YMMV / Tenchu

• Anti-Climax Boss: Tatsumaru as the final boss in Ayame's Tenchu 2 storyline, despite being agile and fast, is surprisingly easy to beat compared to Kagami in Rikimaru's or Jubei in Tatsumaru's, possibly due to his guilt starting to resurface. He also has much lower health than Genbu, the penultimate boss of Ayame's story.
• Awesome Music: While there's a good argument to be made that the games themselves haven't aged all that well in the ensuing years, few will deny that the classical Japanese-inspired soundtracks for each entry are nothing short of epic and memorable, especially the intros. It helps that the main composer is none other than Noriyuki Asakura - the very same man who brought Rurouni Kenshin's amazing soundtracks to life.
• Complete Monster:
  • Onikage, chief servant and Psycho Supporter of the demonic Lord Mei-Oh, is a sinister undead ninja who went by the name Suzaku when serving the ninja revolutionary group The Burning Dawn, where he subtly manipulates the group and assists in its brutal actions. When his own lover is mortally wounded by the hero Rikimaru, Onikage ruthlessly kills her, declaring he has no love for weakness. Later assisting the rise of Mei-Oh with massacres and assisting evil cults in murders and transforming innocents into monsters, Onikage continues to return and engineers another war, with Rikimaru forced to kill over and over again. Killing and replacing the adviser to Lord Gohda, Onikage ends up burning down one of Gohda's castles, revealing himself when he takes Gohda's daughter Princess Kiku hostage and forcing Rikimaru to stab through her fatally to kill Onikage himself. Obsessed with the darker side of human nature and creating a world of chaos and carnage, Onikage repeatedly proves himself to be Tenchu's darkest villain.
  • Birth of the Stealth Assassins: Gohda Motohide is the power-hungry uncle of the benevolent Lord Gohda Matsunoshin. Envious of his nephew upon inheriting the lands of his deceased brother, Motohide bribes many samurai into loyalty and allies himself with the Gohda family's longtime enemy Lord Toda Yoshida to begin a bloody civil war for control of the Gohda dynasty. Launching a brutal attack upon Gohda castle, Motohide's men massacre soldiers and servants indiscriminately. Upon losing a fight to his nephew, Matsunoshin spares his uncle only for Motohide to shoot him with a concealed pistol. Losing another fight to the ninja Rikimaru, Matsunoshin takes a critical injury from Rikimaru to spare his uncle from the young ninja's wrath. Motohide rewards his nephew's selflessness by fleeing, murdering Matsunoshin's defenseless wife and kidnapping his young daughter to appease Lord Toda.
  • Dark Secret: Kubira is a demon inhabiting the body of Lord Kagemasa of Hakkaku. Upon making a deal with the ambitious Kagemasa for military strength, Kubira devours his soul and murders his closest allies. Seeking the rebirth of his master the Lord of the Dead, Kubira subjects Kagemasa's beloved wife Princess Shizu to nightly occult rituals which impregnates her with the Lord of the Deads soul, whose gestation causes Shizu excruciating pain and would eventually kill her. After Shizu flees to the small village of Saiga, Kubira orders gangs of hired bandits and Kagemasa's loyal samurai to kidnap the villagers and steal their food supplies in an effort to get them to surrender the princess. Declaring war on Lord Gohda for his role in protecting Princess Shizu, Kubira eventually fights Gohdas loyal Azuma ninja and reveals his intention to use his master's power to open a gateway to the underworld, allowing the demons below to rise up and feast on the flesh and souls of the living.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Birth of the Stealth Assassins and Wrath of Heaven are held as the games that define the series, which leaves Fatal Shadows and Z as dealing with a Tough Act to Follow. They still hold up as better entries than Dark Secret or Time of the Assassins, which themselves aren't terrible but are let down by the compromises for the hardware they were released on.
  • To a lesser degree, while the second game polished and refined a lot of ideas from the first, its stages and story are held as a downgrade from the first entry, never mind the shift of the Awesome Music to more ambient tunes. Both great games, both very different feelings, which is only to be expected as a different team made the second.
• Demonic Spiders: The zombies in Wrath of Heaven, mostly because they cannot be killed permanently by anything besides Rikimaru's Muramasa - a weapon that drains your health when using it, forcing him to be incredibly cautious. This means that for Ayame and a player trying to go for high rankings, slow-paced stealth goes out the window since the zombies will inevitably get back up and force you to advance or hide.^* Ayame does receive a pair of daggers that can dispose of the undead, but unlike Rikimaru who gets his weapon at the start of his mission, she only gets hers at the end of the stage, meaning that a rerun of it will be necessary if one wants to choke the top rank from it.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, mostly because Sekiro was originally intended to be a Tenchu game and even specifically uses a quote associated with Rikimaru as its tagline. Tenchu fans have come to believe their series will remain in the grave as a result compared to the immense success of Sekiro, and thus aren't on the greatest terms.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Syphon Filter and Metal Gear series.
• Game-Breaker: "Wrath of Heaven" skill from the third game, "Tenchu 3: Wrath of Heaven". This skill allows Rikimaru and Ayame (story mode only) to One-Hit Kill any single target, including the boss characters. This skill reduces Player Character's health to 1/100 and if they misses, they cannot use it again without drinking a healing potion. The player can stop worrying about missing their target by using a smoke bomb or a binding spell to disable their target before using "Wrath of Heaven", which enforces this trope to a whole new level.^note Tenrai boss fight is divided into multiple sections, so if the player carries many healing potions, they can spam "Smoke/Bind - WOH - Retreat - Heal - Repeat" strategy until they win.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The series features a sword called the "Izayoi", the ancestral weapon of the Azuma clan that seems to possess some degree of magical power. Many years later, BlazBlue ends up featuring a weapon called Izayoi that is also an ancestral weapon (Of the Yayoi family) that also possesses magical abilities. At least Tenchu's Izayoi doesn't blind its user.
• Moral Event Horizon: Tatsumaru massacring the quarantine village and the Azuma village.
• Narm:
  • The English dialogue veers into this from Onikage's heavy Japanese accent (part 1) to Rin's inane screaming. There's also the geysers of blood that sound like whoopee cushions when someone dies.
  • Ayame's infamous "Your arrows are like you: weak and twisted. I fear them not." Her voice actor reads the last sentence as a sarcastic. "I fear them...NOT!"
  • Z tries to tell a dramatic story with characters that can't emote at all and your custom protagonist at the forefront. So when Rikimaru tells you that your partner died of their wounds inflicted from Cold-Blooded Torture, including severing their ear, your character is supposed to be royally angered but simply doesn't show it. Or worse yet has some wacky mask or hat on. And that isn't getting into the complete lack of wounds on your partner to begin with.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Compared to its contemporaries, Tenchu is way Bloodier and Gorier, and the series has some downright brutal stealth kills. Highlights involve more than a few decapitations, Tesshu's bone-breaking and flesh-tenderizing precision, and Ayame's infamous "grab your head with my thighs and twist your head 180 degrees" execution.
  • Losing the fight against Byakko in Birth of the Stealth Assassins is particularly brutal, especially to any dog lovers out there. The game over scene will have Byakko taunting the corpses of Rikimaru and Ayame while poor Semimaru is viciously mauled to death by Chiro the tiger in the foreground. His whimpering and the brief splattering of blood make it uncomfortable to watch.
  • Wrath of Heaven's "Cemetery" and "Amagai Castle" levels, featuring non-human enemies in the form of undead and wooden robots respectively. The undead archers of the former shamble along unnaturally, still sporting the arrow through their heads that killed them, while the puppets of the latter emit a constant ambience of clockwork grinding that you can hear anywhere in the level as long as even a single enemy is still alive. Amagai Castle's music is also incredibly unsettling and suspenseful, making the level's abundance of loud death traps all the more effective.
  • Usually if you die on a mission, you get a poem of the character's last thoughts and a fancy background of symbolism depending on the game, though some of the earlier games do have dynamic scenes for whichever boss you die to. Die as Tesshu in Wrath of Heaven and you get to see his severed head, blood at the mouth and all across the plank it was rest on, laid out before a setting sun with an expression of agony.
• Retroactive Recognition: Quinton Flynn as Wang Xiaohai, the Bare-Fisted Monk boss from Birth of the Stealth Assassins. This was shortly before landing his Star-Making Role in gaming that is Raiden.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The first three games suffer from some real nasty Event-Obscuring Camera issues. In the first two cases, the tank controls meant you had to use a dedicated shoulder button to look around, but it makes judging enemies below or around you rather tough, thus hugging walls is an essential mechanic for the safe angles they provide. In Wrath of Heaven the free movement and right analog stick allows for you to turn the camera manually - but not really vertically unless using that same shoulder button. The only compensation is the camera auto-leaning over ledges you're standing at. Fatal Shadows would free up the camera a bit more, and by Z it's effectively a fully modern camera system.
• Sequelitis: Shadow Assassins abandoned everything about the series' signature gameplay in favor of motion control gimmicks on the Wii version, a much slower pace with a borderline puzzle-like design to its stealth instead of free reign, and severe punishment for getting spotted to the point that if you didn't have a sword on you, it was all but assured death without the ability to even try to defend yourself thanks to no proper combat and a nigh-impossible Quick Time Event. The PSP version removed the motion controls for obvious reasons and tried to make the game more fair, but it was little more than a former shadow of what people liked about the series. Critics rated it higher than the past couple games, but the fans abandoned ship.
• So Bad, It's Good: The English dub of the first game.
• That One Boss:
  • Onikage possesses high health, devastating attacks, incredible speed and agility. If you are being too defensive and trying to keep your distance from him, he will use healing potion which restores his health, making the boss fight even more difficult.
  • Lord Mei-Oh has high health, can teleport, and his rapid lightning strikes are unblockable.
  • Lady Kagami has high health and devastating attacks that will leave you vulnerable if you're not careful. If you are being too defensive and trying to keep your distance from her, she will use shuriken/kunai and hand grenades to tear your defense apart.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Shadow Assassins in a nutshell, really.
  • With Z, the game had the most streamlined and fluid controls of the series up to that point, but the Virtual Paper Doll custom protagonist meant that stealth kills lost their cinematic flair and unique animations, and the game being designed with Co-Op Multiplayer in mind resulted in the same two dozen or so maps reused for fifty missions (a hundred thanks to Hard Mode) as well as only two proper bosses in the entire game. As a result of this plus Ayame's absence, longtime fans felt more than a little put off.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Of all the characters throughout the series, the only ones besides the major cast members to get art are Onikage, and Kagura from Wrath of Heaven thanks to her unique design, her giant wolf familiar, and being a memorable minion for the bad guys. Ultimately she pisses off Ayame one too many times with a completely unrepentant attitude about killing, and gets offed for it. Fans have noted that Ayame's story in that game is non-canon, yet Kagura doesn't get her comeuppance in Rikimaru's route so she may still be alive out there, but she's never been mentioned since then.
  • The partner character in Z. For whatever reason your custom protagonist is assigned a partner opposite their gender that you get to customize, though they're only ever stuck with default outfits and appearances, and from there they show up a couple times in the story only to get captured and tortured to death. They never once participate in gameplay nor directly aid you in any meaningful way or even have much character of their own to show, which is a waste given the game's Co-Op Multiplayer focus. Then again, given the Artificial Stupidity of the enemies, one can argue that an AI companion wouldn't fair very well...
  • Z also hits this with its core plot overall. Rikimaru has grown to be the teacher of a new generation of Azuma Clan Ninja, and that sounds ripe with potential. Instead, not only was Ayame inexplicably Put on a Bus, but the story revolves entirely around killing a bunch of random bad guys around the district before dealing with Shigi and his current master — who both are basically evil just because. The game tries to dangle a plot hook of Rikimaru recognizing Shigi, but it becomes a Sequel Hook since the game abruptly ends before it does anything with the concept. As a result, Z ends up feeling like little more than a random collage of missions that have no real plot whatsoever.