Mark Of The Ninja
The game follows the story of a nameless ninja in the present day, and features a conflict between ancient ninja tradition and modern technology. Cutscenes for the game are rendered in a Saturday-morning cartoon animation style.
Mark of the Ninja
By approaching enemies undetected, the player character is able to execute a "one-hit" kill. To facilitate this, the player can extinguish light sources, hide behind objects and pass through narrow grates and shafts inaccessible to enemies.[5] If detected, they must evade their enemies and remain out of sight for a set period of time, after which enemies will return to their original patrol routes and one-hit kills on them will once more be possible. Although fighting hand-to-hand with the goal of quickly disabling an enemy is possible, doing so risks being killed or disabled in turn, as well as alerting nearby enemies with a noisy scuffle. Enemies respond to their environment and one another; they will sound an alarm if they unambiguously spot the player character or find a body, which will alert all enemies in the area and prevent them from returning to their previous patrol routes. If they hear a sound or get a glimpse of the player character they become suspicious, displaying a question mark over their head and actively searching for the player character until they are convinced he is not actually present. They are also subject to terror tactics, and the player can learn to kill and display enemies in a terrifying manner, such as leaving a strangled enemy dangling from a perch or throwing a dead body at an unsuspecting live enemy, causing them to display an exclamation mark over their head, scream, stumble, and fire wildly at anything which scares or startles them.[5]
The player receives points for executing a variety of tactics such as silent kills, passing by enemies without being detected, successfully preventing the discovery of bodies, terrorizing opponents to cause them to fall into disarray, and achieving optional goals such as recovering artifacts and a series of haiku which tell the history of the ninja clan.[3] This score is reduced when an alert is sounded by enemy guards. Depending on the player's performance on the stages, they earn honor and complete seals that are used to buy or upgrade skills and weapons and also unlock alternate costumes. Players get honor by reaching a specific score on each stage, collecting the secret scrolls, and completing the special objectives present in each stage. Some of the scrolls are obtained through secret challenges, where the player is transported to a room to solve a puzzle.[6]
The game's story begins with an attack by a heavily armed force on the dojo of the Hisomu ninja clan. The unnamed ninja protagonist, resting after receiving an extensive irezumi tattoo, is awakened by a female ninja named Ora. Gathering his equipment, the protagonist is able to defeat the attackers and rescue his sensei, Azai, as well as several other members of the clan. Before being rescued by the protagonist, Azai was being blamed by the attackers, who said "you picked the wrong people to steal from". However, Azai simply claimed that the clan has been hidden from the modern world for centuries until now, when "their enemies finally found them". Azai tells him about the power of his tattoo and the legend surrounding it, explaining that the ink comes from a special desert flower and grants greatly sharpened senses and reflexes when absorbed slowly into the body, but will ultimately cause one so tattooed with it to descend into madness. In the distant past, the first Hisomu ninja to receive the Mark became incredibly dangerous, but increasingly deranged, leading to a lengthy reign of terror that only ended with his demise. Therefore, to receive the Mark, a ninja swears to commit seppuku once the madness begins to take hold.
Following his trail, the protagonist and Ora discover that Dosan has been captured by bandits, who are holding him hostage in a war-wracked Middle Eastern city and demanding that he Mark them with his remaining supply of the sumi ink. Upon being freed, Dosan explains that the flowers from whose leaves the sumi is produced have died out, and appear to have been dead at least since the last fresh supply of the ink was taken by the Hisomu clan. As revealed by hidden scrolls recounting the history of the clan, Azai himself had failed to defend the flowers when the devastated region to which they were endemic was taken over by vicious bandits. Thus dishonored, but for the sake of the clan's survival, Azai hid his failure and had planned the Hessian heist in order to supply the Hisomu with cutting-edge equipment now that the unique source of their strength had been extinguished. Finally, he ordered that the last of the sumi ink be used to Mark one final ninja, whose strength would enable the heist and save the clan itself from extinction at Hessian's hands. Dosan uses the remains of the sumi to give the protagonist his final tattoo, shortly before some of Azai's high tech ninja stalkers ambush them and shoot Dosan to death as he and the protagonist attempt to escape.
If the player chooses to kill Azai another psychotic episode follows, in which the protagonist murders his sensei and becomes the maniacal Hisomu tyrant of legend, melting silently into darkness with a swift strike of his sword. If the player chooses to kill Ora, the protagonist disembowels himself with the ritual sword and Ora dissolves into inky nothingness as the Marked ninja sputters his last breath and dies in the courtyard.
Lead designer Nels Anderson has stated that his principal inspiration in making Mark of the Ninja was the lack of stealthy ninjas in games like Ninja Gaiden, which he felt should be the norm,[9] and Klei Entertainment founder Jamie Cheng said that it was important to the developers to make nonlethal tactics rewarding to the player "It took a lot of experimentation to allow players to feel like a badass ninja while at the same time feel the risk of being exposed."[10] Whereas Klei had previously released Shank and Shank 2 on multiple platforms, the company unveiled Mark of the Ninja as an Xbox 360 exclusive with Microsoft Studios as its publisher after a pitch video was created. Following Klei's announcement on February 28, 2012, that it was developing Mark of the Ninja, the game featured at the Penny Arcade Expo East in Boston, Massachusetts in April 2012.[11]
Kyle Orland of Ars Technica noted that the various ways of achieving a high score gave the game an aspect similar to puzzle games.[29] Garrett Martin of the Boston Herald give high marks for the game's cutscenes and stated they were "good enough to warrant a Cartoon Network TV show."[30] The reviewer from GameTrailers compared the game to a combination between the Nintendo game Ninja Gaiden and the modern open-world game Batman: Arkham City. He also lauded the controls and stated that the scheme "bends and yields to allow you to do exactly what you want precisely when you want to."[31]
MTV.com's Charles Webb praised the game's ability to focus on stealth yet remain appealing to all players. "[Klei has] taken the key pillars of this type of game and made them transparent while keeping them challenging and fun" stated Webb.[32] Matt Miller, Associate Editor at Game Informer, lauded the animations of the game. He further noted that the interplay of light and shadow further brought the visuals to life.[8] The reviewer form Edge magazine agreed, and noted that the visuals were of "Saturday morning cartoon" quality.[16] Official Xbox Magazine's Andrew Hayward also gave high marks for the visual atmosphere of the game, and further praised the "wealth of options" to complete missions.[24]
A ninja is powerful yet fragile. Quick but deliberate. Mark of the Ninja is a stealth platformer that puts you in control of a Ninja who's clan is in danger of extinction. Observe your enemies from the darkness, manipulate them with simple yet versatile tools, and experience what it is to be a Ninja. From the award-winning studio that brought you Shank, Mark of the Ninja is a game about finesse, manipulation, and sacrifice.
There's a cartoon crispness to the graphics (which Klei have shown off before in Shank), but Mark of the Ninja's real triumph is the way it conveys information through its art. A neat line-of-sight effect shrouds areas beyond view in murky uncertainty, while the colour vanishes from your ninja's garb to show when he's hidden in the dark.
The stealth genre has brooded in the shadows for many years, coming out only for a handful of memorable games before slinking back into the darkness. It's out again with Mark of the Ninja, but Klei Entertainment's new creation abandons the 3D conventions of most stealth games for a simpler 2D platforming framework that takes the genre in an exciting new direction. It's a ninja game that remembers that ninjas are supposed to be invisible masters of the shadows, not sword-swinging brawlers like their samurai cousins, and its attention to stealth design pervades every moment of gameplay. Fluid controls make combat and movement flow as smoothly as a well-crafted haiku, and brutal assassinations add gravity to the comic-styled visuals. Rich and lengthy levels demand full use of the powers at your disposal, and a somber and minimalistic musical score adds tension to every step.
The hero is the Kratos of ninjas, a scowling, silent type wrapped with red tattoos that give him greater powers than his shadowy brethren. There's a catch, of course: the marks may eventually drive him insane. He's occasionally accompanied by a female accomplice who drops hints and tutorial advice as the two prowl through fanciful Asian urbanscapes and Eastern European castles on the heels of a bad guy in a business suit with a Russian accent. The story is strangely compelling despite its lightweight exposition, told as it is through competently voiced animated cutscenes that look like they were pulled from lost episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, although it ultimately serves little more purpose than providing context for your actions. The rest of the story reveals itself through tidbits dropped by your female accomplice (who's a bit on the cynical side), and still other narrative touches are found in the scrolls hidden in the nooks and crannies of each level, but nothing defines the experience so much as the ninja's unrelenting pursuit of justice in the game itself. 041b061a72