YMMV / Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

• Best Level Ever: Hana Garden, from Aiko's Choice, lets you use all five characters from the start and gives you situations where each one can really shine. It's also the point at which the story reaches a climax, as Aiko and her allies reach the old Sakura Clan hideout to end Lady Chiyo's scheme once and for all.
• Demonic Spiders: Samurai enemies. They are equipped with both melee and ranged weapons, a wide FOV area, won't get distracted by anything, can see through Aiko's disguise, often stationed at or patrolling through highly strategic points flanked by a lot of other mooks (sometimes even other Samurai), and aside from Mugen, they cannot be taken down conventionally by other charaacters. To take down Samurai without Mugen, you need to use at least two characters working together in perfect coordination with a combination of firearm and melee attacks, which can make things a lot more complicated if there are other enemies nearby.
• Difficulty Spike: The third mission, Imai Town, represents a dramatic increase in difficulty. The map is much larger, there are more enemies than ever, Samurai make their first appearance (unless you somehow raised an alert in the mission preceding it which CAN spawn a samurai), and the footprints you leave in the snow can compromise your stealth.
• Game-Breaker: All of the main five are well balanced and meant to be used in unison, but Yuki is absolutely the strongest. She's fast, able to climb hooks and run along walls and roofs, and is both a potent distractor and assassin with her flute and Little Trap. Even her supposed weaknesses, like her fragility and slow body carrying speed, are circumventable simply by loading after every time you're caught so she never takes damage (something the game encourages anyways) and planning around it. Even then her slow body carrying speed is because she drags bodies, meaning she can slip bodies past guards outer viewcones, so it's less of a pure negative and more like a tradeoff for a powerful skill. While she doesn't completely break the game on her own, she has clear advantages over her contemporaries and can be used to effectively solo many parts of certain levels.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Straw Hats generally aren't threatening, but the fact that they won't get distracted by anything means it can be pretty tricky to take one down if they happen to stay in a heavily defended area. They also have comparatively a wider FOV than normal foot soldiers and like Samurai are often stationed at highly strategic points.
  • Civilians. They aren't a threat on their own but they can make your life hell trying to take down enemies by shouting panically and raise the alarm if they detected you.
• Narm: While it's understandable for civilians to panic and raise the alarm when they see people who are as suspicious-looking as Hayato, Aiko, Yuki, and Mugen, seeing them react with similar horror toward the seemingly harmless, doddering, crippled old Takuma feels over the top. Especially when they flail their arms and legs in a desperate bid to escape the elderly man.
• Player Punch: Mugen's suicide midway through the tenth mission. Your resident Samurai, who's equal parts strong, honorable and kind to everyone he meets, dies in complete despair.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • It's impossible to drag bodies as anyone other than Yuki and Aiko - Hayato and Mugen stand up to carry them. This means that if you need to shuffle a body past a guard's outer viewcone, you want to send Aiko or Yuki (though it is possible to get Hayato and Mugen to slowly get a body past one outer viewcone even on Hardcore Difficulty, as they can pick up the body when the guard isn't looking and then drop it whenever the guard is).
  • Ninjas who can jump from rooftop for instant kills cannot leap over a puddle.
  • There are some stealth-RTS fans who regret the fact that you can't tie up unconscious enemies.
• That One Level:
  • The third mission, Imai Town, is easily one of the hardest missions in the game. The snow makes you leave footprints, which can lead observant guards right to your hiding place, it's very well guarded and introduces the samurai enemy, which, due to the lack of pistols to stun them, means only Mugen can take them down. This is also the third level in the game, which can be quite shocking considering how difficult it is for how early in the game it is.
  • The final mission has the first castle entrance heavily guarded with two Samurai and four Straw Hats, all but one watching the narrow path from high ground. Most players will be deadlocked for quite a while in trying to slip by these sentinels.
• Underused Game Mechanic: There are precious few levels where you control all five characters. In fact, there's only one level where you control all five characters, Kage-sama's Camp. And even in it, a couple of them are underutilized; Takuma spends the whole mission perched on a cliff that he can't get off of, and there's no disguise for Aiko to use. This ended up getting solved Desperados III which added a Veteran Bounty Hunter Mode to add any usually-unavailable protagonists to any level. This is fixed in Aiko's Choice, where you get to use all five characters in tandem through most of the side story.
• The Un-Twist: Kage-sama's identity. It's Lord Noboru, the only recurring character aside from Shogun and your party.
• Win Back the Crowd: For the entire stealth-RTS genre, which were a niche series of games including Desperados and Commandos that died during the early 2000s. This games' solid sales and high critical acclaim revived interest in the genre, and eventually led to a full revival for Desperados in the form of Desperados III, itself a critical and commercial success.