Tenchu Z may not appeal to everyone, and it is definitely a specialized taste.
There is a relatively short training session for you to go through before you are thrust into late-medieval Japan, and it does a fair enough job of teaching you the basics required to be a ninja.
I dug into the game and plowed through the fifty missions on normal, occasionally doing one on hard. Some say that the AI is dumb. This is fairly true, but that doesn't mean that they don't have senses. I found that playing on hard was fairly difficult, albeit still easy compared to other games' hard settings.
Although the graphics on the five or so maps wont blow you away, they are fairly decent. I wouldn't say it looks like the XBox, like some have, since I own the XBox one, and it definitely looks worse than Z. To me, the graphics don't make a game. They are just a nice addition.
The control scheme can be a little awkward at first, but I picked it up in five minutes on the demo with just glancing at the controls that pop up on the screen. I find them much easier to work with than Z's predecessor, which seemed clunky. All of the basic controls are there from before, and are very well integrated to work together. Only later when you start getting more complex skills do the controls get a little difficult to work with.
The sound in the game is fairly reserved. The music seems how traditional Japanese should sound. Occasionally the music can be slightly annoying, but the game requires you to pay attention to what's going on around you, not to be listening to a masterpiece of music. The general sounds for everything you do seem to be roughly the same as all of the other Tenchus I've played, but a bit nicer and newer.
The animations for your ninja are very smooth and fluid. They are nice to look at and are very well done. The animations for the thugs, however, don't seem as though there was nearly as much work put into them.
Some say that the story was random and disjointed. Well, probably... if you skip all of the dialogue. I listened to the narrator on every mission and watched every cutscene fully. It was fairly interesting, and it left the game's story nice and open for a sequel - if there is one.
I'm am not a big fan of the older Tenchu games, but this one is my favorite. The small RPG element to it in between the missions is one of the things that really did it for me. Character customization is always a plus, in my book.
The multiplayer, although only tried once, needs a lot of work. Lag is everywhere, and if anyone else on your team gets seen, well... so are you. This is extremely annoying, especially when playing with someone brand new to the game (like I was).
Oh, yeah, by the way: this game was built for the stealthy, ninja player in mind, and it plays like it. If you run thought a level, you are not playing the game as it was meant to be played, and thus not getting the full effect of being a ninja/assassin. What's the point of playing a stealth game if you aren't going to be stealthy? It's like playing Splinter Cell and just running around shooting (Although, the newer ones do let you do this.).
Bottom line. Ninja fans and hard-core stealth fans will like this game. People not big on spending 8-20 minutes trying to kill someone/everyone without being seen, probably wont like this. This game has been tailored for a certain taste.
So, even though the game has a few issues, and may not be the talk of the town, it still carries it's own weight while being a fun stealth game (For people who can handle it.).