Shadow Tactics Analysis: Hayato
Hayato is your first character, your introduction to the core mechanics of the game, and appropriate to this is that he's one of the least divergent members of the cast; most of his core capabilities are outright shared with at least 2 other characters (out of a cast of 5) and one of his abilities that isn't shared per se is leveraging the game's general sound mechanics, which 2 other characters also do. He only has one capability I'd describe as 'unique' in terms of 'not at all representative of things found on other characters' -the surprising thing is he's not The Boringly Competent One the way games often arrive at when minimizing uniqueness on a starting character/class/faction/whatever.
He's internally labeled 'ninja', when his stuff bothers to specify character at all, so it's pretty clear he was designed first and was mostly just the starting point for designing the game systems at all rather than having a strongly-defined character/mechanical identity right out the gate. That's interesting to me given at a glance he seems like The (Male) Main Character, and games often have that character pinned down reasonably specifically much earlier than a lot of other characters.
So on to mechanics.
Carry Behavior
Hayato may carry a single body. While carrying a body, he is always considered to be standing, and is restricted to his normal walking speed. (ie he may not run) In addition to setting the body down anywhere he can stand or dumping them in designated hiding places, he may also dump bodies in deep water and throw them down cliffs, including potentially bottomless pits.
Body-carrying is critical to understand because it's how you hide dead bodies, which is how you avoid getting caught... well, once you have skill and experience you can often get away with not hiding bodies, but by default a learning player should be hiding bodies.
This is because when enemies find a dead body -or even an unconscious individual- they will sound the alarm. This is Very Bad. Sounding the alarm causes (literal red-shirted) enemies to permanently spawn in, with a few of them sent to investigate the area the alarm was originally sounded at, and also tends to draw investigation from nearby Guards. Killing an enemy only for their body to be discovered is a net negative, resulting in more enemies on the map rather than less, and the game is perfectly happy to have redshirts take patrol routes that make your core objectives vastly more difficult to achieve. So much so that most of the time you really should just load a quicksave if the alarm is sounded.
So you'll be hiding bodies, which means picking them up and carrying them, which means body-carrying is important.
Body-hiding itself is a nice balance of realism to gameplay elegance. You can just hide bodies by stuffing them into corners where no enemy patrols, and that's functional enough, but the default way you hide bodies is by dropping them in bushes, dropping them into water, or cramming them into unoccupied buildings. Doing so causes the body to instantly cease to exist for all time; this nicely avoids a series of frustrating problems that crop up with games using more organic/realistic approaches to body-hiding, such as intuitively logical answers being incorrect because the game isn't coded to have enemies think it makes sense for an unconscious body to be lying in a bed, or the player being detected because scripting spawned enemies in a weird location such that bodies the player had every reason to think would never be found are, in fact, found. Shadow Tactics' approach only really gets silly when you're either hiding a body in a building that an enemy patrols through (In which case their failure to find the body you jammed in two seconds ago is pretty eyebrow-raising) or when you insist on dumping an improbably large number of bodies into a specific bush, such that the pile ought to eclipse the bush. These scenarios are acceptable jank, given the design avoids much more disruptive, dumb results.
The need to carry a body per se is quite important to the stealth mechanics. Some stealth games are designed so that enemies will only notice a death if it happens right in front of them, failing to react to corpses per se, allowing a player to snipe a target in an absurdly tight timeframe with no ill consequences. (eg AvP 2010 works this way) In Shadow Tactics, you need to either be confident no one will spot the body once the target is dead, or give yourself a large enough window to also grab the body and dispose of it.
Hayato is actually something of a poor introduction to the concept, one of Shadow Tactics' few notable missteps, because he presents a subtle trap to learning players, having to do with enemy line of sight. Which requires an explanation all on its own to give context.
Every enemy has a viewcone. (Normally represented in green if you make it visible, such as by right-clicking an enemy) This viewcone has two components to it: a fully-filled inner half, and the more ragged outer half. (Note that some objects, like bushes, will partially block line of sight beyond them, such that an area that would normally be fully-filled will be ragged) The inner half of the viewcone is a superior level of awareness, and with one exception for a later post enemies will always notice anything that enters this part of their viewcone. The outer half is a lesser degree of awareness, wherein your characters will go undetected so long as they are crouching. The relevant part here is that bodies are mechaniced as crouching.
Hayato, meanwhile, cannot crouch while carrying a body.
This means that if Hayato kills someone who is only ever visible to enemies in the weaker half of their viewcone, sometimes the correct solution is to leave the body exactly where it is, such as if another enemy is sweeping their view back and forth and you killed the target in the brief period where they were looking away. After all, they won't notice the body so long as it lies there, but will notice Hayato if he picks it up.
The game doesn't teach the player that bodies are treated as crouching, though. It makes sense once you know about it (Crouching makes you invisible far enough away, and you'd expect a body flat on the ground to be less visible than a crouching person), and I imagine some people found it intuitive in its own right, but this is something that ought to have been clearly illustrated to the player. It's easy to end up focused on disposing of bodies to the point that you end up unnecessarily getting Hayato spotted, in part because of this omission.
Indeed, in general Hayato is actually your second-worst body-carrier. Mugen is faster, doubly so since he can carry two bodies, as well as able to dispose of bodies in creative ways, not to mention use them in unusual ways generally not available to Hayato. Yuki and Aiko are both stealthier than Hayato, with the only tradeoff being that of speed, when Shadow Tactics is a game much more rewarding of stealth and patience than of speed. (Unless you're after the speedrunner Badges, of course, but they're optional) Hayato should generally only be carrying bodies when you have no other choice, when you're trying to dispose of a body quickly before an enemy can patrol back into the area, or when you're confident nobody is going to spot Hayato grabbing the body and want the alternative body-carrier moving on with the mission. (eg sending Mugen on ahead to a bush, waiting to ambush a patrol, while Hayato cleans up the body) And this last scenario is only necessary if you're unfamiliar with the map and so not sure whether script-spawning will produce new enemies in a previously-secure area. (This does happen a handful of times, to be clear)
Still, aside the stumble that Hayato in particular is a somewhat poor introduction to body-hiding priorities, this is an excellent system.
Swim
Hayato can enter deep water, and is completely undetectable so long as he remains in water.
"Quietly."
Bizarrely, you may 'run' underwater, moving at around double speed. This is bizarre because running is normally trading away stealth for speed, but when swimming it carries no disadvantage whatsoever. There's no reason for your characters to not swim at top speed at all times; the game really ought to have set a single swimming speed.
This has further jank in that ordering a character to run causes them to stop crouching. Normally this is temporary: a character will resume crouching once they reach their destination or are given a non-running order, but if they're swimming the crouch state is just turned off permanently until you order them to crouch, which you can't do while they're underwater. This might seem irrelevant, but it matters once a character reaches shore: though swimming characters only have one animation for climbing out of water, their crouch state affects how visible they are in this animation. Thus, 'running' underwater carries the disadvantage that if you have the character come ashore in the viewcone of an enemy, they will be gratuitously visible and you'll have to manually order them to crouch again, and do so quickly if you don't want them spotted.
So that's unfortunate jank. Water isn't used heavily by the game and you can usually come ashore out of sight so the jank isn't too bad, but still.
Regardless, swimming is an excellent way to get around. No enemy can swim, nor detect a swimming character, which makes water an excellent place to store Hayato when you're planning your next move and aren't familiar with patrol paths on a map, and also makes it a completely safe escape hatch if you get detected and don't instantly quickload, as enemies can't attack a swimming character even if they saw the character jump into the water.
Swimming is map-dependent, of course, but the game is pretty good about most maps having at least one point swimming can be performed at. Even better, it's pretty reliable about swimming being useful in an interesting manner, rather than using it to do things like force you to use a specific character in a specific part of a map the way games so often do with this kind of capability.
Regardless, swimming is an excellent way to get around. No enemy can swim, nor detect a swimming character, which makes water an excellent place to store Hayato when you're planning your next move and aren't familiar with patrol paths on a map, and also makes it a completely safe escape hatch if you get detected and don't instantly quickload, as enemies can't attack a swimming character even if they saw the character jump into the water.
Swimming is map-dependent, of course, but the game is pretty good about most maps having at least one point swimming can be performed at. Even better, it's pretty reliable about swimming being useful in an interesting manner, rather than using it to do things like force you to use a specific character in a specific part of a map the way games so often do with this kind of capability.
Though it does do some stuff in that vein too, I suppose.
Hayato is not a particularly poor or great user of swimming: swimming is unfortunately a bit of a 'flat' mechanic where its different users are all alike in practice. It's not a big problem for the design, but it does give me little to add here.
Agility
Hayato may jump down short cliffs without aid, hop small gaps, climb up and down ivy-coated walls, and walk tightropes.
"Move like water."
This is actually the default level of mobility for your characters in the game. Of your five characters, three of them all have this level of mobility.
It's not the game's default level of mobility, however: no enemy will jump down a cliff, hop a small gap, climb up or down ivy, or chase you across tightropes. (Though this last point is basically irrelevant, as enemies are normally not positioned such that it has any chance of being relevant. There's... 1 enemy I can think of off the top of my head in a position for it to matter? In the entire game, I mean) This means many maps have a notable fraction of the space inaccessible to enemies; as enemy line of sight is reduced to partial when sufficient verticality is involved, simply crouching atop a cliff only accessible by these forms of enhanced mobility is usually enough to render a character completely undetectable while you study the environment.
Drop Attack
Any location Hayato can jump down to is a location he may potentially perform a drop attack to if an enemy is standing there, landing on them and attacking as one action.
"Death from above."
I'm not sure the exact parameters on this attack, but it's notably faster than the regular melee attacks. I think it might be quieter as well, but I'm not entirely sure and whether it is or not it's certainly not a drastic difference in sound radius.
Also, a sub-note to drop attacks that the game doesn't tutorial you on and indeed I learned of it via discovering the above icon in the files, but you can perform a nonlethal version of the drop attack by manually switching to Unarmed before targeting an enemy. Killing is usually the better option, but for one thing there are levels with a Badge for finishing the level without unnecessary killing. You may find such challenges much simpler if you know about the nonlethal drop attack.
Drop Attacks themselves are of course fun and cool, but dependent on access to high ground you can jump down from to a victim down below. Such conditions overall become rarer as the game progresses, and the whole thing isn't very deep in terms of replayability and whatnot: basically, either the devs gave you a flashy solution to a specific enemy and you should probably take advantage, or they didn't and you can't do it. (Or more accurately if you can do it anyway, it's not worth the bother of pulling a Guard to somewhere you can jump down from) I like that Drop Attacks exist, but I don't have a ton to say about them and they're one of the more boring mechanics in practice.
A non-obvious point is that you can, in fact, set up a Shadow Mode drop attack even though it's a contextual action. The game is actually very nice about this: the Shadow Mode assignment will not go away just because the victim moves out of Drop Attack range, and in fact the game will continuously show you exactly where Hayato will be jumping from to perform the Drop Attack at any given moment. This means you can assign a Shadow Mode Drop Attack, then watch where the jump line moves as the victim patrols about, and then move Hayato to catch them in whatever part of their patrol you want to catch them in. (That's physically possible to do so, obviously) This makes it really easy to time Drop Attacks, much easier than you might intuitively expect.
The one snag in this regard is that you can't assign such a Shadow Mode order unless the victim is, in fact, currently in a position for a drop attack to be possible. This makes it harder to do things like bait enemies to a specific position and then drop attack them with good timing. Fortunately, the game never expects you to try to do so; generally if an enemy is intended to be resolvable with a drop attack, they'll spend all their time in reach for such, or reliably patrol such that the option is intermittently available. If you're trying to get fancy with such a resolution to such a situation... there's another way to handle the situation, which is probably easier and all-around better. Even if you're Badge-hunting. So this flaw is only a mild flaw, the kind of thing it would be nice if a sequel were to address but that honestly isn't important.
Agility
Hayato may jump down short cliffs without aid, hop small gaps, climb up and down ivy-coated walls, and walk tightropes.
"Move like water."
This is actually the default level of mobility for your characters in the game. Of your five characters, three of them all have this level of mobility.
It's not the game's default level of mobility, however: no enemy will jump down a cliff, hop a small gap, climb up or down ivy, or chase you across tightropes. (Though this last point is basically irrelevant, as enemies are normally not positioned such that it has any chance of being relevant. There's... 1 enemy I can think of off the top of my head in a position for it to matter? In the entire game, I mean) This means many maps have a notable fraction of the space inaccessible to enemies; as enemy line of sight is reduced to partial when sufficient verticality is involved, simply crouching atop a cliff only accessible by these forms of enhanced mobility is usually enough to render a character completely undetectable while you study the environment.
It also means that your team can usually take shortcuts to bypass patrols, sneak up on guards who are covering all the obvious paths, and so on.
This is one of the more subtly effective aspects of Shadow Tactics' design that contributes to the feel of 'outwitting reasonably competent foes'. When Hayato goes athletically leaping and climbing along perilous paths to flank an enemy whose back is against the wall, watching the only foot route into their little chunk of the map, the fact that this poor Guard wasn't as safe as he thought doesn't come across like he's simply stupid, but like your team is in fact capable of doing things that aren't normal and so it's reasonable this fellow didn't expect some lunatic to do what's necessary to come up from behind and to his left, approach in complete silence, and abruptly ram a sword through his chest.
It also means that if you do want to Ironman the game instead of Quickloading when spotted (There's Badges that require you not reload, for one), it's often reasonably feasible to make a getaway. I've played stealth-oriented games where it's virtually impossible to shake pursuit once spotted: it's really annoying and tends to incentivize simply reloading if you do get spotted! That Shadow Tactics did this well is a pleasant surprise given the game actively encourages you to quicksave/quickload: it's not targeted at Ironman play! Yet it does that better than several games I've seen that seem targeted at Ironman play!
Also worth noting is that these are contextual prompts, and the game does a pretty nice job on that point. Contextual prompts involving movement commands often fall into one of two bad states: scenario one is that your orders are interpreted too generously/automatically, with no feedback that eg your cliff-jumper units are going to jump down amid enemy forces to reach the destination you gave them because going right through those enemies is the fastest route, never mind you intended them to go a slightly longer way around staying on top of the cliff. Scenario two is that contextual actions are too 'stiff', where eg you can't order a unit to jump a cliff until it's right at the cliff's edge, and then you have no control over its jump destination, and also you have to wait for it to finish jumping before you can give it further orders, even orders like 'walk very slightly past your jump destination'.
In Shadow Tactics, your characters won't do contextual actions automatically and with no warning (If you want Hayato to swim, you have to click in the water), but you can do stuff like click somewhat near a cliff bottom to have Hayato jump to exactly your desired destination, and at times a character will assume you want them to do a contextual movement action but this is always accompanied by a visualization of the contextual movement so you can see that Hayato is thinking of making a jump and can decide whether you're okay with that or not. It's not perfect, but it's a surprisingly nice balance! And on a topic games usually flub very badly! It's nice!
Ninja Hook
Hayato can use special grapple points to ascend and descend at fixed locations.
Most grapple points are to/from rooftops that cannot be accessed any other way, but not all of them; don't get used to thinking of grapple points as an indication enemies can't follow you up, and certainly don't think of them as an indication enemies won't be able to see you while crouched, as it becomes increasingly common as you progress through the campaign for there to be enemies on high ground with a clear view to other high ground locations.
This is also basically a default capability for your team, with the same three characters having it as the prior, but it's still the case that no enemy can pursue via the same route. This can be useful to keep in mind if someone has been spotted and you're trying to disengage, refusing to Quickload.
Ninja Hook
Hayato can use special grapple points to ascend and descend at fixed locations.
Most grapple points are to/from rooftops that cannot be accessed any other way, but not all of them; don't get used to thinking of grapple points as an indication enemies can't follow you up, and certainly don't think of them as an indication enemies won't be able to see you while crouched, as it becomes increasingly common as you progress through the campaign for there to be enemies on high ground with a clear view to other high ground locations.
This is also basically a default capability for your team, with the same three characters having it as the prior, but it's still the case that no enemy can pursue via the same route. This can be useful to keep in mind if someone has been spotted and you're trying to disengage, refusing to Quickload.
In practice, this isn't very different from the rest of the mobility kit, even though the aesthetic is so different. It's often used to justify quick up/down motion when significant vertical distance is involved, but in terms of mechanical implications? It's not very distinct.
Ninjato
Death Duration: 1.3 seconds
Noise: 3
Hayato kills the target in melee.
"Nothing personal."
Ninjato
Death Duration: 1.3 seconds
Noise: 3
Hayato kills the target in melee.
"Nothing personal."
Hayato's most basic form of attack.
Note that attempting to melee a Samurai (Whether with this or Hayato's unarmed attack I'm covering next) who isn't currently Stunned or unconscious will get Hayato instantly killed. Further note that any of your characters dying is an instant game over. So, uh, don't do that.
Otherwise, Hayato is your go-to killer when you need to be fast, with the single fastest generic melee kill action and the second-fastest speed when carrying a body. If you're trying to slip in a kill when an enemy is looking away only briefly, Hayato's your man.
Note that attempting to melee a Samurai (Whether with this or Hayato's unarmed attack I'm covering next) who isn't currently Stunned or unconscious will get Hayato instantly killed. Further note that any of your characters dying is an instant game over. So, uh, don't do that.
Otherwise, Hayato is your go-to killer when you need to be fast, with the single fastest generic melee kill action and the second-fastest speed when carrying a body. If you're trying to slip in a kill when an enemy is looking away only briefly, Hayato's your man.
He should by extension be your default killer if you have no specific reason to prioritize a different advantage, as his speed minimizes the odds of something going wrong because eg you didn't realize a Guard's patrol route does intermittently give line of sight to your victim. Notably, Hayato is the best of your characters at 'panic-fixing' -realizing you've made an error, and doing something to correct it before it actually costs you, instead of reloading or accepting an alarm going out. His melee kill speed is an important part of this, as the other, slower killers are more likely to still be stuck in the kill animation when a Guard looks their way, or when you're desperately trying to tell them to use another ability to deal with someone before they notice anything.
Also, I should explain 'Noise' as a stat: many actions have a Noise level, which defines the circular radius in which enemies can hear the action. 3 Noise is small enough you can kill a Guard who has a buddy a few feet away, but large enough that two people standing in arm's reach will definitely hear the death even if they're looking away from the victim.
Enemies hearing something does not provoke them to sound the alarm. Not by itself. Instead, they turn to face the noise, and in the case of Guards and Civilians will normally try to walk to the center of where the noise originated from. In most circumstances an enemy hearing eg a Ninjato kill inevitably results in them immediately spotting something worth raising the alarm over, and in the case of Guards this overrules their investigation impetus, but this distinction gets very relevant with louder actions and in cases where eg two enemies are close to each other but have a wall between them.
The Ninjato's 3 Noise is in fact the game's default value for things that aren't completely silent but do produce some noise.
Also, a great convenience feature I should point out is that melee attacks of all types can be combined with the contextual modifier for issuing an order to pick something up, and the result will be your character killing a target and smoothly transitioning to holding the body, rather than needing to separately pick it up. This is especially useful to Hayato, as he's much faster at killing someone and then grabbing their corpse if it's one action than if you have him kill a target and only afterward tell him to pick up the body.
Unarmed
'Dying' Duration: 1.3 seconds.
Noise: 1.5
Hayato knocks the target unconscious temporarily.
"To the neck!"
Unconscious enemies are, for most purposes, effectively dead: they lie on the ground and can be carried by your people, they have zero awareness, and other enemies will be alarmed if they discover their unconscious form. The only differences of significance is that unconsciousness is temporary instead of permanent, and that you can't make unconscious bodies permanently disappear by dumping them in bushes, homes, etc. Note that you can, in fact, dump an unconscious individual in a building or bush to hide them, it's just they'll eventually wake up. (And leave the building if in a building, to be clear)
Something worth pointing out is that you can dump unconscious enemies into bottomless pits and water to kill them. Usually you'd rather just kill them directly, but there are missions where this information can be useful to have, especially considering Takuma has the ability to KO enemies en mass.
In most circumstances, you have no reason to perform an unarmed attack, but it's worth pointing out that Hayato's unarmed strike is quieter than his regular melee kill, and you can always move the victim elsewhere, set them down, and then stab them. As such, if you're finding you can't quite stab someone to death solely because someone else is close enough to hear the kill, consider having Hayato knock out the individual to get started.
It's also worth pointing out that while most of your other characters have access to an unarmed attack, Hayato is actually unique for producing slightly less noise with his unarmed attack. As such, if you're trying to KO someone who is uncomfortably close to another enemy, Hayato may make that possible to do stealthily where another character ends up being caught.
Anyway, returning to that 'lethal is usually better' thing, let's get a bit more into mechanics. First of all, there's no such thing as 'accidental unconsciousness'. That is, there are ways to kill enemies where the body being discovered or even the death being witnessed won't cause enemies to freak out and call in reinforcements, whereas no matter how you cause an enemy to be unconscious their body being discovered will lead to the alarm being raised. It will take longer than if a corpse is discovered -a corpse provokes an alarm response the instant it's properly sighted, where an unconscious body being spotted results in the spotter approaching, and only raising the alarm once they've finished waking the individual up- but that's about it.
Second is the consideration of how enemies react to waking up from unconsciousness. Most enemies will get up and enter a semi-alert state, searching randomly around their location, spotting your people more readily, and saying things like, "I know you're here." If nothing gets their attention during this search, they'll eventually decide nothing suspicious is going on and return to their post or patrol route if at all possible. If they can't make their way back to their post or patrol route (Such as because you threw them down a cliff to somewhere with no walkable path back to their post or patrol route), they'll eventually sit down, though they're still paying attention and you don't want to be seen by them.
Civilians don't perform the search when waking up. Instead, they will flee to inside a building. Surprisingly, this is permanent: once a KOed civilian manages to flee inside a building, they're never coming out again. There's some potential edge case utility there if you're confident in your ability to prevent a body from being discovered for a minute or so but not confident in your ability to get the body dragged somewhere for cleaning purposes. However, note that for Badge purposes the game actually treats such a civilian as dead, surprisingly enough, so don't be thinking you'll be able to cheese non-lethal Badges that way. (... you can cheese them other ways, mind, just not this way)
Third, a point the game never explicates is that you actually get visual feedback on how close an enemy is to waking up. An unconscious enemy has three stars circling their head to start, and eventually they start disappearing. The first one disappearing is still plenty of time to escape or whatever. The second one disappearing indicates you're almost out of time. The third one disappearing immediately precedes them waking up.
Also note that an unconscious enemy will never wake up so long as their body is being carried. The timer isn't frozen, not exactly, in that if you pick up an enemy immediately after KOing them, wait a minute, and then drop the body, one star will immediately disappear and they'll wake up at the usual speed relative to that, but you don't have to worry about them waking up in someone's arms. Among other points, this means you can be patient about waiting for gaps in patrols even if you're carrying an unconscious body for some reason or another. I very much appreciate this bit of functionality, since if enemies did wake up in your people's hands, this would largely add pointless micromanagement, where a player would optimally set them down, stand behind them, and knock them out immediately after they woke up. As a bonus, it means the devs didn't have to bother to make animations and so on for 'enemy wakes up while carried and breaks loose', nor figure out what the mechanical considerations would even be. Win-win!
Unarmed
'Dying' Duration: 1.3 seconds.
Noise: 1.5
Hayato knocks the target unconscious temporarily.
"To the neck!"
Unconscious enemies are, for most purposes, effectively dead: they lie on the ground and can be carried by your people, they have zero awareness, and other enemies will be alarmed if they discover their unconscious form. The only differences of significance is that unconsciousness is temporary instead of permanent, and that you can't make unconscious bodies permanently disappear by dumping them in bushes, homes, etc. Note that you can, in fact, dump an unconscious individual in a building or bush to hide them, it's just they'll eventually wake up. (And leave the building if in a building, to be clear)
Something worth pointing out is that you can dump unconscious enemies into bottomless pits and water to kill them. Usually you'd rather just kill them directly, but there are missions where this information can be useful to have, especially considering Takuma has the ability to KO enemies en mass.
In most circumstances, you have no reason to perform an unarmed attack, but it's worth pointing out that Hayato's unarmed strike is quieter than his regular melee kill, and you can always move the victim elsewhere, set them down, and then stab them. As such, if you're finding you can't quite stab someone to death solely because someone else is close enough to hear the kill, consider having Hayato knock out the individual to get started.
It's also worth pointing out that while most of your other characters have access to an unarmed attack, Hayato is actually unique for producing slightly less noise with his unarmed attack. As such, if you're trying to KO someone who is uncomfortably close to another enemy, Hayato may make that possible to do stealthily where another character ends up being caught.
Anyway, returning to that 'lethal is usually better' thing, let's get a bit more into mechanics. First of all, there's no such thing as 'accidental unconsciousness'. That is, there are ways to kill enemies where the body being discovered or even the death being witnessed won't cause enemies to freak out and call in reinforcements, whereas no matter how you cause an enemy to be unconscious their body being discovered will lead to the alarm being raised. It will take longer than if a corpse is discovered -a corpse provokes an alarm response the instant it's properly sighted, where an unconscious body being spotted results in the spotter approaching, and only raising the alarm once they've finished waking the individual up- but that's about it.
Second is the consideration of how enemies react to waking up from unconsciousness. Most enemies will get up and enter a semi-alert state, searching randomly around their location, spotting your people more readily, and saying things like, "I know you're here." If nothing gets their attention during this search, they'll eventually decide nothing suspicious is going on and return to their post or patrol route if at all possible. If they can't make their way back to their post or patrol route (Such as because you threw them down a cliff to somewhere with no walkable path back to their post or patrol route), they'll eventually sit down, though they're still paying attention and you don't want to be seen by them.
Civilians don't perform the search when waking up. Instead, they will flee to inside a building. Surprisingly, this is permanent: once a KOed civilian manages to flee inside a building, they're never coming out again. There's some potential edge case utility there if you're confident in your ability to prevent a body from being discovered for a minute or so but not confident in your ability to get the body dragged somewhere for cleaning purposes. However, note that for Badge purposes the game actually treats such a civilian as dead, surprisingly enough, so don't be thinking you'll be able to cheese non-lethal Badges that way. (... you can cheese them other ways, mind, just not this way)
Third, a point the game never explicates is that you actually get visual feedback on how close an enemy is to waking up. An unconscious enemy has three stars circling their head to start, and eventually they start disappearing. The first one disappearing is still plenty of time to escape or whatever. The second one disappearing indicates you're almost out of time. The third one disappearing immediately precedes them waking up.
Also note that an unconscious enemy will never wake up so long as their body is being carried. The timer isn't frozen, not exactly, in that if you pick up an enemy immediately after KOing them, wait a minute, and then drop the body, one star will immediately disappear and they'll wake up at the usual speed relative to that, but you don't have to worry about them waking up in someone's arms. Among other points, this means you can be patient about waiting for gaps in patrols even if you're carrying an unconscious body for some reason or another. I very much appreciate this bit of functionality, since if enemies did wake up in your people's hands, this would largely add pointless micromanagement, where a player would optimally set them down, stand behind them, and knock them out immediately after they woke up. As a bonus, it means the devs didn't have to bother to make animations and so on for 'enemy wakes up while carried and breaks loose', nor figure out what the mechanical considerations would even be. Win-win!
It's kind of unfortunate so much effort went into the unconsciousness mechanics and then the incentives are heavily biased toward 'never KO people unless a mission objective or Badge mandates nonlethal action'. It kind of makes me want a Shadow Tactics-esque game where KOing is more central: that could be an interesting exploration of this well-developed system whose current state is such that a player should mostly ignore it. Not that I think the current model is a serious mistake or anything, mind, just one of those kind of awkward things that happens in video games, same as how Game Over screens have to be made even for games where 90% of players will never see them.
Drop Attack
Any location Hayato can jump down to is a location he may potentially perform a drop attack to if an enemy is standing there, landing on them and attacking as one action.
"Death from above."
I'm not sure the exact parameters on this attack, but it's notably faster than the regular melee attacks. I think it might be quieter as well, but I'm not entirely sure and whether it is or not it's certainly not a drastic difference in sound radius.
Also, a sub-note to drop attacks that the game doesn't tutorial you on and indeed I learned of it via discovering the above icon in the files, but you can perform a nonlethal version of the drop attack by manually switching to Unarmed before targeting an enemy. Killing is usually the better option, but for one thing there are levels with a Badge for finishing the level without unnecessary killing. You may find such challenges much simpler if you know about the nonlethal drop attack.
Drop Attacks themselves are of course fun and cool, but dependent on access to high ground you can jump down from to a victim down below. Such conditions overall become rarer as the game progresses, and the whole thing isn't very deep in terms of replayability and whatnot: basically, either the devs gave you a flashy solution to a specific enemy and you should probably take advantage, or they didn't and you can't do it. (Or more accurately if you can do it anyway, it's not worth the bother of pulling a Guard to somewhere you can jump down from) I like that Drop Attacks exist, but I don't have a ton to say about them and they're one of the more boring mechanics in practice.
A non-obvious point is that you can, in fact, set up a Shadow Mode drop attack even though it's a contextual action. The game is actually very nice about this: the Shadow Mode assignment will not go away just because the victim moves out of Drop Attack range, and in fact the game will continuously show you exactly where Hayato will be jumping from to perform the Drop Attack at any given moment. This means you can assign a Shadow Mode Drop Attack, then watch where the jump line moves as the victim patrols about, and then move Hayato to catch them in whatever part of their patrol you want to catch them in. (That's physically possible to do so, obviously) This makes it really easy to time Drop Attacks, much easier than you might intuitively expect.
The one snag in this regard is that you can't assign such a Shadow Mode order unless the victim is, in fact, currently in a position for a drop attack to be possible. This makes it harder to do things like bait enemies to a specific position and then drop attack them with good timing. Fortunately, the game never expects you to try to do so; generally if an enemy is intended to be resolvable with a drop attack, they'll spend all their time in reach for such, or reliably patrol such that the option is intermittently available. If you're trying to get fancy with such a resolution to such a situation... there's another way to handle the situation, which is probably easier and all-around better. Even if you're Badge-hunting. So this flaw is only a mild flaw, the kind of thing it would be nice if a sequel were to address but that honestly isn't important.
Also, I should explicitly point out that trying to do this to a Samurai who isn't Stunned will result in them killing Hayato and netting you a Game Over. They actually have a unique animation for this! It's cool! And probably basically no one has ever seen it.
Shuriken
Death Duration: 4 seconds.
Noise: 6
Range: 12
Hayato kills a target at a distance. Hayato only carries one Shuriken, and must retrieve the thrown Shuriken if he wants to throw again. Samurai are not killed, and instead are provoked to search for a time.
"I never miss."
Two important wrinkles to keep in mind: firstly, the Shuriken's noise is centered exclusively on the target. Throwing the Shuriken from right beside an enemy will not alert that enemy. Throwing a Shuriken at someone in the back of a patrol group will alert the other patrollers. I'll come back to this later in more detail.
Second, the Shuriken is particularly strongly affected by the mechanics of enemy death duration, which is something the game does a somewhat poor job of explaining to the player. Thing is, dead enemies are different from dying enemies; a corpse will alert enemies who see it, but corpse visibility is identical to a crouched player character's level of visibility, which is to say enemies won't see it just because it enters their viewcone at all and in particular they'll never notice a body that's on the other side of bushes and similar partial cover or is up on higher ground relative to their own position. They must get close, with their view unobstructed.
Dying enemies, meanwhile, are fully visible out to the maximum distance, just like one of your characters standing, and of course enemies are always alarmed to see one of their own dying.
This distinction is easy to overlook and also not necessarily particularly important when you have Hayato stabbing enemies to death: since he stands up as part of the attack, it's obvious that he is visible for the duration of the attack, and if you're trying to grab the body and hide it then Hayato will once again be standing and visible to enemies, and so in both cases you'll end up alerting enemies from the maximum distance regardless. It's entirely possible to get through multiple missions without realizing enemy corpses are actually less visible than dying enemies, in fact.
For the Shuriken, however, the mechanics that obscure and reduce the relevancy of this distinction don't apply, and it's important to understand the distinction due to the Shuriken's extremely long death duration. Due to it coming out nearly instantly, at a distance, it's tempting to try to chuck it at an enemy in a brief period when no one is looking at them, and in actuality this will invariably result in the alarm being sounded. Nonetheless, if an enemy is positioned behind an obstruction, up high ground, or conveniently inside a bush, and you have confidence no one will look at them for an extended duration... then tossing the Shuriken is actually a very safe thing to do.
This is one of the game's rare slip-ups, and probably the worst one, as it can easily ingrain a player with the notion that bodies must be cleaned up as fast as possible. That's certainly a safe axiom to hold yourself to, broadly speaking, but in cases where a body is actually going to be well-hidden and reaching it and then hiding it much more risky than leaving it alone... whoops, the game has accidentally mis-taught you. It's particularly important for how it influences the player's expectations about other ranged attacks -I'll get into that more as soon as we get to such a one.
Anyway, it's also worth noting that the Shuriken is hugely useful in dark missions. Normally the Shuriken's throw range is shorter than the inner portion of the enemy viewcone, enough so that Hayato will be spotted before he makes the throw bar a well-timed run, forcing you to sneak up behind or use high ground or cover to make an approach from the front feasible, particularly when multiple enemies are looking at the same general area. In dark missions, the Shuriken's range is well beyond enemy inner viewcones, making it easy to kill semi-isolated enemies with impunity even if they have their back against a wall or the like. Conveniently, Hayato goes on every dark mission, letting you really leverage this strength.
Also, to be clear: Hayato isn't just bragging when he says he never misses. As far as I'm aware, the game's mechanics are set up so that a toss is a hit is a kill. There's a reason I used that line as the quote!
It's also important to emphasize that the game doesn't do anything to prevent you from screwing yourself over regarding a target's position. Most enemies on most maps are possible to reach the location of, but there are a handful of enemies in high locations it's completely impossible to reach, and it's very common for enemies to be placed in inconvenient locations. You wouldn't want to toss the Shuriken somewhere only to realize the Shuriken would make it a lot easier to clear a path to where you tossed it!
Indeed, the Shuriken is a more niche tool than you might first expect. Generally, if you can toss the Shuriken and then retrieve it in short order, you can arrange a melee kill on the same target, with the melee kill being faster (Thus, you need smaller windows to slip the kill in between enemies paying attention), immediately putting you in a position to move the body if necessary, and just being cognitively simpler. The Shuriken is unmatched when, for example, you can get within tossing range of a Strawhat by using cover, with no feasible way to sneak around them and no enemies having line of sight to them. It's also very useful if you can properly plan ahead, letting you wipe out a key enemy on high ground to simplify a sequence if you can successfully determine you won't need the Shuriken again until it's time to retrieve it.
But overall Hayato is, quite often, better off stabbing people, or jumping on them from above.
Shuriken
Death Duration: 4 seconds.
Noise: 6
Range: 12
Hayato kills a target at a distance. Hayato only carries one Shuriken, and must retrieve the thrown Shuriken if he wants to throw again. Samurai are not killed, and instead are provoked to search for a time.
"I never miss."
Two important wrinkles to keep in mind: firstly, the Shuriken's noise is centered exclusively on the target. Throwing the Shuriken from right beside an enemy will not alert that enemy. Throwing a Shuriken at someone in the back of a patrol group will alert the other patrollers. I'll come back to this later in more detail.
Second, the Shuriken is particularly strongly affected by the mechanics of enemy death duration, which is something the game does a somewhat poor job of explaining to the player. Thing is, dead enemies are different from dying enemies; a corpse will alert enemies who see it, but corpse visibility is identical to a crouched player character's level of visibility, which is to say enemies won't see it just because it enters their viewcone at all and in particular they'll never notice a body that's on the other side of bushes and similar partial cover or is up on higher ground relative to their own position. They must get close, with their view unobstructed.
Dying enemies, meanwhile, are fully visible out to the maximum distance, just like one of your characters standing, and of course enemies are always alarmed to see one of their own dying.
This distinction is easy to overlook and also not necessarily particularly important when you have Hayato stabbing enemies to death: since he stands up as part of the attack, it's obvious that he is visible for the duration of the attack, and if you're trying to grab the body and hide it then Hayato will once again be standing and visible to enemies, and so in both cases you'll end up alerting enemies from the maximum distance regardless. It's entirely possible to get through multiple missions without realizing enemy corpses are actually less visible than dying enemies, in fact.
For the Shuriken, however, the mechanics that obscure and reduce the relevancy of this distinction don't apply, and it's important to understand the distinction due to the Shuriken's extremely long death duration. Due to it coming out nearly instantly, at a distance, it's tempting to try to chuck it at an enemy in a brief period when no one is looking at them, and in actuality this will invariably result in the alarm being sounded. Nonetheless, if an enemy is positioned behind an obstruction, up high ground, or conveniently inside a bush, and you have confidence no one will look at them for an extended duration... then tossing the Shuriken is actually a very safe thing to do.
This is one of the game's rare slip-ups, and probably the worst one, as it can easily ingrain a player with the notion that bodies must be cleaned up as fast as possible. That's certainly a safe axiom to hold yourself to, broadly speaking, but in cases where a body is actually going to be well-hidden and reaching it and then hiding it much more risky than leaving it alone... whoops, the game has accidentally mis-taught you. It's particularly important for how it influences the player's expectations about other ranged attacks -I'll get into that more as soon as we get to such a one.
Anyway, it's also worth noting that the Shuriken is hugely useful in dark missions. Normally the Shuriken's throw range is shorter than the inner portion of the enemy viewcone, enough so that Hayato will be spotted before he makes the throw bar a well-timed run, forcing you to sneak up behind or use high ground or cover to make an approach from the front feasible, particularly when multiple enemies are looking at the same general area. In dark missions, the Shuriken's range is well beyond enemy inner viewcones, making it easy to kill semi-isolated enemies with impunity even if they have their back against a wall or the like. Conveniently, Hayato goes on every dark mission, letting you really leverage this strength.
Also, to be clear: Hayato isn't just bragging when he says he never misses. As far as I'm aware, the game's mechanics are set up so that a toss is a hit is a kill. There's a reason I used that line as the quote!
It's also important to emphasize that the game doesn't do anything to prevent you from screwing yourself over regarding a target's position. Most enemies on most maps are possible to reach the location of, but there are a handful of enemies in high locations it's completely impossible to reach, and it's very common for enemies to be placed in inconvenient locations. You wouldn't want to toss the Shuriken somewhere only to realize the Shuriken would make it a lot easier to clear a path to where you tossed it!
Indeed, the Shuriken is a more niche tool than you might first expect. Generally, if you can toss the Shuriken and then retrieve it in short order, you can arrange a melee kill on the same target, with the melee kill being faster (Thus, you need smaller windows to slip the kill in between enemies paying attention), immediately putting you in a position to move the body if necessary, and just being cognitively simpler. The Shuriken is unmatched when, for example, you can get within tossing range of a Strawhat by using cover, with no feasible way to sneak around them and no enemies having line of sight to them. It's also very useful if you can properly plan ahead, letting you wipe out a key enemy on high ground to simplify a sequence if you can successfully determine you won't need the Shuriken again until it's time to retrieve it.
But overall Hayato is, quite often, better off stabbing people, or jumping on them from above.
That said, the Shuriken is the other big reason Hayato is much better at 'panic-fixing' than other characters. He can stab someone, you notice a nearby enemy is going to discover them, and potentially toss his Shuriken and kill them before an alarm can be raised. That kind of thing.
Also noteworthy is that with good reflexes or good use of Shadow Mode, the Shuriken lets Hayato kill two enemies close together with no opportunity for an alarm to be raised. If you can sneak Hayato up directly behind an enemy unseen, he can toss the Shuriken at a different nearby enemy and immediately stab the individual he's lurking behind before they can properly react to their buddy ending up with the Shuriken in their throat. Combined with having another character also ready to stab, you can even take out three-enemy patrols with little noise, no resource expenditure, and no need for Mugen to be present. This is a good example of the game rewarding a player for their growing understanding of the game: initially, a first-time player is likely to think two-enemy patrols absolutely demand two characters cooperate or an area-of-effect ability be employed, and by extension that a three-enemy patrol is impossible to kill quietly if you have exactly two characters and no area-of-effect attacks. (ie any two of Hayato, Yuki, and Aiko, with Takuma being effectively an empty slot if he's used up all his limited-use abilities) Early missions are designed to be completely possible to complete undetected even while operating on such rubrics, too, helping reinforce the impression this is how the game works.
But once you can pull off this trick reliably, Hayato's presence suddenly lets you quietly take out one more individual than your team size would suggest, and with much less finickyness than you might expect. It's very satisfying going back to early missions and finding what was once a complicated tightrope of a challenge can be resolved much more easily than you thought possible in your first pass.
Samurai are also an interesting exception. The game's random loading screen hints forewarn you that Shuriken are ineffectual against Samurai, but it does so in a misleading way, claiming they're immune. This is not quite accurate; Hayato is allowed to target Samurai with Shuriken, and it's actually occasionally useful to do so, as Samurai respond to a Shuriken hitting them by going into a semi-alert state in which they search for Hayato, starting out by going directly to wherever he made the throw from and then searching randomly around that position until they either lose interest or find something suspicious. This is not a proper alarm, and indeed even if other enemies witness the Samurai being hit by the Shuriken they won't raise the alarm themselves. As Samurai cannot be pulled out of position by normal distraction techniques outside of the unreliable edge case of a mixed patrol, this utility is very valuable, significantly simplifying certain cases of a Samurai who is watched by other enemies.
This utility is completely unique to Shuriken as well, as far as character abilities goes.
Just remember to retrieve the Shuriken, not to mention ideally time the hit so the Shuriken is readily retrievable -it specifically lands at the Samurai's feet and stays there as they move away, which makes it very predictable where it'll be. Ideally you don't hit the Samurai while they're standing in the inner portion of another enemy's viewcone, is the big thing.
Samurai are also an interesting exception. The game's random loading screen hints forewarn you that Shuriken are ineffectual against Samurai, but it does so in a misleading way, claiming they're immune. This is not quite accurate; Hayato is allowed to target Samurai with Shuriken, and it's actually occasionally useful to do so, as Samurai respond to a Shuriken hitting them by going into a semi-alert state in which they search for Hayato, starting out by going directly to wherever he made the throw from and then searching randomly around that position until they either lose interest or find something suspicious. This is not a proper alarm, and indeed even if other enemies witness the Samurai being hit by the Shuriken they won't raise the alarm themselves. As Samurai cannot be pulled out of position by normal distraction techniques outside of the unreliable edge case of a mixed patrol, this utility is very valuable, significantly simplifying certain cases of a Samurai who is watched by other enemies.
This utility is completely unique to Shuriken as well, as far as character abilities goes.
Just remember to retrieve the Shuriken, not to mention ideally time the hit so the Shuriken is readily retrievable -it specifically lands at the Samurai's feet and stays there as they move away, which makes it very predictable where it'll be. Ideally you don't hit the Samurai while they're standing in the inner portion of another enemy's viewcone, is the big thing.
Oh, and a nice thing: Hayato just automatically picks up the Shuriken as a free action if he gets close to it after it's been tossed, no need to specifically order him to pick it up. He can in fact retrieve the Shuriken immediately even if it's currently stuck in a victim's throat!
Throw Rock
Noise: 5
Range: 12
Duration: 5 seconds.
Cooldown: 6 seconds.
Hayato throws a rock, briefly causing enemies who heard the rock to look at its impact point. Can also be thrown at oxen, causing them to kick behind them. This will kill any enemy, even a Samurai, who is standing just behind the oxen, and the death will be treated by enemies as an accident, meaning they won't raise an alarm if they find the body, even if they don't actually witness the cause of death.
"Let's make some noise."
'Duration' in this case is how long regular Guards will stare at the rock's impact point. Strawhats, Samurai, and some special characters will only be distracted for a second or so, making it much less useful against them, though note that's still enough time to potentially have someone run past while they're looking away.
The oxen mechanic only crops up in a few missions, and the game does a poor job of trying to hint at the mechanic. The first mission it crops up there's dialogue alluding to this mechanic, but it's not made clear that it's the rock-throwing ability you use to trigger it. (And Yuki's dialogue makes it sound more like you're supposed to use a more harmful effect on oxen) If you know about the mechanic properly, it can be very powerful when it's relevant, with the potential to kill Samurai without spending ammunition being particularly amazing, so it's frustrating how poor a job the game does of communicating the way to trigger it. If it was something you were intended to discover organically, that'd be a whole different story, but the game does try to spell it out, it just... does it poorly.
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Next time, we look at the playable character we meet fourth in-game: Yuki.
See you then.
Throw Rock
Noise: 5
Range: 12
Duration: 5 seconds.
Cooldown: 6 seconds.
Hayato throws a rock, briefly causing enemies who heard the rock to look at its impact point. Can also be thrown at oxen, causing them to kick behind them. This will kill any enemy, even a Samurai, who is standing just behind the oxen, and the death will be treated by enemies as an accident, meaning they won't raise an alarm if they find the body, even if they don't actually witness the cause of death.
"Let's make some noise."
'Duration' in this case is how long regular Guards will stare at the rock's impact point. Strawhats, Samurai, and some special characters will only be distracted for a second or so, making it much less useful against them, though note that's still enough time to potentially have someone run past while they're looking away.
The oxen mechanic only crops up in a few missions, and the game does a poor job of trying to hint at the mechanic. The first mission it crops up there's dialogue alluding to this mechanic, but it's not made clear that it's the rock-throwing ability you use to trigger it. (And Yuki's dialogue makes it sound more like you're supposed to use a more harmful effect on oxen) If you know about the mechanic properly, it can be very powerful when it's relevant, with the potential to kill Samurai without spending ammunition being particularly amazing, so it's frustrating how poor a job the game does of communicating the way to trigger it. If it was something you were intended to discover organically, that'd be a whole different story, but the game does try to spell it out, it just... does it poorly.
Anyway, Throw Rock is our first example of a primarily stealth-focused ability. It can be used to make an enemy look the wrong way before running up to them and killing them (In fact, this is how the game introduces it to you), but most of its potential lies in letting you move through areas undetected by getting viewcones angled away from ground you'd like to pass through. This can be used to simply bypass Guards entirely, to open a path to let you get one or more characters to a key enemy who is difficult to reach but otherwise poorly-covered by their fellows, to pull multiple viewcones off a target you'd like to take out but who is constantly watched by multiple enemies, and of course can be used to accomplish a combination of such tasks.
It gets even more useful in dark missions and in conjunction with Mugen, as in both cases you can throw a rock to pull enemy attention toward an object that, once they've noticed it, they'll leave their post to approach. (In the case of dark missions, putting out a torch will cause enemies to approach it so they can relight it) There's other tools on other characters to manipulate enemy attention, but Throw Rock is the safest to experiment with, where the worst that happens is generally that you wasted a few seconds on the experiment not really doing anything. Other distractions can cause more serious problems if you use them wrong.
Note that dropping Throw Rock on an enemy is pretty useless. Enemies don't react like they got bonked on the head by a big rock: they just turn to face the center point, same as always. The oxen thing is also the only contextual interaction you can do with Throw Rock: you might expect to be able to knock an object over or something with it, but nah.
Also note that Throw Rock is basically invisible to enemies: Hayato can crouch in a bush right in front of an enemy and lob a rock right behind them, and they won't go 'hey, a rock just went shooting up out of that bush! That's suspicious!' So don't worry about being spotted by virtue of using it.
Matchlock
Death Duration: 1 second.
Noise: 8
Range: 17
Cooldown: 3 seconds.
Hayato kills an enemy with his wrist-mounted matchlock pistol. Samurai will be merely Stunned for several seconds, but can be killed with a melee attack while Stunned. Hayato normally starts with three shots and cannot acquire any more within a mission unless an ammo crate is present.
"Pistol, ready."
Hayato doesn't actually have this skill in the first few missions, as it's justified by a specific plotpoint later in the game. Past that point, Hayato consistently has at least potential access to it in each mission. It's also a standard capability: only one character doesn't have Matchlock per se, and they still have a clear equivalent in the same slot.
Anyway, the Matchlock. At a glance, it's easy to think its primary merit over the Shuriken is its almost 50% greater range, but while that is relevant things are actually a bit more stacked in the Matchlock's favor.
First of all, that brief death duration: I commented that the Shuriken cannot be used to kill someone in a brief period when no one is looking at them to avoid the alarm being raised. The Matchlock can, as 1 second is fast enough that a well-timed shot may have the enemy finish dying before the viewcone swings back at all, and even if someone does briefly see the dying enemy... they may finish dying before the enemy that can see them realizes something is wrong. This means the Matchlock can be used to disentangle complicated cases of multiple enemies mutually covering each other from a distance, especially in conjunction with other party member abilities we'll get to as we get to them, where the Shuriken wouldn't be a solution.
Second, where the Shuriken's noise is centered on its target, the Matchlock's noise is centered on Hayato. This means the Matchlock can be used to kill an enemy unnoticed even when someone else is actually fairly close to them, so long as they either never have vision on where your victim falls or you have a plan for getting the corpse moved before they can see it.
And of course third you don't need to worry about retrieving your shot for future use, giving the Matchlock an edge at picking off an enemy whose location is inconvenient to access.
You should still preferentially use the Shuriken over Hayato's Matchlock wherever practicable, but this isn't by virtue of the Shuriken being superior, it's by virtue of the Shuriken being unlimited-use and the Matchlock not.
Note that the Matchlock will only ever Stun Samurai. You might expect a follow-up shot to kill them, but no, it'll just refresh the Stun. Don't waste ammo trying. Also note that firing the Matchlock at a Samurai only halves their viewcone's distance, which is particularly important because the Samurai will also whirl to face their shooter and can still raise the alarm if they see someone. (Which is pretty silly and game-y, since you'd think they'd raise the alarm the instant they were shot if they were coherent enough to raise the alarm at all, but whatever) This is further exacerbated by the non-obvious point that for some reason firing the Matchlock causes Hayato to be temporarily considered standing, even though his animation won't reflect this change if you have him crouching and the game never alludes to such a mechanic; this means that close-range shots on a Samurai with the Matchlock will reliably get an alarm raised. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your target isn't inside the sound radius: you actually need to be slightly farther than that, but it's a close enough rubric.
Matchlock
Death Duration: 1 second.
Noise: 8
Range: 17
Cooldown: 3 seconds.
Hayato kills an enemy with his wrist-mounted matchlock pistol. Samurai will be merely Stunned for several seconds, but can be killed with a melee attack while Stunned. Hayato normally starts with three shots and cannot acquire any more within a mission unless an ammo crate is present.
"Pistol, ready."
Hayato doesn't actually have this skill in the first few missions, as it's justified by a specific plotpoint later in the game. Past that point, Hayato consistently has at least potential access to it in each mission. It's also a standard capability: only one character doesn't have Matchlock per se, and they still have a clear equivalent in the same slot.
Anyway, the Matchlock. At a glance, it's easy to think its primary merit over the Shuriken is its almost 50% greater range, but while that is relevant things are actually a bit more stacked in the Matchlock's favor.
First of all, that brief death duration: I commented that the Shuriken cannot be used to kill someone in a brief period when no one is looking at them to avoid the alarm being raised. The Matchlock can, as 1 second is fast enough that a well-timed shot may have the enemy finish dying before the viewcone swings back at all, and even if someone does briefly see the dying enemy... they may finish dying before the enemy that can see them realizes something is wrong. This means the Matchlock can be used to disentangle complicated cases of multiple enemies mutually covering each other from a distance, especially in conjunction with other party member abilities we'll get to as we get to them, where the Shuriken wouldn't be a solution.
Second, where the Shuriken's noise is centered on its target, the Matchlock's noise is centered on Hayato. This means the Matchlock can be used to kill an enemy unnoticed even when someone else is actually fairly close to them, so long as they either never have vision on where your victim falls or you have a plan for getting the corpse moved before they can see it.
And of course third you don't need to worry about retrieving your shot for future use, giving the Matchlock an edge at picking off an enemy whose location is inconvenient to access.
You should still preferentially use the Shuriken over Hayato's Matchlock wherever practicable, but this isn't by virtue of the Shuriken being superior, it's by virtue of the Shuriken being unlimited-use and the Matchlock not.
Note that the Matchlock will only ever Stun Samurai. You might expect a follow-up shot to kill them, but no, it'll just refresh the Stun. Don't waste ammo trying. Also note that firing the Matchlock at a Samurai only halves their viewcone's distance, which is particularly important because the Samurai will also whirl to face their shooter and can still raise the alarm if they see someone. (Which is pretty silly and game-y, since you'd think they'd raise the alarm the instant they were shot if they were coherent enough to raise the alarm at all, but whatever) This is further exacerbated by the non-obvious point that for some reason firing the Matchlock causes Hayato to be temporarily considered standing, even though his animation won't reflect this change if you have him crouching and the game never alludes to such a mechanic; this means that close-range shots on a Samurai with the Matchlock will reliably get an alarm raised. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your target isn't inside the sound radius: you actually need to be slightly farther than that, but it's a close enough rubric.
The actual main use of the Matchlock is in fact to set up kills on Samurai, preferably in conjunction with Aiko or Yuki. You shouldn't ignore its potential utility for picking off non-Samurai, but especially when you're doing a mission for the first time it's generally best to try to hold onto Matchlock uses for taking out Samurai. You wouldn't want to find yourself out of ammo and facing a Samurai who you can't kill now and is in the way, after all.
Heal
Hayato restores up to 3 missing HP to himself or a single adjacent ally. One charge per mission, with any overhealing wasted.
"I have bandages."
Healing is even more universal than the Matchlock, found on literally every character, and unlike the Matchlock it's not plot-gated.
It's also essentially completely useless if you're playing the game properly. If your characters are taking damage, this almost always means the alarm has been raised and you really ought to just load your last quicksave so you don't have to deal with the redshirts. On occasion an enemy will detect one of my people and take a shot without sounding the alarm right before I kill them, but this is uncommon. (And clearly not intended behavior) Furthermore, most of your characters have exactly 4 HP (Unless you're playing on Hardcore, admittedly), and enemies do 1 damage by default. Even if you're regularly a little sloppy and just accept a certain amount of redshirt generation and damage, it's entirely possible you still won't need to heal anyone within a mission!
To be honest, I suspect Shadow Tactics was conceptualized a bit differently at some point. There's a few different things that suggest this, such as how the tutorial for Strawhats claims they'll send Guards to investigate suspicious stuff instead of going themselves and this absolutely does not happen, so I suspect at some point the assumption was more that a player actually would expect to take a certain amount of damage even with good play, at which point widespread healing would've been actually useful. But in the actual final product? Healing is honestly pretty strange to include in the game at all, let alone to have it so widespread.
Heal
Hayato restores up to 3 missing HP to himself or a single adjacent ally. One charge per mission, with any overhealing wasted.
"I have bandages."
Healing is even more universal than the Matchlock, found on literally every character, and unlike the Matchlock it's not plot-gated.
It's also essentially completely useless if you're playing the game properly. If your characters are taking damage, this almost always means the alarm has been raised and you really ought to just load your last quicksave so you don't have to deal with the redshirts. On occasion an enemy will detect one of my people and take a shot without sounding the alarm right before I kill them, but this is uncommon. (And clearly not intended behavior) Furthermore, most of your characters have exactly 4 HP (Unless you're playing on Hardcore, admittedly), and enemies do 1 damage by default. Even if you're regularly a little sloppy and just accept a certain amount of redshirt generation and damage, it's entirely possible you still won't need to heal anyone within a mission!
To be honest, I suspect Shadow Tactics was conceptualized a bit differently at some point. There's a few different things that suggest this, such as how the tutorial for Strawhats claims they'll send Guards to investigate suspicious stuff instead of going themselves and this absolutely does not happen, so I suspect at some point the assumption was more that a player actually would expect to take a certain amount of damage even with good play, at which point widespread healing would've been actually useful. But in the actual final product? Healing is honestly pretty strange to include in the game at all, let alone to have it so widespread.
Also note that while I say 'one charge per mission', this is not strictly true; there are cases where a character starts with no healing charge at all, and if they don't start with a healing charge they'll never gain one. Furthermore, if we include Aiko's Choice, it's willing to both do this zero healing charges thing but also to give characters two healing charges.
But one charge is what happens in the majority of cases, and there's no ability to find charges mid-mission.
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Narratively, Hayato is the least interesting character in the game.
Note that he's not actually a bad character. He's got an actual personality, one that fits his job and role in the story, and he's got plenty of good, enjoyable dialogue. He has something of a character arc, even if it's low-key and one particular piece of it failed to sell me on it. His voice actor does an excellent job of delivering pretty much every single line.
But compared to the other characters in the story,, who range from 'really good' to 'amazing'? Hayato being competently-executed still puts him firmly in the position of 'least interesting'.
What is interesting about him is actually much more meta. Hayato, in the earliest stages of the story, hits all the notes of a Generic (Male) Video Game Protagonist: no personal stakes in the story's events, low affect, positioned first by basically every interface element, given a profile of capabilities that is the single most common one (His movement profile, specifically), and repeatedly positioned as a leader with little justification or explanation.
But then the game just... stops all that.
Not literally all of it -it's not like his mechanical profile changes- but the story derails hard from how this non-character archetype usually goes. Generic Male Video Game Protagonists -hereon shortened to GMVGPs- normally get increasingly praised by the narrative for how competent and effectual they are, with anyone else on their side getting ignored, often even when the GMVGP is actually much less impressive by any objective metric than the people around them; Hayato, instead, stops getting played up except as part of the group being labeled impressive. Similarly, such characters normally have the world increasingly contort itself so the burden of Important Decisions is laid upon them, which often ends up dumb and uninteresting due to the aforementioned tendency to have absolutely no stakes in anything going on in the story; Hayato instead increasingly fades into the background while other characters make significant decisions, a fact that makes perfect sense in the context of Hayato being introduced as a literal mercenary who has no particular loyalty to his employers or indeed to the country he lives in as a whole.
Even his low affect gets hit with this, with it being a plotpoint late in the game that he's struggling to control his emotions while another character -a woman, it should be noted, which is doubly unusual for this whole thing- is perfectly able to appear calm and Hayato is struggling to understand why. This can be argued as not very unusual, in that there are plenty of stories with a male protagonist who cries or otherwise significantly displays emotion, but usually when a male protagonist character is having a big cry the story is attempting to attribute this outcome to the magnitude of the event provoking it: that a typical generic male protagonist crying when someone dies is often not allowed to be 'crying when someone you care about dies is a normal and reasonable response', but rather has to be played up as 'the individual who died was super special and important, and the male protagonist would most certainly not have cried over mere mortal concerns like losing a parent'. Shadow Tactics doesn't do anything like this with Hayato. Instead, he's caught off guard by his emotions because he's never gotten attached to anything before, and didn't realize he was even capable of caring to this degree.
Among other points, this tells us that his low affect in the early game isn't due to some intrinsic quality, but rather is simply that his life has, for various reasons, worked out to him not ending up in a position to care much about most things. He didn't show much emotion because he had little reason to show emotion.
That's a very, very different presentation and explanation than the usual.
This is one of many reasons why I went into Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun with fairly low expectations, and unexpectedly found myself really liking it. A typical GMVGP is this bizarre, frustrating non-character who exists to be primarily an emotional vehicle for an assumed-male player, and frequently a sizable fraction of the story is spent on propping up their apparently-presumed-to-be-fragile ego, generally with an extremely deleterious effect on the actual story because their actions are inorganic and the amount of praise they draw from characters in-universe makes little or no sense. They furthermore often are harmful to the gameplay, particularly in a game like Shadow Tactics where you're not dealing with a single player-aligned entity, due to the gameplay often being distorted to play them up and make them seem 'cooler' and more special, generally at the expense of characters whose gameplay is much more interesting.
Hayato doesn't end up doing those things, and rapidly evolves into a believable and organic individual with a certain amount of superficial overlap with a GMVGP, while the other characters are allowed the room they need to stretch their legs, both as narrative characters and as gameplay pieces.
Even better, Hayato doesn't go the opposite direction: often when a story deliberately eschews the GMVGP, they feel the need to include a GMVGP lookalike for the express purpose of making it clear how much they dislike the GMVGP. Gameplay-wise, this usually means the player is burdened with a boring gameplay piece that's also ineffectual, and narratively such characters are usually not even particularly entertaining as an illustration of how dull such characters are, which isn't exactly a surprise given the fundamental problem is that they are boring. It's not impossible to satirize something that's boring in an entertaining manner, but it's a lot harder than satirizing something that's stupid-but-entertaining.
Hayato, meanwhile, is a plenty solid gameplay piece, and while he's the least interesting character he's got enough to be reasonably compelling.
The whole thing is very striking and I'm genuinely curious as to what in the design process led to this. It seems most likely that the team genuinely intended for Hayato to be a GMVGP during initial development -among other things, when looking at the files several files related to him lack a prefix to distinguish them from equivalent files related to other characters, making it clear the developers were conceptualizing him as something of a default- but then that's not the outcome we got. Did they just organically develop the game and without even really realizing it averted those trends? Or were there people on the team who actually recognized how toxic that trend is and deliberately push to avoid it? Something in between?
Whatever the case, the final result is much appreciated.
On a more minor note, I also like how Hayato has the basic arc of 'don't be such a loner!', but handles it differently from what I'm used to seeing: often such arcs come across like 'if you're not a wild party animal literally unable to live without continuous human contact, you're a defective subhuman who needs correction and/or extermination as soon as possible' due to how aggressively extreme they are and how often loner characters are not allowed to exist in a given such narrative without undergoing such an arc, but in Hayato's case the story ends on the note of him still being a loner, just with a few people he has some fondness for now.
-------------------------------------------
Narratively, Hayato is the least interesting character in the game.
Note that he's not actually a bad character. He's got an actual personality, one that fits his job and role in the story, and he's got plenty of good, enjoyable dialogue. He has something of a character arc, even if it's low-key and one particular piece of it failed to sell me on it. His voice actor does an excellent job of delivering pretty much every single line.
But compared to the other characters in the story,, who range from 'really good' to 'amazing'? Hayato being competently-executed still puts him firmly in the position of 'least interesting'.
What is interesting about him is actually much more meta. Hayato, in the earliest stages of the story, hits all the notes of a Generic (Male) Video Game Protagonist: no personal stakes in the story's events, low affect, positioned first by basically every interface element, given a profile of capabilities that is the single most common one (His movement profile, specifically), and repeatedly positioned as a leader with little justification or explanation.
But then the game just... stops all that.
Not literally all of it -it's not like his mechanical profile changes- but the story derails hard from how this non-character archetype usually goes. Generic Male Video Game Protagonists -hereon shortened to GMVGPs- normally get increasingly praised by the narrative for how competent and effectual they are, with anyone else on their side getting ignored, often even when the GMVGP is actually much less impressive by any objective metric than the people around them; Hayato, instead, stops getting played up except as part of the group being labeled impressive. Similarly, such characters normally have the world increasingly contort itself so the burden of Important Decisions is laid upon them, which often ends up dumb and uninteresting due to the aforementioned tendency to have absolutely no stakes in anything going on in the story; Hayato instead increasingly fades into the background while other characters make significant decisions, a fact that makes perfect sense in the context of Hayato being introduced as a literal mercenary who has no particular loyalty to his employers or indeed to the country he lives in as a whole.
Even his low affect gets hit with this, with it being a plotpoint late in the game that he's struggling to control his emotions while another character -a woman, it should be noted, which is doubly unusual for this whole thing- is perfectly able to appear calm and Hayato is struggling to understand why. This can be argued as not very unusual, in that there are plenty of stories with a male protagonist who cries or otherwise significantly displays emotion, but usually when a male protagonist character is having a big cry the story is attempting to attribute this outcome to the magnitude of the event provoking it: that a typical generic male protagonist crying when someone dies is often not allowed to be 'crying when someone you care about dies is a normal and reasonable response', but rather has to be played up as 'the individual who died was super special and important, and the male protagonist would most certainly not have cried over mere mortal concerns like losing a parent'. Shadow Tactics doesn't do anything like this with Hayato. Instead, he's caught off guard by his emotions because he's never gotten attached to anything before, and didn't realize he was even capable of caring to this degree.
Among other points, this tells us that his low affect in the early game isn't due to some intrinsic quality, but rather is simply that his life has, for various reasons, worked out to him not ending up in a position to care much about most things. He didn't show much emotion because he had little reason to show emotion.
That's a very, very different presentation and explanation than the usual.
This is one of many reasons why I went into Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun with fairly low expectations, and unexpectedly found myself really liking it. A typical GMVGP is this bizarre, frustrating non-character who exists to be primarily an emotional vehicle for an assumed-male player, and frequently a sizable fraction of the story is spent on propping up their apparently-presumed-to-be-fragile ego, generally with an extremely deleterious effect on the actual story because their actions are inorganic and the amount of praise they draw from characters in-universe makes little or no sense. They furthermore often are harmful to the gameplay, particularly in a game like Shadow Tactics where you're not dealing with a single player-aligned entity, due to the gameplay often being distorted to play them up and make them seem 'cooler' and more special, generally at the expense of characters whose gameplay is much more interesting.
Hayato doesn't end up doing those things, and rapidly evolves into a believable and organic individual with a certain amount of superficial overlap with a GMVGP, while the other characters are allowed the room they need to stretch their legs, both as narrative characters and as gameplay pieces.
Even better, Hayato doesn't go the opposite direction: often when a story deliberately eschews the GMVGP, they feel the need to include a GMVGP lookalike for the express purpose of making it clear how much they dislike the GMVGP. Gameplay-wise, this usually means the player is burdened with a boring gameplay piece that's also ineffectual, and narratively such characters are usually not even particularly entertaining as an illustration of how dull such characters are, which isn't exactly a surprise given the fundamental problem is that they are boring. It's not impossible to satirize something that's boring in an entertaining manner, but it's a lot harder than satirizing something that's stupid-but-entertaining.
Hayato, meanwhile, is a plenty solid gameplay piece, and while he's the least interesting character he's got enough to be reasonably compelling.
The whole thing is very striking and I'm genuinely curious as to what in the design process led to this. It seems most likely that the team genuinely intended for Hayato to be a GMVGP during initial development -among other things, when looking at the files several files related to him lack a prefix to distinguish them from equivalent files related to other characters, making it clear the developers were conceptualizing him as something of a default- but then that's not the outcome we got. Did they just organically develop the game and without even really realizing it averted those trends? Or were there people on the team who actually recognized how toxic that trend is and deliberately push to avoid it? Something in between?
Whatever the case, the final result is much appreciated.
On a more minor note, I also like how Hayato has the basic arc of 'don't be such a loner!', but handles it differently from what I'm used to seeing: often such arcs come across like 'if you're not a wild party animal literally unable to live without continuous human contact, you're a defective subhuman who needs correction and/or extermination as soon as possible' due to how aggressively extreme they are and how often loner characters are not allowed to exist in a given such narrative without undergoing such an arc, but in Hayato's case the story ends on the note of him still being a loner, just with a few people he has some fondness for now.
It was a pleasant surprise for me personally.
---------------------------------------------
Next time, we look at the playable character we meet fourth in-game: Yuki.
See you then.
Big whiff of nostalgia reading those quotes :)
ReplyDeleteHayato ended up being my main character in any mission that didn't have disguised Aiko. Agile, fastest kill, and potential for double kill with the shuriken... Kind of hard to beat!
I didn't know his KO attack was more silent, makes me want to go back and try to pull off more daring stuff.
And about the matchlock pistol... I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how often I used them against something else than a samurai (except Takuma's, which is special). The game always gives you solutions that don't involve them, so even when replaying missions, I barely felt the need.
In terms of what the devs intended, I find it interesting to compare with the characters in Desperados III. Hayato gets the closest to a one-to-one copy, and the main thing they changed was that using the "shuriken" prevents you from doing proper kills, probably in an attempt to tone down the "double-kill" move (with little success). It makes me think the devs thought it was too powerful a combo in Shadow Tactics.
Yeah, the KO being quieter is easy to overlook. The game lists Noise on moves, but melee attacks are otherwise all 3 Noise, so why would you guess exactly Hayato's unarmed attack is an exception?
DeleteI use Matchlocks on non-Samurai when going for some of the Badges, and sometimes just as convenience when I know I won't need the shot later. Matchlock usage is boring, though, so I do mostly ignore it: sure, it'll disentangle X situation, but I'd rather see if I can do that some less easy way!
I suspect the devs genuinely didn't realize Hayato's Shuriken lets him do double-kills by himself and so tried to make it not doable, yeah. But yeah, throwing away Cooper's knife doesn't actually stop you, between ropes being added and Cooper being able to just grab the knife and finish them anyway. I do like that at least gives you some cause to engage with the KO system.
Small fun fact regarding the oxens: Not only can they kill your own characters but it even counts for the Nakasendo Road Badge of provoking the oxens to kill three people. So you can kill two guards with oxens and then suicide one of your own chars to get the badge just before the game over screen.
ReplyDeleteOh wow, that's hilarious.
Delete