Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun Enemy Analysis

Due to my prior computer being a piece of junk I couldn't actually install Shadow Tactics to and the haphazard nature of my operation in the Nightmare Apartment, this post currently lacks images for the enemy types. I intend to correct this, but didn't want to delay posting even longer than already happened. Hopefully I'll get the screenshots grabbed and incorporated in short order.

Enemies in Shadow Tactics come in four broad types: there are some mission-specific enemies who are presented as different from these types, but there's only one uncommon variant I'd describe as truly distinct: most enemy types with a non-standard label aren't different as far as what this post is concerning itself with. (eg mission 2 has 'officers': these are just Strawhats, aside that regular Strawhats don't provide progress on the 'kill officers' objective when killed)

I'm going in ascending order of difficulty, except I've tacked Civilians to the end because starting with them would be poor communication.

Guard

-Standard baseline enemy

-Fully susceptible to all distractions and kill methods

The baseline enemy, which all others are measured against.

Guards are of course the most common enemy type throughout the game, and are distinguished primarily by their willingness to wander from their post for any number of reasons. They're also the enemy type most prone to being assigned to patrol (Strawhats and Samurai very often stand in place permanently), most prone to being 'grouped' together mechanically (Patrol groups acting as a unit, Guards talking with each other who will respond to things together, etc), and if an enemy is sitting in a part of the map you have no real reason to go anywhere near, that enemy is probably a Guard.

Most of what I could say about Guards I covered extensively talking about the abilities of the party. So on we go!

Strawhat

-Mid-tier enemy

-Ignores footprints in snow

-Ignores light sources that have been put out in dark maps

-Will normally refuse to leave their post or patrol route, but attention can be directed to some extent

-Ignores Civilians pleading for an investigation

-Fully susceptible to all kill methods

When I say their attention can be directed 'to some extent', I mean Strawhats will react to eg noises, footprints, light sources, but will only momentarily look at them before resuming their standard behavior. Kuma is a partial exception, as his spammed sound will repeatedly pull their attention away. Aiko's Talk action is a full exception, which is one more way Talk is an absurdly powerful action.

Strawhats are the enemy type most stubbornly committed to their post, generally only leaving their assigned route/position if the alarm is raised. If grouped with Guards, they can be pulled out of  position by distracting the Guards with the right tools, but in most cases a Strawhat will never leave their post. The game's tutorial will inform you that Strawhats will send Guards to investigate things for them, but as far as I can tell, this is not a mechanic at all. As such, Strawhats can be safer than regular Guards to be brazen around: killing an enemy such that the death is heard but terrain blocks sight to the dying individual is problematic if it's heard by a Guard, because they'll come running and find the body, but is safe if only Strawhats will hear it, as they'll stay right where they are even if they literally heard a gunshot or similar sound that you'd expect them to find alarming.

This can be frustrating if you're focusing on using tools for luring enemies out of sight, of course.

Samurai

-Elite enemy

-In default state, cannot be killed except by Mugen and environmental hazards

-Matchlocks and Takuma's rifle will temporarily Stun Samurai, quartering their vision range, immobilizing them, and allowing melee attacks to KO or kill them safely

-If KOed, can be safely melee killed while still unconscious

-Will normally refuse to leave their post or patrol route

-Ignores Civilians pleading for an investigation

-Nonetheless, will investigate footprints in snow and go to inactive light sources to re-light them

-Sees through Aiko's Disguise, treating it as if she's standing normally

-Trigger's Yuki's Trap, but is only momentarily stopped by it and ignores it

-Hayato's Shuriken does no harm, but the hit Samurai will temporarily become semi-alert, wandering around without actually raising the alarm

The only enemy that isn't automatically one-shot by all kill methods, it's easy to think of them as upgraded Strawhats, but while they share the Strawhat behavior of refusing to investigate eg Yuki's Whistle, they're actually more willing to leave their post, it's just limited to some weird edge cases. The Shuriken thing especially seems like it has to be an accident or oversight or outright bug.

This whole thing is part of why I said in Mugen's post that Mugen being around is wonky for the enemy design. If a mission is snowing or dark (or both) and Mugen is deployed, Samurai become easier than Strawhats to bait out and kill: it's fortunate that Mugen only deploys to one such mission, minimizing the relevancy of this wonkiness. (Two missions if we count Aiko's Choice) It's only when Mugen is not about that Samurai are reliably more of an obstacle than Strawhats.

When Mugen isn't about, Samurai work very effectively at their job of being the most elite enemy that is most demanding to take down. It's usually best to try to peel off Guards and take down Strawhats watching a Samurai before targeting the Samurai himself, given that ideally you'll have two characters standing at roughly opposite sides of the Samurai -as a Samurai whirls to face their shooter when Stunned by a bullet, it's safer to have one person shoot and then another person approach for the kill from the opposite side.

A rarely-relevant but interesting caveat to Samurai invulnerability is that dropping a body on them knocks them unconscious, same as anyone else. As an unconscious Samurai can be executed safely (or picked up and hurled down a cliff, dumped into water, or stuffed into a well, all dealing with them permanently), this can allow you to kill a Samurai without expending a bullet or using Takuma's grenade even without Mugen's assistance.

Since Mugen is the only character who can freely toss bodies about, there's sharp limits to this exploit: you need high ground nearby the Samurai to toss down from, and you need that high ground to either be accessible with regular foot travel (Ladders aren't adequate: you can't climb a ladder while carrying a body) or to have an enemy on it or to have an enemy on some even higher ground where their body can be tossed down to your desired high ground location. Only a small portion of Samurai are close enough to high ground for this to be even theoretically possible, and the game largely reserves high ground locations for the player's use: in conjunction with the limitations on your ability to pull Samurai from their post (You can't just have Yuki whistle them to a spot near a cliff), the option isn't available very often. Further exacerbating this is that buildings with a door-based route to high ground don't actually work: your crew will respond to clicking on a door while holding a body by vanishing it into the building, and they won't path through doors on their own. (So you can't just click on the desired destination to have them go through the doors while holding the body)

Even so, this is worth keeping in mind if you're going for Badges, especially if you're trying to get multiple Badges from a given mission all at once. It can create solutions to situations that might seem impossible otherwise.

I should also point out that Samurai are the clearest example of how the game is oriented toward not letting enemies sound the alarm in the first place. (Or more accurately, to quickloading if the alarm is raised) In mission two, if you let the alarm get sounded three times, Samurai spawn in and start patrolling, even though you completely lack the tools to take down Samurai in that mission! That's particularly drastic, but in general Samurai are allowed to spawn in response to the alarm being sounded, and in missions where you lack Mugen that can mean you run out of ability to kill Samurai while plenty are about.

Civilian

-Half normal vision range

-Unarmed

-Cannot sound the alarm: in a situation other enemies would raise the alarm, instead yells loudly and then attempts to inform the nearest non-Civilian enemy, who will hopefully investigate

-Ignores footprints in snow

-Fully susceptible to all distractions and kill methods

Civilians are kind of the main point of this post, as the game doesn't properly explain the multiples ways they're unusual, and it's easy to end up thinking that Civilians are more of a problem then they actually are.

For starters, their complete inability to raise the alarm is unexpected and is often obfuscated in play: if a Civilian spots a body, their shout pulling attention their way will often result in the body being spotted by enemies who can raise the alarm, and so it's easy to go a long time thinking Civilians can directly raise the alarm.

Their retrieve-enemies-to-investigate behavior is also never explained and, thanks to the prior issues, is easy to go a long time failing to discover it organically: you basically have to be pursuing Badges that forbid loading a save or at least heavily discourage it (Speedrun Badges don't 'roll back' the clock when you reload: if you take 2 hours to do a mission, speedrun Badges consider you to take 2 hours, even if you saved 10 minutes in, left the game running for ages, and then loaded to 10 minutes in and finished twenty minutes later with no further reloads) to be likely to stumble into this mechanic properly.

Said retrieval behavior is surprisingly complex and forgiving. You might expect the alarm to be raised just because a Civilian reached a Guard, Strawhat, or Samurai, but apparently the soldiers of the game have a really low opinion of the word of Civilians: Strawhats and Samurai will briefly look at the Civilian and then completely ignore them! Guards will at least go running to where the Civilian yelled at, apparently investigating the Civilian's claims, and if they don't spot anything by the time they reach that spot they'll spend a bit wandering randomly, searching for trouble... but if they don't personally find anything, they'll dismiss a Civilian screaming about murder as nonsense and go back to their assignment. As such, being spotted by a Civilian with no Guards nearby is kind of a joke: just get out of the area and clean up any bodies, and no real consequences will follow.

Once a Civilian has either pled their case to a soldier or realized no soldier is nearby for them to report to, a Civilian will find a door (Not necessarily a door the player can use) and vanish inside it, never to be heard from again. The especially odd thing is that for some reason this is counted as the Civilian dying, denying you Badges for not killing people and adding to your Civilian kill-count at the end of the mission. Civilians also do this if you KO them and then let them wake up: they run to a door and I guess get promptly eaten by a monster in the house. As such, if you are pursuing nonlethal Badges, you should never KO Civilians... unless you intend to dump them down a well, which doesn't count as a kill but gets rid of them permanently. (This is specific to wells: throw them down a cliff? Death. Drown them? Death. Stuff them into a building? They wake up, leave the building, then freak out and barricade themselves somewhere, and are considered dead) I really hope this is a coding whoopsie, like somebody was trying to flag a well dropping as lethal and didn't realize the entry they were altering was for 'Civilian vanishes into building' rather than 'body is thrown down well', because this is absolutely bizarre and pretty perverse!

Civilians themselves have a sub-variety: non-hostile Civilians. These Civilians are marked with white outlines when you have the outline behavior enabled, and are essentially non-entities in game mechanics. You can't attack them, they ignore distractions and don't care about seeing your party, nor about spotting a murder or a dead body... they do mechanically exist as far as pathing goes (You can't walk right through them), but otherwise they only really exist as narrative entities.

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The final enemy variety note is that a handful of enemies are unarmed but otherwise function more like the armed enemies: they have a full viewcone, they can raise the alarm themselves, and they don't do any of this running and hiding in a building stuff. This is very rare, and I'm... not actually sure of their full mechanics, because their missions are designed to minimize the relevancy of such a question.

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And that's it for this miniseries!

After this, I'll do a couple quick reposts-to-preserve, and then properly move on to Doom Roguelike.

See you then.