It’s my birthday and I’m going to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins for the original PlayStation.

Introducing revolutionary stealth gameplay, Tenchu was the single best ninja video game we’d ever seen at the time of its release. (I’m even tempted to say that it remains the best ninja game of all time today.) With its emphasis on sneaking around and avoiding combat, the game perfectly captures the feeling of being a ninja. Plus, historically speaking, it was one of the first titles to actually make this kind of thing work.

CONTENT WARNING: This game contains heavy violence and pixelated gore. Reader discretion is advised.

A project from a brand new developer called Acquire, Tenchu was one of the very first stealth games—or more accurately, one of the first notable stealth games. In 1998, Tenchu was part of the Stealth Holy Trinity which essentially created the Stealth genre in video games, alongside Metal Gear Solid (also on PS1) and Thief: The Dark Project (PC). If it wasn’t for these Sneaking Class of ‘98 alums, we probably would never have gotten series like Hitman, Splinter Cell, or Dishonored.

One thing that Tenchu really nails is its relatively realistic take on ninjas. The game is just fantastical enough, with a few magic elements here and there—particularly with certain monstrous enemies and special items—but overall it feels grounded in its execution. This was a departure from most ninja media seen up to this point, which often leaned heavily into mysticism and legend. Tenchu, at least as far as I can tell, was one of the first “realistic” renditions of ninjas in games.

The characters in Tenchu are fantastic archetypes. The player can choose to use either Rikimaru or Ayame, two ninjas of the Azuma ninja clan who serve their feudal master, Lord Gohda. Rikimaru is the quintessential shinobi; stoic and stern, he is a ninja’s ninja. Ayame is a brash and sarcastic kunoichi, a excellent contrast in character to the emotion-less Riki.

While I’ve always favored Rikimaru to Ayame—he’s just too damn cool not to choose every time—I’ve come to appreciate Ayame’s character a lot more over the years. It makes plenty of sense to me that she would be repeatedly underestimated and disrespected by the men she encountered, and over the years she’d probably develop a thorny attitude in response. Plus the dichotomy in our heroes is really fun. I love that Rikimaru is cold and reserved, but Ayame is hot-blooded and antagonistic—each one on complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

Let’s be clear, the game’s visuals are pretty crude and ugly overall. These graphics weren’t considered all that impressive in 1998 and they certainly haven’t aged well in the 20+ years since. Still, there is a certain charm in the PS1 aesthetic, with its jaggy edges, muddy textures, and polygons that constantly jitter and shake whether the camera is moving or not. Personally, I genuinely love it. But if you didn’t grow up playing games that look like this, you might not dig it so much.

The controls are quite awkward and exceedingly hard to work with. This game has no Dual Shock support, meaning you can’t use the analog stick, the D-pad is your only input for movement. You can certainly get used to this however, and the game even has some extra movement options for you to learn. There’s double-tapping directions for Dashes and Side-steps, a quick-turn 180 Roll, a forward-flipping Long Jump, and even a Moonsault. If you’re going to force players to use a D-pad to navigate 3D space, this is at least a decent way to implement it.

Also worth noting on the control side: anytime the player is given a first-person view—such as when you use the grappling hook—the Y-axis is inverted. This was very much the style at the time, with seeming every console game assuming that any 3D aiming and all first-person perspectives must control like you’re flying an airplane by default. This was the case with pretty much all N64 games—from Mario to Turok to GoldenEye, etc.—but also for pretty much all applicable PS1 games as well. Of course, in the case of Tenchu, their are no control options to toggle, so you’ll just have to get used to it.

The grappling hook itself though, viewed purely as a gameplay mechanic, is freaking awesome. Everything about it is rad; from the way the perspective shifts to first-person when you aim it—leaving completely unable to hide or defend yourself while trying to deploy it—to the way it just yanks you off the ground and zips you straight up to your target like your were Michael Keaton’s Batman. It’s the most important item in a ninja’s toolkit.

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins magazine ad. Love that tagline: “*Live by Honor. Kill by Stealth.*”

The gameplay loop that develops with the grappling hook is incredibly fun. The player is generally pretty safe on the eaves and rooftops, able to survey the environment and make a plan of attack. But on the ground-level, your ninja is likely to encounter guards or dogs or innocent bystanders, and so you need to be quite cautious to avoid detection down there. Especially for beginners, the normal strategy often forms as dropping down to the street to take out one guard, then using the grappling hook to get back up to a rooftop as quickly as possible. Thus the grappling hook becomes your trusty tool to zip out of the danger zone, back to the relative safety of literal eaves-dropping.

Now all good stealth games need an extrasensory element to make the game playable, even if it does technically imbue the player with superhuman powers of perception. Hitman’s Instinct ability is a great example of this. Mark of the Ninja provides visual queues both for how far sound will travel and how far your enemies can see. The Soliton Radar System served this function in Metal Gear Solid, and similarly in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory there was both a light bar (showing how visible Sam was) and an aural monitor (showing how much noise Sam made). You generally need one extrasensory element to make stealth games work, and Tenchu has the Ki Meter.

Learning to read the Ki Meter is extremely helpful for locating targets, identifying threats, and staying undetected. It’s located in the lower lefthand corner of the screen, next to your health bar. The Ki Meter displays a little number from 1-100, indicating your distance to the nearest person. (A 10 or less means the person is relative far away, while 100 means you are right on top of them.)

Accompanying the range number is a Ki symbol which indicates the awareness level of that closest person. There are four status indicators and they look something like the symbols below.

Here’s what each Ki symbol means:

? on Blue Circle: Indicates the target is completely unaware of your presence.
! on Yellow Triangle: Indicates the target can see you, but hasn’t yet identified you as a threat.
!? on Purple Diamond: Indicates the target knows you are around and is actively searching for you. Even if you are never spotted, characters will jump to this status if a dead body is found.
!! on Red Decagram: Indicates you have been spotted. This status means enemies are in full Attack Mode and the fight is on.

Fans of Metal Gear Solid will likely recognize the similarities between these Ki symbols and the symbols used in that game. In fact, if memory serves correct, the !! and !? Ki statuses directly correspond to Metal Gear’s Alert mode and Evasion mode respectively. I guess a Double Exclamation Mark is truly stealth gaming shorthand for “get the hell outta there”.

Combat is rigid and janky—which is secretly a good thing, because it reinforces the need for stealth. Fighting in this game is a known quantity: chaotic enough to consistently avoid, yet simple enough to feel manageable. Attacking enemies head-on is never the best way to go, but if you are stuck with no other options, it’s at least not impossible. Though the fact that you hold Back to block—much like a traditional 2D fighting game—adds an extra layer of jank, forcing you to slowly back up at all times when playing defensively.

Speaking of combat—and how it’s pretty bad—the level structure in Tenchu has one huge, glaring flaw that cannot be ignored: Almost every mission ends with a boss fight. Why?! Why would you do that? In a game all about sneaking by unnoticed, why should every stage end in a showdown? The game follows a rigid setup of sneaking-segment-then-boss-fight, which feels like a failure of imagination. In my opinion, you should really be able to just sneak past the bosses if you’d want to. Or better, you should be able to sneak up on a boss and preemptively take them out with a Stealth Kill as well.

Of all the revolutionary ideas in Tenchu that finally made Stealth games a reality, the Stealth Kill might be the most important innovation. As described in the game’s Strategy Guide, a Stealth Kill is performed thusly: “Press the Square Button when you are near an unaware enemy guard. Your Ninja will perform a cinematic instant kill on the enemy. Experiment with different approach angles for different kill techniques.” By providing players with a way to instantly dispatch an enemy (if done with sufficient skill), the developers finally turned stealth gameplay from an odd curiosity into a real genre.

The key element that makes the stealth kill work is that the enemy must be caught completely unaware. An enemy who is searching for you will already be ready for fight, so he cannot be taken out with one hit. Even an enemy who’s just suspicious will unsheathe his weapon, and in that case too, a stealth kill will not be possible. Only by being super sneaky and maneuvering through your environment unnoticed can a ninja unleash their full potential.

The Strategy Guide’s description mentions experimenting with “different approach angles” to produce different kill techniques. This is because our ninja protagonists have four different stealth kills they can perform, depending on how the player is oriented towards the enemy. For example, here are Rikimaru’s stealth kills:

Throat Slit - Approach enemy directly from behind
Gutting Kill - Approach enemy from either side
Sword Through Head - Approach enemy from the front, or while enemy is turning around
Bone Breaker - Face back-to-back with enemy

Looking at the list above, you might assume the Sword Through Head technique is the most difficult to pull off—after all, it’s done by attacking the enemy from the front. But since you can perform this one while they are turning around, it’s not necessarily the hardest. Bone Breaker is probably the most tricky to pull off, simply because you basically need to be right next to your target, and yet facing away from them, to execute it.

Of course with all this talk of throat slitting and swords through heads, it must be stated that Tenchu: Stealth Assassins is an incredibly violent game. It was given a M - Mature rating back in the day and it certainly earned it. Most obviously, the blood in this game is completely over the top. Emulating gory chanbara films such as the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Tenchu features geysers of spattering blood whenever an enemy is cutdown with a sword. Not only does a firehose worth of blood shoot out from a dying foe, but it will collide with/slide down any wall it comes into contact with, before quickly fading out of visibility.

Now while the all this blood might seem is gratuitous, I must admit that I kinda love it. For one thing, it does make a decent homage to chanbara cinema. Also, since this game does not sport particularly high-fidelity visuals, the excessive blood comes off as playfully cartoonish. While the blood might be shocking initially, due to how unrealistic it looks, it quickly becomes rather funny. It’s certainly outlandish, but the blood is so over-the-top, I find it hard to take seriously.

On the audio side, Tenchu is a true masterpiece, another example of what made the Sony PlayStation a powerhouse. The soundtrack is AMAZING, in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time. Not adhering to any conventions I can think of, Tenchu’s music is incredibly eclectic and downright strange—but in a good way!

In fact, this game was No.1 in our list of Top 10 Underrated Video Game Soundtracks a few years back. To lazily quote myself from that article:

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins tops our list not for its revolutionary stealth gameplay, but for its insanely good soundtrack. An incredible mix of traditional Japanese musical elements with rock, jazz, orchestral, electronic, and who-knows-what-else, Tenchu's music was unlike anything we had heard before. In fact, we still haven't really heard anything like it since! A perfect fit for the game's setting and tone, the soundtrack was so unique, it challenged our notions about what kind of music can even work in a video game.
Tenchu composer Noriyuki Asakura had already worked on samurai anime series Rurouni Kenshin and his experience shines through on these tracks. He really pushes the envelope much farther than anyone would notice. For example, the game's opening song, "Add'ua": most westerners would just assume that this ninja game's theme has Japanese lyrics. However, the song is actually sung in Hausa, a language native to Niger and Nigeria, predominately spoken as a second language across Western Africa. I mean, seriously? Awesome! Guess we can add another incorporated style to the list: Hausa music.

Tenchu’s soundtrack is still the coolest s#!& ever.

In addition to the killer soundtrack, Tenchu also features plenty of spoken dialogue. And as a Japanese game being localized for North America, the title of course needed to be dubbed into English. Think about it: American players who are interested in a Japanese game about Japanese ninjas sneaking about feudal Japan couldn’t possibly want to hear Japanese dialogue, right? Right?! Well, Sony didn’t think so for some reason. (Subs before Dubs, my friends.)

Surprisingly for this era, the English voicework is actually quite excellent…for the most part. And sure, some of it is hilariously bad. However, even in those cases, it’s actually so bad that it comes back around to be good again. Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I’ve come to love this cheesy English dialogue. Heck, I’ve been quoting this game for years! (And no one ever gets it, haha.)

Fun Fact: This game has several cheat codes you can use to unlock all levels, unlock all ninja tools, refill health, and more. There’s even an extensive Debug Mode you can use to customize level layouts and NPC placements, play music and cutscenes at will, and other crazy stuff. Check out The Cutting Room Floor article on Tenchu for more details.

To activate the Debug Mode: Pause the game, then press and hold L1 and R2. Whilst holding L1 and R2, press Up, Triangle, Down, X, Left, Square, Right, Circle. Release L1 and R2, then press L1, R1, L2, R2. The 'PAUSED' text should disappear and you'll hear a sound. Once you unpause, you can press L2 and R2 simultaneously to open the Debug menu.

This is what happens when you’ve played too much Tenchu.

The narrative in the first Tenchu game is minimal, and honestly, not really important. Ninjas sneaking around assassinating targets is a pretty straightforward premise. However, it is worth noting that Rikimaru seemingly dies at the end of the game. (Oh…Spoiler Alert!…I guess.) You would think that a dead protagonist would make sequels a bit tricky, but the folks at Acquire found an easy workaround. They made the next game into a prequel….

As you can no doubt tell, I really love Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. This game established many of the cornerstones of the Stealth genre in its first go, particularly with its Ki Meter and Stealth Kills. Sure, the controls are awkward, the visuals are a muddy mess, and the level structure which ends each stage with a boss fight is just bafflingly old-fashioned—especially when combat is this sloppy. However, it almost doesn’t matter when the rest of the game is this good. Level layouts are varied and interesting, character designs are rock solid, and the overall atmosphere is perfect. Heck, the soundtrack alone so freaking good, it’s reason enough to play this game today.

If you like ninjas, stealth games, or just eclectic vibe-forward music, you really have to experience Tenchu: Stealth Assassins.