Something really bad happened to Tenchu on the way to the DS. It lost its third-person perspective, stealth kills, and the need to sneak among other things. From Software has taken an excellent franchise, ripped its core out, and replaced it with gameplay centered around traps and nothing else. Sure this might be ok if it was executed properly but unfortunately that’s not the case at all.

When you create a new save game you’re initially shown a large menu filled with all kinds of options. The first of these is the single player game which could be described as a campaign but amounts to nothing more than maps filled with enemies that you must eliminate or bypass. You initially have the choice between a couple different missions, each of which, when completed, unlocks more missions of the same variety. When you complete a mission you’ll get either an in-game cutscene or a storyboard on the top screen with story text on the bottom screen. As you unlock and complete missions the story will progress and eventually a key story point will be reached which will remove all current missions and replace them with new missions for the new story arc.

Mission maps are very dull and are composed mostly of rock plateaus and box shaped trees. You can grab onto the ledge of rock formations and pull yourself up, you can push your back against a flat surface to move the top-down camera a bit further forward, and you can block and attack with your sword. Since your 3D top-down view of the action is located on the top screen and your location along with nearby enemy locations are shown on a flat representation of the map on the bottom screen, it’s nearly always easy to kill enemies or sneak past them. This whole in-game setup leads to next to no stealth and turns Tenchu into nothing more than setting traps on NPC enemy walking paths and walking up behind enemies to slashing them.

Besides just slashing away, the core of the combat in Tenchu DS involves setting traps. You can set down a spike field, a bomb field, food to attract a ninja, and many more traps which are unlocked as you play. There are also quite a few projectiles which you can throw at the enemy. The most unique aspect of all of these secondary weapons is that they all must be bought or made. When you kill a ninja they will drop ingredients which can then be used to create weapons or traps in a menu outside of the actual game. Not only that but you can actually connect via local or internet WiFi to other players to trade, sell, and buy the things you and they have created. While this is a neat feature it does nothing to enhance the actual gameplay.