I felt a burning itch to look into gameplay footage from other players who may have conquered the previous title, to see what kind of kunoichi techniques are utilised by far greater players than I, but I stayed my hand. This plays directly into a phenomenal loop within the mechanics – the art of getting creative. The game had convinced me that repeating an action for a different outcome wasn’t madness – it was bloody good fun.
I’d dig into my quicksaves, and time travel back a few extra minutes and resume my thoughts on how to solve the matter. Heck, there were times where I would execute what I considered to be a perfect plan – bad guy nerds falling left and right, when suddenly I would stop and find myself wondering …could I do it better? Perhaps I didn’t want to expend a limited resource for that kill, maybe a patrolling guard could be an advantage at another point of his path. My initial frustrations from not fully understanding the game systems evaporated once I realised that technically, no amount of colossal mistakes could actually ruin me – trying again wasn’t just available to me, it was encouraged. For the truly enlightened among us, we know that the act of save-scumming can be a lifesaver when walking the razor’s edge of failure – the ability to rapidly make granular saves, attempt your grand plan, then immediately abandon it and try again from a few moments earlier it’s a godly tool. Every meticulous plan can be attempted, and the ensuing fuck up observed, thanks to the game incorporating the ancient and appreciated system of quicksaving.
Thankfully trial and error are concepts beautifully realised within the game. My last play session went well past my bedtime, I was just so in the zone. Soon enough, I was rapidly dispatching fools in all manner of incredible, deadly ways. I was not respecting the way of the ninja. I took a moment to relax, have a cold drink of water and reassess the friction I was feeling was essentially from trying to implement a playstyle that I had not yet settled into. This first hour or two within Aiko’s Choice contained one of many harsh lessons, and a rising frustration that I initially was levelling towards the game. My first instinct with reviewing games is to try and keep a reasonable level of speed – time spent playing is time not spent writing and publishing – and you need to find a balance between completing something quickly, but not glossing over it or missing anything important. The game is not immediately ready for you to speed run it – player knowledge and map awareness are needed in equal parts. This ultra-methodical playstyle was one that had a small learning curve. Blasting them may have been easier – but the alert level and noise did not readily appeal to me. While these were immensely devastating, I had settled into a very slow and methodical playstyle, carefully observing enemy patterns and creating elaborate scenarios to dispatch them. Takuma, for example, was a dude who was packing guns and grenades. I can openly say that beyond my staples, a lot of the super specific options would likely be hampered by playstyle and player preference. This isn’t to say that every character ability is an earth-rocking game changer.
It was finally dawning on me that my party of killers was a well-stocked toolbox, and that the world in front of me was a range of DIY problems to be fixed in cool and creative ways. This seemed exceptionally useful as a baseline, but then I also made the critical mistake of discovering that my ninjas are unable to easily kill enemy samurai – whereas Mugen, my cheerful samurai fiend, could dispatch them with ease.
I then came to realise he has the unique ability to kill every motherfucking person in a generous radius. Look at his thudding footsteps as he walks, so noisy – what on Earth am I supposed to do with this guy? Look at this armoured idiot, who can’t nimbly leap on roofs or stealthily dispatch an enemy. Originally, I was partly disgusted by the presence of a samurai – I am a long time ninja enthusiast, and somewhere in my past I developed a strong anti-samurai rhetoric. Stealth is the word of the day, month AND year – so try and remain unseen, lest you make your situation rapidly worse.Įach of your deadly brethren has their own abilities, strengths AND weaknesses. In short, you control a cadre of assassins with different vocations, and use them to execute (mostly literally) particular manoeuvres to traverse a map and complete objectives. At first I was going to refer to the game as a real-time strategy, but the more minutiae-scaled detail of its mechanics really does lean more towards a tactically-oriented experience.