Aragami 2 Reminds Us of the Value of Life—and Ninjas

In a tragically Tenchu-less decade, Aragami 2 blinked onto the scene last month to quench our desperate thirst for ninjas. But the game does more than revisit the joys of casting shadow arts at a warlord’s soldiers as you flip your way up a castle. It’s a reminder of how OG stealth games came to teach us about the value of life while they were also teaching us about assassination. But is the game’s speed and power creep moving the genre in the right direction?

Tenchu—a somewhat legendary ninja game series, first released in 1998, that went on to dominate the stealth-action genre for the better part of the 2000s—remains a fond memory for many, and a quintessential point of reference for stealth games. In 2016, the original Aragami made a splash on the indie scene, reigniting the spirit of Tenchu. It was a pleasantly stripped-down third-person stealth-action title with a vivid art style of gloomy reds and blacks that centered masterfully on the stealth mechanic. Aragami 2 seeks to expand on that quaint concept, in the interest of producing a more expansive spiritual successor to its legendary influences.

The Aragami series leans into a few mainstream trends pioneered by contemporary stealth games—the most obvious being Arkane Studios’ Dishonored, with its wonderfully simplified blink and shadow vision mechanics, which trivialize planning your strike and moving in and out of the action. But it has also been accused of imitating Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in its combat and speed.

While Aragami 2 can seem overlong and buggy, the game remains a faithful and fun sendup of the third-person stealth-action games from the early aughts, and revitalizes them with a new layer of style, flow, and aesthetic.

Fans of stealth games from the 2010s may be unfamiliar with the ninja games and their Tenchu roots that Aragami 2 draws from, and all the crazy jumping, wallscreen-stabbing, and Kurosawa blood-spraying that entails. This, combined with the many shadow powers, means your problem is how to expose and peel away a fortress’s defenses more than the nitty-gritty of traversal.

The game features your standard goons, but has a few surprises too. The fourth enemy type, priests, are an especially fresh addition; they’re a late-game adversary spiritually attuned to nearby guards, and they know when their allies have been killed. Priests can even resurrect or awaken guards after they’re stunned in the final levels.

I remember the moment of unfolding delight when I noticed through shadow vision that an entire household of guards were linked by a ghostly thread to some singular point in the center of the building, and, advancing to find a single sorcerer, backed right into a wall covered by vision cones.

Later in the game, there are also enemy ninjas with some of your powers—though they’re not much of a threat as long as they don’t spot you. If such enemy types actually hunted you from the shadows as you do low-rank enemies, any hope of artful infiltration would quickly spiral out of your hands, which is precisely what the game’s final boss aims to do. Having all your tricks used against you by another ninja bamf-ing around the level like Nightcrawler in the White House in X-Men 2 certainly puts you on the back foot. Deathloop models this concept too, via the character of Julianna, delivered with terrifying authenticity via a PvP system.

It’s worth noting that Aragami 2’s blink and shadow vision powers, which Dishonored popularized to the point of making them an archetype of the genre, have both been de-powered in the most recent Dishonored title, Death of the Outsider, from 2016. The expansion replaced them with new experimental alternatives that complicate awareness and mobility, reintroducing some of the difficulty associated with those concepts that the first game evaporated from the genre in 2012.

As games like Aragami 2 continue to borrow from Dishonored’s power system, it’s interesting to note how Arkane may be moving away from them, perhaps implying an interest in putting the rabbit back in the hat when it comes to overindulging the stealth-action player with omnipresent senses and agility. Perhaps they’re right, and the last thing we need from games about rewarding patience are more and more ways to cut to the chase.

Interestingly, Aragami 2 embraces nonlethal playstyles from the bottom to the top of its skill tree—something that never quite seems to be the case in assassination and stealth games. The game has its own brutal guard-mangling abilities in the shadow-kill and warp-strike spells, though they’re both pleasantly contrasted with the mesmerize and shadow-pull spells, which could even be argued to be superior. Despite this mechanical choice, the game avoids any kind of heavy-handed altruist message of nonviolence espoused by certain legends of the stealth genre.

The power dichotomies of stealth games have notoriously been quite intentional. In both the Dishonored and Metal Gear Solid series—two seminal stealth franchises—it is often made clear that lethal play will cause an unhappier ending. The games then tempt you with the objective fact that their lethal gameplay options are better. They both show you that being as heartless as possible is the easiest way to get what you want, but the long-term consequences of those decisions will catch up with you, and your loved ones and community will suffer for your moral weakness.

Even when mercy isn’t built into a stealth game’s narrative, mission completion scorecards can make you look like a monster whenever you bumble through a level seen by half the guards but artlessly murdering the rest. It’s almost as if lethal play has always been the unspoken easy mode in this genre, and the skill ceiling is there for pacifists.

This adds up to an overarching theme in stealth games that’s always appealed to me: It is far more badass to be kind in a cruel world than succumb to your inferiors.

Dishonored isn’t the first stealth game to expand the thoughtfulness of patient gameplay into meditations of mercy. The original Thief games had the same nonlethal mechanics, as indeed did Tenchu. But explicitly centering them as the correct (and ultimately canon) choice of action—as Dishonored has done—became a “thing” only once it was used as a jaw-dropping twist in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

While Dishonored and Metal Gear Solid have long made strides in layering narrative meaning over lethal and nonlethal mechanics, these enlightened morals feel more at home in the majestic ancient Asiatic setting of Aragami 2, suffused with an air of deep reflection and personal philosophy upon which the Sun Tzu adage that the ultimate art of war is not to fight weighs heavily upon those with the power to kill.

Aragami 2 bravely carries the torch of pacifism into a games market as thick as ever with amoral, poorly motivated ultraviolence, but doesn’t quite dare to substantiate its reasoning. If nothing else, it corroborates what many of us have long come to understand: Stealth games are often about mercy more than malice.