When I first became aware of Red Ninja: End of Honor, it was when I saw an ad for it at E3 2004. My immediate reaction was, "Hey, that woman's almost naked." Which, from the ad, was all the information I could gather about the game. I couldn't find it on the show floor itself, and I had heard near the end of the show that year that the game was postponed indefinitely because the gameplay just wasn't there. I had no reason to doubt this source, which is why I was surprised to see the game on sale over a year later at GameStop. Apparently, someone at Vivendi Universal saw the concept art, decided that nearly-naked female ninjas would sell great, and unleashed this game upon the world. And in retrospect, I really wish that the game's last hurrah was E3 2004's end.
To begin, you're the kunoichi Kurenai, during the days of Japan's three unifiers (just prior to the Tokugawa shogunate). Seems when she was a little girl, her father invented a powerful new weapon that would turn the tide of the then-common civil wars. However, before it could be implemented, he was killed and she was hung by an iron wire. But she somehow lived through being both hung and garroted, and was adopted by the ninja Chiyome. Well, years later, the little dying girl has become a bloodthirsty killer whose disregard for human life is only matched by her disregard of bras, and she's out to get revenge.
Honestly, the plot is boilerplate. In some way, Red Ninja reminds me of the old Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Double Impact, as it basically tells you the whole important part of the plot immediately so you can spend the rest of your time watching intense violence. By the way, if you're losing respect for me after discussing a Van Damme movie, well, I don't blame you. My only defense was that it was on Showtime and therefore free. Anyhow, don't expect anything like character development. The only development that this game bothered with involved lots of estrogen and well-placed adipose tissue.
The plot isn't the only thing less developed than my social skills, however. The game's controls, to be perfectly frank, bring a new meaning to the phrase "massive brain hemorrhaging." You'll discover this right in the training level, when you discover that most moves beyond running in a straight line are awakward at best. Sure, the game gives you all sorts of interesting moves you can do. You can swing across chasms, run along walls, bounce off walls any number of times, and other nifty fun ninja tricks. And unless you do them with absolute perfect timing and positioning, you will fail at all of them. Repeatedly. It doesn't help that part of the perfect timing is learning exactly how much input lag you'll suffer from and accounting for it. For being a stealthy ninja, Kurenai is sure incompetent at this whole "moving around" thing.
And that's all before we've even gotten into combat. Kurenai decided to keep the iron wire she was hung with way back in the day, and uses it as a leash for her weapons. Conceptually, this is admittedly cool. Why carry around a bunch of daggers and the like when you can just bring one and retrieve it constantly? Plus, using the wire to give out Colombian neckties is a neat idea, particularly as the dagger is implanted in some poor fool's stomach. However, the iron wire snaps like a twig when there's any sort of tension on the wire running through an enemy, the enemy tries to get away, a stiff breeze comes by, whatever. Sure, you instantly and magically get a brand-new wire (with brand-new attachment don't ask me where she keeps them, I haven't figured it out either), but what's the point of the wire if it just snaps whenever you try using it?
Of course, then there's the seduction "skill." It was perhaps inevitable that a 16th-century ninja wearing a thong and a top that only barely covers her nipples would try to strip her way past her enemies. If there were some sort of regular way to predict or control how enemies would react to this maneuver, it might be an interesting addition. Well, you do have one indication you can only use this on solo foes (apparently, samurai never used to go to strip clubs in groups). But beyond that? It's anyone's guess. More often than not, it doesn't work, which means these guards are either very loyal, eunuchs, or just not turned on by nearly naked women suddenly appearing during times of high alert. Go figure.
So you have a game where the control scheme is maddening, and many of the moves just don't work right. At least it looks pretty, right? Um, no. The game theoretically tries to go for realistic (or near-realistic) graphics reminiscent of the Onimusha games. However, the quality is absolutely atrocious. The textures in this game look muddy, the polygons are more jagged than a steak knife, and the animation is absolutely atrocious. Honestly, this game's graphics pale in comparison to Tomb Raider. I mean the original Tomb Raider, whichever version you prefer. Heck, I've seen nicer graphics on the N-Gage.
I imagine most people are going to get suckered into this by the cover art. Because honestly, who isn't attracted to a woman whose legs extend so high, they end just short of her breasts? I know that quite a few character designs are based purely on the fact that the artist in question is really horny and decides to project his fantasies onto the canvas. But couldn't Tranji, the developer, find someone who knew something vaguely resembling proper proportion? I'm honestly wondering if the art team for this game has even seen pictures of women in porn the models look that fake.
Finally, I just want to know why they only bothered to make so few animations for the enemies. They move stiff, and they apparently only have two or three ways to die. My personal favorite was to seriously weaken an enemy, and then throw the dagger at him from a distance into his midsection. The dagger would plant itself into his stomach, and he'd suddenly fall in half as if a really sharp katana cleaved through his waist. Apparently, that was a load-bearing belly button. Given how few different models there are for this game's enemies, you'd think they'd have at least spent some time making a few different ways for them to die.
The game's sound is mostly appropriate for a ninja-based stealth game namely, mostly absent. You get the standard plucks of a samisen and the like at various intervals, but it feels like the same generic traditional Japanese music, ripped blatantly from kabuki and noh theater, that people with no music budget have been ripping off for ages. The sound effects aren't much better they sound enough like various things (like footsteps, strangling, metal clashing) that you'll not notice them being especially sharp or dull. And that's about the best you can say about anything in this game.
It's not that Red Ninja: End of Honor is a bad idea, per se. Theoretically taking the idea behind Tenchu: Stealth Assassins and adding a bit of sex appeal isn't the worst idea anyone ever came up with. However, they didn't add much sex appeal, they made all the controls clunky as possible, and the graphics managed to make me wonder whether I was playing this game on a PlayStation or a PlayStation 2. It's not a failure on the level of some of the games I've played (like most console Simpsons releases), however, its pretty darn close. The fact that you can really get all the appeal this game has to offer by just downloading a copy of the cover really doesn't help matter, either. Really, though, the front cover is perfect for this game awkward, unbalanced, and a complete tease compared to what you're actually getting.
