Shadow Tactics Analysis: Four Things It Hits Out Of The Park

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a shockingly good game, one of those rare games that knows what kind of game it wants to be, knows how to be that game, and manages to have and create a lot of fun in the process, where so often a game that knows what it wants to be and how to be that thing also appears singularly disenchanted with the experience, a product of rote memorization by people who don't seem to enjoy the game that they're creating.

It's also not a game that lends itself very well to the kind of analysis that comes most readily to me, so this will be a relatively short series, focused mostly on the characters, aside a few major points I'll be bringing up in this very post plus a later post doing a brief overview of enemy types. I'm not interested in writing guides where I can tell you exactly what to do to solve a fixed series of missions; there are plenty of options out there for that, and I don't like encouraging that mentality anyway.

It's still an excellent game that deserves more attention, hence why I'm writing posts regardless of their mismatch with my style.

So, four things Shadow Tactics does shockingly well...

1: Solving The Two-Guard Problem

The two-guard problem is my mental shorthand for a recurring design issue in stealth games that requires some setup to explain.

First, let's explicitly note that stealth games are generally premised under the idea that the player can complete the game without ever detected by any enemies. Even if a game doesn't treat that as an overt failure condition that causes a game over or similar, stealth games are almost always predicated on the idea that perfect play involves being perpetually undetected, and that this is humanly possible to do throughout the game.

Second, let's also note that stealth games are usually, though not always, narratively premised under the idea that the player character (Or player characters, in cases where the player is controlling a group, such as in Shadow Tactics itself) is exceptional in their field and overcoming the opposition through superior wit and so on.

So that said... the two-guard problem goes like this: imagine your stealth game places two guards so that they both have a clear view of each other and a clear view on a mission-critical object the player must reach. Furthermore, there are no specially-scripted options for working around this particular pair: the player can only use their always-available tools for sneaking around enemies, peeling away enemies, etc; they are not being explicitly helped by the developer with a 'cheat'. That is, if the player has a universally-available option to convince a guard to move away from their position without alerting anyone, that's allowed in this scenario, but you're not allowed to say that these particular guards can be pulled from their posts by the player triggering some developer-designated scripting, like a lever that signals a shift change or some such.

The thing about the two-guard problem is that for literally every stealth game I've played or otherwise been strongly exposed to (eg watching a complete video Let's Play of a given game) prior to Shadow Tactics, the two-guard problem is a failure state in the design.

Failure State A goes like this: the player cannot complete the game in this scenario without being detected.

Generally, these types of games are, in fact, designed so that it is possible to stealth your way through the entire game. I call this a 'failure state', though, because the way they comply is by dumbing down the opposition. You're able to stealth your way through such a game because the Two Guard Problem conspicuously fails to manifest: your enemies always conveniently have blind spots, patrol routes with conspicuous gaps, etc. This is a little disappointing, period, but is particularly problematic in those (numerous) cases where the game is also trying really hard to sell the notion that the player character is a Master Of Stealth: no, I'm not. I'm surrounded by morons, and am also incredibly lucky.

Failure State B is the opposite: the player can complete the game, undetected, in this scenario.

In and of itself, this isn't a failure state. The issue is that in most such cases, the reason the player can overcome the situation undetected is because the game's stealth mechanics are so broken the player can 'stealth' their way past basically any situation without much intelligence.

In the 2010 Aliens Vs Predator game, for example, the Alien and the Predator both have tools for convincing a lone Marine to wander off into the darkness to be shanked... tools that, outside some enemies who are arbitrarily immune, will work on literally an infinite number of Marines. You could replace 'two guards' with 'two hundred' guards, and it would just make it really tedious for the Predator or Alien to 'stealth' their way through the situation. This horribly undermines the difficulty curve regarding stealth; a fortified location filled with alert enemies will take longer to clear out than a trio of drunks who aren't paying attention to much of anything, but they're not fundamentally a more difficult situation.

The more common form of breakdown in Failure State B is instead for the premise that the game is about stealth to go out the window. A lot of games that are ostensibly primarily or purely stealth games (As opposed to AvP 2010, which has stealth gameplay but only the Alien could be reasonably said to be primarily/purely a stealth experience) nonetheless give the player tools for overcoming enemies in open combat. Often, these tools are sufficiently overwhelming of the stealth gameplay that the reason the Two-Guard Problem doesn't prevent the player from completing the game undetected is because the player can casually walk in and hurl a wizard fireball that instantly incinerates the two guards before they can raise the alarm.

Which okay sure that technically is complying with the 'never detected' notion, but if you picked up a game because the presented experience is 'master thief sneaks into mansions and escapes without leaving a trace of their existence', it's pretty disheartening if your method of achieving 'stealth' is to burst into the room and gun them down. Like yes, dead men tell no tales, but really?

In Shadow Tactics, the two-guard problem is solvable, it's solvable with stealth, and that stealth feels stealthy and doesn't require you to be facing idiots. Furthermore, scaling up the Two-Guard Problem actually matters. A pair of guards hanging out alone can possibly be handled stealthily by Hayato all by himself fairly trivially. Increase it to three guards, and it actually becomes a bit tricky. Go up to ten guards like this and it's going to be really difficult to have Hayato alone kill everyone undetected or sneak through undetected. He'll ideally have his teammates helping.

Crucially, more guards tends to require different solutions for a given team composition than fewer guards. With one guard, Hayato can sneak up behind them and stab them, and you're done. With two guards staring directly at each other, Hayato needs to do something like throw a rock to distract one of them, stab the other, then quickly stab the distracted guard, or throw his shuriken at one and then promptly stab the other, either way.

This means that when the game ups the complexity of a formation, the player has to think of new solutions, which is infinitely more interesting than just iterating your existing solutions over a longer period of time. It also combines nicely with the varied assortment of team members that missions present you with: you can be faced with literally the exact formation you dealt with last mission, but because you have a different set of characters you have to come up with a different solution to the problem. Mugen working with Aiko can deal with a patrolling group of three guards by having Aiko distract them with conversation, and then Mugen comes up behind them and kills them all with Sword Wind. Hayato working with Aiko can't do that; you'll need to think of a different way of dealing with such a group, whether it's a different way of killing them all or just deciding to sneak the two characters past, leaving the patrol alive.

This also goes quite nicely with the game's Badge system, and how it gets used to encourage the player to go back to old missions and try out radically different solutions. Alright, that mission was easy enough when you were just killing everyone, but what if you restrict yourself to killing only the people you must kill? That's going to require a completely different thought process, a much more challenging one in most cases.

It's an exceptional achievement all on its own, and blends beautifully with everything else the game does to boot, creating a whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts.


2: Overcoming Competent Foes

I already touched on this with the prior point, but it's worth going over in its own right: in Shadow Tactics, your enemies feel competent in a way that is not typical of stealth games.

Part of this is the Two-Guard Problem being allowed to exist and yet being an actual hurdle, as covered earlier. Basic, obvious security measures can be applied by your enemies without this making the game unwinnable, and so your foes get to be at least minimally-competent.

But the game goes much further than that!

First of all, enemies that move as groups actually move as groups. If a trio of Guards are patrolling together, finagling things so exactly one of them hears something suspicious won't result in that one Guard wandering off to be killed by a trap while his buddies continue their patrol, oblivious. No, they'll all investigate the suspicious noise together.

Second, this extends to temporary conversations. If one Guard is wandering around, periodically stopping to talk to a buddy, interrupting their conversation with a distraction will get the attention of both of them instead of just whoever heard the distraction.

Third and something of a sub-point of the prior, enemies who periodically talk to other enemies notice when their intended conversational partner isn't present. (Well, not all of them do this, but most of them do) You can't just kill an enemy while their conversational partner wanders off to continue their rounds and expect that to be good enough: their buddy will be back, and will get suspicious when he can't find the person he's expecting to be there, and so may find one of your people while he's searching for his buddy.

A knock-off consequence of all this is that even though the game actually doesn't give enemies much in the way of memory, it doesn't feel like this is so, because the game largely doesn't let things reach the point where their lack of memory is obvious. It's not actually the case that if a pair of Guards patrolling together loses one of their members that the other will automatically notice he's missing and raise the alarm like a real human being would, but the point is academic because it's extremely difficult to arrange a situation in which one Guard out of such a pair dies while the other survives and isn't provoked into raising the alarm.

Furthermore, it's a lot easier to accept cases where you do slowly peel away a group without any individual noticing that something is very wrong here. In some of the more densely-populated areas of a given map it can get kind of ridiculous that the survivors never notice something is wrong, but for the most part it's easier to accept that some enemies are just less attentive than others, or at least that their attention is in the wrong places -especially since enemy attention is so explicit a mechanic. When some enemies actually are paying more attention than others, the more oblivious enemies feel like a deliberate, believable part of the world, which is a striking difference from so many stealth games where the idiocy and obliviousness of your foes is so widespread and consistent it becomes unbelievable.

All of this is excellent because it benefits the viscerality of the experience. Plenty of stealth games are okay as abstract puzzle experiences, where you treat them purely as thought exercises of how to solve a series of problems given the tools available to you. Rarely do they manage to sell the illusion that your opposition are thinking human beings, and thus rarely do they sell the illusion that the world you're experiencing is any kind of believable reality.


3: Simultaneous Action

The concept of having multiple separate pieces act simultaneously to enact complex ambushes and whatnot isn't new to gaming, of course, but Shadow Tactics is the first game I've seen that executed it well.

Some games expect very precise solutions from the player while having imprecise controls and poor feedback on what a player is even meant to do in a given situation, resulting in an unfun, borderline-unplayable experience. (The classic Lemmings games suffer from this fairly often, for example) Other games are too time-tolerant, to the point that simultaneous action is unnecessary, neutering what is often meant to be a fairly major mechanic. Still others are turn-based and so sidestep these problems, but usually with a side effect of producing all kinds of weird, not-that-edge-case behavior that is extremely surreal if taken seriously from an in-universe standpoint.

Shadow Tactics manages to get things just right for a real-time tactics game, in part by being very aware of the limitations of its support for simultaneous action. As a concrete example: one trick you can pull off with 'Shadow mode' (The game's term for arranging to issue simultaneous orders, basically) is to have Aiko distract a group of three enemies while disguised, queuing up an order for her to stab the one she's talking to while also queuing up stabbing orders on the other two enemies with two other characters, whom you manually walk up behind the two while Aiko has the group distracted.

This works beautifully, and is very satisfying, in no small part because the game recognizes that Shadow mode is suited to having characters initiate actions simultaneously, or alternatively to precisely timing certain actions, but not both at the same time. You are never expected to pull off the above trick in a tight window before some other patrol loops back to see the group you're ambushing, and Aiko's ability to distract enemies will normally never time out, giving you all the time in the world to walk two other characters up to just behind their targets.

This is a specific example, but representative of how the game approaches situations you're meant to use Shadow mode to resolve: they are designed so it's reasonable to resolve them with Shadow mode, which requires a much more impressive level of care and thought on the part of the designers than it might sound.

More generally, Shadow Tactics stays away from timing the player. You're not pressured to perform complicated tasks as quickly as possible to avoid mission failures, or to catch up with something of use before it exits the map, or otherwise pressured into acting quickly in a more general sense. You can spend the time to figure out the rhythms of the enemies and set up your actions at your own pace. This is very important: the Aiko and friends trick I laid out above wouldn't be nearly so practical to do if every mission had a hard timer that would fail you when it ran down, even if nothing else about the game was changed.

This is an especially pleasant surprise as so many games conflate timing pressure ("Do a thing at the right time") with time pressure ("Win before the clock runs out, Or Else"), even though these really have very little to do with each other.

Also crucial is that Shadow Tactics is a game that delights in creative solutions. It is possible to use Shadow mode, and more generally directing multiple characters to act simultaneously, to pull off tricks that are in some sense not intended solutions to a given problem in a given mission, but it's rare for this to represent any kind of failing of the game's design. Most problems are meant to have multiple possible solutions, with the Badge system blatantly encouraging players to think of different solutions to old missions. If you 'break' a problem by using simultaneous action more effectively than the developers believed to be possible, that (usually) doesn't result in you breaking a mission's scripting and getting a hold of something useful far sooner than you're meant to have it, or anything along those lines. It means you get to pat yourself on the back for a job well-done, and go right back to having fun.

One of the only exceptions I ran across is one the developers have a sense of humor about: one named character is encountered as an enemy in two different missions, and isn't meant to be possible to kill in the first one. If you contrive to do so anyway, as I managed to do somewhat on accident (I got a specific enemy into a buggy state that let me kill several people without being detected who I really wasn't supposed to be able to kill undetected), you will get a game over, one labeled as a time paradox, as the plot demands you instead kill them in the later mission, which of course is impossible if they're already dead.

Anyway, overall Shadow Tactics has the best implementation of simultaneous action of multiple actors I've ever seen in a real-time game.


4: The Impossible Becomes Possible

One of the most impressive, enjoyable things about Shadow Tactics is that as your skill as a player grows you increasingly will find that if you replay early missions, groups of enemies you found challenging or even thought literally impossible to overcome with the team you had available are now... quite doable. Maybe even easy.

There are plenty of games where the player's skill is going to rise as they play the game, but many such games endeavor to only present challenges roughly as the player's skill level should be adequate for them, and so it's less obvious and less satisfying. Like, yes, the endgame enemy demands you put together all these tricks you learned over the course of the game, but you never got a direct comparison point of trying to fight the enemy when you are unskilled, finding yourself unable to see how defeating it is meant to be possible, and then down the line revisiting the topic and discovering your skills have grown so much that what once seemed impossible is enjoyably pedestrian.

Often, when games do try to create this experience, they cheat with an ill-considered illusion. If the first boss of a game is meant to kill you, it's probably literally invincible in that encounter, and the real reason it's possible to defeat much later in the game is because its invincibility and unreasonable super-attacks were taken away from it, rather than you, as a player, having grown to meet the challenge.

So Shadow Tactics doing this successfully, and so smoothly and naturally (Because the fundamental gameplay concept is centered around picking your battles so a player doesn't resent writing off a given encounter as unwinnable) is very impressive. Even better, its Badge system actively encourages players to discover that their skills have improved so much, by providing an incentive for completionists to go back and do one of those unreasonable-sounding challenges once they've overcome later hurdles. Or maybe you go back to do an easy Badge you missed (because several Badges aren't revealed until either you earn them or you complete the mission), and in the process you discover that the mission is much easier than you first found it to be.

Either way, it's an impressive feat, particularly coming from a game that doesn't have any kind of pre-mission choices. Usually when a game has shades of this, it's because the player has some ability to go into a mission/dungeon/whatever with better equipment, better skill choices, etc, with this often overshadowing and occluding the part where their ability to execute the core gameplay has risen dramatically. In Shadow Tactics, what you take into a mission is pre-set, and cannot be adjusted by you: if you come back and find what was once impossible is actually easy, it's because your skills have risen to meet the challenge.

This is such a rare experience for a game to produce that it makes it all the more impressive. There's not dozens of examples within the same genre to imitate.

This is probably my personal favorite aspect of Shadow Tactics' competence.

--------------------------

Next time, we start the character posts with Hayato, the resident grumpy ninja.

See you then.