Shadow Tactics Analysis: Aiko

It's a bit easy to overlook in her default portrait here, as well as in-game, but on the title screen you can clearly see Aiko actually has two very long braids of tightly-bound hair. This is a touch I like, since of course the geisha disguise involves quite a lot of highly visible hair; I'm much more used to, when the topic of disguises comes up, games thoughtlessly allowing characters to casually disguise themselves with much longer hair than their baseline, sometimes with no room for the audience to assume a wig or whatnot is involved.

It's also nice that the title screen art has the braids move like they have a fair bit of weight to them. People often treat hair as if it has no weight, because of course they get used to the weight of their own hair and don't think about it, but the kind of very long hair Aiko has does in fact amount to quite a bit of weight!

Interestingly, Aiko is internally labeled 'geisha'. She can in fact disguise as a geisha in some missions, and this is probably precisely why her base design was given such long hair, but when not Disguised she functions much like Hayato and Yuki: as an agile ninja character. I'm a bit curious what the progression in development was there, if she was always planned to be a ninja-y character with disguise ability, or if her Disguised self was more the starting point and the devs only later gave her the same kind of athleticism as Hayato and Yuki.


Carry Behavior
Aiko may carry one body. While doing so, she is always considered to be crouching, and moves very slowly, slower than even crouch speeds. In addition to setting the body down anywhere she can stand, she may also dump bodies in deep water and throw them down cliffs, including potentially bottomless pits.

This is the same as Yuki's body-carrying behavior, and much like with Yuki it means Aiko is generally a better choice than Hayato when you want a body moved.

That said, Aiko's ability set means you're less likely to want to assign her to such duties, as she may be busy doing other things that cannot be handled by a different character, particularly in missions where Yuki is also present to handle bodies. Aiko's Disguise in particular mildly discourages having her handle bodies, though I'll talk more about that when we get to Disguise.

Swim
Aiko can enter deep water, and is completely undetectable so long as she remains in water.
"We have the advantage."

Of your three swim-capable characters, Aiko gets arguably the least use out of the ability, thanks pretty much entirely to Disguise. Why swim to bypass some patrols when you can walk right past them without being noticed?

That said, if you haven't gotten a hold of a disguise yet, you certainly shouldn't forget the option.

I'd say 'or if the map doesn't have a disguise', but while that does happen, there is no map that has swimmable water, has Aiko present, and lacks a disguise to acquire. (... unless counting Aiko's Choice, which I mostly am ignoring for these posts)

Agility
Aiko may jump down short cliffs without aid, hop small gaps, climb up and down ivy-coated walls, and walk tightropes.
"An elegant landing."

Aiko is the only character who has a line specifically regarding jumping down. It's mildly funny.

Actually, on the topic of 'generic' character dialogue, it's worth pointing out that one of Shadow Tactics more subtle bits is that it has quite a lot of mission-specific dialogue for responding to input from your characters. Some of this is relatively obvious, like a snow mission having your characters remarking on the cold, the snow, their footprints, etc, but not only are there mission-specific lines (Some of which are easy to miss the connection to their mission, actually) but the game will also remove lines from the pool to contribute to characterization. So, for example, in one mission Yuki spends a lot of time verbally beating herself up (Calling herself 'stupid' in particular a lot) in both cinematics and 'generic' dialogue, and many of her usual lines that are confident and/or her having fun simply won't play. The result is that Yuki's stressed-out state in the narrative is held to reasonably consistently throughout gameplay -a common problem with games that have characters play lines as a regular part of gameplay is that they tend to be a single set that's completely unresponsive to the situation, which gets wonky when, for example, you get a character grieving over a loved one's death followed immediately by a peppy 'you got it!' because you issued an order to them and they're The Cheerful Character.

Shadow Tactics successfully avoids this type of dissonance, so deftly I imagine most players don't consciously recognize it was done. Certainly, I played through the game somewhere over a half dozen times per mission before noticing the game doing it, even though I did immediately catch the more obvious 'this mission is at night and Hayato has lines referring to it being nighttime' stuff.

(Alas, the standalone expansion Aiko's Choice has the characters each use a 'generic' set in every mission, losing out on this particular value. It's never seriously dissonant, but it's still a little surprising this loss happened at all)

Anyway, Aiko is your third and final character with the full ninja mobility kit. Much like swimming, though, Aiko has less cause to use it than her peers, thanks primarily to Disguise. In particular, since these actions all break Disguise, even when such routes would be a shortcut it may be undesirable for Aiko to make use of them, such as if there's nowhere safe for her to reapply her Disguise down where she's hopped to; better to just walk the long way around, if such a long way exists.

More so than her other Disguise-unfriendly capabilities, though, you'll still make use of this a fair amount regardless, and even once you have a disguise in a given mission you shouldn't forget these options exist. Among other points, if you want to bypass a Samurai, Disguise won't let Aiko walk on past them, where her ninja mobility might let her get past undetected.


Ninja Hook
Aiko can use special grapple points to ascend and descend at fixed locations.
"They must not see us."

Like the prior two abilities, Aiko has less cause to take advantage than the other characters do. Like the general agility, you'll still end up using it regardless -grapple points are often the only or at least best way to get to certain points in the map, and Disguise breaking when grappling doesn't do a lot to change that. Especially in cases where grapple points are available and Disguise is not, at least not yet.

A Simple Hairpin
Death Duration: 2 seconds.
Noise: 3
Aiko kills the target in melee. This will not break her Disguise, though the actual act will arouse suspicion if seen.
"A drop of blood."

Aiko takes longer to kill in melee than Hayato, but not as long as Yuki. The difference is such that it's regularly possible for Aiko to pull off the same trick as Hayato of initiating a kill just as a viewcone pulls away, particularly if you're playing below Hardcore. If it weren't for her Disguise, Hayato would be the clear winner here, but Aiko's Disguise means she can initiate an attack with perfect timing very, very easily, where for Hayato it's easy to end up getting caught because he spent a second walking toward the target before attacking. In conjunction with her dragging bodies instead of carrying them while standing, Aiko can sometimes arrange to kill someone who is a little within the close portion of someone else's viewcone without being detected!

Do note that if you do this, you should not order Aiko to do the 'kill-and-grab' approach. Doing so causes her Disguise to instantly break and actually makes the period in which Something Concerning is potentially visible to enemies last noticeably longer: if you have her kill someone and then separately grab the corpse, the whole thing is less visible. Ideally you actually have Aiko kill, crouch, and then grab the body: if a character grabs a body while standing, they will resume standing automatically once they've finished dumping it off. This applies to everybody but Takumi to some extent, but for Yuki and especially Aiko it's easy to get caught out by having them make a kill-and-grab while set to standing, then dump off the body somewhere, then tell them to move somewhere, expecting them to be crouched and whoops they walk right in front of a Strawhat and get shot.

Aiko is the last character where I feel the need to explicitly point out that initiating a melee attack on a Samurai will kill her and net you a Game Over if the Samurai isn't disabled. So don't do that.

Also, I should point out that Aiko's disguise portraits both have several instances of exactly the hairpin this attack depicts. It's a fun touch.

Unarmed
'Dying' Duration: 2 seconds.
Noise: 3
Aiko knocks the target unconscious temporarily.
"No blood."

As usual, KOing an enemy has little use if you're not specifically pursuing one of the Badges that calls for a lack of lethality. This is particularly true of Aiko, as she's your only melee-capable character the game never disarms; if you have Aiko, she can stab people to death.

It's kind of weird that Aiko has the ability to peacefully walk right among her enemies but has no real incentive to do non-lethal takedowns. It's easy to imagine her getting someone drunk or something and then politely helping them walk somewhere with onlookers not taking her behavior as suspicious, but that's not a mechanic, nor anything comparable. Alas.


Drop Attack
Any location Aiko can jump down to is a location she may potentially perform a drop attack to if an enemy is standing there, landing on them and attacking as one action.
"I apologize for your untimely death."

Like Yuki, Aiko's drop attack occurs noticeably faster than her regular attack. This is useful to keep in mind in missions where Aiko can't retrieve a disguise, as well as in the period before a disguise has been acquired even on missions that have a disguise, but once Aiko has a disguise she rarely has cause to use a drop attack: Disguise covers much of the utility but in an even more convenient and reliable form.


Sneezing Powder
Duration: 10 seconds.
Range: 12
Cooldown: 2.5 seconds.
Aiko throws some sneezing powder at an area, causing all enemies within the area to have their viewcone shrink by 75%. This does not break her Disguise, though the actual act will arouse suspicion if she is seen while performing the throw.
"A remedy for watchful eyes."

Note that Sneezing Powder's duration is misleading, in that what specifically happens is the target's viewcone is fully shrunken in about a second, then for another second or so it stays fully shrunken, and then it extends back to its normal range over the course of the remaining duration, increasingly quickly. As such, it does not actually give you a full ten seconds of freedom to do things in the area of the viewcone Sneezing Powder immediately takes away, and you shouldn't build plans as if it does.

Sneezing Powder is an ability I think has potential as a concept, but suffers a bit in the execution.

On paper, Sneezing Power really ought to be uniquely useful: it's one of only two tools to manipulate Strawhat awareness for more than a second, and is the only tool for doing so to Samurai. (Aside the janky point that Hayato's Shuriken will provoke a Samurai into performing a search, which I don't think was really 'intended' from a design perspective)

In practice, the mission design does a poor job of creating opportunities for either of these to be particularly useful, particularly in conjunction with more general parameter issues, such that Sneezing Powder is by far the least useful of all the skills for manipulating enemy attention.

Parameter-wise, its throw range is just slightly shorter than the standard inner viewcone range of enemies. This means Aiko can only readily use it on Samurai if she can flank them, and often if you can flank a Samurai you're already in a position to kill them, at which point why bother with Sneezing Powder? Samurai are also one of the enemies most prone to being placed in positions that are very difficult (Sometimes impossible) to get beside or behind, worsening the issue. All of this means Sneezing Powder's unique utility against Samurai is largely theoretical.

Similarly, Sneezing Powder actually has a decent area of effect, which really seems like it should add value, but in practice enemy positioning isn't very cooperative with this idea. Even enemies that are conversing with each other or patrolling together are often spaced just far enough apart you can't catch all of them with a Sneezing Powder... and as we'll be getting to in a minute, Aiko has a much better tool for handling the attention of such groups, to boot.

The mechanics on the temporary viewcone reduction also limit its utility. Its numbers suggest a very long period of obliviousness, much longer than eg Hayato's rock throw can produce, but this is only fully accurate when you're talking right at the edge of a viewcone, which is already the safest part of the viewcone to do risky stuff in. If you're not playing on Hardcore, Hayato can in fact do stuff like kill an enemy right at the edge of another enemy's viewcone and the kill will finish before the watcher's viewcone fills in far enough for them to start shooting and raise the alarm.

This isn't even getting into stuff like the potential to misjudge things after you've thrown the Sneezing Powder, where you think an enemy's viewcone won't cover a spot with its inner radius when it returns to normal and whoops it does in fact reach that far.

In theory Sneezing Powder should at least justify itself on the basis of being Aiko's only ability she can use when not Disguised that won't break her Disguise when used. In practice, she can't use it freely in front of enemies without risking breaking her Disguise, and anytime that's not a concern she could... use it when not Disguised? So it's in a wonky space where it's not really clear when you're supposed to care about it. I'm sure real people have used it and felt it was The Perfect Solution to some formation, but I personally have played through every base-game mission a dozen or so times and have never managed to find a good use for it.

But on to the stuff anchoring why it's so hard to find a use for it.

Disguise
Aiko puts on a disguise; this takes several seconds, during which Aiko is standing and thus will be visible to enemies from a greater distance, but once completed Aiko can freely pass through most enemy viewcones without arousing suspicion. Samurai are an exception, and will realize Aiko is a hostile all the way out to their full range of view. Many actions will break the disguise, but Aiko may don the disguise anew as often as necessary.
"I will remain unseen."

The list of what breaks Disguise is not entirely intuitive and not laid out anywhere in-game, so for your convenience...

Actions that break Disguise: Crouching, carrying a body, walking through shallow water, using a grapple location, climbing ivy, climbing a ladder, hopping down a ledge, performing a Drop Attack, swimming, putting out light sources, firing Matchlock.

Actions that do not break Disguise: Walking, running, going through doors, entering and exiting buildings, performing a regular melee kill, performing a regular unarmed attack, throwing sneezing powder, healing someone, talking to enemies, performing most special contextual actions.

Yes, Aiko can brutally murder people without ruining her disguise -apparently she's very good at not getting blood on her clothes- but will be instantly Too Suspicious if crouching, walking through shallow water, or climbing a ladder. I guess these are so unacceptably un-ladylike nobody seeing them would believe it? Crouching makes sense insofar as crouching is the game's mechanic for being sneaky and so it's less that a priestess or lady of high society crouching is Too Suspicious as it is that sneaking is suspicious, but I really don't get why shallow water and ladder usage both break Disguise. It's particularly weird to me that running doesn't break the Disguise, as much like with swimming this means there's no mechanical reason to walk while Disguised and it seems like running would actually be attention-grabbing in most situations.

Also worth mentioning is that some situations can break Disguise but don't do so automatically and instantly. If Aiko is seen by a Samurai, for example, this functions like normal rules regarding being spotted, just with the additional bonus that if the Samurai decides yes he's seeing a hostile Aiko's Disguise will break at that point, freeing other enemies to notice her and start shooting at her. Similarly, tossing sneezing powder or being seen killing someone are both actions that will arouse suspicion if seen, which means that if Aiko eg tosses sneezing powder from right in front of an enemy or initiates a kill where some enemy's viewcone will fill up before the 2-second death duration finishes Aiko's Disguise will break at the point the alarm goes off... but if she is seen being suspicious only briefly, her Disguise will remain intact.

In any event, note that you always have to acquire Aiko's Disguise mid-mission, and not every mission actually offers a Disguise. I'm willing to gloss over realism issues here even though there are some because Disguise is the most powerful ability in the game.

With how many limitations it has on it, Disguise might sound a bit niche, especially since you have natural map-wide awareness and so where in many other games it would be a scouting tool in Shadow Tactics that utility doesn't exist, but the ability to walk right up to enemies and casually murder them is incredible at unraveling a great many situations. Often, chains of Guards and Strawhats are anchored by an individual who isn't actually seen by anyone but who has their back against a wall and cannot be reached without walking through the areas covered by the rest of the chain; Aiko sidesteps the entire process, walking right on through and killing the key enemy in back with no difficulty whatsoever.

Also notable is that it lets Aiko take advantage of brief moments of vulnerability other characters may not be able to realistically do the same for. An enemy that passes from one viewcone to another, with a brief patch of terrain unseen between the two, may be literally impossible for other characters to leverage if there's nowhere in that area for them to hide from the target. Aiko doesn't care: she can simply follow the target, or wait for them inside that not-quite seen gap, and kill them in the brief moment no one can see them. Since her body-carrying behavior is drag-based, even if other enemy patrols will eventually gain sight on the location, she can potentially dispose of the body undetected afterward anyway.

It's difficult to overstate how powerful Disguise is. It creates a plethora of opportunities no other ability can match the breadth of, not even touching on the cognitive load aspect of how Disguised Aiko means you don't have to double-check nearly so many viewcones when attempting to kill a target deep in uncleared territory.

And that's before considering Aiko has another ability locked behind it!

As I noted earlier, if you have Aiko kill and grab someone as one action directly from her Disguised state she will default to standing once the body is dumped, potentially causing her to be seen by enemies who she shouldn't be at risk from. You can work around this in cases where you're dumping a body in a bush by ordering Aiko to crouch once inside the bush: she will let go of the body and remain crouched, and since you're already in a bush the corpse will immediately vanish. But when throwing bodies off of cliffs or stuffing them into buildings or the like, you'll need to order her to crouch and pick up the body again if you want to get away with disposing of the body in view of an enemy.

Also worth noting is snow-based footprints: while it can create silly, unrealistic results, Aiko's footprints will be ignored by enemies if she's currently in Disguise. This is obviously so enemies aren't perpetually reacting to her walking by them just because the map happens to be snowing, but can be very useful if eg you have Aiko flee around a corner and have enough time for her to put on her Disguise before a Guard investigating her footprints can get sight on her.

This carries with it the comedic caveat that Samurai are not oblivious to Aiko's footprints just because she put on a Disguise. If you're unaware of this, it can be a nasty surprise, but if you are aware of it, it can be very useful, allowing Aiko to pull a Samurai away from deep within non-Samurai enemies by virtue of leaving a trail while Disguised. This doesn't crop up very often -there's only three snow levels, and you don't even have Aiko in one of them- but it's a neat trick to keep in mind.

Also, a minor animation point: the melee kill animations of your characters in Shadow Tactics by default assume the attacker came from behind. Hayato's Ninjato stab always has him put his sword through the chest from behind, for example. This will in fact snap the target into the appropriate position, even if it requires instantly reversing their position: normally this is a funny edge case, because the viewcone mechanics mean you do in fact usually try to initiate attacks from behind, but in Aiko's case it regularly comes up as looking ridiculous since she can in fact walk right up to Guards and Strawhats and murder them without bothering to get behind them, but they'll reverse so she's attacking from behind anyway.

Exacerbating this silliness is...


Talk
Aiko talks to a target at close range. The target will face Aiko and pause their patrol route if they normally have one, and will ignore other distractions such as the sake bottle or unlit light sources so long as the conversation is maintained. If an enemy is part of a group, the entire group will focus on Aiko and stop moving. This effect can be maintained indefinitely, and works on all regular enemies except Samurai. Only available while Disguised.
"The art of conversation."

... this. Since Talk always forces the target to face Aiko, if you then have her kill her conversational partner, they will automatically be facing the wrong way for the kill animation and so instantly reverse! Aiko is the only character who probably should have had either a separate kill animation for attacking from in front, or had her Disguised kill animations assume she attacks from in front: it's what you'll have her do a lot.

Anyway, Talk is what takes Disguise from 'incredible' to 'I want to call it a gamebreaker'. It has several unique, advantageous qualities.

Firstly, talking never times out. Aiko can keep an enemy occupied with small-talk indefinitely; where other distraction effects, like Hayato's rock throw, force you to time things and may not let you get through an area undetected if you have too much ground to cover, talking forces an enemy to look where you want them to look for as long as you want them to look.

Secondly, talking works on Strawhats with no qualifiers. This is huge, as it's completely unique: all other distractions work extremely briefly on Strawhats, so briefly as to be nearly useless. As Strawhats are frequently linchpins in a group and are also frequently placed to be awkward to kill first out of a group, having access to this ability is a gamechanger.

Thirdly, talking is a unique tool for putting a patrol on pause. Every other character has a tool for causing patrolling Guards to break from their patrol route, but they all have some manner of flaw; Hayato's rock throw works very briefly and thus doesn't remove the time pressure a patrol puts on you when trying to deal with enemies the patrol will ultimately see, Mugen's sake bottle will be difficult to get back if you use it purely as a distraction tool rather than immediately killing the lured target, Yuki's whistle puts the targets on partial alert and causes them to search the area in an unpredictable manner, potentially making them more problematic than when they were on their predictable patrol route, and Kuma has a time limit and can potentially be completely wasted, denying you future opportunities to have him distract that particular patrol. Aiko talking to a patrol is free aside that it occupies Aiko, and if you conclude your plan isn't actually workable, then aborting it costs you nothing.

Fourthly, talking can be used to direct an enemy's attention at something you want them noticing, such as a torch you have put out that thus will cause them to leave their post. This isn't a unique utility at the broadest level, but Aiko is uniquely surgical in this regard; every other character with such an ability does so with an area-of-effect ability, and so even if they can reach the desired enemy with their ability they may be unable to pull the exact one enemy you want pulled without also pulling other enemies. As it's easiest and safest to kill enemies one at a time, that's a big deal.

Fifthly, talking is uniquely useful against enemies that react as a group, especially patrolling guards. You team can sneak up and kill groups of enemies of their team size simply by walking up behind them and attacking simultaneously, with maybe a Shuriken throw in there to get 1 more than your team size, but enemies that act as a group are generally a pain to arrange those conditions on; if they're not patrolling, such groups usually have the members covering each other directly (ie Guard A is staring soulfully into Guard B's eyes), and if they are patrolling they generally all have their viewcones swing wildly and are desynched to boot, not to mention they're moving at all and thus you can't simply stop behind them and set up Shadow mode attacks. Talking resolves all these problems by causing the entire group to stop moving and look in one direction, viewcones essentially unmoving, with unlimited time to move the rest of the team in position... and Aiko herself will conveniently be in reach to kill whoever she's talking to. Thus, even large groups that might otherwise seem impossible or at least extremely difficult to sneakily kill with melee attacks are suddenly effortlessly trivialized. No other ability creates such an opportunity that is so easy to take advantage of.

Sixthly, it is Aiko's only way to contribute from Disguise without any risk of arousing suspicion from enemies; anything else she can do will either break her Disguise (eg drop attacks) or will be looked askance upon if enemies see her doing it. (eg sneezing powder) Even if talking were less amazingly useful of an ability, this consideration right there would ensure it was an important part of Aiko's toolkit.

The closest thing to a flaw or limitation on talking is the fact that Samurai see right through Aiko's Disguise and talking is a close-range action, meaning enemies being watched by a Samurai even intermittently are impractical to try to leverage talking on, where eg Yuki's flute may be used to pull a watched enemy to their death without arousing suspicion from watchers. And even then, it's sometimes possible to talk to an enemy who is being watched by a Samurai by standing just outside the Samurai's viewcone!

Furthermore, while enemies hearing or seeing something suspicious while Aiko is talking to them will end the conversation, investigating a suspicious activity doesn't necessarily render them immune to attempts at conversation. That is, you can have Yuki whistle to pull a patrol of three Guards out of sight of a Samurai, then have Aiko talk to them while Disguised to pin them down and control their facing while Yuki and Hayato sneak up behind so you can kill all three of them simultaneously. 

That Talk is so incredibly versatile, powerful, and easy to use is really the thing that kills Sneezing Powder's utility, incidentally: if Aiko couldn't Talk at enemies, I'd probably find myself using Sneezing Powder sometimes, but currently basically anytime I can imagine a use for Sneezing Powder while Disguised it has the issue that Talk can do the same thing but without timing shenanigans, in terms of making an enemy blind to something they should be able to see just fine. Since Sneezing Powder can't be smoothly combined with Talk, even the notion of eg 'Talk at one Strawhat, blind the other' is pretty dubious to implement: you'd have to have Aiko toss Sneezing Powder from out of view, start the conversation right afterward, and then quickly do whatever it is you're trying to do.

Note that even though Aiko will, by default, stand a little away from her target when initiating conversation, if you then have Aiko kill that target with her hairpin this will occur instantly, no need for her to walk toward the target. This is not intuitive and can trip you up when planning Shadow Mode actions, where eg Yuki is standing behind her target at roughly the same distance Aiko is from her own target, but executing the Shadow Mode attacks you've lined up will result in Aiko instantly killing her target and then Yuki's target sounds the alarm before Yuki can reach him. The simple solution is to have everybody except Aiko line up their attacks in Shadow Mode, select Aiko, select her melee attack, hover over her target, trigger Shadow Mode, and the instant a death starts order Aiko to commence the stabbing. It's an unfortunate bit of clunkiness.

Also: I just love Aiko's inane distraction chatter. It's really fun, and paced out so it only gets annoyingly repetitive if you have her sustain a single conversation for a very long time.


Matchlock
Death Duration: 1 second.
Noise: 8
Range: 17
Cooldown: 3 seconds.
Aiko kills an enemy with her wrist-mounted matchlock pistol. Samurai will be merely Stunned, but can be killed with a melee attack while Stunned. Aiko normally starts with three shots and cannot acquire any more within a mission unless an ammo crate is present.
"An inelegant solution."

Note that if you are in the middle of actively aiming the Matchlock while Disguised, this won't break Aiko's Disguise, but enemies with vision on Aiko will find it alarming. This doesn't affect Shadow-planned actions, so you can set up a shot from Disguise by marking Aiko's target in Shadow while she's out of sight.

Actually firing the Matchlock does break Disguise instantly, though.

Aiko's Matchlock is probably the least useful of the Matchlocks in practice. Hayato's Shuriken is more directly competing with firing his Matchlock, but anytime Aiko has her Disguise this functionally displaces a lot of the utility of the Matchlock: why shoot some jerk from a rooftop because he's standing in an enclosed little space no other enemy has a view on but that gives him a view on something important, when Aiko can just walk right up to him and stab him?

As a result of this, she's actually my first pick for burning Matchlock ammo on Samurai kills, as she's the least likely character for me to then go 'being out of bullets is denying me a solution' in regard to some later moment.



Heal
Aiko restores up to 3 missing HP from herself or a single adjacent ally. One charge per mission, with any overhealing wasted.
"

Heal remains a pretty irrelevant ability, and Aiko in particular has the least use for it: depopulating a map while Disguised doesn't even carry the usual risk of an enemy turning and shooting at the last moment, so Aiko is at the lowest risk of being shot at all.

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From hereon, I'll be casually dropping pretty major spoilers. If you haven't beaten the game yet yourself, you might want to come back to this series later.

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There's a number of interesting things about Aiko's characterization, but by far the most striking to me is the conjunction of her weaponizing stereotypical femininity while also failing to be Team Mom, and indeed she's the character with the least relationship to Yuki. (ie the youngest member of the team) Hayato is a reluctant mentor, but he does some mentoring. Mugen passes on some life lessons and is patient and friendly as Yuki fumbles her way through unfamiliar interactions, such as in one scene where Yuki says he's different from other samurai and he asks her if that's meant as a compliment where another individual might take offense right away. Takuma I'll talk about more when we get to him, but I've already alluded some to him having a strong relationship with Yuki. Aiko, meanwhile, barely interacts with Yuki, and has the closest to an openly hostile interaction with her, at one point reluctantly entrusting her with an important mission and clearly less than pleased when Yuki doesn't do exactly as she was told... even though Yuki breaking her word saved Mugen's life, and Aiko and Mugen love each other.

More subtle, but also part of this and interesting, is where Yuki's own focus and reactions lie. Yuki is starry-eyed over Hayato doing Cool Ninja Things, comes to be very fond of Mugen because he's a 'nice samurai', and is fascinated by the mechanically clever things Takuma has done with his own gear. She's not equivalently awed by Aiko using her charms, showing little to no interest in Aiko's approach to the world.

This is all very striking. So much fiction would force Aiko into being the emotional core of the team who is endlessly patient and caring for no deeper reason than because she's the only adult woman on the team, even if it strongly violated her explicit character. (Which it would in Aiko's case, but I'll get to that) Similarly, so much fiction would inevitably either have Yuki become interested in becoming like Aiko simply because Yuki is a young girl and Aiko is a stereotypically feminine adult woman (You know, aside the whole murderous ninja thing), or have Aiko take Yuki under her wing and teach her the Art Of Being A Woman, once again for no other reason than the age+gender consideration.

In Actual Shadow Tactics, though, Yuki is a tomboy, and this is fine. No one pushes her to be less tomboyish, not even subtly. No one pushes her to behave more like Aiko. Aiko evinces no interest in teaching her how to be 'womanly'. Yuki's interests are actually very stereotypical for a young boy, interested in what amounts to engineering and wowed by athletics and other Young Boy Cool Factor things, and the story doesn't make a big deal out of this in any way. It's just a natural part of her character.

Similarly, the role of Emotional Core Team Mom is taken up by... Mugen. So Team Dad, I guess, but the point is Mugen is the emotional core of the team who is gentle with people and tries to take care of their emotional well-being. He even gets fridged!

Now, these points in and of themselves are interesting but not necessarily impressive. I've seen stories in which a major male character filled the Team Mom role, where what this meant was that the creator(s) couldn't figure out what to have the most major female character have going on for their character because they'd shunted the only thing they knew how to write for female characters onto someone else and recognized on some level that you can't just have two copies of a narrative role like that without it creating narrative problems.

Fortunately, Shadow Tactics pulls through: Aiko is not an un-person. She in fact has a character that fits very naturally with her ability set. As Disguise and Talk suggest, Aiko is a social chameleon who plays roles to suit her circumstances and largely keeps her real feelings on the down-low. She's task-oriented and mission-focused: when Mugen dies, Aiko is immediately motivated to carry on Mugen's wishes and avenge him. Hayato, Yuki, and Takuma are the ones who are a bit aimless, grieving too much to call to mind a plan of action, and only go on to successfully avenge Mugen because Aiko is there to keep everybody on task with clear goals.

Even an element I was initially unhappy with is organically natural: that the reveal that Aiko and Mugen were lovers comes a bit out of left field. Of course it does. They both had their duties, and Aiko is a professional who habitually obscures her real feelings. It would've been out of character for her to have done something to call the audience's attention to it -and the one mission where Mugen and Aiko work together, nobody else around, does have some hints that they're fond of each other in that way, just low-key enough that it's easy to interpret it as eg low-key flirting between old friends that's not going to go anywhere. Which... again, low-key ambiguous flirting of that sort is consistent with their personalities and circumstances.

As a final bonus, there's the meta-narrative consideration that it's Aiko -rather than Mugen- who is the game's most brutally powerful character. This makes perfect sense in a game focused on stealth; blending in so no one questions your presence is so much sneakier than crawling through the bushes, hoping no one spots you because you so obviously Don't Belong.

Also, a subtle detail I love has to do with the final mission's Badge design. Ignoring the speedrunning Badge because that's a whole other thing and I've never earned it so I can't speak to how difficult it is, but outside that point by far the most difficult Badge in the final mission is the non-lethal Badge... and said Badge more or less forces you to have Aiko perform the final confrontation of the game, whereas playing the mission normally any of her, Yuki, or Hayato can perform that confrontation. This is fantastic, as Aiko is really the one that has the most emotional stake in the confrontation in question, and this is an excellent way to balance the considerations of player control and narrative design: in normal play, you can go with whoever, as the game doesn't artificially force any particular option and you're ultimately the one in control. But if you go for the hardest Badge, the one that minimizes innocents caught up in revenge... then the game organically guides you to have the character with the greatest emotional stakes in the confrontation actually take down her nemesis.

That's amazing.

(Worth pointing out: the standalone expansion is Aiko's Choice. More emphasis on Aiko!)

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Next time, we talk about Mugen, who is technically the second character you get but whatever.

See you then.