While the one-strike kills balance brutality and elegance and still feel fresh 12 years on, the open combat feels far less evolved. Stick with it, and instead of cowering fearfully round a corner waiting endlessly for the right moment to strike, you'll soon be jogging up behind guards and eviscerating them in the open, before grappling back to a rooftop to avoid being spotted. But no-one said being a shinobi was easy. While dangling the fantasy of being a silent, deadly infiltrator scything through a sandbox, it also limits early enjoyment with unintuitive controls and a slipshod camera. Wrath of Heaven opens up like an exquisite flower, rewarding the effort you put into it. There are no choke points that require you to use these uncanny abilities - you can play through the entire game with just your steel and a grappling hook. There's a reincarnation talisman, various enchanted blades, and supernatural skills such as turning invisible or freezing enemies with mind control. While you begin each mission by arming yourself from a straw hut B&Q of basic equipment - spiked caltrops to dissuade pursuit, old-school throwing knives, a blowgun, poisoned rice cakes to lure and immobilise sentries - as you progress through the story, your powers become more interesting. Slowly, your abilities also begin to bend toward the fantastical. After gutting strolling ronin and oblivious archers, you're soon fighting demon-horned footsoldiers, vengeful forest spirits and mewling, exploding midgets. Very ninja.Īt first, your ninjas seem a little earthbound compared to their opponents.
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I can't help but feel if publisher Activision had insisted the irresistible Ninja Dog be featured prominently on the cover of Wrath of Heaven, the Tenchu series would still be the pre-eminent video game franchise of the 21st century, a Doge-flavoured Call of Duty. Beat Ayame's campaign on the highest level and you can play as Ninja Dog, a weaponised shiba inu who trots around on their hindlegs while expertly wielding kodachi blades. Call of DogeĪlso crammed into Wrath of Heaven is a limited but enjoyable local multiplayer mode that, GoldenEye-style, lets you play as baddie avatars. You spend a lot of Tenchu like this: wrangling the camera so you can get a peek at the patrolling guards to work out how best to gut them. But for all the overarching grandeur of Lord Godha's campaign to defeat an evil warlord by claiming three enchanted jewels or somesuch, Wrath of Heaven boils down to a series of discrete infiltration and assassination missions for its two leads: the severe, white-haired Rikimaru (who resembles a katana-wielding Alistair Darling) and the poised, lethal Ayame (a tyke with two stubby kodachi blades and more speed than brawn). Set in Edo-period Japan, Wrath of Heaven initially presents itself as a sweeping epic that threatens to tip into the melodramatic, thanks to a long, dreamy and at times logic-free opening cinematic soundtracked by a mash-up of rock, dance and classical that all sounds a bit Clean Bandit. It arguably deserves the prize for that awe-inducing subtitle alone: Wrath of Heaven sounds like it's what your Azuma clan ninjas will be battling against, but in truth it's the ultimate unlock, a devastating technique awarded to those players dedicated enough to surpass Tenchu's exacting shinobi standards. Ninjutsu scholars might quibble over which instalment represents the apex of the series, but there was a tangible sense of purpose and poetry to 2003's Wrath of Heaven (essentially Tenchu 3, and the franchise's first outing on PlayStation 2). The once ascendant series is now essentially defunct, and while invisibility on current-gen consoles might seem appropriate for a stealth game, the fact that Tenchu has melted away so utterly over the past few years makes me melancholy. In video game terms, Ninja Warrior UK has more in common with Sonic the Hedgehog than Tenchu, the franchise that hews closest to our pop culture ideal of the austere shadow warrior. Any true ninja would harrumph at the overeager procession of Lycra-clad, would-be shinobis and rightly dismiss the whole gaudy enterprise as frivolous shadowplay, a noisy, inelegant distraction from the important business of infiltration, sabotage and assassination.
There are no shurikens but lots of shrieking.
Centred around a comically oversized and carefully padded obstacle course, the show is an absolute triumph of non-lethal razzamatazz, with guffawing commentary from former footballer Chris Kamara as competitors negotiate awkward hurdles and tumble into water hazards. We're fast approaching the endgame of ITV's knockabout Saturday night gameshow Ninja Warrior UK, the latest international incarnation of a tried-and-tested Japanese format.
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