Game:

Red Ninja: End of Honor (2005)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 4:56:43

26,839 views

451

This is the hardest and most frustrating stealth game I have ever played.

Please note that there are recording issues such as dropped frames and quick freezes. I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to prevent it from happening, but, in the end, I couldn't find any solution to prevent it. I don't know if it's the emulator, the recorder, or my PC not being good enough that is causing the problem. I apologize if it ruins the watching experience. The reason I chose emulator over console was to have better graphics and record in a bigger resolution.

I didn't realize what was I getting into when I chose this game for a challenge run. I didn't know how frustrating it would be until I started actual attempts.

On hard difficulty, there are more enemies, they do more damage, and bosses have a lot more health, which makes the stage 4 boss extremely difficult because you have a timer counting down on that boss fight.

On hard difficulty, enemy vision range is a lot higher than normal/easy difficulties. This forces you to be extra careful since the radar doesn't show exactly how far each enemy can see (like in Metal Gear's radar). An example of just how ridiculously far they can see is where I messed up in stage 3. I was in the middle of seducing one enemy. The guard behind him really far away could apparently see me, so he went into red alert and made all the other guards nearby go into red alert including the guard I was seducing.

What makes this game really hard is how the game punishes you every time you fail stealth and get caught by the enemy. Every time you get caught in red alert, every enemy's vision range INCREASES. They can already see a lot farther on hard difficulty, and now they can see even farther each time you're caught. So if you get caught say 3 to 4 times, you're now dealing with enemies that can see you from extremely far away. When it gets this bad, chances of survival gets pretty low. Every time you take out one enemy, the next one will see you and immediately go into red alert. Basically, whatever strategy you had planned won't work anymore. The penalty effect lasts until the end of the stage.

When you get caught too many times, the game penalizes you even further by spawning the most dangerous enemies in the entire game, the white ninjas. When these guys spawn, chances of survival is extremely low. You have to deal with the white ninjas along with all the other enemies that are already attacking you. These white ninjas are fast and extremely cheap. Blow darts and smoke bombs do not work on them.

The other thing that really frustrated me was the platforming. The worst one is the long bridge near the end of stage 2. There's a wall you need to run through 2 times to get through this part. The problem is Kurenai will sometimes stop wall running on this wall, so she loses running momentum and falls to death. Note it takes over an hour just to reach this bridge, so it's really frustrating when you do all that work to get here only to have the run die because Kurenai won't wall run. I only have a chance at a real attempt when I pass this bridge, so that drove me pretty crazy.

It was also very frustrating when the enemy AI cheats as in they suddenly see me and go into instant red alert when I'm in a position where they shouldn't be able to see me. An example of this is when I messed up in stage 3 and got caught. I ran away successfully and got back to no red alert by hiding behind a building, but the red armor enemy somehow saw me through the building I'm hiding in and immediately went into red alert and came straight to me.

Here's a brief overview of how many things that had to go right in order to do this challenge successfully. I had to hope Kurenai will wall run successfully 2 times in the bridge in stage 2. I had to hope the AI doesn't cheat and automatically find me too many times in stage 3. I had to not mess up on the platforming, especially in the nightmare gear platforming part in stage 5. And the part after that in the lava area, I had to execute the long range head fatality successfully or else it would red alert a lot of enemies, which is enough to spawn the white ninjas in an area where there's practically no space to fight.

It took a really long time to route this game, especially on figuring out how to get through each area without getting caught. The starting area of Stage 3 was probably the hardest one to figure out how to do without being caught. It looks very simple in the video, but it took me a long time to come up with that.

I highly recommend watching other people's playthroughs of Red Ninja. It's very interesting to see what solutions other players came up with to get through the stealth parts, which are different to how I did it.

I'm extremely glad this challenge is done because I'm never EVER doing it again, lol. I'll still play the game casually.

This was played on emulator. No cheats. No tool-assists. No save states.

Thanks for watching. =)

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