Mark of the Ninja (stealth side-scroller from Klei) catch-all

Played with mouse and keyboard a bit and it was fine, but it didn't feel fully logical. Just got through playing an hour or so with controller- and yeah, what a difference. The best thing wasn't just that it was better- but how logical the controls were with controller. I had very few incidents, even switching a half hour in, with the switch- it was mostly mapped in a way that just made sense.

I just played this game for five straight hours. It's three in the morning and I have work to do tomorrow.

Committed. Either you are, or you should be. Take your pick :p

shoptroll was kind enough to gift me this game and I finished the first playthrough last night. What a great game! I especially liked all the gameyness to it with the scrolls, scroll mini-puzzles and level goals. The last couple levels were really enjoyable as I found the

Spoiler:

Night crawler

move satisfying. All the stealth mechanics from the noise levels, executing killing blows, distractions, hiding and items worked so well together. And freaking out guards never got old. I wasn't a fan of Shank but what a solid game from Klei.

I have a feeling this is the game that will get people to really notice Klei, not Shank. Then again, I haven't played Shank. I DO know when I saw the booth at PAX East I was confused as I thought Shank was DeathSpank, the latter being made by Hothead Games. I think I insulted the guy working the booth when I expressed my confusion. "I thought Shank was made by Hothead, the guys who did the first episodes of the Penny Arcade game..."

Yep, that's gotta feel good.

BNice wrote:

I wasn't a fan of Shank but what a solid game from Klei.

I hated Shank. Shank was the reason I didn't buy this until the Steam sale.

I picked this up during the fall steam sale and holy poop balls, batman. It's just stellar. Played it through in 3 sittings and it immediately went into my GOTY list. There was nothing in this game that I didn't love. I, like many others, avoided this because of Shank, but they really pulled it off this time with MotN. Even the ending was made with style and grace.

Finished last night too. Amazing!

Especially the final couple levels:

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With all the hallucinations. Killed most of my own clan thinking they were guards. Wasn't sure if I should kill Azai or myself. I do think he was in the wrong. But here I was following the advice of a girl who wasn't even there the whole game. Killed Azai out of self-preservation mostly. ;)

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I killed Azai because I figured I'd be killed eventually. I found Azai to be a greater evil, but only slightly. Plus, if it weren't for Azai stealing the corporation's stuff in the first place none of this would have happened. He basically gave me powers that would drive me insane just so I could clean up his mess for him.

Crazy lady in my head or not, that f*cker deserves to die.

Spoiler:

Morality in this game isn't clear cut. Every character is evil because they're either part of a mercenary empire or murderous ninja clan. The choice at the end of the game isn't really about good or evil, it's about self-preservation versus tradition and honor. Azai chose to steal the technology from Hessian in order to preserve the clan's standing in the world because the flowers to make the tattoo ink were dead. If he didn't make this move then the clan would eventually become irrelevant and disband. However that goes against the tradition of not stealing power that you have not earned, which led to the original madness with the ink.

If you choose to kill Azai then either it's because he's violated the clan's moral code or because you actually agree with his motivation but rather than save the clan you want to save yourself. If you choose to kill yourself then either it's because you agree with the clan's tradition for you to do so or because you agree that Azai made the right decisions to preserve the clan. The first time you see this choice it seems quite simple, live or die, but it's more complicated in context.

Great post, Latrine. Thanks for explaining this:

Latrine wrote:
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Azai chose to steal the technology from Hessian in order to preserve the clan's standing in the world because the flowers to make the tattoo ink were dead.

Which I totally didn't get, as I wrote earlier in the thread.

Latrine wrote:
Spoiler:

If you choose to kill Azai then either it's because he's violated the clan's moral code

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I would say that's basically the choice I made, despite not understanding why Azai perpetrated the theft. Azai did wrong in unleashing the player to abet the cover-up, so his death by Mark was poetic justice. Of course now there's an insane ninja who might very well kill everyone, but you know, not my problem. :)

And just to cement exactly how thick I am when it comes to this game's story, can someone point out

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what the indication is that the guards in the final level are hallucinations? I only knew that from the seal description, but don't think I would have picked up on it in the gameplay.

Gravey wrote:

And just to cement exactly how thick I am when it comes to this game's story, can someone point out

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what the indication is that the guards in the final level are hallucinations? I only knew that from the seal description, but don't think I would have picked up on it in the gameplay.

Sure!

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Every time you killed one, when they dropped to the ground, there was a puff of smoke and they changed from gun-armed-thug into unarmed ninja of your clan.

Stele wrote:
Spoiler:

Every time you killed one, when they dropped to the ground, there was a puff of smoke and they changed from gun-armed-thug into unarmed ninja of your clan.

Wow, hahaha, the red mist must have been pretty thick with me never to have noticed that.

It easier to notice if you try to hide bodies. I'm one of the people who tries to hide every single body for that bonus few hundred points.

Ora explicitly tells you that they're hallucinations. They have an echo voice effect. Also on the score screen for the level they show their true form if you killed them, that's actually when I first noticed who they were.

Also about the ending,

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Personally I like the ending where you kill Azai and become a devil ninja of legend. It just felt more fitting given how many people I slaughtered during the course of the game. For me it made more sense to be a terrifying zealot assassin rather than a self-sacrificing acolyte. Although I imagine that if you do a more stealthy and non-lethal playthrough then your interpretation of what it means to be a ninja might be different.

Am i supposed to be able to buy upgrades after completing the first level? I got points and a scroll but didn't see where i could spend them.

No. It'll be very obvious when you can.

Mark of the Ninja's five stealth design rules

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/182368/Mark_of_the_Ninjas_five_stealth_design_rules.php#.UL4IZtfIV8E

Some good stuff in there. Small snippet:

"In a stealth game people come in with a very patient style of play. There's a lot of waiting. If something goes wrong and they have to do all that waiting again, it quickly descends into tedium," he said. If people get through a section of a challenge before failing, they will generally do that section again exactly the same until they reach the point they failed at.

"With Ninja, it basically had a checkpoint between every meaningful encounter," he said. "This allowed us and the player more experimentation in the game. You've all heard of degenerative strategies, where people have worked out one thing that works and it's boring as hell, but they keep doing it because they don't want to lose work. They don't want to lose the last six, seven minutes of play so they just keep doing that boring thing."

Yeah the checkpoint system was very frequent. I got to points on the last few levels where if I screwed up I would just restart checkpoint myself, since it was never very far away.

I'm tagging as I liked the game. Getting into it slowly but surely.

But, can you buy all the upgrade at one point?

Manach wrote:

I'm tagging as I liked the game. Getting into it slowly but surely.

But, can you buy all the upgrade at one point?

Yes, but that point is basically New Game+. To afford everything, you have to 100% the game.

Gravey wrote:
Manach wrote:

I'm tagging as I liked the game. Getting into it slowly but surely.

But, can you buy all the upgrade at one point?

Yes, but that point is basically New Game+. To afford everything, you have to 100% the game.

Yeah, I'm slowly going back every so often and mastering a new level. This works in the first several levels well, but they introduce some foes towards the end that really piss me off. So who knows if I'll truly 100% the game.

I just finished the game on normal on my first playthru.. WOW. I love the game.

Will see if I'll do a NewGame+ tho. But, that was refreshing.

Manach wrote:

I just finished the game on normal on my first playthru.. WOW. I love the game.

Will see if I'll do a NewGame+ tho. But, that was refreshing.

I finished the game a couple of months ago, shortly after it came out, and am now working my way through trying to get all of the objectives in the game (scrolls, seals, goals). Will see later if I want to go through the NG+.

NG+ is interesting but personally I found it didn't add much to the game since you're still so powerful even without complete information. It was especially annoying in the few spots where it's impossible to see a guard before they see you. By the end I was just speed running through NG+ to get the achievement. Still it was fun to play through again and play with some of the toys that I didn't use in my original run through.

I just loved this game. I had never heard of it until the Gamasutra article. I finished New Game + today and I just wish there was more game to play. Can anyone recommend something similiarly awesome? I played Deadlight but really disliked the slow movement and the slow transition between getting dead and trying again.

Does Steam have any good metroidvania type games?

Wow, I had a really, really different take on the ending:

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If you choose to kill Azai then either it's because he's violated the clan's moral code

But your only evidence of that is the girl's claims, and you know she's a hallucination. You "see" a crate of weapons, but you see a lot of other stuff that's not real, too.

I'm not sure that the girl was ever real. I think you may have been hallucinating her from the very start of the game. I think she was your mind's method of expressing magical knowledge to you that you couldn't otherwise know. Your tattoos were feeding you info, but a voice attached to a body was the only channel it could find that your brain would accept.

I noticed on several occasions that there was simply no way for her to see what was going on, even very early in the game, but she would comment on it anyway. This supports the idea that she was never actually there.

Because of this, I realized that there was an excellent chance that the entire 'clan goes evil' scenario was all my imagination, that I could no longer reliably differentiate truth from fiction, and that killing myself would be the safest path. I could only kill Azai if I was certain of his guilt, and I wasn't certain of anything at that point.

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I think it's pretty obvious she was never real, especially waking up. Her first line is "They're looking for you." Who is? And why you specifically?

But the opening cut-scene to the game is a ninja breaking into a factory, killing a bunch of guys and stealing guns and equipment. Azai kick-started the whole thing. So yeah, I took him down because this never would have happened if he hadn't done wrong.

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I agree that Ora is a hallucination from the start but I don't agree that everything that happens after the first half of the game is a hallucination. In particular I think that Dosun does find that the flowers are dead and the scrolls that Azai has written confessing this are genuine, they're not written in a way that explicitly vilify Azai if they were completely hallucinations.

I don't use anything that Ora says as evidence, I'm going almost purely by the scrolls. Also I wouldn't say that Azai stealing the technology of Hessian is an evil act, but it does go against the clan's code. You really have to dig deep into the scrolls to get all this.

The history of Clan Hisomu goes something like this. The first master, Tetsuji, was a great ninja but he was restless after the war ended. A merchant promised to return him to his youth and glory, this is when Tetsuji receives a Sumi tattoo and becomes both powerful and paranoid. The other ninja try to stop Tetsuji by also using the Sumi and this is what leads to a period known as the hundred years of darkness, which stops only when the Sumi runs out. Afterwards Master Otomo establishes a code of honor for Clan Hisomu. Essentially it has three principles: 1) Humans are prone to corruption. 2) Stealing power that you have not earned leads to corruption. 3) A master can control a student. When Japan opens to the West they get more Sumi but use the code of honor to control its usage and prevent something like the hundred years of darkness from repeating by having any student who is marked commit suicide. This part is important because it ensures that the power is short lived. There's also an interesting comment from Azai at this point, "Do the tattoos make one mad, or simply...dangerous? ... I see no difference between the two."

Jump to the present and we learn that Master Azai has failed in his responsibility to safeguard the Sumi, that the flowers used to produce it are dead. In order to preserve the clan's existence he decides to replace the Sumi with an equivalent modern technology. This is where he breaks one aspect of the code, stealing a power that is not earned. Furthermore he gives this technology to many of the ninja, the Hunters that you encounter later in the game. What Azai said before about the Sumi also applies to this new technology. Rather than having a single student accept the power and then commit suicide, he has broken tradition by arming the entire clan indefinitely. Also it doesn't help that he lied about everything and gave you the mark to accomplish all of this.

So ultimately the final choice is this. Do you care more about your honor and your responsibility to the clan and its preservation and fulfill your duty by killing yourself? Do you care more about the clan's honor and would rather slaughter the clan than let it become corrupted? Or do you simply care about your own self-preservation or the fact that Azai betrayed you? Or are you just a bloodthirsty ninja who must bring death?

The Xbox version is 50% off today. If you want it on 360 and haven't picked it up yet, now's the time!