Connor
About four years ago I won a writing contest on a niche subreddit.
My reward was a game called ‘Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun’.
And because this was not just any game, it was the spoils of victory, naturally it jumped the queue in my already overstocked steam library; I played it immediately.
What followed was a gorgeous romp through busy environments set in edo Japan, a small cast of characters to carry through complex mission fields and a review I knew I was going to write one day.
Welcome to that day.
Shadow Tactics is an overhead stealth based strategy game à la ‘Commandos’ where you control, at varying times, a ninja, a samurai, a snarky gutter rat, a sniper and a kunoichi.
You are placed in a map with a set of objectives, an OSHA nightmare of environmental hazards to weaponize and a frankly unreasonable number of armed guards between you and what you need to do. There’s no prescribed path, you can travel through one route while barely interacting with the other half of the map.
From then on in you must adapt to a certain style of gameplay. One that rewards patience, observation and careful co-ordination followed by bold movements with razor thin margins of error.
Your five sneaky soldiers have a small arsenal of abilities mostly aimed at controlling the attention of the guards and moving unseen.
And as any stealth game player can tell you, there are two ways to be stealthy:
Leave no bodies for the guards to find…
Or leave no guards to find the bodies.
You have many ways to slaughter your fellow man in this game; the difficulty is in preventing everything from rapidly spiraling out of control.
Which it will.
Among your most used keys will be F5 and F8, the respective shortcuts for quick-save and quick-load.
Because an alarm going off spawns several clown cars of hunting guards and is functionally the same as a game over.
Shadow Tactics is fair in its brutality. Every situation that hits the fan is accompanied by a realisation that being just a little more observant, waiting just a little longer, considering that one element that you missed, could have saved you.
And that’s the flavour of difficult that makes a game intriguing, because you know next time will be different.
Soundwise we have a heavy emphasis on traditional Japanese music.
You are doing yourself a favour if you sit on the title screen for a minute or two and just take it in; warbling strings slowly evolves into an evocative theme. More modern concert instruments join in and generate something melancholy; this isn’t a wild action game where the hero does backflips and gets the girl, war is a tragedy and we are about to slip into the blood-soaked shoes of its victims.
In game sound design is doing work.
While the shing of a katana leaving its sheath and the wet gurgling of a nameless guard with a shuriken embedded in his jugular are all well done, the truly impressive thing to be listening out for is the way the music plays with you.
A playful tone when the kunoichi dons her disguise, a threatening shift when you are discovered. If we are actors on a stage, then the concert knows their part well.
You can choose to hear the voices of the main characters in English dub or subtitled Japanese, and while the Japanese voices most certainly blend into the portrait more smoothly, English voice work is decently well done.
On that note, the true stars of the show here are the characters.
Our five heroes start as strangers. Over the course of the game, their relationships evolve and become an interpersonal web of battle-bound comrades. Early levels consist of taking one, two or three of them on a mission at once, but by the end you have the whole crew and their arsenal and are juggling multiple abilities at once.
By the time you get to that point, in game dialogue and cutscenes made in the game engine will have progressed them by inches into a diehard crew that stick together no matter what…
And it’s your job to keep them alive.
Good luck.
Shadow Tactics is the middle child in a trilogy of games set in the same style, the others being ‘Desperados III’ and the recently released ‘Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew’.
In one of those you control a posse of cowboys in the dusty and brutal wild west, in the other you are a pirate crew beset by mystic curses.
So with cowboys, ninja and now pirates covered, safe to say this is one team of game creators who truly speaks to the wide-eyed six year old in all of us.
Tragically, that developer is Mimimi games… who have announced their shutdown only recently.
So it is with some bittersweet feelings that I go through their other games, but hey, don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
When Shadow Tactics clicks, it’s a feeling like nothing else.
Slipping past the legion of enemies stalking you and defying every odd, finding every loophole and threading the needle an impossible number of times in a row (ignoring all the times you had to use quick-load no jutsu).
I still have that last level to go, it’s a vicious beast of a thing to tackle. But beat it I will, and then I’ll be on to doing the same with Desperados, then Cursed Crew.
We’ll be sad to see you go Mimimi, but in the meantime, we have the games you left behind to keep us company.
