through the story so you're forced to
either play very well or spend a lot on health
potions. Luckily the stealth kills are simple to
perform, or you wouldn't last long in a town
filled with enemy troops.
Stealth is undoubtedly the primary skill of a
ninja. Of course a ninja needs to fight, but
before that a ninja needs to be invisible.
Combining a ninja's stealth abilities with their
combat abilities makes for a swiftly-defeated
opponent. As long as an enemy hasn't seen you
(handily represented by a small set of icons at
the top of the screen showing how many
enemies are in range of you and their
individual alert status) you can sneak up on
them and wait for the metallic noise of stealth
joy and small on-screen reflective glint to
announce the fact that you're in killing range
of them. By pressing triangle you'll perform a
deadly stealth kill - how you kill them depends
on your direction from them. You might jump
down and twist their head violently, snapping
their neck. You might be able to stab them
with your sword through the door that
separates you. You might trip them forwards
and hold them down; drowning them in the
k