It’s amazing how much fun this game is when there’s so much wrong with it.
So, you’re a ninja, you sneak around and kill people. (Occasionally you recover a package or follow someone, but basically, you kill people.) The enemies are all pretty similar to each other (they have different weapons and levels of perception, but they’re all much the same); the enemy AI is clearly mathematical (meaning that they enemies have clearly predictable behaviours) rather than realistic; there are probably only a dozen actual levels, though these are repeated with different enemy placements to give 50 missions. On top of that, you have a character editor with the option to dress up you male character in various ninja-like outfits, or your female character in lots of less ninja-like but rather more interesting outfits; you have dozens of cool but actually unnecessary ninja items like smoke bombs, blowguns, etc. (of the fifty missions, you only really need the items on two of them, even on Hard difficulty); and you have the option to buy various combat moves and special abilities (many of which are good fun, but most are fiddly to make work, and none seem to have been considered when the levels were designed so that you get satisfaction but no real use from them).
The thing that determines whether you will enjoy the game, is how you approach it. If you say “I have an objective, I will complete it as fast as possible” and then go route-one through the level to the end point, then you’ll be bored. Played this way, Tnchu is rubbish. Any way you look at it, Tenchu Z does not have engaging linear gameplay. Simply if you want to “win”, don’t bother trying.
However, if you want to play, to explore, to have fun, this game is absolutely fantastic: you can really get into sneaking around the levels, hunting down your foes. The environments feel like real places that you’ve entered, rather than abstract “levels” that have been made for you. The audio does a great job in building up this illusion. And most importantly, all of the levels are sandbox-like in design: at the very least there are multiple paths through each area, but almost all are completely open-plan, so you can sneak about them in a way that makes “paths” or “routes” meaningless.
This gives you the freedom to play any level any way you want. Want to run around causing mayhem? Want to be the ultimate invisible shadow who completes his missions without ever being spotted? Want to experiment with the ranged weapons or traps? However you approach a level, it will work, and you will have fun playing around with it.
One final point on multiplayer. If you get a good group of players, who want to sneak around as a team, this can be fun. Ideally, use the Hard setting, pick the tougher levels, and make sure you have one or two less competent players with you – that way their mistakes will turn usually predictable levels into wonderfully unpredictable romps. However, if you’re playing with even one person who just wants to rampage through as fast as possible, then they just end up making each multiplayer level really short for everyone else. In summary, scoring this game is pretty well impossible. Technically it’s nothing special, the multiplayer is easily “broken” by the attitude of fellow players, there aren’t many levels, the special abilities aren’t made enough of, etc., etc. … yet there’s the option here to have vast amounts of fun. So, since it seems normal nowadays to give tedious but accomplished games 7s and 8s, and this has the potential to be excellent fun, this has to be 9.