One to two players, one savegame, requires 40K, vibration and anolog control.
No widescreen support, supports 480p.
Rated M for blood and gore and violence.
Tenchu is an easy game to play the wrong way. Its a hard game to play the right way. The right way is to sneak around and kill people without noticing (you are a ninja after all). The wrong way is to charge up and kill them, making all the noise in the world.
The controls were difficult to use at first, since the buttons are used in a variety of combinations depending on the moves you want to make. Fortunately, the missions get more difficult along the learning curve of the controls. You'll be a master ninja in no time.
Missions are challenging to play while staying hidden, but you have a variety of items to use to help you along like poison rice balls, blow guns, throwing stars, sticky bombs, etc. You can perform tricks like sliding along walls, hanging off ledges and doing tucked rolls to move silently and speedily in any direction.
When you do get spotted, occasionally you can run away and hide behind something and your attacker will forget about you. When they're just too close you'll have to battle it out. You have an equally impressive amount of movements when fighting hand-to-hand such as performing leaping attacks, or kicking your opponent onto their back so you can stab them on the ground. You're supposed to be able to charge your enemies quickly, or pick them up, but I've not figured out how to do that yet.
The game seems very silly if you forget you are a ninja. In one level I was standing up on the branch of a dead tree 5' off the ground. An enemy spotted me in the tree, but forgot about me as soon as I ducked. The only way somebody could hide from me in a dead tree is if they were a ninja.
Multiplayer modes feature death match and cooperative modes, but co-op mode does not follow the story line in single player mode, but is instead played as a mission. In deathmatch mode, you can play as any of the bosses you've defeated. The bosses don't have the cool different stealth kills that the main characters do.
Multiplayer/co-op battlefields are unlocked through the course of single-player mission play. You can use multiplayer mode to fine-tune your stealth-killing expertise to become deadly efficient.