Red Ninja: End of Honor

I rented Red Ninja over the weekend, and I’ve played through the tutorial and the first level and a half or so. And while I really wanted to give the game as much of a fair shot as possible, and hoped that the reviews really were missing something about the game that would turn it into something enjoyable, I have to agree with them this time. While the game’s appearance is quite nice – the feudal-Japan environments are some of the nicest I’ve seen lately, and I really like how Kurenai is modelled and animated – and the ingame ambient sound and music are well-done, the gameplay seems clumsily designed, poorly implemented, and the victim of several opposing design goals.

On one side, the game tries its hardest to emulate the stealth gameplay in Tenchu, but it lacks even the refinement that series has managed. It’s difficult to actually be stealthy thanks to twitchy controls, and what’s worse is that it’s difficult to maintain awareness of your surroundings because the player doesn’t have enough control over the camera. The first-person view has a smaller range of rotational movement than the one in Tenchu, and when the player is pressed up against a wall, the first-person view cannot be used, and the third-person camera cannot manually be swung left or right as in Tenchu (it prefers to edge gradually in the direction in which the player is moving). Staying hidden ends up being mostly unnecessary, though, as a group of guards can be pretty easily mowed down by hooking one with the ‘tetsugen’ wire weapon and running left or right to knock down the others like bowling pins, and then picking them off as they stand up.

On the other side, the game has some interesting platforming mechanics that I’ve rarely or never seen in other 3D platformers. It has a sort of wall-running that’s based on momentum – i.e., if you run up the wall at a high angle you’ll lose speed faster, but if you go for a low-angle arc you’ll get more distance – instead of the automatic variety seen in the newer Prince of Persia games. The tetsugen wire can only tether to predefined points in the game (like in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), but its behavior is dictated by a physics model, and swinging on it it satisfying – especially when the player just nails a long jump or bridges several gaps with successive swings instead of stopping off at the platforms in between. The way the wire is modelled reminds me of the fishing-line-swinging in the excellent Umihara Kawase, but the tetsugen’s implementation isn’t nearly as polished.

The tetsugen is also interesting in how it’s used to dispatch enemies. Once you hook an enemy with the tetsugen (the game automatically ‘wraps’ the tetsugen around any enemy you touch with it), pulling on it will do damage to the enemy. There’s a meter in the lower-left hand corner of the screen that displays the amount of tension in the wire, and when the meter’s above a certain point, yanking on it will decapitate, dismember, or cut in half the enemy you’ve hooked, depending on where you hooked him. Tension can be generated by running away from an enemy, or by winding the wire around a post or over a wall or high ledge in between you and the enemy. Unfortunately, the wire comes unhooked from enemies all too easily, so attempts to be more creative with one’s kills are often stifled.

Neither the stealth nor the platforming sections feel particularly well-designed, from base mechanics to level design. Stealth rooms are your usual playgrounds full of baffles and dimwit guards on patrol, as well as the ever-present ledges and rooftops (nearly all of which put you at a distance from guards that’s out of the useful range of the tetsugen). Platforming sections are cluttered and unexciting; there is none of the visual, palpable flow that can be seen in the best pure platformers (2D or 3D).

The most overriding and show-stopping problem with platforming, and indeed with the game, is the camera. Outdoors and in wide-open areas it’s mostly unobtrusive and does its job without trouble, but in any indoor area it’s disobedient and quarrelsome, and is the first in-game camera I can recall that’s actually given me motion sickness (during both play sessions so far, in fact). It spins wildly when the player changes direction in close quarters, and the rails it’s mounted on in some sections cause it to actively defy the player’s commands for it to change direction. It requires absolutely constant player input for it to be facing in the right direction for any amount of successful platforming. Its misbehavior combined with the sloppy design of the platform sections makes things no fun at all.

I think Red Ninja would have ended up being much more successful if the designers had chosen either ninja stealth action or platforming as the game’s focus. Both halves of the game feel half-baked and slipshod, and more focus on either half, in level design and mechanics design, would have made it more enjoyable overall. The game feels to me like its developers were handed a set of disparate, jumbled goals by the producer and weren’t able to implement any of them very well. This brings up another impression I have of the game: when VU Games assembled Tranji, they hired the right art designers and modellers for the job (as evidenced by the player model, the character art, the beautiful environments, the nice audio and the semi-interesting story) and the wrong gameplay and engine designers. There is so much potential on the artistic side of this game that the train-wreck of the gameplay and camera is that much more disappointing.

Now, while I generally agree with the sentiment that a reviewer should complete a game before reviewing it, I would rather not play any more of this game, because I really do not enjoy it and I would rather not be made any more nauseous by the camera than I have been. I feel like I’ve got a good sense of the game as a whole, and if anyone wants to make the claim that the game turns into a paragon of gameplay and level design after the second level, then I’d love to hear it.

Screenshots and Concept Art (GamersHell)
FLOWER – D.K.’s official site (character designer)

Tranji/Vivendi Universal Games
released March 29, 2005 (USA), on Playstation 2 and Xbox
$49.99