This time around instead of stealth kill animations there are low budget kill screens that represent all the traps and weapons you used to kill an enemy. These appear right after you kill someone on the top screen and blind you for a few seconds by covering up the action and thus killing you if many ninja’s are on your tail. Oddly enough you can take little vouchers that represent your kills and sell them for in-game money. This is helpful for buying supplies and all but it just seemed awfully strange.

Then there’s the new top-down view. To sum it up, it’s horrible and should never be used again. You can see too much of the action and this takes away from what the rest of the series has been all about, stealth. Not only is the perspective terrible but the graphics are down right horrendous. Yes most DS 3D games don’t have the best texture quality or polygon count but Tenchu DS takes it down to a new low. This is mostly because of the extremely low quality texture palette that is used has so many of the colors blending together that you can hardly tell whether something is a ninja or grass or a rock at times.

Then there’s the horrendous audio, the worst of which is the background music used in most of the menus which amounts to about 5 seconds of low quality music on a loop. To add to that, all of your favorite enemy ninja sayings are gone and now all you hear is a grunt and the slash of your blade or the tripping of some kind of trap. Some of my most memorable gaming moments involved ninjas in the PS2 Tenchu saying, “Where you go?!” and “Ninjaaaaaaaaaaaa?” so it’s pretty devastating that From Software decided to eliminate them from this version.

Then there’s the multiplayer. Seeing as the game is marked as being WiFi enabled and comes with the Nintendo WiFi manual I thought it was pretty safe to assume that you could battle up to four other people online. Oops, I was wrong, it turns out that you can only do WiFi battles over local WiFi and thus I had zero chance to play multiplayer which is odd seeing as the entire single player game feels like training for the multiplayer game. Sadly the only online mode available is the worthless item trading mode which takes forever and a day to find someone to trade with. The few times I did find someone to trade with they had next to nothing to sell and all of their items were marked up at ridiculous prices.