What was understood and what was lost over a decade
This is something of a long-time coming, a background project based largely on a series of video games that capture a now long-lost era of pop culture. An aesthetic that can best be described as urban neo-gothic horror. Video games that were edgy because they made use of what they lacked technologically, benefitting from sixth generation console limitations. Uglier graphics, standard definition resolution, subpar draw distances; video game developers and by extension many film and TV directors were between the word-of-mouth/magazine coverage era and the algorithm, ludicrous speed reactions. What am I getting at? Well, if you’re a regular subscriber or you tune in regularly to this blog you may or may not have an idea of the video games I’m about to bring up:
A couple of times and long before I joined the Army, I watched and eventually bought and played the video game Outlast and its DLC: Whistleblower. A first-person view indie horror video game that markets an age-old, but classic trope of haunted abandoned asylum with a twist.
Zero Punctuation’s review of a 2013 action-adventure video game based largely on f[clock ticking]ing with people’s memory and further contributing to collective false memory, or the Mandela effect, was on my mind not too long ago. On sale on Steam, Remember Me is something of a spearhead to Don’t Nod Entertainment’s later time-manipulation faff about, Life is Strange, only What’s Your Name Again? is more sci-fi than that other game about early-2010s hipsters and young adults who’re better off crowding Starbucks locations in Portland and making a mockery of the acoustic guitar.
Maybe, like Yahtzee suggested, it’s the butt that’s talking. “Remember Me!” Who wouldn’t?
At this point, I’m milking Red Ninja for every ryo it owes me which isn’t something I normally do. I occasionally bring around my love for God of War Greek era and Max Payne as well as my contempt for the concept of Chainsaw Man and Tatsuki Fujimoto, not because I want to bury something to propel the other, but because I want to bring awareness to a multitude of different things that travel in similar circles. Since this is meant to be the conclusion of the Red Ninja recount series, the final part of this impromptu investigation into how a neat concept hung itself on its own cord by accident is going to be Ghost of Tsushima:
Sony’s a d[clang]khead for abandoning PC ports of popular games, I may never get to play Ghost of Yotei ಠ_ಠ.
Like Sekiro Monogatari before it, Sakai Jin VS the Mongol Horde is also set in historical Japan but right around the time when my favorite era, the Kamakura Shogunate reigns supreme, when the Hojo clan can pull all the strings and tickle the bums of the emperor and the shogunate and leave progressively larger handprints until Go-Daigo took notice and said, “Those degenerates over there, Ashikaga-dono!” Sadly, the Ashikaga would turn on Go-Daigo because one doesn’t simply scorn a samurai. But they’re not important in this story, the Adachi and Sakai clans are.
So far I have three games about shinobi or shinobi-shaped things. Redeemer of Tsushima Island, One-Armed Wolf and the Rejuvenating Waters, and Hidden and Discreet Things in a Sexy Red Kimono. Two take place in the Sengoku-era, one was around the time of Hojo Tokimune. Two play extraordinarily well, especially when it comes to samurai or ninja, one plays like it walked off the set of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and never recovered.
Jin Sakai and Kurenai both use weapons consistent with real and fictional samurai and shinobi respectively, but Sakai-dono, as a samurai, is expected to use all those weapons befitting his status. The katana, the wakizashi, perhaps a yari/naginata/nagamaki, etc. especially while on horse, a bow and arrow; the samurai warrior and especially the general is an expert in all samurai tactics and even embraces many new and innovative tactics. Am I right, Hojo Tokiyuki-dono?
Not that Kurenai is unskilled in anything, the best way to describe her is right where she needs to be skills-wise, but for the third time, the controls don’t reflect that. Slight taps vs full taps, hold a button vs hold the same button plus another one for alternate controls, a fixed camera from a distance like what God of War achieves vs a fixed camera up-close that keeps an enemy out of view and damn, you just got stabbed with a naginata by a nameless foot soldier who should’ve been dangling from a beam in a mine.
It’s also worth noting that while Kurenai’s shinobi profession may seem cowardly in the Kamakura period, stealthy or show-y, both serve or belong to an exalted clan in Japanese history, even if one is completely made up in a way that would earn it the Akira Kurosawa Seal of Approval. Meanwhile, even the director of the worst ninja film of all time would look at Red Ninja and not even bother using the defibrillator to shock it back to its feet, but I don’t wanna be too harsh on the game. I was intrigued by a ROM hosting site to check it out for myself, and it clearly had an impression on me because I wrote about the game four or five times to date.
If a game kicks my ass because it was sufficiently difficult, then so be it. It can laugh at me from the Recycle Bin. But if it kicks my ass due to difficulty stalagmites and loops that belong in the first Sonic game then it’s not f[match-click]ing fair.
I’m exaggerating, Dragon’s Lair functions. For evil!! ╰（‵□′）╯
Both do make a good showing for their respective settings, though both also keep to the mythological shorthand rather make public the complications of their respective settings, which may be for a good reason. The Mongol Army wasn’t homogenous, they through Jurchens, Chinese, and Korean troops at the Japanese, none of whom spoke the same language or dialects, so you know damn well it was a mess the first time around, as well as the second, myths about the divine winds notwithstanding.
Similarly, the myths surrounding the shinobi of old are largely perpetuated by western and Japanese properties due to mythic shorthand for easy access. Loads of games default to masked assassin moving stealthily in the dead of night rather than a straw hat wanderer embedding himself in feudal Shizuoka. Swords clashing makes for better entertainment, just ask the Brothers Uchiha or Gokenin Zankuro.
But never mind the fact that it’s historically accurate for a samurai to use a gun (though this would be true during and after the Warring States period), the individual settings for each do well to communicate to me that this is a specific historical setting, as does Three-Legged Wolf Adventures and Watch Me Run from the Ashikaga. Actually that last one is in concert with Ghost of Tsushima but set 60+ years apart, while Sekiro and Red Ninja are contemporaries with unclear starting points due in large part to the semi-mythical origins of the concept of the ninja. Also because Sekiro has you up against creatures that exist in Junji Ito’s mind.
Maybe his antagonists have been outdone by Miyazaki’s in FromSoftware’s games
So between the gameplay and plot synopses of Wolf Amputee, The Patriotic Spartan, and Shinobi Before They Were Cool, the Tale of the Burgundy Spymaster of the Sengoku-jidai is one that I desperately want to see revisited. The concept itself should’ve been impossible to f[bone crunch]k up. And in my head it is! Countless fanarts of existing and original character kunoichi show that the concept is rich with potential. Even I did it, by way of AI image generation, based off an old drawing of mine.
Rare Tiberius artistry at work!?
Actually, this was largely based off artwork by the artist Gesogeso on sites like Instagram and Danbooru, but the fact remains that a sexy woman who can kill you with ninja skills isn’t an failure of a concept, it’s narrative gold. The developers behind Red Ninja put too much in a shallow kitchen sink and tried to pass it off as complete when it really comes close to the mess that was the Holy Roman Empire’s power division.
I might be asking for too much hoping an exceptional programmer can fix Red Ninja’s control scheme and remake it, but there’s much in the way of Kunoichi fiction. Just a matter of finding it. Hell, Googling kunoichi media yields obscure films that would make for great topics for me to discuss later this year while they’re still available on Tubi, but so far, kunoichi have historically been background set-dressing for male shinobi set-pieces.
This was the only one I could find on short notice that allegedly features kunoichi in the starring role. Whether it lives up to that promise remains to be seen while Tubi still has it. Whether I choose to talk about it after watching it also remains to be seen, but I watch a lot of things, so anything is possible. I brought up a buddy cop animanga series known as Taiho Shichauzo and much of that is readily available on YouTube itself. But a friend of mine (me) still encourages straw hat piracy. Just don’t pull a Zoro and get lost.
Ever got lost on a straight path? This man managed to achieve that. (T_T)
Another week, another comparison between two games I’ve talked about at length on this blog before concerning warriors scorned by the powers that be and in a way that requires service to an opponent and/or taking the entirety of the Pantheon and unleashing the wrath of Timur the Lame onto it.
Maybe it was a coincidence, but Stalin never should’ve trusted Hitler for that long. Same with Mussolini, they already hated each other.
To summarize the plot of Red Ninja again, young Kurenai’s father is killed by the Black Lizard/Kurotokage clan, she is left for dead, and recruited by the enigmatic Mochizuki Chiyome, aligned with the Takeda clan and its leader, Takeda Shingen, to serve him and dismantle both the Kurotokage and Takeda’s enemies: the Oda clan. Her various methods of disposing of enemies consist of a weapon at the end of a chain used creatively, classic shinobi stealth and deceit, her own body as hinted by her suggestive outfit and the video game’s cover art, poison darts, and trademark shinobi tools like kunai and shuriken. There’s a blend of typical tropes and Japanese history, of which I approve as a Japanese history enjoyer.
God of War debuted in 2005 as an homage to claymation sword-and-sandals epic movies from the 1950s through the ’80s like Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules (likely the 1958 version), and Clash of the Titans. The central character is Kratos, a very brutally patriotic Spartan, whose skin is marked, first by the searing chains of the Blades of Chaos awarded to him by Ares, and then by the ashes of his family who was killed in a blinding rage as a means to sever his connection to mortality and commit him to lifetime service to Ares. Say what you will about Ascension and the PSP games, but they all do well to cement his position in a very Greek tragedy way.
Ascension is shortly after he realizes that serving Ares is a ruin. Leaving his service isn’t as easy with the Furies breathing down his neck to bind him to his oath. Chains of Olympus occurs five years into his redemptive service to the larger pantheon sans Ares where his main duty is to retrieve Helios from Hades and drive back Morpheus, the God of Dreams. God of War 2005 is five years after that, and a real chance at redemption arrives at the death of Ares by Kratos’ hand, but due to the nature of his brutality and prior service, the one thing he’s always wanted–a mental cleanse–is out of reach.
“The gods of Olympus have abandoned me… now there is no hope.”
But Olympus won’t let him go. They award him Ares’ throne, which was never what he wanted, and in Ghost of Sparta (my personal favorite next to II), visions of his childhood and his brother Deimos come back to haunt him. Learning from his mother, who was cursed by Zeus, that Deimos had been held for ages in the Domain of Death, Kratos seeks to free him, and the gods try to stop him tacitly by having Athena talk him out of it and explaining why they thought Deimos was the personification of dread. In Greek mythology, the deity Deimos and his twin brother Phobos represented the concepts of dread and fear respectively. In typical tragic fashion, Ghost of Sparta shows him being kidnapped from Sparta by Ares and Athena themselves to eliminate threats, namely threats to Olympus. Thanatos, the literal black sheep of the pantheon and personification of death, keeps him locked up. Committing to these duties, Thanatos engages them in combat and kills Deimos.
His mother, brother, wife, and child all dead around Kratos and without any human attachments, Athena awards him godhood and the official seat as the god of war. A great boost of morality for Sparta, an asset for Olympus, and a Spartan kick in the teeth for Kratos whose humanity, which he wanted to cling on to, has been stripped away.
Channel: Parts From Movies
I could not resist.
God of War II is where Kratos is in full “f[roar]k this” mode and he personally guides his Spartans into battle with virtually zero resistance from them and all from Olympus who realize they replaced a beast with an even worse monster. A man who cared little for petty godly squabbles is now using his position to discredit their sense of order and elevate himself as a consequence. Now Sparta truly is known throughout the world. Zeus tricked him into stripping himself of his own godly powers and saw to it personally that he would never be able to resist him again… or so he thought until Gaia intervened personally. Kratos angered himself back to life and slaughtered his way to the Isle of Creation to seek counsel from the Sisters of Fate, the literal gatekeepers of time. Ignoring the inherent danger of messing with time to f[SPARTA]k Zeus back, Kratos returned to weaken Zeus, and with the help of the Titans who lost the Titanomachy, he storms Olympus and starts slashing gods one by one, plunging the world into chaos in the process. No gods to manage their domains, no more earth; even the Titans were using him.
Yeah, as epic as this is (and it fu[clash]ing was), there’s a couple of inconsistencies. How does Kratos become the God of War at the end of the 2005 game, but the death of his remaining family solidifies it further? If Kratos could go back in time, why not save his family or stop himself from becoming a servant of Ares to begin with? These kind of ignore what kind of man Kratos was and what the Greek games were. Mythology is never consistent, just look at who the first emperor of Japan is supposed to be compared to who historians believe the real first emperor of Japan was (Jimmu and Kinmei). As for why he didn’t bring Calliope and Lysandra back to life… I chalk it up to Kratos not being that kind of griever. He’s more this kind:
He’s like a Toyota, he only moves forward, even when he goes back.
And that’s all for the plot synopses of Vermillion Ninja and Ghost of Sparta. What do they do that can be compared here? Combat, of course. Each character gets gadgets and weapons to use against their enemies, but the default is a weapon at the end of a chain, or dual weapons in Kratos’ case of which he had several by III. Kurenai is able to use her kusarigama primarily offensively. Kratos’ blades, no matter what shape they take, are more than just offensive combat tools. Grappling, platforming, climbing, fighting from various distances; and a good look at Kratos’ primary weapons shows this:
They’re ugly, they cut terribly, they burn and sear, they char, they can wedge and burrow into solid rock, are resistant to scratching and the roughest forms of abuse (which defines Kratos’ fighting style); these blades, forged in the darkest pits of Hades, have raw divine power keeping them in their consistently rough and rugged shape.
They allowed Kratos to fight and platform with acrobatic prowess. They also helped greatly during the countless puzzle segments that defined the Greek era games. Compare that to Kurenai and Crimson Shinobi whose platforming is less jumping onto conveniently exposed platforms and solving puzzles while using her weapon system and more incorporation of trademark shinobi trope tactics. The design leans into some of the mechanics that made Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden staples over the years, but is again, held back by its hybrid implementation of multiple combat and platforming systems, some of which fight each other. For reference, this is a kusarigama:
Rather than a pair of chained weapons, Kurenai has one weapon at the end of one chain with the other end being a weight, so it kills and entraps. Which brings her closer to Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.
Neither of them uses their signature weapon acrobatically, at least not for Scorpion until Shaolin Monks where he’s a boss battle in the Netherrealm, and I think the budgetary hemorrhage from Midway in the 2000s, coupled with the game’s structure of being a 2D fighter, Shaolin Monks was the only way Ed Boon and the like could use that. Funny enough, all three of these games released across 2005 fighting with a bevy of releasing around the same time. Shaolin Monks was the latest to release (September 16, though sources differ on the precise release date), so while Red Ninja was probably buried by God of War, I wonder if the Midway guys were eyeing God of War and used the spear like that after seeing what Kratos could do. Probably not, but I like to think.
Red Ninja probably could’ve implemented something slightly similar or adjacent to Kratos’ level of platforming, not to mention a better camera, controls, and enemy AI. Actually, Japanese devs can, have, and do use this, typically in Ninja Gaiden. Ryu Hayabusa’s move set is compatible with a wide array of weapons within a ninja’s skillset and outside typical ninja characteristics consistent with the genre as we see it in pop culture. Kurenai is limited to the tools that emphasize stealth, but the game doesn’t behave consistently in a way that allows for that.
But in an age of remakes and remasters, as I said the first time I reviewed Red Ninja in full, a case can be made to apply that to some games that were buried, this one included.
The last game to put side-by-side with this one is a 2020 American homage to Kurosawa samurai epics. Yes indeed I do mean:
Ghost of Tsushima, also known as The Tale of Sakai Jin or Sakai Jin Monogatari or 境井仁物語. This game is more of an evolution from honorable samurai warrior to deceitful proto-shinobi as the shinobi wouldn’t be put to more use by the samurai and daimyo class until the Sengoku era, but both this and Red Ninja being set in Japan gives me a lot of leeway. Haven’t I written about Japanese historical series before?
I don’t think Google Translate is doing me any favors.
Two weeks ago, I revisited the video game Red Ninja: End of Honor after leaving it be for a few months and briefly mentioning it during the 2025 Year in Review wrap-up. I was initially left quite sour by its dodgy mechanics interfering terribly with the plot and keeping me from getting as far as I wanted. The exploration design philosophy combines objectives with freedom of exploration so there’s no two ways to clear a level, which excites me having played Castlevania and various Metroidvanias, sometimes of a lewder variety to go along with the gothic subculture of Castlevania.
This has a SFW version if you wanna game without playing with two joysticks.
And I call it a tragedy of game design for Red Ninja, because looking at it from a hot-air balloon, you can see what it wanted to do and how different it was from how it turned out. Sengoku-era kunoichi left for dead commits herself to samurai clan after being saved by one of its head priestesses who also moonlights as a ninja herself and leads a group of kunoichi in service of one clan against another prominent clan of the time. Knowing what I’vewritten about, Japanese history is my forte and seeing a concept like this get bogged down by some of its own design flaws.
I wouldn’t have wanted this to fail in 2005 and I don’t think it can fail today. We’ve always liked sexy ladies suplexing monsters and wild beasts and enemy soldiers. See my repertoire on Lewdtroidvanias for details. With better controls and a bit of a tighter combat focus, even if it was buried by other popular games to come out at the time, it could’ve been remembered as a hidden gem. Think diamond level instead of silver. So it has something neat going for it, but the controls do it no favors.
Conceptually, a ninja in a historical Japanese setting hacking and slashing against rogue samurai in service of his lord is a winning formula, which brings me to:
The Tale of the One-Armed Wolf.
Having written about my experiences in this 2019 FromSoftware game before, this may not seem very fair, gameplay-wise, and it technically isn’t, but we’re not comparing them just on gameplay, but also setting and perhaps lore and plot as both games follow the same beats but at different points in Japanese history.
One of the first things to distinguish 隻狼 from Crimson Kunoichi is the setting and location. Both take place at different points late in the Sengoku-era, but in different locales. Vermillion Shinobi puts Kurenai as a servant of the Takeda clan, directly under Takeda Shingen who lived from 1521 to ’73 in the old Kai Province that now makes up part of Yamanashi Prefecture of the Chubu region of Japan–or central Honshu. Lone Wolf is less explicit on locale, since it features so many from dilapidated temples to the outskirts of Ashina Castle to the Castle itself to Wolf’s own memories of Hirata estate, which may have existed either elsewhere in Japan or was toppled by the Ashina clan itself. The Ashina clan interestingly did exist in real life, and my sources claim they began in modern-day Kanagawa, then moved north to Tohoku where they met their end by the forces of Date Masamune.
Thus ended the Ashina Clan.
But Wolf was loyal to a single man, or child: Lord Kuro, the Divine Heir. The mystical Dragonspring rejuvenating waters are capable of allowing those who consume it or are blessed with its essence of immortality, but like a monkey’s paw curling, immortality and infinite beauty aren’t one and the same. Sure, you can live long enough to see Jotaro Kujo punch a vampire to death in Egypt, but you won’t look anything like a human being anymore, so be careful what you wish for.
On that note, interspersed with the human enemy retainers of Ashina Castle, they use a handful of semi- or non-human enemies at their disposal. Gargantuan animal species, mythical creatures, beasts, and other beings stemming from Buddhist mythology–all for war against the Interior Ministry, which simply seems to be the Tokugawa Shogunate while they’re consolidating power. Keep in mind, this is the Sengoku-era and the Tokugawa would eventually rule Japan for the next quarter-millennia until the Black Ships arrived in Edo Bay.
西男、どこへ行くと？
The goals of Ashina Genichiro are to make his forces immortal and weaponize that immortality to topple the Tokugawa before they can unify the country. Basically using an army of undead warriors to divide and conquer as far as the eye can see. Wait a damn minute, I’ve played this game before!
Two, actually.
As for Scarlet Shinobi no Sha, since Kurenai is a kunoichi, or female shinobi, her methods of combat are less 16th-century fantasy and more practical ninja weapons that have been said to be used by ninja, though sources are sparse or nonexistent for secrecy’s sake. The emphasis being on speed and stealth, ninja needed tools that can be easily used and hidden. Their missions were almost always: get in, do task, get out. Assassination, espionage, intelligence gathering; ninja were back then what modern-day scouts and special forces are. The less collateral there is, the better. U.S. Army Delta Force may pride itself on the business model of the quiet professional, but the fact that there are conflicting reports on ninja IRL shows who the real quiet professionals were.
For Kurenai and her masters, Takeda Shingen was a real person and Mochizuki Chiyome has been documented, but where there wasn’t a need to falsify Shingen’s history, Chiyome’s personal life is one of speculation, and that may have been on purpose. Knowing everything about shinobi would ruin the image, but again recordkeeping is nebulous with accounts changing depending on the story-teller, or we would have definitive proof of Rasputin’s final moments.
Whatever reports there are of Takeda Shingen being a master bastard would’ve been penned by his enemies. This game focuses on his rivalry with the Oda clan, but they were one of several. The Tokugawa, the Hojo, the Uesugi, and the Imagawa all had scores to settle with the Takeda clan as a whole or Shingen specifically. If he did use shinobi to undermine his enemies, he wouldn’t have been the first, nor would he have been the only one. It’s a bit of an oversimplification to claim many samurai used underhanded tactics to get one over on their enemies, but it points to their use of existing tools to do so, and one no military force has ever done away with because of its effectiveness. The Elusive Samurai, for instance, features Kazama Genba who can be described as a progenitor of the shinobi archetype based on the setting being the downfall of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1333.
Both games are baked in mythology, but of a different type. Garnet Shadow Warrior plays up shinobi mythos and the Sengoku-era in pop culture based on grounded, historically feasible accounts penned either by the Takeda clan or their main rivals while Lone Gray Wolf cranks up the mythos with Buddhist monsters and phenomena. Not every beast you face as the titular Sekiro is completely under Ashina control; these being wild animals, only a few of them were “tame” enough to take on the Interior Ministry, and even some of the human enemies aren’t fully loyal to the Ashina. Some are there for their own ends. Even if the Ashina won out eventually (and for the record neither the Ashina nor the Takeda could stand up to the Tokugawa), those warriors likely would’ve betrayed Ashina. If Genichiro was smart, he would’ve used the same tactics Genghis Khan’s army supposedly used to keep his burial site hidden.
Sell it with a Timurid-like curse on any who unearths his tomb.
The major differences between them are the gameplay styles. Solo Dog of War is a Souls game with fewer bells and whistles to be found in traditional Dark Souls and later Souls game, the Welsh-inspired Elden Ring. Does this mean it’s simpler than the rest of the Souls library? Nope. Difficulty has not been sacrificed on the altar to bring Single-Player Ninja Guardian to our consoles and PCs, for you can still get thrown off a cliff or slashed by a knob-end who took R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” to literal heights.
Channel: Xironia
Blood Spy is less theatrical, but largely because it combines three separate gameplay styles into one without the finesse that all of them have in isolation. This isn’t an instance of combining chocolate and peanut butter to bring us Reese’s nor is it a showcase of why peanut butter and chocolate don’t work. More like, if trial and error was applied, then Red Ninja could’ve been more than just a one-off project. Weapon at the end of a chain, seduction, platforming, and stealth aren’t ideas that should fail on paper, but the execution of this combination is the thing that matters the most. Places where some combination of those work well can be found in a bunch of games, including the Lewdtroidvanias I linked to earlier in this post.
But the world hasn’t collapsed despite what the news cycle spits at you. So a developer who happens upon this post or more realistically the game can (and F[sword clash]NG SHOULD) revisit the concept and reapply it to modern hardware. I’d kill a thousand men to see it return to the forefront, even if handled by someone else. Ideally, someone competent. The last thing we’re asking for is Saint’s Row 2022.
Besmirchment of my legacy and dishonor on my name is intolerable!!
Months ago, I added Red Ninja: End of Honor to my list of topics to cover in the New Year and I had done so at a time when the game had frustrated me greatly. I briefly touched upon it in this post about what I found wrong with it, why I hadn’t advanced as far as I could, etc., etc. I was playing enough of it earlier to get a handle of it and return to form of sorts and this and the next series of posts are going to be subjective, but on reflection, I don’t think I was going to approach it as fairly as I had hoped.
Now Red Ninja is a game with flaws, but watching some video essays and reviews of the game, it has a cult following, so with that in mind, here’s the short version: it needed better controls and a better camera.
Which is something I don’t want to say about the game because it has a lot going for it. Stealth mechanics that make use of traditional stealth and historical context. I do need to clarify something I said in that post linked above. I mentioned that kunoichi didn’t exist. I retract that statement. They were real, but pop culture elevated their status a lot. This was due to sparse record-keeping, mythic statuses of actual female warriors, or onna-musha/bugeisha, and historian debate. There’s more records of onna-musha than of kunoichi. So you might happen upon a historical, if loose, retelling of Tomoe Gozen than of Mochizuki Chiyome. For that matter, The Elusive Samurai has one such onna-musha, the tomboyish Mochizuki Ayako as a retainer to that dastardly light-footed regent.
For all intents and purposes, Red Ninja takes from the kunoichi trope and while a history buff, from what I’ve seen so far in my gameplay, Crimson Kunoichi does use mythical status to elevate its protagonist Kurenai. It also mythologizes samurai and ninja clan politics of the Sengoku period. Before the Tokugawa clan won out for the next quarter-millennia, various samurai clans competed with one another, and this game centers around the rivalry between the Takeda and Oda clans.
The starting premise is that Kurenai’s father, Ryo, was killed by the Black Lizard clan (Kurotokage? 黒蜥蜴氏) and Kurenai and the rest of her family was slaughtered en masse until noblewoman Mochizuki Chizome found her near death, and recruited her into a body of kunoichi to serve the Takeda clan.
Don’t worry, she was a real person.
Records about Mochizuki survive or we wouldn’t know about her, but her historicity is of significant historian debate. As a Takeda clan noblewoman, she may have been hidden to protect her from assassination by Takeda clan enemies and subsequently mythologized, which is largely why historians struggle to frame her correctly in the framing of Sengoku era politicking. Not to mention, the two most famous ninja clans, Iga and Koga, may have only been two of several. Again, espionage has historically been light on records for pragmatic reasons.
Even if the Takeda clan did use ninja for espionage, the records are missing or were destroyed by them or their enemies. So the majority of the game is a revenge tale that I haven’t finished and might not finish this year. C’est la vie.
Wait, there’s a picture of Mochizuki Chiyome.
As she appears in the game. Pop media has given her different appearances, but this may be closer to who she was in real life.
So, Tiberius, what’s your issue with the game? The mechanics. The controls require a level of surgical precision that mean the difference between a successful heart surgery and a medical malpractice lawsuit. Slight analog stick movements work for games where the protagonist has a clear walking animation. When I do it in classic God of War or The Suffering, Kratos and Torque do walk. Here, it seems to be more than a little gimmicky and the reliance on specific pressure points makes the difference between a fumble and a successful assassination. Button presses aren’t the least responsive, but it can be difficult if you try to perform a certain move and it doesn’t register cleanly. Maybe it’s my controller acting up, but for f[sword clash]k’s sake, let me hang a motherf[AAAH!]ker from a beam!
Platforming again relies on precision and I would’ve preferred the God of War approach, not convenient ropes like in the first game, but using the Blades of Chaos/Athena/Exile/Spartan Rage to swing from specific points. Those blades are already ugly enough to leave grisly marks, so make them function as a grappling hook reinforces Kratos’ approach to traversal.
I started with God of War II, so I’m biased when I say that these were better.
Not for nothing, this game arouses me about Japanese history that few media properties do. Exemplified by my piece on Running from the Ashikaga among others, I don’t think pre-Sengoku Japan gets a lot of exposure in the west. On the one hand, this helps with keeping outside opportunists from mischaracterizing the era with their manure; but on the other hand, serious western historians and history buffs from seeing the era and viewing it with the contextual clarity that they deserve.
Is this a recommendation? A dissuasion? Well… it’s more like a collection of what I think could’ve helped the game mechanically. Kurenai’s main arsenal doesn’t hurt her. In fact, her story fits neatly into the myths that surround Mochizuki Chiyome and the Takeda clan, so countless other stories of kunoichi can work with this frame. Kurenai would be one of several.
Following up on that, the historical use of female spies is an interesting point. Say a female spy used her feminine charms on male guards to gain sensitive information and Kurenai does have this as her advantage, as did pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny when they appeared in Assassin’s Creed IV.
I knew something was off when “James Kidd” was noticeably more babyfaced than his hairier contemporaries.
Like the aforementioned pirates of the early 18th century, luring a horny man to his demise and stealing his secrets is a time-honored tradition. Though historically spies wouldn’t be inserted James Bond-style; that would be too much effort for very little payoff. Realistically, Kurenai or another kunoichi type would already be aligned with Takeda clan enemies by way of association. A plot would be to use them to get closer to the Oda clan leadership, steal as much information as they can and then use that against them. It may be goofy as hell as a Shonen series, but Femboy Shikken makes good use of stealth in the manga by way of known local miscreant Kazama Genba.
Kurenai and Kazama Genba are both portrayed as masters of stealth by way of the tactics they use. Kurenai is designed to wear a skimpy kimono that exposes her ass and threatens to unseat her tits, thereby weaponizing her feminine sex appeal to male guards. Kazama has a mask that can be molded to imitate the likeness of central figures. In one instance, he posed as Ogasawara Sadamune to help Tokiyuki take the imperial decree from his headquarters. And it worked! Until Ichikawa Sukefusa and his big ass Mickey Mouse ears heard them faffing about. Kurenai’s lure and attack method works when the game’s mechanics don’t trip over itself.
Overall, if it had a modern remake of some kind like what Max Payne is set to have this year, then I’ll play that from start to finish uninterrupted when I’m able to. If you have the patience, see your local emulator for more details.
My notes say the next topic of discussion is gonna be Lucky Star.
Then after that I’ll get back to Red Ninja mainly to put it alongside the likes of Sekiro and God of War 2005.
Toy company extraordinaire brought down by hemorrhaging money
Last week’s gap was a “woke up and chose violence” moment. This time, for something back on track: Midway!
This blog has talked about individual Midway Games, but hasn’t brushed up on the developer-publisher itself. Best to round out the picture by looking at the factory’s skeleton then so we can learn how the Mortal Kombat developer went under in 2010. Midway’s origins are certainly a story worth telling, they may have gotten famous in the 1980s and ‘90s in the arcades, but they began in 1958 as any other toy company in Chicagoland. Pinball, party games, amusement park distribution, cheap carney games made for ripping off unsuspecting children. I swear that baseball hit the bottles! Gimme my prize, old man!! The eventual shift to video games by the late ‘70s and beyond is consistent then with their philosophy. Bought by Bally in 1969, they expanded into arcades, distributing known titles and developing their own, one of their earliest being Space Invaders.
Beep, beep, beep, blast!
For North American distribution, these guys made Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man a household name. It was a gilded age for arcades and also quite short-lived. Keep in mind, that the gaming industry back then was mostly carried by Pong. There was only one game, but 20 billion different devices running that game in arcades, on early consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Magnavox Odyssey, on toasters, on walls, on lamps, on tree trunks—market oversaturation brutally killed the gaming industry back then, hurt worse by the release of admittedly experimental, but otherwise manure-level “games” on later consoles like the 2600 or the NES. The most catastrophic being that of E.T.
An early tie-in for the movie, the window was extremely small and putting together digitized Legos in six weeks could work in theory, but those who were there saw the end result of applying it in practice and apply it they could not. The difference between bugs and glitches then and now is that today’s bugs and glitches are prettier, cost 18 terabytes of data, and need to be connected to the internet despite being singleplayer. So where was Midway in the middle of all that? Sitting undisturbed in the arcades where a couple of quarters could get you to Pac-Man level 256 where things got funky.
Now it’s time to get funky!
By the late 1980s, Midway was a solid pinball and arcade cabinet manufacturer-distributor with association Williams Electronics and Bally Manufacturing. These combined forces worked together crafting machines, entertainment machines for you, me and every ‘90s kids’ favorite wallaby. But what would they have as their most famous video game series? Rampage? Paper Boy? Galaxian? Nay, it was:
I won’t look down on you if you weren’t there for this era, I barely caught the tail end of it with Ermac whooping my ass at Mach s[souls]t. And if there’s a difference between those who saw Tetris get released and those who simply grew up with its colossal number of ports (right here), then I represent a portion of those who grew up playing the home release of Mortal Kombat trying to play the arcade games. It didn’t translate as well as I’d hoped, but I wasn’t raised on quitting juice, I was breastfed!
Mortal Kombat was originally meant to challenge Street Fighter II. Developed by four dudes in eight months, the framework in place and one that Midway let Ed Boon and John Tobias use until 1995 was digitized sprites of neon-colored actors imitating ‘70s Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan flicks. Funny enough, a bunch of these mo-capped actors are retired martial artists and such. They even tried to grab the Muscles from Brussels to star in the game, but depending on the source he either couldn’t do the motion capture, outright rejected the offer in favor of a competitor, or his agency did. Not that Boon Tobias was salty per se, but it’s been said that Johnny Cage is a direct parody of the Belgium’s Most Muscular Waffle.
Buns and thighs
Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme I Screwed Up went on to act in the 1994 Street Fighter live-action movie whose only claim to acclaim should be the monumental work put in by Raul Julia as M. Bison, going out with a bang later that year from stomach cancer. And Street Fighter took a reputational hit while MK3 released the year after that and broke into Hollywood with campy action movie goodness. Suffice it to say, the ‘90s were great for Midway…
…now where did it go wrong? Right around the late ‘90s, actually. Reaching its zenith, around the time of the first movie and MK3, consoles didn’t stop releasing. Disgruntled Nintendo personnel crafted the PlayStation in a wizard’s lair (but forgot to clean the cauldron after use, rude), Nintendo themselves continued to make hanafuda cards and SNES, Sega was crapping out console after console and finding some way to put their blue mascot on them all, the Neo-Geo, and the 3DO admittedly came and went earlier, but also helped to shift the market console-wards with arcades becoming more and more cumbersome to travel to and from.
Yeah, I only ever went to arcades when I was in summer day camp and we traveled by rented school bus to go there. Great memories, but I probably wouldn’t wanna handle the logistics of that either.
Now, Mortal Kombat would see a myriad of ports to different consoles, some of which I listed here over the years, and the last main title being 1997’s MK4 reaching arcade cabinets. General reception at the time and now disregard it as a high school or college project. Those are my words, by the way. The reception was probably not that harsh…
They weren’t harsh enough
A professional developer’s first go at 3D games was seen as a huge step back into a shallow grave with Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Abe’s Odyssey serving as the pallbearers, and the implementation of 3D like this into a violent video game just elevated critics and news reporters even more. Even Ed Boon acknowledging its missteps didn’t do much to drive the attention away, but fortunately, they had enough cash to work on further future projects. MK: Mythologies – Sub-Zero released the same year to similarly ugly criticism, and no one has ever played Mortal Kombat: Special Forces because it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist.
F[Scorpion’s spear]K!
Saying it thrice doesn’t make it true, dammit! Nevertheless, the innocent quarters sent to slaughter in the arcade era made for further funding and with the writing on the wall in blood, Midway’s arcade division was officially shuttered by 2001. The next year, Mortal Kombat returned to force with a new graphics engine and an expansive mythology beyond the old comic books of the 1990s. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance fixed what the other three games broke over its back and if you believe the 3D era of Mortal Kombat was MK4 and not Deadly Alliance, then this was a time when Mortal Kombat got weird and for better or worse, these games took the spotlight away from some other titles that blessed the 2000s. Highlighting just a few gems and coals really quick in no particular order, there was Area 51, Rampage as said before, The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind, NFL Blitz, L.A. Rush, SpyHunter and several others for distribution in North America, developed by smaller devs in association with Bandai Namco and Square Enix. Yeah, yeah, this kind of s[footstomp]t happens all the time. Still does.
But you probably didn’t notice some of those other titles with Mortal Kombat’s strange mechanics taking the spotlight. For me, Chess, Puzzle, and Motor Kombat were nifty little additions. The series didn’t have to take itself seriously and in many ways it didn’t. Hell, one of the composers made a cameo in MKII!
TOASTY!
But it’s not like this was enough to save Midway in the new millennium. Their machines stopped robbing us of our hard found quarters sandwiched between couch cushions and underneath desks and chairs, and Midway carried themselves in stride belting out game after game after North American release of obscure JRPG after game, but MK was the company’s face. Not even a collaboration with John Woo and Inspector Tequila for 2007’s Stranglehold could help, then again market trends change faster than people change their underwear so for all the trouble I went through to blaze through that Hong Kong-infused Max Payne clone may seem like a waste, but waste not, want not is my motto and I try what I can to live it to varying degrees of success.
Midway’s twin peaks were before the turn of the millennium and ever since the arcade cabinets lost relevance, the money’s run empty ever since with Mortal Kombat’s 3D era eating up what was left. If you pay close attention to the mechanics and art direction from Deadly Alliance to Deception to Shaolin Monks to Armageddon, you can pinpoint and examine what part of the games had the most attention and what parts had the least. Deadly Alliance put a lot into the engine, but was basically a 3D arcade game. Deception did more with its Konquest mode and Chess and Puzzle Kombat modes but even these weren’t spared the cutting room floor in some areas. Konquest mode segments are either rushed, scrapped, or unfinished and it looks like they had a bunch of ideas that would never be explored.
Shaolin Monks revamped the free roaming Konquest idea, took out the RPG-esque side questing and gave us a Streets of Rage/Final Fight-like beat ‘em up! Hell yeah, after about 12 or 13 years. Probably could’ve done this sooner, but the biggest sacrifice suffered by this game is its plot. Mortal Kombat’s framing has almost always been some flavor of otherworldly warriors fight to the death in bloodsport in a mystical tournament with the wider plot being an evil conqueror tries to take over the earth but the tournament is implemented as the ultimate legal arbitration before the conqueror reminds us of his evil.
Channel: Leah Stevens
But Shaolin Monks is largely only good if you ignore the writing or try to rewrite it like Dragon Ball. Guess I have to perform a séance then to get inside Toriyama’s head. And also learn Japanese well enough to talk to him. And yet it funnily enough had more on its plate than Armageddon that suffered the most from rushed and unfinished development. The two-year wait time for games might have worked well enough at the time, but without enough time to let the dough rise, the bread gets lumpy, the booty gets soggy, and it doesn’t even clap audibly when I—
Sorry, we’re still talking about video games, right?
This one gave us Motor Kombat and by far the largest cast of any Mortal Kombat game to begin with, resurrecting some maligned characters and reintroducing those who fell by the wayside over the course of Midway’s last puffs of air, but to do that a bunch of other stuff needed to get the boot. Fighting styles were chopped to two (boo), but Motor Kombat was introduced (yay); Konquest mode has a bunch of cut content (boo), but it makes for an interesting plot that ties everything together concerning Blaze (yay); and the cardinal sin this game commits is that unique fatalities are not here at all.
(⊙ˍ⊙)
Yeah, put in the different unique button inputs and roughly every character can do exactly the same f[bone crunch]ing fatality as everyone else. You can call it Copy Paste Mortal Kombat and in some spaces that’s exactly what it is. Mortal Kombat without fatalities is like Doom without the unique kills. Wait a minute
Quantity over quality aside, you really see here how much the budget was beginning to dry up with stages and select plot points dropping off into the Pit without a designated recovery team to wade through the spikes and get them back. Then again, one can argue Deception also had this problem and I’ll put my hat in the ring and say that Shaolin Monks was also a victim of this in some capacity. For Deception, it picked up a bunch of characters that were supposed to debut in Deadly Alliance, but the roster was filled up so Dairou had to wait for Deception to finish.
As for Deception’s Konquest mode, a side plot concerning the Wu Shi Academy’s selection for a champion to represent Earthrealm happens if you talk to specific elderly masters. The most Shujinko walks away with is a White Lotus Society headband since his quest, while it took priority, didn’t have a deadline, so Shujinko nearly spends his adult life leveling up for nothing while they go with a champion anyway, and it feels doubly worthless when those old masters are killed by the Deadly Alliance. In my post about the 3D MK series, I noted that if Quan Chi and Shang Tsung were smart, they would’ve selected whose souls to steal and transplant into the Dragon King’s Undefeatable Army, and most of those would have to be fighters. With human aging being a joke in this franchise (a census taker in Seido asks for people’s ages, with one woman being 354 years old; Kitana is 10,000; Goro is at least 2,000 or more years old, etc.), you can bet your sweet bippy that some of those stolen souls are ancient kung fu masters exhibiting loads of tropes that erupted with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and the original Karate Kid that they didn’t really start walking back or reinventing until after the 2011 reboot.
But I’m jumping the bladed hat again. The main point here is that from Deadly Alliance in 2002 to Armageddon in 2006, Mortal Kombat existed in a strange window that for some would either be on brand or out of place. For me, there were plenty of developers taking the piss out of their own products at the time with GTA being so satirically black Dave Chappelle would give applause and Sony Computer Entertainment letting David Jaffe put Kratos in a cow suit and a potato suit. Even in MK9, Ermac’s shrinking fatality is comedic and Boon and Tobias never really abandoned friendships; they just came back after a decades-long hiatus.
For all of the 3D games’ weirdness and charm, of all the things to feel like an NTR-level betrayal would be none other than:
It sounds both absurd and fantastic. Scorpion and Michael Keaten squaring the f[batarang]k up, but look under the hood, and trouble is a foot that the developers weren’t allowed to remove by contract. Another game that on the one hand, had fatalities, but on the other had to censor them because Warner Bros. and Daddy DC explicitly stated that the Justice League must maintain its family friendly image and my reaction to googling executive meddling in MK VS DC was this:
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Bull f[broken chair]ing s[door slam]t.
This game came out the same year as The Dark Knight, and well after series like Teen Titans and Batman Beyond. Cherry-picking? Actually, maybe. Those might be outliers to the standard, but a DC funded Batman or Superman or Green Lantern film at the time…
ಠ_ಠ
…provided the studio can stop helicopter parenting the project. A neat script about an interesting plot concerning a beloved character can easily feel f[pig squeal]ked if DC execs get their hands on it and gangbang it into a wheelchair with or without Warner Bros. approval. Midway must’ve been feeling desperate to grovel before these girthy presentations for nearly $50 million, and another hot take I have here is DCEU was always gonna collapse and their heavy-handed approach didn’t help, but an early sign of trouble had to do with the treatment of their characters to third parties. Sony can pretend to be a team player by letting Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros. keep Kratos’ personality intact for the funnier fatalities, and for DC, I take it that they need to be convinced to take darker risks for their characters or straight up don’t understand why certain characters are dark to begin with. You know how many times Joker’s thrown Harley out on her ass in the cartoons? And then there’s the emotional and physical abuse, who’s to say she doesn’t have scars and bruises in that HBO cartoon she’s in?
Thus Midway came to a bitter end in 2009 with Warner Bros. eating the remaining assets and greenlighting Mortal Kombat 9 for 2011, considered by many to be a great game if not the apex of the reboot games, and not for nothing, MK VS DC may have cut too much trying to trim its own fingernails, but the idea to gift us 2013’s Injustice and the 2017 sequel is at least one thing DC hasn’t bungled in the last decade. One… they still have a plethora of sins to pay back.
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