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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shino-bi-do-bi-doooooo!, 27 Sep 2006
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
Shinobido: The Way of the Ninja has many a moment that makes you want to shout with joy as you play it, but if your character was to do this then he'd soon be dead as the way of the ninja is to remain as silent as possible as you go about your deadly business.
It's the late 16th century and the back story tells us that at the end of the Muromachi Period there's a civil war about to break out, including the Utakata, long peacefully ruled by the House of Icihjo (why is Jo itchy?). Yes, you get the impression that the storyline does tend to be the kind of thing that'll be instantly forgettable so I'll be brief. The fact is that your House used to be in alliance with the Asuka Ninja Clan, but now they're all dead so, as you might expect, it seems to fall to you alone to get done everything of which you're asked.
Yes, that's right, it's one man against the world, heading off to kick ninja butt, but bear in mind that while you're meant to behave in a stealth-like fashion, if you do get some people's backs up and they call for back-up (ooh, that sort-of rhymed), then you'll be swamped and the Help FAQ tells you to run away from heavy fights that you can't win. You're there to accept missions and get rewarded in cash which you can use to purchase additional health packs and items to attack such as shuriken. Oh, and the 'How to' helpfile, in the form of advice scrolls, makes all forms of combat look easy, but certainly not in a fast battle.
Shinobido is a game that requires patience and dexterity similar to that of the Hitman series, even though it doesn't quite reach that game's heights, otherwise you'll attract such unwelcome attention, so it's best to plan out your method of attack as to who you're going to kill first. Watch the way they walk back and forth like a sentry, then enjoy the great fun as you creep up behind them and slash their throat and, thus, kill 'em! You'll hear a 'swish' sound of your sword as you approach and, effectively, know that you can perform the deadly deed.
One of the first things you'll notice as you inevitably get into trouble with the locals is that the controller vibrates when you're panicking, to simulate your heartbeat. This is quite handy because that, coupled with the music that you hear, will give you an indication of whether you're likely to be safe if you think you've escaped the eye of the enemy. In fact, at times it can get very fast so in one sense it's quite difficult and will take a long time to master, leading to great longevity here.
However, unless you're being followed by some of the more expert types across the enemies you'll face, you can jump up and run across rooftops to avoid being seen by them, which highlights the often poor AI as you can easily hide away and they soon forget about you. I found this particularly daft in a reconnaissance mission I passed because four ninja guys were following me and I evaded their stares and swords by jumping up onto the roof of a wooden hut. Once they'd got on with their own business again there would often be one just standing about not paying attention to what was going on behind him upon which I could strike. Naturally, this disturbed the others and we went through this cycle until they were all dead and the mission was therefore complete.
Of the items available to you to use, the sword is easily the weapon of choice. It can get you out of a bind if cornered by simply thrashing it about and, when you kill someone, you can grab their sword and use two at once. This doesn't work for too long as your man has a tendancy to throw one of them away when you'd rather he held onto it. The grapple hook is good fun, used in similar fashion to Spiderman's web-slinging antics, but the control system used to select an item and then use it by focusing on what you want to grapple onto can get too complex at times and if you're being chased by someone then forget it - just leap onto a wall and there's bound to be a roof nearby.
One slightly annoying this is the game's autosave feature so if you screw up a mission you can't redo it, you lose 'trust' and have to soldier on and rebuild that trust, by either doing some easier, less-rewarding missions or staying home and defending your garden from baddies. Without checking again, I think this is turn offable but the missions and locations do get a bit repetitive, as do the backdrops, so the same one will come up again in some form or another if not the same mission again itself. In fact, I killed some bigwig a second time within the space of a few missions, thinking it couldn't really be him again, surely? The names of them aren't easily memorable so I just made an assumption. Still, it was good fun to slash his throat again...
Overall, Shinobido: The Way of the Ninja is a great piece of gaming fun but might not be to everyone's taste so you may wish to try a rental first, particularly since the graphics are far from the best we've come to expect on the PS2. They move fast, but there's jaggies aplenty more frequently than is good for a console that can avoid them when it wants to.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Tenchu Evolved, 1 Sep 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
I've no argument with the other review here so I won't go over the same ground. However, he is wrong about the auto-save. It's a fully manual save system so you can redo a mission if you've saved beforehand but it means reloading from the memory card each time. Actually this is one of a number of poorly thought out or unpolished elements that undermine the good, sometimes very good, things in Shinobido. Shinobido is actually made by the same people involved in the first two Tenchu games on the PS(One) and it shows. In many ways it is what PS2 Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven should have been ie. an evolution of the Tenchu concept rather than the safe, decent repetition but with updated (hah!) graphics it turned out to be. Unfortunately although Shinobido is a far more ambitious and, over all, a better game, it repeats many of Tenchu's annoyances. Controls are very similar, crude feeling but still usable, and although the graphics seem to be running on an almost identical game engine they actually manage to look even worse. There's not enough time to go into everything right and wrong with Shinobido. It plays well and the superb level design allows even more of that old Tenchu style flexibilty of approach. There's a good variety of mission types considering the limited number of locales and very generous longevity due to the gameplay structure. There are some worthwhile unlockables and it comes complete with an excellent Mission Editor. The AI (enemy artificial intelligence) is a particularly noteworthy step up from Tenchu, far from perfect and still capable of being abused, but really much more realistic and believably unpredictable. If it had come out early in the PS2's life, before the first PS2 Tenchu, we might have been remembering Shinobido as a benchmark game in the stealth genre and as a demonstration of what a (then) next-gen sequel game could be. But it didn't happen like that. It came out after two PS2 Tenchu games have already milked the ninja stealth concept pretty thoroughly. So all it is now is an also ran,
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5.0 out of 5 stars
BEST GAME IN THE WORLD, 10 Sep 2009
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Seriously, this is the best ninja-game of all time. It's just how a ninja game should be made. The main character isn't very strong so face-to-face fights don't end well for him, but keep him lurking in the shadows and he's a force to be reckoned with!
The game graphics are STILL amazing, the music is great and I LOVE the fact that they've kept the original Japanese voices, even though you can switch to the creepy English voices if you don't like reading subtitles.
BEST GAME IN THE WORLD EVER!
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