Miser_Reborn
Any particular reason I chose to make this particular review? Not particularly. I was playing the game recently and figured it had a good mix of problems and positives, so I figured why the fuck not. It's been a week since I made a long, rambly thread no one will read, so I guess it's about time that got fixed.
I first heard of Mark of the Ninja around what I believe was its initial release. I quickly dismissed the game as another XBLA game I'd never bother playing, and it probably would've stayed that way had Christian not sung its praises. After a little e-begging, a friend (WHO I SWEAR I'M GOING TO PAY BACK) bought it for me. Thanks, ambiguous friend.
The first thing you'll notice is that the story is absolute shit, so you shouldn't care about it. Presentation-wise, it isn't particularly stellar, but it looks fine enough. The music's pretty boring, too. All in all the non-gameplay stuff isn't significant in any way so I'm going to stop talking and move on from the obligatory paragraph where I talk about that shit.
Mark of the Ninja is a stealth game, which is unusual considering it's also a 2D sidescroller. If you'd told me that a stealth game could work in 2D prior to playing this game, I'd probably call you mental, but the game surprisingly manages it pretty solidly. Stealth games today are becoming increasingly common, and because of that the genre is getting increasingly bogged down, and because of that the genre is getting increasingly worse. Rare are the games that actually innovate in the genre, and common are the yearly franchises that copy-paste themselves all over the industry.
*AHEM*
Even cherished franchises in the genre are getting worse reboots and sequels, as in:
There's also this weird trend where games that are clearly of other genres
*AHEM*
are pointlessly (arbitrarily) tossing stealth into their mix. In some cases
*AHEM*
this doesn't work to the game's advantage. There are a few exceptions, like in Far Cry 3, where the game makes being stealthy completely optional, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where the game makes being stealthy mostly optional, but for the most part stealth is becoming the new sandbox game. Don't know how to make a game good? Last generation's answer to this quandary was to throw the game into an open-world environment. As an example, see:
This gen, it's making the game stealthy. Why? I dunno. Probably because assholes like you and me complained too much about games becoming too shooty-shooty and less thinky-thinky. Unfortunately, to game company higher-ups, thinky-thinky translates less into this:
And more this:
But enough dancing around the issue. Mark of the Ninja is a breath of fresh air in the genre. Rather than being an easily marketable concept first and a stealth game second, like, oh I dunno, something along these lines:
Mark of the Ninja is a very smart stealth game first... and an easily marketable concept second (Honestly, who wouldn't by a ninja game. The Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden series are still going strong-ish despite having their best games decades ago.). It's almost like Mark of the Ninja actually understood what makes a stealth game good, or something crazy like that.
Rather than giving you total awareness of literally everything ever going on in your environment, as in a game like Metal Gear Solid 1, Mark of the Ninja gives you just enough if you're willing to look for it. At the same time, once you get it, it's yours, but it might cost you something to keep, if that makes sense. (I know it doesn't.) Like, if you want to know what's on the other side of a door, you can lean against it to... sense it, or something. It's stealth game logic, what do you expect. The important thing is, you can plainly tell what's where. What can a guard see? Just what's in the cones of flashlight light, unless there are other lights that would give you away. Make too much noise by running and you'll alert guards. What did they hear, and where? They'll usually say something like "Oh, it must be rats!" (again, stealth game logic) if they hear something, but what's nice is it tells you exactly where that something was heard. What's important to note is that you can only have so many pieces of info at a time. If you lean against a door, for example, you lose track of what the guards on your side of the door are doing. This isn't perfectly refined- for instance, sometimes you'll unintentionally run directly into beginner's traps and die, and some things, like the "scent radius" of dogs, are kind of vague. However, doing this kind of thing is tough to get down quite right without straining the player's...
33 Replies
Miser_Reborn
...suspension of disbelief.
The core idea from which Mark of the Ninja rose was the ability to come up with “valid†solutions to problems the designers had never considered. In the developer commentary, it mentions a case when a playtester who had never played Mark of the Ninja before came up with an idea for a scenario totally counteractive to what was clear. It was something along the lines of using the body of a guard he’d killed to deactivate a laser instead of throwing a dart at the fuse box that might as well have had a sign on it saying “please murder me to progress through the level.†This proves that the game is built around one of stealth games’ greatest strength: actually rewarding a good player’s awareness, timing, and skill.
It also doesn’t fall into the same pitfall as many other stealth games do by allowing the player to upgrade themselves however they choose and use whatever play style they like. A lot of stealth games tend to force you into one role- for example, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory downright penalizes you if you don’t play through it with the expertise of a master and forbids you from killing enemies. Deus Ex: Human Revolution pretends to give you the ability to play through it guns-blazing, but considering the scarcity of ammunition in it, it’s pretty hard to do that, so you’ll need to play silently at least some of the time, even if you want a shooter. Mark of the Ninja, on the other hand, has a lot of play styles, all of which receive equal reward. You can be totally silent and kill no one if you want, or you can remain mostly silent and stealthily assassinate every guard in Tokyo. You can’t really go through killing people outright, though, since you’re a little less fragile than my great-aunt with osteoporosis. That’s honestly kind of a good thing, considering the game would just feel like a terrible beat-em up otherwise.
Mark of the Ninja manages to combine excellent use of situational awareness with player choice because it has very basic, easily explained rules. There’s no cheapness to it. Everything is very clean and clearly thought-out. If you’re hiding behind something, you’re pretty much safe, unless of course you chose to perform a tap dance routine in front of the pot you’re hiding behind. If you’re going to shoot lights out, they’re going to go out, unless they have a grate over it. Any guards that are in the immediate vicinity are going to be alerted. There’s no question how the game will react to your behaviour,and I guess it should probably depress me that I need to compliment this kind of tidiness in the industry today. If you’ve played Super Meat Boy, you’ll know what this kind of tight game design is like. See? Even Tuco agrees.
Is it perfect? No. Neither is the tightness in Super Meat Boy (see: fans, radio towers, etc.). It’s about as close as platformers come, though. Control-wise, there are a couple buttons doing a lot of things, so it’s not always clear how to jump from that grappling hook platform (spoiler alert: grappling hooks make everything better) to that wall you’re clearly allowed to jump on. Often you’ll accidentally fall and alert the guards below and create this whole big mess because the game wanted you to hold right when you hit the wall. Also, throwing things tends to be a pain. I swear, if I play one more sidescroller where I have to aim with the analog stick, I’m going to reenact God Bless America.
Aside from that, there’s only a handful of other problems in the game. A single line of dialog can be the difference between knowing what the hell you’re doing and accidentally dawdling in someplace you shouldn’t have been. Also, whenever you kill someone, you have to sit through one of two quick time events. At first, this seems like a nifty addition, but it just adds unnecessary padding to takedowns to make them a little more interesting. For the love of god, please stop using quick time events. That goes for everyone, unless you actually know how to use them well, like God of War or Suda 51 or Platinum.
All in all, a few petty nitpicks here and there don’t detract from one of the best stealth games that isn’t prefaced with a word associated with having sharp pieces of shrapnel lodging themselves in your epidermis. What year was this game released, exactly?
o.O
Game of the Year 2012 officially.
Miser_Reborn
@Redblood801: Oh, absolutely. I haven't played Thief, but I can safely say it's the best outside of Metal Gear or Splinter Cell that I've played.
Redblood801 Chief Dingus
@Miser_Reborn: Well I've never played those games because I'm an uncultured pleb.
Miser_Reborn
@M4xwell: Well then, what? I write a four-page review of a game and all you have to say is one of your catchphrases?
M4xwell Insanitarium
@Miser_Reborn: you must expect at least one notion of ambiguity in such a massave decree.
M4xwell Insanitarium
@M4xwell: massive*
Also, assassin's creed has broken the once-strong barriers of a true stealth game to a malnourished, preteen-rubbed generic shitstain.
Miser_Reborn
@Redblood801: No, it made a game that had pirates in it. Know the difference. Black Flag basically came about because someone at Ubisoft said "hey, people are getting sick of historical epics. What else sells easily?" "Pirates?" "Mmm, good idea. Reskin the previous games, add that thing people seemed to like, and sell it at full price."
Miser_Reborn
@M4xwell: Is that to suggest they did the same thing with the Galaxy, Kart, Party, RPG, and Luigi, Paper, and Smash Bros. series?
...Until I typed that all out I had no idea how big a problem this was.
M4xwell Insanitarium
@Miser_Reborn: proving my statement. Although that can show glimpses of ingenuity, in the end, they will find a way to ruin it and profit from the now generic and norm 'ideas'.
Miser_Reborn
@M4xwell: Oh, I get it now. I don't really think Mario's the worst offender of being an annual franchise, though. Honestly, I think AC probably is, considering how little those games change., At least Mario is renowned for its formula.
Miser_Reborn
@xRyubu:
This guy is an asshole, MGS4 is good?
Go fuck yourself kindly...
1. I'M HERE. You can address me directly and discuss the matter of MGS4. This is not the YouTube comments section.
2. I never said it was bad, Where did you get that I said it was bad? I said it was worse, and if you think MGS4 is better than 1 or 3, you're the real asshole. Even fans of the series would think that.
3. It helps to support your points instead of just saying "wow lol u r wrung." Sometimes that can be effective, like if you want to appear dismissive about something "("MGS1 is a bad game." ">implying MGS1 is a bad game"), but not here.
As in:
The game was less of a game and more of a movie. Metal Gear Solid 1 had a lot of cutscenes, sure, but at least those were intermittent with good gameplay often. The series has rarely reached the same heights as the first game.
Miser_Reborn
FAK ME.
My response to M4x didn't go through so here it kind of is again.
@M4xwell:
A discussion about Mark of the Ninja, or at the very least modern stealth games as a whole. Not that I'm complaining or trying to be conversation direction Nazi, I just find it funny.
At this point I kind of wish someone who ardently defends Assassin's Creed would join in on the festivities. Not just to stir the pot, but because I have absolutely no idea why people like this franchise. Typical answers are: "the story", which is trash, "the combat", which is trash, "the platforming", which is trash (WHAT KIND OF PLATFORMER HAS NO JUMP BUTTON!?), and.... I don't even know!
M4xwell Insanitarium
@Miser_Reborn: calm the fuck down.
EDIT: never mind. I only said that when 'n' was involved.
Miser_Reborn
@M4xwell: In retrospect perhaps I could've tested the posting with a letter other than "n."
M4xwell Insanitarium
@Miser_Reborn: I believe it originally was a nostalgic feel, the original N back in 2003 was my first game played on a computer. Years later, after the the 1.4 was out and i played it, i had a very long hiatus towards the game until 2011, when i replayed 1.4 and loved it. It also was the first way for myself to become creative in a game (Ned - the editor for maps), especially when 'mods' came out for it to conduct MORE experimental maps (NReality). I didn't play all 2012 and early 2013 until i looked online for the hell of it, and found out they made a 2.0. I downloaded it and was shocked: They ACTUALLY created a userlevel database that wasn't complicated (Before you had a set amount of userlevels and needed to go on NUMA and manually put it into the game via code), and it had backwards compatibility, so i was able to express and show my maps created years ago and make more with the community. Although it can be described as 'floaty' to you, it still adds on a difficult, enjoyable, and creative gameplay and experience for me.
Miser_Reborn
@M4xwell: k thx
I'm glad you can actually explain why you like your favourite games, though. I'll talk to people and the answers I get tend to be things that are along the lines of... well, see earlier. Not only are these things wrong, but they're incredibly unthorough. This applies to any medium, mind you.
Like, if I were to talk to someone about why I loved Phoenix Wright, my first response wouldn't be "THE CHARACTERS." I'd explain about how the characters are funny, likable, but also often serious. That applies to the whole series, honestly; even though it's fun as hell, it knows when to be serious and have a heavy moment. You can feel the rush of a correct objection, sympathize with a murderer, and laugh hysterically at their breakdown in the same trial.
^gay
My point is learn your lesson here, kiddos. M4xwell has got the right idea. You probably don't.
Redblood801 Chief Dingus
I just want people to know, I'll play what I damn please. I don't need to explain why I play a game, I just play it cause I like it.
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