Game review: Shinobido 2: The Revenge of Zen

After completing Uncharted: Golden Abyss, I've had bad luck finding a Vita game that I can enjoy as much from the other launch titles. If you read my last post, you know my language problems with Unit 13, and as of this writing Sony still hasn't resolved the problem. This is forcing me to write to them at least once a week to remind them again that I'm still waiting for a patch, for a possible release date for a patch, or for a refund. The last would seem more likely, since they already refunded the game once. But we shall see what happens there.

Since I didn't have much luck with the online store, I went out to the local shop to pick up Shinobido 2: The Revenge of Zen. This meant shelling out 50 euros for a box and a manual, along with some coupon codes for Touch My Katamari and Ridge Racer, two games I wouldn't touch even if they were free.

Getting into the game involves a long, long intro with some really lousy acting. In fact, I may have to stop giving Skyrim shit about its lousy voice acting because of all the shit voice acting I've seen in recent Nintendo and Sony games. The opening story is pretty much standard fare from Japan. In a prefecture called Utakata, war breaks out between 3 daimyo, again. This is just six months after events in the original Shinobodo, but you don't need to know about that to get into this story, because they sum up the whole other game in the opening act.

After you are introduced to Zen's life partner San, she is murdered and set ablaze by Shu the Cypress, who is supposedly a family friend. Zen shows up in time to watch his partner roasting, and to be attacked by Shu and dumped into a river. Except, we aren't allowed to see that part. We're only told that by the dude who claims to have fished Zen out of the river below, a ninja master named Zaji. (This later turns out to be a lie, and in fact, Zaji lies like a rug to suit his own ideals.)

This ninja leader is the sole occupant of Asuka Village, which has been wiped out during the previous war, and now the population count of one is due to the only other two ninjas being away conducting some foreign affairs missions, or something. Zen is asked to stick around and take on missions, which may imply an open world of ninja grinding.

If only. Ten missions in, and I began to realize that I was going to be playing all the variant types of missions in the same locations over and over. My starting point in missions changed from time to time, to give me the sense of variety, but after 30 plus missions, every location is as dull as Zen's katana. It doesn't help that the merchant I'm told to kill or guard or rob is always the same fat guy in different colored robes, always with his head swaying like he's doing a bad Stevie Wonder impersonation. All the enemies share this copy pasta cloning problem, a disappointment since Uncharted made some effort to offer soem variety among the guerrilla forces I was facing. But in Shinobido 2, there's only one enemy model given for each faction. Later levels try to hide this by adding hired ninjas, but these models are even more bland than the common enemies. There's a larger armored ninja in later missions who talks like a borg, and the game flirts the line of plagiarism when the armored dues say shit like "Resistance is useless."

Combat in this game sucks. During the early missions, I felt that this was because the game wanted to emphasize stealth over fighting, but this impression was proved false when some boss fights forced me to use the combat. So I'd go from sneaking around making short one-shot-one-kills to cursing the controls while I tried to find a way to corner a boss and prevent my own movements from defeating me. That's assuming the boss doesn't pull a musket that fires multiple accurate like a semi-auto handgun of a few CENTURIES of development.

And there's also a paradox revealed here about Zen's abilities as a ninja. If you sneak up on someone (not all that hard, considering everyone in the game is partially deaf) and stab them in the back, Zen's sword is good for a one-shot-one-kill execution. But if you try to take a swing at even the lowest level dudes, suddenly, his sword can't kill anyone without a long, long fight. Enemies bleed in copious amounts, but require upwards of 6 strikes to kill. This is assuming you can keep Zen facing the right way, which is easier said then done. Because of the terrible combat controls, it feels like the length of Zen's blade diminishes until he's holding a paring knife. And for boss fights, he swaps out the paring knife for an X-acto blade.

Let's talk about those bosses, some of whom I had to face over and over. The two rival ninjas don't develop any new styles to counter my growing familiarity with their cheap tactics. The "master" of the Kenobe ninjas is depicted as fat and stupid, making it doubtful that anyone would hire him back after his initial failures. But no, every time I defeat him, he just runs away for another fight. So even if I had to cut him 20 or so times with a katana, neither blood loss now nearly two dozen gaping wounds slow him down. And Zen of course lets him run away. Why not just kill the dude, and spare us from anymore of his terrible voice acting? The same could be said of the other nija, a woman who can cast clones of herself, but still can't fight in anything but the same predictable pattern using the same old cheap tactics.

Even knowing I was stumbling into a mess of copy pasta, I decided to commit myself to playing as far into the game as possible, mainly because there is no YouTubing this title to see the ending yet. So, I stayed up overnight, pulling 29 hour all-nighter to play much of the game for an impressive 19 hours straight. In this time, I hunted down and killed Kazayuma, one daimyo, and then another, Ichijo.

You may have a different order depending on which daimyo you choose to serve, but as I didn't like either of the men's reasons for going to war, I chose to side with the priestess of the Amitura order. Well it turns out she's a stock standard religious nut, complete with talk of heaven and hell, and of converting people to her ideals. Which kinda put me in a funk cause I was fighting for the same people I wouldn't associate with in real life. Still, of the three daimyo, her brand of nutter butter was still more appealing than the dick sauce the guys had to offer.

And, y'all regular readers know how I'm a pacifist and generally feel bad even killing on screen enemies unless there's a good reason for it. Well this game seems to hate people like me, because just about every time I'd sneak up on my next victim, they'd say something like, "I guess my wife is sleeping by now." Just…ugh, way to make me despise every kill, no matter how clean or sudden I make it.

Zen doesn't help matters because he's an asshole who only delivers lines with a scowl. He's incapable of any other emotion, and all of his lines are delivered with phoned in quality. He starts and ends every level with pithy comments. At the start, he say one of two things; "A cold wind blows in," or, "All right, let's finish this quickly." At least at the end of a mission he offers a bit more variety with lines like, "This is one flower that blossoms in a bloodbath," or "Life is like a petal, blowing in the wind," or my personal favorite, "I dip my penis in cream, but the cat still won't lick it." (I may have invented that one to relieve my boredom.)

Zen gains another one-shot-one-kill skill called Rankoku, where he is able to suddenly leap much, much farther away than normal, dive bombing distant enemies to deliver a cinematic black and white killing flurry that splashes the screen in red. This is probably to cover up the lousy camera shifts, and it doesn't help that almost every time, Zen says the same thing, "Here it comes." After seeing the same move hundreds of time, I started singing a line from Iggy Pop's Here Comes Success before executing Rankoku, which effectively made Zen my backup singer. Cheap, but effective comedy, which helped me alleviate my growing hand pains as I played through the missions.

After wiping out the army of Ichijo, I attempted to fight him the same way I had the other daimyo, Yamazuma, but the game got real cheap at that point. After fighting through a castles of guards and facing the boss himself, the game informs me that this was actually a double hired to play Ichijo. Another mission is given where Ichijo challenges me to a duel, and I go to the same castle, this time without guards, run all the way up the empty castle levels, and face a harder boss who has no problems using cheap tactics. No other weapons besides my sword will damage him. I laid out 20 landmines and he stepped on all of them, to no effect. So I restarted and just hacked and hacked until he finally fell down…and it's another body double. So then ANOTHER mission says, "Kill Ichijo and take the Mikiri Mirror!" And despite his stats saying he has no more troops, Ichijo still has more guards in his castle. And yes, he uses even more cheap tactics to draw the fight out.

So, I finally kill this harder boss—again, harder because he's even more full of cheap tactics—and when he falls, another boss shows up. She's even cheaper, and once I defeated her after multiple rage filled failures, I was just about ready to give up. I wasn't having fun, and the repetitive game play was just abusing my hands with little reward. I made efforts to learn alchemy and make my own healing potions, but after a while it became clear that herb gathering wouldn't give me any advantages in the boss fights, and none of the items were needed during regular fights. I don't even know why they game me landmines, shuriken, and grenades when all of them are as effective as a moist toilet paper spitball delivered from a short straw at long range.

But I decided to face Shu the Cypress anyway, leading to the dumbest and most painful cinematic scene in the whole game. Then comes the cheap fight to end all cheap fights. Nothing works on Shu. He drinks potions to make himself even stronger, and all fainting or confusion potions thrown at him last for less time than it takes me to close a five foot gap. Landmines are pointless. Grenades are pointless. Zen's sword? drops from the X-acto blade to a dull ball point pen. And even though he doesn't need any extra help, Shu can conjure explosions that will hit Zen, unless he jumps back about ten feet.

I have to point out how the game makes no sense about Zen's power levels versus Shu's. As the story is laid out in the game, Zen and Shu were both ninja guards working for the same princess. Yet right at the start of the game Shu is a sorcerer with amazing powers, and Zen…is a level one nobody. Zaji talks about how Zen is an amazing ninja with magic powers of his own, but those magic powers never show up. Instead, Zen gets Rankoku, which doesn't work against bosses, and a set of spandex wings that allow him to fall slower. You can't even call it gliding because he's dropping like a stone and almost impossible to control. So the difference in your power levels versus Shu's never improve, even after level grinding in endless mission, and yet, both of these characters grew up together in the same ninja village. This is a double whammy of bad writing and cheap tactics to make the game much, much, MUCH harder.

Oh, and did I mention that I'd selected Easy Mode? Yeah. So if the game is this punishing on easy, I'm not even going to bother trying the other settings like I did on Uncharted. (I even attempted some Crushing levels on Uncharted, and no shock, the difficulty setting lives up to its name.) In easy mode, Zen can lay out 20-30 slashes of his sword without killing Shu, and yet, even with me consuming health potions, Shu can kill Zen with three sword slashes. Actually, almost all bosses can do this, taking insane amounts of damage without dropping, and killing Zen with three short strokes over and over. Namco's idea of easy is so twisted and frustrating, and the cheap tactics of the boss fights makes all the level grinding in between just as useless as the alchemy skills and the item shop.

So after playing this same fight with Shu roughly 60 times, I decided that I didn't care how the game ends. I'm sure that after I kill Shu, there's yet another terrible plot twist to drag the game out to a few more missions and boss fights. "Sorry Zen, but your plot device is in another castle" might have been slightly more effective writing than what's on offer here.

So, let me recap: monotonous level grinding in the same dull locations over and over, low level boss fights with no variety, ending with high-level boss fights who take cheap tactics to a whole new level. Marry this with bad acting, a non-story unfolding mostly in text updates, and a series of plot twists so dumb, they made my eyelid twitch, and you have a game that's sure to annoy. I might not have been so harsh if this was priced around 25 euros or lower. But for the asking price of a full-sized console game, what I got was a half-assed effort that left me cussing and complaining long after I pulled the cartridge from my Vita and debated smashing it with a hammer.

There's not even any need for the stealth options like sneaking up on tip-toes or getting rid of the bodies. You can run full tilt to your victim, slide to a stop making a hellacious amount of noise, and they still won't hear you coming. Enemies who find a body look around suspiciously for a few second,s but then go right back to standing around, waiting patiently for you to come and kill them too.

There's no need to learn the games alchemy, or to gather items from the levels. About the only good thing I can think to say is that the unimaginative naming conventions for alchemy ingredients yielded the occasional pothead chuckle from me because I'd gather up some Super Strength Weed, or some Forgetful Weed. And Speed Weed sounds like someone was stepping on my products. Also, I was told I was allowed to rename my alchemy jars, so the only jar I ever used became known as Raven Jar Jar Binks.

But all enjoyment that I got from this game came solely from my efforts to take the piss from it, delivering my own MST3K-like lines to combat the constant monotony that is Zen's world.

If you must play this game, wait until it goes on sale on the Sony Store. Do not pay extra for the box and cartridge, because they will make this an expensive and painful addition to your game library. And while the game's short XP grinding missions might be the perfect length to make a trip on the bus or subway, a dedicated gamer playing through the game on their couch at home is going to be irritated by how little variety is offered for the asking price.

I give Shinobido 2: Zen's Revenge 1 star, and would recommend it to masochists and people who think monotony is the spice of life. For everyone else looking for stealth mission action on the Vita, I'll advise you to wait until Metal Gear HD comes out. That's two portable stealth games that will still give you a better story, better acting, (yes, really) and better fighting options. Zen's Revenge feels like a game only half completed before it was rushed out to make the launch date, and for me it has no replay value. Your mileage may vary.