There’s a lot of games back in the day that I would always see at rental places, or in the hallowed halls of EB Games that I would always be drawn to but never rent or purchase. The kind of cover that I’d see and go “mhm, maybe” only to get distracted mid-step towards it by something else on the shelf and then I’d wander over towards Jak 2 instead or something. Most of them I never really paid a second thought to or remembered after a few days, but there’s been some that have lingered in my mind over the years and will randomly burst into my waking consciousness with “remember Oni, why didn’t you play Oni!" (I have now, my stupid brain) or “how did Red Ninja: End of Honour play, though?” as a very specific intrusive thought.
Why did Red Ninja: End of Honour stay in my memory all this time? I don’t know, I have no idea what could possibly have drawn young Octopus to it on the shelf even. If I had to guess, it could maybe be two really big reasons; I like the colour red and ninjas, of course.
Yes, that has to be it. Don’t know what two other huge reasons there could be.
Regardless of whatever truly unknowable reasons there are for why I remembered the game cover, it’s stuck in my memory and I’ve always wanted to play it, despite some dire warnings in the form of its numerous poor review scores. Red Ninja is sitting at a critical review average of 46% according to the holiest of libraries, Metacritic. But, the 70% percent user score could mean some amount of hope for it. And I mean, it’s still better than the 43% score of Final Fight: Streetwise (behold! My review!). So take that as you will.
So I decided to take it upon myself and play through this incredibly janky PS2 stealth-seduction (oh yeah) action game for the benefit of us all. I’m truly a martyr, I know, but I’m a humble one so hold your adulations, please. This kind of janky stuff is my gaming jam, after all.
So, let’s flash some ninja leg and play Red Ninja…
After we talk about the boring stuff first, of course. I know what you’re here for; the boring stuff, and not shots of protagonist Kurenai’s big and really bouncy wire-knife-weight weapon.
What I do know is that the game was made in partnership with the screenwriter Shinsuke Sato, who’s had a fairly long career of writing and now directing a lot of live-action anime adaptation movies. Red Ninja isn’t his only video game work; he’s also credited as a character and scenario designer for Tekken 4, aka the one that had some very specific character design drip with Jin’s leather flame hoodie.
The game also had a fairly extensive promotional campaign, and one featured in some surprising places. They had pop-up days at some big name Japanese maid cafes with the waitresses/maids dressing up as Kurenai, as well as just general public cosplaying of the character. “Octopus, that sounds like a normal promotional campaign for a Japanese game; what’s this surprising place?” The surprising place was Playboy magazine, baby.
October, 2004; featured in that month’s Playboy, amongst articles about iTunes’ and Napster’s destruction of music industry standards, the dark world of the caviar trade mafias, an interview with Jimmy Fallon, an almost propaganda-tier entry about a famous new-age UFO sex cult which seems to just be an excuse to show some boobs considering it entirely ignores the numerous issues with them, critique and analysis of the War on Terror’s effect on soldier morale and general outcome of the war, a lot of profoundly unfunny attempts at ‘sophisticated but sexy’ cartoons and a whole lot of nudity was the article Gaming Grows Up. What the **** was Playboy, man?
Part of this article was a single image of Kurenai, posed in between the ‘must play games’ blurb and a really weird side panel of comparing things in real life to video games; she came after the full frontal Rayne from BloodRayne, and the spread of some character from Leisure Suit Larry no one remembers, but before Tara from Darkwatch which is a bizarrely deep cut. The whole thing reeks of some really out-of-touch executives trying to ‘sexify’ games to an audience I don't really think cared, and is also just a little off in a way only Playboy could manage.
Behold, the strangest and also smallest scale marketing campaign. That’s it, that’s the mention. You’re welcome; I dove through some very weird **** to get this one image.
Recommending Playboy: The Mansion twice? Shameless, and the image of a Playboy editor actually playing Pikmin 2 and Geist is hilarious to me. I’m not even going to touch ‘Star Fox 2’ listed as a GameCube game; that poor series has suffered enough.
That’s enough of the boring stuff, as I’m all out. So, let’s actually give some enemy ninjas a little shimmy before slicing them in half and talk about Red Ninja: End of Honour.
The game sees you play as Kurenai, a kunoichi who has just mastered the ninja ways after the murder of her father as a girl and is now out for revenge. It has a few elements of historical details involved such as the rise of guns in Japanese feudal society playing a major part of the storyline, and is also therefore set in the Sengoku period of the country's history as about 90% of ninja storylines are. Do you want to know who gets referenced quite a few times, like in 90% of other historical Japanese games? The ‘Demon King of the Sixth Heaven’ meme himself, Nobunaga Oda, who I think has to hold a record for the most number of fictional media appearances held by a real historical figure, some of which he’s even actually a dude in.
I mean I really doubt there were man-portable multi-barreled minigun turrets back in the Sengoku era, so they took some creative liberties here for sure.
The storyline is overall just fine, I have nothing really terrible to say about it save for being a bit hokey and very stiffly written in that usual Japanese way, and nothing really terribly exciting happens for 80% of it. Kurenai is borderline mute throughout the game, and the only real dialogue she has throughout the game is calling out character names and stoically staring.
She just doesn’t have much else going on personality wise save for this very strong stoicism. The fact she uses the tetsugen wire because it's what the Black Lizard Clan attempted to hang her with as a child (she wears the choker to hide the scarring, despite the scars not being visible when you see her first taken down off the tree in the opening cutscene?) is a pretty badass detail, but it’s really the only aspect of her character that isn’t 'I’m a no-nonsense ninja out for revenge' intensity. There’s some supporting characters to round out the decent little cast, and who also tend to just appear randomly throughout the various missions you undertake despite it not really making sense at the time in how they got there.
One is just essentially a male version of Kurenai, your ninja not-actual-brother who flips in to say some stoic ninja wisdom or something then leaves (with a bit of a parting smouldering look of course), and the other is your younger kunoichi friend who also just appears, usually to give you an necessary item that you didn’t bring with you for some reason. I’m not sure why Kurenai would leave her ninja house without her ninja blowgun or her ninja grappling hook, seems like those would be some essentials, but thanks all the same, Akemi. I’d say Kurenai isn’t a very good ninja, but then again she has absolutely zero pockets so maybe she purposefully travels really light. But then where does she put these things once she gets them…
I think it’s best not to think about it.
Let’s get the greatest problem of the game out of the way; the controls absolutely suck, in just about every aspect. The bindings are mostly fine, but it's just in how they feel to actually use. Your animations are all stiff, the movement is really loose and far too imprecise, which also extends to the jumping. The game feels really stiff with just about everything, but particularly the jumping. You have very little directional control once you’ve taken to the air, your jump is way too fast, and these combined with another major problem makes platforming incredibly frustrating. The other major problem? The camera.
It’s the game's worst enemy. It's real ****ing rough, and I’ve played Final Fight: Streetwise. It’s loose, but then somehow also overly tight at the same time in a strange paradox; I swear it's sometimes sentient, and purposefully fighting you. It never looks at what you want it to, and it’s non-adjustable sensitivity is too ****ing fast and you can’t adjust it. The first-person aiming in particular is impossible to do with any rapid precision with how fast your reticule moves, which is unfortunate as you have to sometimes use it with rapid precision. It’s not bad enough that the jumping itself is really rough, but then trying to get the camera to work with you and line-up said jumps in what can become some pretty precise platforming sections aggravated me to no end.
It’s a shame that the actual applied gameplay of the platforming sections is as rough as it is, as the actual spectacle of some of them can be impressive.
The worst part? The vertical camera is default inverted as that’s how games used to be, but there’s a setting in the options to change this. The issue is for some reason it doesn’t actually turn the camera completely un-inverted, but switches the inversion to being on the horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Why? You also can’t change it in-game and have to go back to the menu every time you want to change it. Why?
The game is very clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of the incredibly popular at the time Tenchu series with its gameplay, in that it’s a primarily stealth focused ninja game with action combat elements. Only it didn’t actually implement them well or make an enjoyable game, unlike Tenchu.
Stealth stuff comes first. It’s half-baked, not particularly interesting or dynamic and is I think one of the weakest aspects of the game which is entirely unfortunate considering Red Ninja is primarily a stealth game. It has some of the basic elements in there; guards can spot you based on how close you are, there’s the usual behind-the-enemy stealth kills, you can do a slow crouch walk to make less noise when you move, you can hug walls to peek around corners. They’re just so barely fleshed out and half-assed is where they falter. There’s just nothing overly interesting about it, and on top of that boilerplate feeling the enemies also happen to be borderline blind and deaf.
Numerous times in my experience with the game, I would walk so closely beside a guard that I was practically brushing his arm with Kurenai’s robe and they would have no reaction, so narrow is their vision cone. Likewise, I would often just run directly behind a guard and they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe by the third or fourth mission they got a little more responsive (maybe going ‘huh?’ and almost turning around before I’d stealth kill them), particularly the higher tier armoured samurai type guards, but even then they were not really very smart. Before anyone drops a ‘Octopus plays on easy mode confirmed, fake game journo slop’, I was playing on the normal difficulty, the level I assume the game was designed for. I hear that hard difficulty is a brutally punishing experience with the enemies seemingly far too aware to the point they hear you even when crouch-walking, but I cannot confirm that and I’m absolutely not playing Red Ninja again just to find out.
Why yes, this enemy did in fact not react at all to me running full tilt directly behind him; thank you for asking.
There is one specific mechanic with the stealth that is unique to it, and that’s the much foreshadowed seduction move. When you’ve pressed up against a wall and are peeking around a corner, you can hit triangle to have Kurenai do one of a few different canned animations where she pops out and tries to ‘entice’ guards to approach, setting them up for a stealth kill. They have to be looking at you of course, and within a fairly short range. This may seem like a very powerful and easily abusable move, but it’s not. The biggest limiting factor is the chance of it working on enemies seems to be random; sometimes Kurenai will pop out of the corner all sultry like, give them the ol’ ‘bend over and pretend to adjust her sandals while showing her butt’ technique, only for the enemy to smack her out of it. I will admit, I laughed the first time it happened. I’m unclear if the stronger enemies are more resistant to it maybe, but even the basic spearmen sometimes shunned my unsolicited romantic advances.
“Is that a strange woman I’ve never seen before, in this area I’m actively guarding against enemy intruders, blowing me a kiss before waving me towards an obvious ambush spot? I’m coming, mi’lady!” Simps, I tell you.
It’s funny that the marketing of the game and the previews were really pushing this part of the game, as that's the entire extent of it. There’s nothing else to it. You can do it from one specific interaction, and it’s random if it works at all. At a certain point I just stopped using it considering I could have just ran up and stealth killed the guard likely anyway. Points for some entertainment value, at least. The marketing focus of this game really made it out that the whole ‘sexy ninja lady’ was a big element of the game, but the truth is that it’s hardly even there outside of the seduction mechanic and constantly seeing ‘down the barrel’ of Kurenai. It never factors into any dialogue, or cutscenes, or the story at all, or even in how Kurenai acts outside of the one seduction move. Something like BloodRayne, aiming for the same sex appeal marketing strategy, had a little more oomph to it in that side of the gameplay. I’m not complaining or praising the game for having or not having enough sexy ninja lady aspects, just that it’s kinda funny how hard the marketing was pushing it. I mean it appeared in Playboy, for **** sakes; I read an issue of Playboy for this game.
The level design also leaves a lot to be desired for the actual stealth side of the game, often feeling like they just dropped some stuff in your path without any real regard for cover or particular care. There’s commonly only one real true path to take through the various sections of the missions if you’re trying to only go stealth, with there very rarely being more than one way around the levels which to me at least is the opposite of what a stealth game should be. This is especially true in some of the later levels when the guard placements become impossible to avoid just due to funneling you through a lot of small spaces, with there being really no way around without either getting into a direct fight or following the one specific path the developers intended for you to progress.
Speaking of direct combat; at least it’s not as bad as the stealth, but there’s not overly much going on with it. You can slash with your dagger in a little four hit combo, and also use Kurenai’s tetsugen wire weapon to grapple, pulverize, and dismember the really unfortunate guards in front of you. The wire is the best part of the game, and it’s a shame they didn’t build it out more as I think there’s some real potential with it. The wire is lock-on based, letting you tether enemies to you and then doing a variety of stuff with them for a few seconds before they break free; there’s even a system for aiming at specifically legs or their head. You can use the wire between you as a razor sharp limbo pole and actually attack other enemies with it by moving it into them which is honestly ****ing sick, you can physically pull your grappled target around, and you can also hit the attack button again to yank the wire back to you to deal a very high amount of damage to the grappled target, often dismembering what the wire was attached to if they’re weak enough. Specifically the wire was the most fun part of the game to me, or at least the idea of the wire as in actual application it's a little jank as hell.
Over the course of the game, you also get a few upgrades to the wire. You eventually learn how to do an instant kill maneuver with it on up to three enemies, but only if they’re at a very specific distance from you which is frankly overpowered as hell. There’s also a weight attachment Akemi gives you in the third mission, again why would Kurenai leave home without that, that lets you stun and bully enemies by launching them around and stunning them instead of grappling them. Weirdly, the weight either does pathetically low damage or may even not be capable of killing an enemy which is a little bizarre given that you’re spinning around a heavy metal object directly into people’s heads with enough force to cleanly launch them off their feet. If anything I feel that it should do more damage than the regular blade, but that’s just me. It is actually pretty useful at least, letting you knock down and reel in enemies if you get them around the head with the grapple, and you can even use it to hang enemies off of rafters and other such objects which, again, is actually pretty ****ing cool.
It’s very strange, as despite being touted as a stealth game I frequently found the most success in it by running around and wire whipping every enemy in front of me. The tougher enemies can actually block your wire attacks and slap you out of your basic dagger attack chain, but against the majority of the enemies I could just spam the wire grapple at them and they were pretty powerless to stop me. Sort of the opposite of what you want in a stealth game, really. Of course if I ever got surrounded I'd have issues, which is unfortunate as there’s a few times where you get ambushed in a cutscene and are then forced to battle a mass of enemies. In a stealth game. Why?
You find and utilize a few different tools of course, ranging from ninja water shoes to a consumable item that lets you jump really high? Oddly enough, there’s a slo-mo ability tied to a ‘ninjutsu’ meter, and nothing else. I never found any particular use of the slo-mo save for once or twice against some bosses to try and squeeze an extra hit in or two, but it's weird that the meter is only used for the slo-mo and not the invisibility item or the super jump item. Seems like those could be obvious uses of the meter instead of being one-use items, but that’s just me.
The environmental puzzle-type sections utilizing wallrunning and your grapple hook are also a very mixed bag. The grapple hook itself is pretty fun, being the one aspect of the game that honestly isn’t that janky somehow. It’s easy to use, unlike the wallrunning. Like everything else involving jumping and the controls, the wallrunning is so ****ing rough. You have to be at a specific angle to get it to trigger, with a certain amount of momentum, and it’s equally as uncontrollable once you’re doing it as the jumping. It’s way too fast, so fast that the camera often has trouble keeping up when you’re going vertically at least, and combined with the already troublesome jumping controls many of these environmental parkour-esque sections became some of the most frustrating in the entire game. The most frustrating thing of the game?
The wallrunning looks really cool in a screenshot, as the image doesn’t show me struggling to line this one run up and then successfully pull it off for ten minutes beforehand.
The boss battles. They’re either incredibly frustrating experiences involving a not clearly established gimmick to them, or just slug fests against overwhelming attacks which is bizarre as it’s a stealth game. They all have such massive health pools that they devolve into chipping away for what feels like a ****ing hour before triggering the next stage, all because you do such pathetically low damage to them; of course, if they hit you once they take half your health. It’s not even just the bosses entirely by themselves that made them so ungodly frustrating, but factoring in that you’re also battling the camera and the janky controls at the same time. It all culminated for me with the boss of the fourth level, a snake-controlling ninja lady who really harps on Kurenai’s red kimono for some reason, to a weird degree. I hate her with every molecule in my corporeal body.
My complete and utter disdain for this woman cannot be described adequately. If every one of the limitless snakes in her battle arena were killed, and their scaled skin was woven into a single long strand, stretched into an iridescent idol of my monolithic frustration it wouldn’t reach even a fraction of the size of my hatred for her. Hate. Hate. Hate.
Why does she hate Kurenai’s clothes so much? She’s no better.
I have a confession to make about Red Ninja; I didn’t finish the game. Fake game journo slop, I know. I’ve tapped out of playing any more of this game and I don't even care. I hit several walls throughout its long disjointed playthrough, but until the end they were just due to not being very invested. Disinterest, not actual frustration. Until the second last boss. I bashed my head against that wall for an hour, and eventually I blinked away enough of the concussion to realize I was going to gain nothing out of continuing. You deal such a pathetically low amount of damage to him, the first stage of the fight is in a tight intersection of pillars causing the camera to be uncontrollable, and he can either kill you in two successful attacks, or there’s a strong chance he locks you into an inescapable death loop with the next attack. I was having the exact opposite of fun, and I feel that I’ve gained everything there is to gain from playing any more. This is the first game that I’ve reviewed, outside of my Marvel retrospective reviews where I don't play the entirety of each of the 100 games I have to cover, where I have actually had enough and can not continue. Take from this what you will.
I made it far enough to see the out-of-nowhere Kurenai outfit change; that’s all that matters.
Ultimately I think Red Ninja is a very confused game that wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a stealth game or an action game. It has some elements of both, only not particularly well implemented, and it really could have used another go-over or three, or five, or ten. Any stealth game that sees me actually succeed by running around fighting even 80% of the enemies has kinda fundamentally failed at being a stealth game. That being said, I think there were some cool ideas and it had some potential with the tetsugen wire, and even the grapple hook and parkour-esque environmental aspects could have been nice if the actual jumping and platforming controls weren’t an exercise in pure frustration that eventually built up enough for me to stop playing entirely. I think if Tranji Studios focused this on being a straight up action game and cut out the weakest link of the stealth mechanics, it would have come out a lot better. Build up a bigger combat system utilizing the wire and maybe a few other weapons, keep the wallrunning and environmental platforming sections in for some flavour after redoing everything about the jumping and controls; it could have at least had a chance to be better than what it ended up as, I can guarantee that. Maybe have a dedicated grapple button with the wire, add in throwing entangled enemies around and an aimable ranged whip attack with whatever weapon head you’re currently equipping; that’s where I’d start at least.
Oh, and keep the seduction mechanic complete with the enemies sometimes slapping you out of it. Hilarious.
I, uh, don’t think they’re into it this time.
It's a decent premise absolutely marred by horrible controls and missed opportunities. It’s in that really unfortunate bad game territory of just being bland and bad, without any ironic excitement or spice to let it bounce back off the ground into the ‘good-bad’ zone to where you can actually enjoy it. There’s no zest, no fun factor; it’s just disappointing. This was an exercise in missed potential and complete frustration that I could only recommend to other gaming masochists like me or die-hard ninja game fans who don’t just want to play Tenchu again, and keep in mind it made me rage quit as a gaming masochist. I played Final Fight: Streetwise all the way through and I quit this game. Also, just play ****ing Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven over this.
Until next time.
Why did Red Ninja: End of Honour stay in my memory all this time? I don’t know, I have no idea what could possibly have drawn young Octopus to it on the shelf even. If I had to guess, it could maybe be two really big reasons; I like the colour red and ninjas, of course.
Yes, that has to be it. Don’t know what two other huge reasons there could be.
Regardless of whatever truly unknowable reasons there are for why I remembered the game cover, it’s stuck in my memory and I’ve always wanted to play it, despite some dire warnings in the form of its numerous poor review scores. Red Ninja is sitting at a critical review average of 46% according to the holiest of libraries, Metacritic. But, the 70% percent user score could mean some amount of hope for it. And I mean, it’s still better than the 43% score of Final Fight: Streetwise (behold! My review!). So take that as you will.
So I decided to take it upon myself and play through this incredibly janky PS2 stealth-seduction (oh yeah) action game for the benefit of us all. I’m truly a martyr, I know, but I’m a humble one so hold your adulations, please. This kind of janky stuff is my gaming jam, after all.
So, let’s flash some ninja leg and play Red Ninja…
After we talk about the boring stuff first, of course. I know what you’re here for; the boring stuff, and not shots of protagonist Kurenai’s big and really bouncy wire-knife-weight weapon.
The Boring Stuff; I Swear I’m Reading The Article For The History
Red Ninja is the only released game by the Japanese company Tranji Studios. They formed from two other companies, then put out Red Ninja and closed, got their work bought by the company Ertrain who exclusively made Japanese-only DSi store games, then they also closed once support for the DSi was abandoned. So it goes. Trying to find information about any development stories or interviews with staff involved was impossible save for one name; Kenchiro Takaki, who served as the design director. He’s now a big name at Cygames, who are mainly known for the GranBlue series, and also as a sponsor of several US horse breeder races? What? Takaki is also the creator of something that should come as no surprise given his work on this, the Senran Kagura series. If you know, you know.What I do know is that the game was made in partnership with the screenwriter Shinsuke Sato, who’s had a fairly long career of writing and now directing a lot of live-action anime adaptation movies. Red Ninja isn’t his only video game work; he’s also credited as a character and scenario designer for Tekken 4, aka the one that had some very specific character design drip with Jin’s leather flame hoodie.
The game also had a fairly extensive promotional campaign, and one featured in some surprising places. They had pop-up days at some big name Japanese maid cafes with the waitresses/maids dressing up as Kurenai, as well as just general public cosplaying of the character. “Octopus, that sounds like a normal promotional campaign for a Japanese game; what’s this surprising place?” The surprising place was Playboy magazine, baby.
October, 2004; featured in that month’s Playboy, amongst articles about iTunes’ and Napster’s destruction of music industry standards, the dark world of the caviar trade mafias, an interview with Jimmy Fallon, an almost propaganda-tier entry about a famous new-age UFO sex cult which seems to just be an excuse to show some boobs considering it entirely ignores the numerous issues with them, critique and analysis of the War on Terror’s effect on soldier morale and general outcome of the war, a lot of profoundly unfunny attempts at ‘sophisticated but sexy’ cartoons and a whole lot of nudity was the article Gaming Grows Up. What the **** was Playboy, man?
Part of this article was a single image of Kurenai, posed in between the ‘must play games’ blurb and a really weird side panel of comparing things in real life to video games; she came after the full frontal Rayne from BloodRayne, and the spread of some character from Leisure Suit Larry no one remembers, but before Tara from Darkwatch which is a bizarrely deep cut. The whole thing reeks of some really out-of-touch executives trying to ‘sexify’ games to an audience I don't really think cared, and is also just a little off in a way only Playboy could manage.
Behold, the strangest and also smallest scale marketing campaign. That’s it, that’s the mention. You’re welcome; I dove through some very weird **** to get this one image.
Recommending Playboy: The Mansion twice? Shameless, and the image of a Playboy editor actually playing Pikmin 2 and Geist is hilarious to me. I’m not even going to touch ‘Star Fox 2’ listed as a GameCube game; that poor series has suffered enough.
That’s enough of the boring stuff, as I’m all out. So, let’s actually give some enemy ninjas a little shimmy before slicing them in half and talk about Red Ninja: End of Honour.
The Not-Boring Stuff; Is There Really A Seduction Mechanic?
Let’s get it out of the way; the game is clearly trying to sell itself on a little bit of sex appeal, if the character design and the Playboy ad didn’t give that away, and the fact you see Kurenai’s underwear so often that it loses any power. It’s not even an upskirt really, given that there’s no skirt to begin with; it’s neutral state is flashing you.The game sees you play as Kurenai, a kunoichi who has just mastered the ninja ways after the murder of her father as a girl and is now out for revenge. It has a few elements of historical details involved such as the rise of guns in Japanese feudal society playing a major part of the storyline, and is also therefore set in the Sengoku period of the country's history as about 90% of ninja storylines are. Do you want to know who gets referenced quite a few times, like in 90% of other historical Japanese games? The ‘Demon King of the Sixth Heaven’ meme himself, Nobunaga Oda, who I think has to hold a record for the most number of fictional media appearances held by a real historical figure, some of which he’s even actually a dude in.
I mean I really doubt there were man-portable multi-barreled minigun turrets back in the Sengoku era, so they took some creative liberties here for sure.
The storyline is overall just fine, I have nothing really terrible to say about it save for being a bit hokey and very stiffly written in that usual Japanese way, and nothing really terribly exciting happens for 80% of it. Kurenai is borderline mute throughout the game, and the only real dialogue she has throughout the game is calling out character names and stoically staring.
She just doesn’t have much else going on personality wise save for this very strong stoicism. The fact she uses the tetsugen wire because it's what the Black Lizard Clan attempted to hang her with as a child (she wears the choker to hide the scarring, despite the scars not being visible when you see her first taken down off the tree in the opening cutscene?) is a pretty badass detail, but it’s really the only aspect of her character that isn’t 'I’m a no-nonsense ninja out for revenge' intensity. There’s some supporting characters to round out the decent little cast, and who also tend to just appear randomly throughout the various missions you undertake despite it not really making sense at the time in how they got there.
One is just essentially a male version of Kurenai, your ninja not-actual-brother who flips in to say some stoic ninja wisdom or something then leaves (with a bit of a parting smouldering look of course), and the other is your younger kunoichi friend who also just appears, usually to give you an necessary item that you didn’t bring with you for some reason. I’m not sure why Kurenai would leave her ninja house without her ninja blowgun or her ninja grappling hook, seems like those would be some essentials, but thanks all the same, Akemi. I’d say Kurenai isn’t a very good ninja, but then again she has absolutely zero pockets so maybe she purposefully travels really light. But then where does she put these things once she gets them…
I think it’s best not to think about it.
Let’s get the greatest problem of the game out of the way; the controls absolutely suck, in just about every aspect. The bindings are mostly fine, but it's just in how they feel to actually use. Your animations are all stiff, the movement is really loose and far too imprecise, which also extends to the jumping. The game feels really stiff with just about everything, but particularly the jumping. You have very little directional control once you’ve taken to the air, your jump is way too fast, and these combined with another major problem makes platforming incredibly frustrating. The other major problem? The camera.
It’s the game's worst enemy. It's real ****ing rough, and I’ve played Final Fight: Streetwise. It’s loose, but then somehow also overly tight at the same time in a strange paradox; I swear it's sometimes sentient, and purposefully fighting you. It never looks at what you want it to, and it’s non-adjustable sensitivity is too ****ing fast and you can’t adjust it. The first-person aiming in particular is impossible to do with any rapid precision with how fast your reticule moves, which is unfortunate as you have to sometimes use it with rapid precision. It’s not bad enough that the jumping itself is really rough, but then trying to get the camera to work with you and line-up said jumps in what can become some pretty precise platforming sections aggravated me to no end.
It’s a shame that the actual applied gameplay of the platforming sections is as rough as it is, as the actual spectacle of some of them can be impressive.
The worst part? The vertical camera is default inverted as that’s how games used to be, but there’s a setting in the options to change this. The issue is for some reason it doesn’t actually turn the camera completely un-inverted, but switches the inversion to being on the horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Why? You also can’t change it in-game and have to go back to the menu every time you want to change it. Why?
The game is very clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of the incredibly popular at the time Tenchu series with its gameplay, in that it’s a primarily stealth focused ninja game with action combat elements. Only it didn’t actually implement them well or make an enjoyable game, unlike Tenchu.
Stealth stuff comes first. It’s half-baked, not particularly interesting or dynamic and is I think one of the weakest aspects of the game which is entirely unfortunate considering Red Ninja is primarily a stealth game. It has some of the basic elements in there; guards can spot you based on how close you are, there’s the usual behind-the-enemy stealth kills, you can do a slow crouch walk to make less noise when you move, you can hug walls to peek around corners. They’re just so barely fleshed out and half-assed is where they falter. There’s just nothing overly interesting about it, and on top of that boilerplate feeling the enemies also happen to be borderline blind and deaf.
Numerous times in my experience with the game, I would walk so closely beside a guard that I was practically brushing his arm with Kurenai’s robe and they would have no reaction, so narrow is their vision cone. Likewise, I would often just run directly behind a guard and they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe by the third or fourth mission they got a little more responsive (maybe going ‘huh?’ and almost turning around before I’d stealth kill them), particularly the higher tier armoured samurai type guards, but even then they were not really very smart. Before anyone drops a ‘Octopus plays on easy mode confirmed, fake game journo slop’, I was playing on the normal difficulty, the level I assume the game was designed for. I hear that hard difficulty is a brutally punishing experience with the enemies seemingly far too aware to the point they hear you even when crouch-walking, but I cannot confirm that and I’m absolutely not playing Red Ninja again just to find out.
Why yes, this enemy did in fact not react at all to me running full tilt directly behind him; thank you for asking.
There is one specific mechanic with the stealth that is unique to it, and that’s the much foreshadowed seduction move. When you’ve pressed up against a wall and are peeking around a corner, you can hit triangle to have Kurenai do one of a few different canned animations where she pops out and tries to ‘entice’ guards to approach, setting them up for a stealth kill. They have to be looking at you of course, and within a fairly short range. This may seem like a very powerful and easily abusable move, but it’s not. The biggest limiting factor is the chance of it working on enemies seems to be random; sometimes Kurenai will pop out of the corner all sultry like, give them the ol’ ‘bend over and pretend to adjust her sandals while showing her butt’ technique, only for the enemy to smack her out of it. I will admit, I laughed the first time it happened. I’m unclear if the stronger enemies are more resistant to it maybe, but even the basic spearmen sometimes shunned my unsolicited romantic advances.
“Is that a strange woman I’ve never seen before, in this area I’m actively guarding against enemy intruders, blowing me a kiss before waving me towards an obvious ambush spot? I’m coming, mi’lady!” Simps, I tell you.
It’s funny that the marketing of the game and the previews were really pushing this part of the game, as that's the entire extent of it. There’s nothing else to it. You can do it from one specific interaction, and it’s random if it works at all. At a certain point I just stopped using it considering I could have just ran up and stealth killed the guard likely anyway. Points for some entertainment value, at least. The marketing focus of this game really made it out that the whole ‘sexy ninja lady’ was a big element of the game, but the truth is that it’s hardly even there outside of the seduction mechanic and constantly seeing ‘down the barrel’ of Kurenai. It never factors into any dialogue, or cutscenes, or the story at all, or even in how Kurenai acts outside of the one seduction move. Something like BloodRayne, aiming for the same sex appeal marketing strategy, had a little more oomph to it in that side of the gameplay. I’m not complaining or praising the game for having or not having enough sexy ninja lady aspects, just that it’s kinda funny how hard the marketing was pushing it. I mean it appeared in Playboy, for **** sakes; I read an issue of Playboy for this game.
The level design also leaves a lot to be desired for the actual stealth side of the game, often feeling like they just dropped some stuff in your path without any real regard for cover or particular care. There’s commonly only one real true path to take through the various sections of the missions if you’re trying to only go stealth, with there very rarely being more than one way around the levels which to me at least is the opposite of what a stealth game should be. This is especially true in some of the later levels when the guard placements become impossible to avoid just due to funneling you through a lot of small spaces, with there being really no way around without either getting into a direct fight or following the one specific path the developers intended for you to progress.
Speaking of direct combat; at least it’s not as bad as the stealth, but there’s not overly much going on with it. You can slash with your dagger in a little four hit combo, and also use Kurenai’s tetsugen wire weapon to grapple, pulverize, and dismember the really unfortunate guards in front of you. The wire is the best part of the game, and it’s a shame they didn’t build it out more as I think there’s some real potential with it. The wire is lock-on based, letting you tether enemies to you and then doing a variety of stuff with them for a few seconds before they break free; there’s even a system for aiming at specifically legs or their head. You can use the wire between you as a razor sharp limbo pole and actually attack other enemies with it by moving it into them which is honestly ****ing sick, you can physically pull your grappled target around, and you can also hit the attack button again to yank the wire back to you to deal a very high amount of damage to the grappled target, often dismembering what the wire was attached to if they’re weak enough. Specifically the wire was the most fun part of the game to me, or at least the idea of the wire as in actual application it's a little jank as hell.
Over the course of the game, you also get a few upgrades to the wire. You eventually learn how to do an instant kill maneuver with it on up to three enemies, but only if they’re at a very specific distance from you which is frankly overpowered as hell. There’s also a weight attachment Akemi gives you in the third mission, again why would Kurenai leave home without that, that lets you stun and bully enemies by launching them around and stunning them instead of grappling them. Weirdly, the weight either does pathetically low damage or may even not be capable of killing an enemy which is a little bizarre given that you’re spinning around a heavy metal object directly into people’s heads with enough force to cleanly launch them off their feet. If anything I feel that it should do more damage than the regular blade, but that’s just me. It is actually pretty useful at least, letting you knock down and reel in enemies if you get them around the head with the grapple, and you can even use it to hang enemies off of rafters and other such objects which, again, is actually pretty ****ing cool.
It’s very strange, as despite being touted as a stealth game I frequently found the most success in it by running around and wire whipping every enemy in front of me. The tougher enemies can actually block your wire attacks and slap you out of your basic dagger attack chain, but against the majority of the enemies I could just spam the wire grapple at them and they were pretty powerless to stop me. Sort of the opposite of what you want in a stealth game, really. Of course if I ever got surrounded I'd have issues, which is unfortunate as there’s a few times where you get ambushed in a cutscene and are then forced to battle a mass of enemies. In a stealth game. Why?
You find and utilize a few different tools of course, ranging from ninja water shoes to a consumable item that lets you jump really high? Oddly enough, there’s a slo-mo ability tied to a ‘ninjutsu’ meter, and nothing else. I never found any particular use of the slo-mo save for once or twice against some bosses to try and squeeze an extra hit in or two, but it's weird that the meter is only used for the slo-mo and not the invisibility item or the super jump item. Seems like those could be obvious uses of the meter instead of being one-use items, but that’s just me.
The environmental puzzle-type sections utilizing wallrunning and your grapple hook are also a very mixed bag. The grapple hook itself is pretty fun, being the one aspect of the game that honestly isn’t that janky somehow. It’s easy to use, unlike the wallrunning. Like everything else involving jumping and the controls, the wallrunning is so ****ing rough. You have to be at a specific angle to get it to trigger, with a certain amount of momentum, and it’s equally as uncontrollable once you’re doing it as the jumping. It’s way too fast, so fast that the camera often has trouble keeping up when you’re going vertically at least, and combined with the already troublesome jumping controls many of these environmental parkour-esque sections became some of the most frustrating in the entire game. The most frustrating thing of the game?
The wallrunning looks really cool in a screenshot, as the image doesn’t show me struggling to line this one run up and then successfully pull it off for ten minutes beforehand.
The boss battles. They’re either incredibly frustrating experiences involving a not clearly established gimmick to them, or just slug fests against overwhelming attacks which is bizarre as it’s a stealth game. They all have such massive health pools that they devolve into chipping away for what feels like a ****ing hour before triggering the next stage, all because you do such pathetically low damage to them; of course, if they hit you once they take half your health. It’s not even just the bosses entirely by themselves that made them so ungodly frustrating, but factoring in that you’re also battling the camera and the janky controls at the same time. It all culminated for me with the boss of the fourth level, a snake-controlling ninja lady who really harps on Kurenai’s red kimono for some reason, to a weird degree. I hate her with every molecule in my corporeal body.
My complete and utter disdain for this woman cannot be described adequately. If every one of the limitless snakes in her battle arena were killed, and their scaled skin was woven into a single long strand, stretched into an iridescent idol of my monolithic frustration it wouldn’t reach even a fraction of the size of my hatred for her. Hate. Hate. Hate.
Why does she hate Kurenai’s clothes so much? She’s no better.
I have a confession to make about Red Ninja; I didn’t finish the game. Fake game journo slop, I know. I’ve tapped out of playing any more of this game and I don't even care. I hit several walls throughout its long disjointed playthrough, but until the end they were just due to not being very invested. Disinterest, not actual frustration. Until the second last boss. I bashed my head against that wall for an hour, and eventually I blinked away enough of the concussion to realize I was going to gain nothing out of continuing. You deal such a pathetically low amount of damage to him, the first stage of the fight is in a tight intersection of pillars causing the camera to be uncontrollable, and he can either kill you in two successful attacks, or there’s a strong chance he locks you into an inescapable death loop with the next attack. I was having the exact opposite of fun, and I feel that I’ve gained everything there is to gain from playing any more. This is the first game that I’ve reviewed, outside of my Marvel retrospective reviews where I don't play the entirety of each of the 100 games I have to cover, where I have actually had enough and can not continue. Take from this what you will.
I made it far enough to see the out-of-nowhere Kurenai outfit change; that’s all that matters.
Ultimately I think Red Ninja is a very confused game that wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a stealth game or an action game. It has some elements of both, only not particularly well implemented, and it really could have used another go-over or three, or five, or ten. Any stealth game that sees me actually succeed by running around fighting even 80% of the enemies has kinda fundamentally failed at being a stealth game. That being said, I think there were some cool ideas and it had some potential with the tetsugen wire, and even the grapple hook and parkour-esque environmental aspects could have been nice if the actual jumping and platforming controls weren’t an exercise in pure frustration that eventually built up enough for me to stop playing entirely. I think if Tranji Studios focused this on being a straight up action game and cut out the weakest link of the stealth mechanics, it would have come out a lot better. Build up a bigger combat system utilizing the wire and maybe a few other weapons, keep the wallrunning and environmental platforming sections in for some flavour after redoing everything about the jumping and controls; it could have at least had a chance to be better than what it ended up as, I can guarantee that. Maybe have a dedicated grapple button with the wire, add in throwing entangled enemies around and an aimable ranged whip attack with whatever weapon head you’re currently equipping; that’s where I’d start at least.
Oh, and keep the seduction mechanic complete with the enemies sometimes slapping you out of it. Hilarious.
I, uh, don’t think they’re into it this time.
It's a decent premise absolutely marred by horrible controls and missed opportunities. It’s in that really unfortunate bad game territory of just being bland and bad, without any ironic excitement or spice to let it bounce back off the ground into the ‘good-bad’ zone to where you can actually enjoy it. There’s no zest, no fun factor; it’s just disappointing. This was an exercise in missed potential and complete frustration that I could only recommend to other gaming masochists like me or die-hard ninja game fans who don’t just want to play Tenchu again, and keep in mind it made me rage quit as a gaming masochist. I played Final Fight: Streetwise all the way through and I quit this game. Also, just play ****ing Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven over this.
Until next time.
Pros
- + A cool idea with the wire weapon.
- + Some solid graphics for its time, all things considered.
Cons
- - Atrocious controls.
- - Terrible platforming.
- - Awful enemy AI.
- - Half-baked mechanics across the board, but primarily the stealth.
- - One of the worst camera's I've dealt with.
5
out of 10
Overall
Red Ninja takes what is at least a passable concept and idea, and ruins it with terrible stealth and half-baked mechanics. The controls are awful and frustrating to deal with which is unfortunate as big parts of the game involve precise platforming, and the one okay aspect of the combat system is bare-bones and cannot make up for the rest of the mediocrity around it. I couldn't finish playing this game, and I've played PS2 Altered Beast.
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