Shadow Tactics Analysis: Yuki

Yuki is, as I alluded to last post, technically met almost last out of your 5 party members, but I tend to think of her as the second party member anyway due to how the plot and mission design is constructed, and some aspects of the code suggest to me the devs were thinking of her that way themselves, so here she is in the second spot.

Internally, she's labeled 'trapper'. She does in fact have a trap skill, so that's not terribly surprising, and the other unique piece of her kit has pretty obvious synergy with said trap. This is still interesting to me for how her characterization doesn't put that much emphasis on the trap -she's a well-rounded person with a variety of interests and skills, and in narrative terms her trap is just one expression of her broader fascination with mechanisms and drive to understand how things work. It's easy to imagine a Shadow Tactics sequel where Yuki returns and has a very different skillset, no trap present, though I suspect such won't actually happen. (Aiko's Choice as a quick story placed within the first story was already very unexpected)

Anyway, point being games with a clear mechanical focus for a character often hinge their entire personality around that mechanical focus, which both makes such characters a bit 'flat' in general and can cause problems if a sequel wants to reuse the character but doesn't want to be strictly tied to the mechanics the character had. (Such as because the devs discovered in making the game that the mechanical focus in question had problems they'd like to sidestep, or because the sequel is a very different genre) Yuki being not simply The Trap-Obsessed Person is thus a very good thing for many reasons.


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

You might intuitively expect this to be inferior to Hayato's carry behavior, but the fact that Yuki is treated as crouching when carrying a body is, if you're not speedrunning, vastly more an advantage than the slow speed is a disadvantage, allowing you to potentially kill enemies in brief windows when nobody is looking at them -such as if you distracted those enemies by having Hayato throw a rock- and then drag the corpse off while enemies have the corpse in their viewcone, a trick Hayato can't pull off. He can be the better choice in the edge case of killing someone where a patrol will turn the corner and have the victim in their close-range view immediately, but most of the time Hayato is only the better choice if the corpse isn't currently at risk of being seen but you want it cleaned up just in case (eg because it's your first time doing a mission and you're not sure whether enemies may be generated later that will pass through the area) and/or if you're doing something with tight timing, particularly something that requires Yuki be elsewhere.

If you are speedrunning, you're presumably already familiar with the map and won't waste time cleaning up bodies that you already know won't be found by enemies, so Hayato's superior body-carrying speed isn't very relevant... except in a couple of cases where carrying a body is mandatory to complete a mission, anyway.

I should point out that Yuki is also slower than Hayato at contextual body-disposal actions like dumping bodies into water: Hayato simply offloads the body he has slung over his shoulder. Yuki has to stand up, pull the body up and lay it over her shoulders, and then throw it in. This is important to keep in mind if you want Yuki to dispose of a body in an enemy viewcone, as she is in fact considered to be standing for the entirety of such an animation, even for the parts she's visually crouched in. You'll get caught if you have Yuki try to dump a body in water or down a cliff or into a building that an enemy has partial sight on.

Swim
Yuki can enter deep water, and is completely undetectable so long as she remains in water.
"Sneaky."

Yuki has a bit less ability to abuse the ability to swim than Hayato does; her skillset is better-suited to cramped conditions with lots of walls and/or significant elevation differences, while water in Shadow Tactics tends to primarily have the shore coming up in more open areas, or provide access to relatively linear paths her skills still don't stand out in.

It's not that different, as I commented with Hayato's post, but it is a difference, however small.


Agility
Yuki may jump down short cliffs without aid, hop small gaps, climb up and down ivy-coated walls, and walk tightropes.
"It is a puzzle."

This has many of the same implications -both gameplay and narrative- as with Hayato, though with the qualifier that Yuki's skillset has moments where enemies being unable to reliably follow her are frustrating.

So I'm going to take this space to talk about non-standard walking surfaces, as Yuki happens to be present for every mission they're used in and they have some odd wrinkles to them.

First is snow: people leave footprints in snow. (Aiko's Choice reuses this same mechanic for beach sand, with no significant modifications) Your enemies have the bizarre ability to know at a glance the difference between footprints left by your crew and footprints left by anybody else: a Guard will never investigate footprints left by a Civilian wandering around, even if the Civilian was running in a panic at the time, but your own people's footprints are Obviously Suspicious and will be investigated by Guards.

Just Guards. Strawhats and Samurai will notice your footprints and stare at them, and will be more alert for a bit afterward (Their viewcone 'fills in' when studying footprints, and this 'filling in' behavior is what controls when they formally spot something worth attacking/raising the alarm over: it takes several seconds for it to completely un-fill), but then lose interest, refusing to leave their post. Civilians never notice footprints at all.

Once a Guard has decided to investigate footprints, they will follow the trail forward until either they lose the trail (Yuki grapples onto a roof, say) or find something more concerning. (Such as Hayato standing over a corpse) Surprisingly, this includes that they will follow footprints into buildings, though once inside a building they seem to just randomly guess on what entrance to pop out of in search of the trail.

Footprints themselves fade away after a few seconds, so longer patrol routes won't necessarily notice them if you pass through when they're far away, but footprints last long enough that they will in fact be seen by someone whose viewcone is just swinging back and forth idly.

The other surface variant is seen very rarely: shallow water. Your characters all make noise as they walk through shallow water, even if crouched, with a run producing more noise. Since enemies react to noise they hear by turning to face the sound, this makes it harder to sneak up from behind undetected. Funnily enough, this can be worked around with good timing: walking a bit behind an enemy and then running the remaining distance can let you slip in a kill without them attacking or raising the alarm, as it takes a second or so for an enemy to transition from 'Huh? What's that noise?' to actually turning around to look at the source.

The only other thing worth pointing out is that enemies once again have the bizarre ability to always know the difference between A Suspicious Splash and A Non-Suspicious Splash: they won't freak out over one of their own wading through the shallows.


Ninja Hook
Yuki can use special grapple points to ascend and descend at fixed locations.
"Oooh, so exciting!"

This has the same sort of implications as with Hayato, except Yuki is a lot more able to leverage the Ninja Hook in kind of funny ways due to her trap. But I'll talk more about that when we get to her trap.


Rat's Tooth
Death Duration: 2.8 seconds.
Noise: 3
Yuki kills the target in melee.
"Stick! And stab!"

More than twice as long as Hayato's own melee kill, Yuki's melee attack can be awkward to find opportunities to kill enemies unseen. Hayato is fast enough that he can slip in kills in cases where an enemy who doesn't move is watching another enemy, so long as the viewcone is swinging back and forth and the intended victim is beyond the close-range portion of the viewcone; Yuki cannot pull off this trick, needing enemies to patrol out of sight of others or otherwise give her time to work with. As such, when you have the two together it often makes more sense to have Hayato land the kill and Yuki haul the corpse away.

This is one case where Shadow Tactics unfortunately has the animation point misleading, as Yuki's melee kill animations are the quickest of all kill animations to get the target visually crouching or even lying down, but this doesn't connect to the mechanical reality of how visible the kill is -the kill is still fully visible to enemies at maximum range until a little after the animation completes, same as Hayato's kills, even though Hayato's melee kills leave the body at standing height for longer. Thus, Hayato's shorter duration on the kill animation means he's visible for less time than Yuki, period, regardless of what the animation would suggest.

I actually quite like Yuki's kill animations, as they sell the idea of a teen girl taking out an adult man from ambush reasonably well, but this visual communication point is unfortunate.

Oh, and just like Hayato, attempting to melee a Samurai in any capacity will kill Yuki and net you a Game Over. So don't do that unless they're currently Stunned or unconscious.

Unarmed
'Dying' Duration: 2.8 seconds.
Noise: 3
Yuki knocks the target unconscious temporarily.
"Sleepy knife."

Just like her kill animations, Yuki's KO animations don't really seem like the action should be visible for as long as it is. They're also on the silly side, though to be fair the entire KO mechanic is pretty Cartoon Logic in terms of 'smack people on head, they instantly black out with apparently no long-term harm'.

In conjunction with Yuki's Unarmed attack being just as loud as her kills, Yuki rarely has any business KOing people, even more so than is already true of the KO mechanics in general.


Drop Attack
Any location Yuki can jump down to is a location she may potentially perform a drop attack to if an enemy is standing there, landing on them and attacking as one action.
"Heh! Just like a shinobi."

Yuki's drop attack is where it's really obvious that drop attacks have a different death duration than regular attacks, as her drop attack kills enemies comparably quickly to Hayato's drop attack even  though her regular melee attack takes so much longer.

In turn, this makes drop attack opportunities much more valuable for Yuki than Hayato, potentially letting her pull off the 'their buddy looked away for just a second, letting me kill them without being detected' trick Hayato can do with his regular attack, where otherwise Yuki can't pull that off. In missions where you have Yuki but not Hayato (Or have both, but they're in different parts of the map), it's especially useful to watch for such opportunities with Yuki where with Hayato they're cool but not very important to leverage.


Little Trap
Noise: 4
Setup time: 1.5 seconds.
Yuki sets up a trap at a designated location. She must walk to the location, and cannot interrupt the setup time once started, but is automatically crouched for the duration of the setup. The trap is invisible to all enemies, but an enemy dying to the trap is fully visible and the death duration is fairly long. The trap can only trigger once after being set, and must be retrieved and set again to kill a new enemy. Yuki carries exactly one trap, and must retrieve the old one if she wants to re-position or re-use the trap, but she can retrieve even an active trap safely. (She will automatically retrieve an expended trap if she walks over it, but must be manually ordered with a contextual input if the trap hasn't been activated yet) The trap will not trigger on allies, but otherwise triggers completely automatically. Useless against Samurai.
"What a good little trap."

Yuki's trap is thankfully very generous in its mechanics: enemies that visually overlap with the trap at all will trigger it, not needing to step in the exact center, and on activating it are teleported to the exact center; you don't need to get the location exactly right to catch an enemy with it, nor do you have to worry about a precisely-placed trap unexpectedly alerting enemies by virtue of the victim triggering it from a slightly different position than the point you placed it at. You can thus get away with shenanigans like placing the trap in a tiny region no enemy quite has line of sight on and then luring an enemy to roughly its location, confident their death will go unseen.

Strictly speaking, Yuki's trap is almost completely inferior to Hayato's Shuriken. They're both death-at-a-distance attacks with a long death duration and producing more noise than a melee kill and having to be retrieved afterward if you want to use them again, but the trap is useless against enemies that refuse to move (eg most Strawhats, which are always more problematic than Guards, all else being equal), does not let Yuki kill an unmoving enemy she's unable to melee kill due to their position (Where Hayato can potentially toss a Shuriken from high ground or nearby cover to solve such a situation), and the need to set it up ahead of time makes it much trickier to set up near-simultaneous kills. (That is, Hayato can throw a Shuriken and then immediately stab someone he's standing behind, potentially killing two people who are covering each other without raising the alarm, and this is easy to set up. Doing an equivalent with the trap is possible, but much easier to screw up) Hayato can, if he doesn't care about retrieving the Shuriken at all or can put it off for a bit, even kill enemies whose position is not currently possible for him to reach, such as sniping a Strawhat in a guard tower, which simply isn't an option with Yuki's trap.

The only significant advantage the trap has is that long patrol routes in areas lacking good cover can create situations where the trap can secure a kill undetected and the Shuriken cannot. These situations don't crop up often, and usually it's possible to arrange a melee kill in such situations anyway, just less convenient than setting the trap.

That said, that's a comparison in isolation. If I could swap out Yuki's trap for a Shuriken of her own, I'd probably do so, but that's not the choice being made. We need to look at Yuki's next ability to appreciate what Yuki brings to the table over Hayato.

Though it is worth noting that the need to retrieve the trap isn't much of a limiter on it. Where the Shuriken needing to be retrieved forces you to think twice before tossing it at high ground enemies and whatnot, the only equivalent situation I can think of for the trap is if you set up a trap and then hop down a cliff that lacks ladders, ivy, etc, to readily get back to it. This isn't exactly a regular situation. Since you often want to get bodies moved anyway and Yuki will automatically and instantly pick up the activated trap upon touching it, the need to retrieve it is a pretty minor limiter. It can potentially be a nuisance if you're trying to speedrun a level, but honestly, the trap is such a slow way of doing things in general that it's not a go-to choice for speedruns regardless.

Indeed, though I say Shuriken is overall better than the trap, I tend to use the trap a lot more than the Shuriken, simply because the retrieval limiter frequently means it makes more sense to stab than to Shuriken. The trap can be replaced by simply stabbing a target with good timing if your reflexes are good, such as attacking right when a target turns a corner, but it's more convenient and reliable to use the trap in such situations.

Also, I already alluded to this, but to be completely clear enemies killed by a trap do make noise that enemies will find alarming and investigate. This usually isn't an important point as there's few situations where an enemy will be heard being killed by a trap without being immediately seen dying, but it can crop up a few ways; some maps have thin walls that nonetheless completely block vision, and it is possible to set a trap so a group patrolling in a V formation will have one of the back individuals walk into the trap instead of the pointman, which won't go undetected in reality due to the noise factor. So keep that in mind when getting creative with trap usage.

Also, it's worth mentioning that, like Hayato's Shuriken in dark missions, Yuki's trap excels in snowy missions. Since Guards will notice footprints and track them precisely so long as there's no breaks in the trails, it gives Yuki the ability to pull Guards in situations she might otherwise struggle to pull them at all or without alerting other enemies, and since Guards will keep following footprints indefinitely you can lure them quite a ways away, such as to get them out of sight of a Strawhat who will refuse to follow the footprint trail himself. Also like Hayato and dark missions, Yuki comes to every snowy mission, giving you maximum opportunity to explore this. It's really nice!

Also like Hayato's Shuriken, the in-game hints forewarn you that Yuki's trap is ineffectual against Samurai, and your intuitive reading of this description is probably a bit different from the gameplay reality. Unlike the Shuriken, the trap actually is basically useless against Samurai; if a Samurai steps on the trap, the trap will trigger, but the Samurai will sort of kick at it briefly, stopping for around a half-second, but otherwise is not affected. This deactivates the trap, and is only potentially useful if you want to de-sync patrol routes. Bizarrely, a Samurai who triggers a trap isn't in any way alarmed by this, but if someone else witnesses the Samurai triggering the trap the witness will raise an alarm as if they just saw someone die.

In conjunction with the fact that the vast majority of Samurai will never leave their post except to try to kill your people, the trap really is a terrible idea to try to use on Samurai.

Interestingly, the file names suggest at one point Yuki was supposed to use caltrops, and have the ability to set poisoned caltrops. Given the one poison ability in the game KOs enemies instead of killing them, I would guess a poisoned trap would've been a nonlethal trap, but it's also possible the devs had intended for poison to be a lethal mechanic, like a delayed kill or something, and dropped it for any number of reasons. I'm a bit curious about this.

Animation-wise, I'm not aware of any kind of viable trap that looks like Yuki's Little Trap, and the visualization is kind of strange for a reliable kill (It launches a spike straight up. So... into their groin?), but I'm happy to gloss over all this because it would be pretty difficult to come up with something that fits the context, looks natural in all situations, makes sense to be a reliable kill, and makes sense to be a reusable trap. Desperados III -made by the same company after Shadow Tactics- subs in a giant beartrap for its equivalent, but that fits the context and also is still pretty ridiculous-looking: you'd basically need Esoteric Scifi Nonsense or Esoteric Magical Nonsense to come up with something that meets all the requirements here.

(It's not surprising to me that the next big project by these devs was in fact a story embracing fantastical elements outright)

Birdcall
Sound radius: 10
Cooldown: 5 seconds.
Yuki generates a loud noise; you designate a location to use it from, but Yuki must walk to that location, she does not 'throw' the sound. Civilians and regular Guards who hear the noise will investigate it, walking to exactly where Yuki used it from if nothing else catches their attention on the way. Strawhats and Samurai will very briefly look in her direction, but otherwise ignore the noise.
"Bird's voice."

At first glance, Yuki's whistle seems comparable to Hayato's ability to throw rocks, being a way to generate noise, and indeed when first playing the game it may seem directly inferior: unlike the rock, it can't provoke oxen into killing people, and the fact that it's centered on Yuki's location and has a large radius makes it more unwieldy, as the game does a somewhat poor job of conveying how different the abilities are.

In actuality, the whistle is much more widely useful of a mechanic. The rock throw lets you convince Guards to look away from something temporarily. The whistle can be used not only for that, but also to convince Guards to walk wherever you need them to be. There's the obvious point that this combines extremely well with the trap: set up the trap, whistle directly atop it, and then duck into cover while the Guard gets himself killed. Hayato can kind of do something comparable with rock throw+Shuriken in that a Guard is distracted by a thrown rock for 1 second longer than a Shuriken takes to kill someone, but it's much more limited than what Yuki can do. The whistle+trap combo lets Yuki kill arbitrarily large groups of Guards all by herself so long as none of them are combined into a single unit and the terrain is somewhat cooperative; simply peel off one guard at a time into a trap, disposing of the bodies between kills, and it doesn't matter how well their viewcones cover each other or how many of them there are together. Hayato will be completely stymied simply by having three non-patrolling Guards who all have a clear view of each other. Yuki doesn't care if it's three or eight or twenty.

And even with Guards who operate in pairs, it's possible, if a little tricky, to arrange for a near-simultaneous kill with the trap+stabbing whoever doesn't walk into the trap, letting Yuki kill such single-handedly. Add in teammates, and the whistle gets even more powerful; Mugen, in particular, is a fantastic partner with Yuki, as she can pull groups of enemies to a single location out of sight so Mugen can kill them all with Kazekiri without being detected.

Also note that you can chain whistle uses to lure Guards further than you might expect. This requires the map be dark or that terrain provides opportunities for Yuki to whistle from behind cover more than once, but that's less of a limitation than you might expect. This can potentially let you do stuff like pull a Guard past a chain of Strawhats to somewhere nobody can see him, where you might otherwise struggle to think of a way to kill the Guard unseen. The primary limitation of chain-whistling is actually that a semi-alert Guard will react to hearing a whistle by running to investigate, where normally they investigate a whistle at a walk, making it difficult to chain more than two whistle uses together.

Note that Civilians do not switch to running if chain-whistled. This isn't terribly important, but it opens up options if you're wanting to pull a Civilian away from a group and there's no convenient cover that fully blocks line of sight right there. They also have much lower line of sight than Guards, so it's actually feasible to pull a Civilian in this way in a completely open environment!

Anyway, one of the things that's easy to overlook or get confused about is that the whistle can actually be used to pull enemies from entirely different elevations. This is never tutorialed by the game itself, and it's easy to try it a few times and end up thinking it doesn't work, because enemies will psychically know whether they can walk to Yuki's location and if it's not possible to walk to where she's standing they'll stop for a moment and then go back to what they were doing, same as a Strawhat does with any distraction. As such, while you might expect to, for example, be able to have Yuki whistle from a rooftop's corner to bait a Guard to standing below that corner, that doesn't work and trying may leave the impression different elevations are impossible.

Exacerbating this is that enemies also make a judgment call about the distance they'd have to walk to reach the location, and if it's too far they will once again shrug off the whistle. Thus, even if you whistle from a location they can reach, it's possible they'll still refuse to investigate, with no clear feedback on why not.

Nonetheless, if there's a nearby ladder, or they can take a nearby door to come down, or if they just need to briefly circle around to a ramp, Guards will happily leave their posts to be murdered. This gives Yuki a lot of utility on missions with such navigable height differences, as significant height differences go hand-in-hand with significant visual blockers; if you can get to a spot unseen and whistle at an enemy on a different elevation and have them listen, that's almost certainly a situation where you can kill them unseen easily. Setting the trap makes this particularly trivial to do -simply set the trap, then whistle while standing on it- but often a stabbing can be arranged easily if you like.

These are also cases where chain-whistling is particularly realistic to arrange, such as whistling to pull a Guard up to high ground, then having Yuki duck behind a building, set her trap, and whistle again once they're in range. This can let you pull a Guard from a location partially visible to other enemies, then pull them to a location that isn't visible, and thus kill them undetected.

That said, Yuki does suffer a little as the game progresses and Strawhats and Samurai become more common, since her two unique contributions are both useless or essentially useless against Samurai and immobile Strawhats. (And with patrolling Strawhats, the whistle is still basically useless) It's a bit awkward that Yuki essentially specializes in picking on the least dangerous class of enemy. Fortunately, Guards remain the bulk of enemies in most missions throughout the game; there's no point where Guards are phased out entirely in favor of Strawhats or something of the sort. As such, it's not nearly as bad as it could be.

Indeed, the whistle's inability to pull Strawhats and Samurai can be a strength, allowing Yuki to whistle in reach of multiple enemies to pull just one Guard who is standing somewhere past Strawhats and/or Samurai. This has the odd effect of making Yuki subtly advantaged at peeling apart formations involving Samurai.

In general, the whistle is one of the more subtly oppressive design elements to Shadow Tactics: the more I played, the more I came to realize it kind of breaks the game an awful lot of the time. Its radius is large enough to pull people safely without necessarily needing special terrain construction to enable it, yet small enough relative to how the game spaces out enemies to be able to reliably pull just one Guard a lot of the time. In retrospect, I'm not surprised Desperados III's version of the whistle has a larger radius and the game itself prefers to pack enemies together more densely: these were needed together to make the whistle's mechanics less powerful.

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

Yuki appreciates her Matchlock a lot more than Hayato appreciates his, since she doesn't have a Shuriken or other ranged attack. In missions where you have Hayato and Yuki together, you should prefer to have Hayato use his Shuriken if considering a ranged solution, but when you have Yuki and not Hayato (Or they're not close together on the map), then Yuki really appreciates her Matchlock.

This unfortunately doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's worth remembering.


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

Just like Hayato, this is a standard capability, but proper play has little cause to use it.

I will instead point out that Desperados III did away with this as a standard capability, freeing up Heal's input slot to be a unique ability on each character. Thank goodness.

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As a character, Yuki very much surprised me.

My first impression of her was pretty negative: I've seen other stories have a younger girl speak roughly like Yuki does, but normally when I see it the thought process seems to be 'this makes this female character cute and attractive', so I was sighing to start. It takes time for the game to unpack and explicate Yuki's backstory as an orphan who's never gotten a proper education and does things like call her knife 'rat's tooth' because she possibly doesn't know the relevant words. (eg 'knife')

In retrospect, though, I'm very positive on her character: she's probably my favorite of the cast outright.

For starters, part of what let me have this bad first impression is that the writing was reasonably organic and real: Yuki doesn't go straight to introducing herself as an orphan thief, instead she's doing her own thing when Hayato encounters her, and then gets so excited by seeing A Real Ninja Doing Cool Ninja Things that she tags along, while Hayato is sighing because he has a mission and doesn't want to babysit some teenager who he expects will get in the way and mess up his mission. Hayato isn't interested in what her story is, so he doesn't ask, and Yuki herself has other things on her mind, so she doesn't explain.

A lot of times fiction so heavily prioritizes getting Key Info into the audience's hands that characters behave quite unnaturally: the Orphan Thief goes straight to loudly blabbing her backstory because the creators want you to immediately know about her Key Features, not because it makes in-character sense for her to mention this stuff so soon. This type of writing tends to annoy me in particular in part because it often goes hand-in-hand with 'flat' characters: the creator(s) is mostly thinking of this character in terms of whatever their Key Feature is intended to be, and so the character only behaves in ways that are somehow referential to their Key Feature. Which is stereotyping, for one thing.

Shadow Tactics instead writes your party as complex human beings with their own goals and motives for doing things, and so at times context takes time to reach the audience in full, such as Yuki's backstory. It's nice!

Yuki's orphan thief background is also handled better than I'd have expected on other layers: often, backstories of this sort are clearly selected so the character can be an object of pity other characters will be nice to so as to illustrate the magnanimity of those other characters, especially so if the character is female and/or younger. (As Yuki is) That an orphan thief who has spent years living this way is, in reality, rather likely to be frighteningly competent at various tasks necessary to keep theirself fed and clothed and so on? Often gets glossed right over.

Yuki sidesteps all that nonsense. She certainly benefits from the rest of the cast taking an interest in her and helping her learn skills and whatnot, but for example Takuma takes her on as something of an apprentice because her preexisting interest in and talent with mechanical workings leads to the two of them organically having positive interactions on this type of topic. Similarly, while Yuki is wowed by Hayato's adeptness at Cool Ninja Things, the only part of her kit the game actually attributes to that relationship is the ninja hook. (Which is handled cleverly: the mission you first get Yuki on just doesn't have hook points, removing any need to disable the ability on Yuki) Her athleticism, swimming competency, trap and whistle combo, and even her melee kill animation are all established things she already can do before she ever meets Hayato.

The game is also quite consistent that Yuki is clever, just not educated. I'm especially fond of a moment in mission 3 where she suggests a distraction to Mugen, and Mugen's response is, "An unusual stratagem. I am tempted to try it!" where the voice acting makes it clear Mugen wouldn't have thought of this idea on his own but thinks it's a clever idea. (It also ties into Mugen's character in ways I like, but I'll get into that in his post)

The whole thing is a surprisingly nuanced depiction of someone whose life circumstances have given them notable disadvantages in education and other social resources but their 'school of hard knocks' life has nonetheless lead to them developing competencies readily relevant to the life they've lived.

It's especially surprising coming from a full-3D video game with heavy voice acting. This is the type of product that generally fails to tell such stories because being in a position to make such a product means the odds are poor anybody involved has lived such a life.

Yuki is, for this and many other reasons, probably my favorite part of Shadow Tactics' writing.

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Next time, we cover the playable character you meet absolutely last: Aiko.

See you then.