Samurais are recurring Guards featured in Tenchu series, typically featured as starter mooks the player free to either fight or evade.
Appearance and Abilities
Samurais that encountered in the game are typically wearing black hakama, sandals, and blue/purple kimono. As with real-life samurais, they are skilled in an array of weaponry in their times such as spear, katana, and even bows and arrows. In Tenchu series, they are employed by bosses of the series as guards to watch over their lair. As starting enemies however, samurais are deliberately designed to pose mediocre challenge for the player due to their somewhat sluggish fighting style compared more precise player's and more formidable guards that they can be dealt easily on their own and even eluded/tricked easily. Moreover, there's a chance that would flee in terror if the fight proved too much for them, though most prefers to fight to the death no matter the odds. They however, only pose greater challenge in numbers.
Variations
Basic Variations
There are 3 basic types of samurais:
- Katana: Most common variant of the samurais. They wields katana as primary wweapon
- Yari (Spear): Samurais that equipped with a spear as main weapon. As they can use their spear quite deftly to perform both thrusting and slashing attacks, they pose greater challenge than katana users. Most of them will attempt to keep the player at bay to avoid attacks and also to “push” them around to gather more attackers. While not overly effective against the players mobility, they can be a considerable threat in tight environments and in numbers. While level placements are random in most cases, it is best to dispatch Yari-armed samurais in open space or away from small environments.
- Yumi (Bow): Samurais that armed with bows and arrows. While fragile when it comes to melee combat, Bow-armed guards are serious hazards in-game. They tend to have larger areas of sight and depending on the adaption at higher elevations to allow maximum usage of their sight. They will always stay at a range and fire arrows that can stagger and cause great injury. Consecutive hits can cause the player to fall over in some cases. They are however quite helpless in close range and suffer from a lack of melee attacks. It is important for one to locate them and either avoid or dispatch of them if one wishes to take a “high” approach to stages.
Others
In addition of 3 basic variants above, there are also other variations:
- Ronin: Characterized with their more delicate outfit. Ronins are much more formidable than their regular counterparts.
- Shimatsu-ya samurai: Veteran samurais featured in Tenchu: Fatal Shadows, charactericed with their much more proper outfit amd a mask that covering their nose and mouth. As with ronins, they are tougher than their regular counterparts.