Aragami really seems like a game that I’d enjoy, being someone who is, at best, mildly obsessed with ninjas. The concept alone sounds like it’s right up my alley: a ninja stealth game where you can teleport between shadows. What more could you want? I could dance around the punchline here, spin a slow burn about whether or not a five year old game is worth your time, but I’ll help you come to the same realization I did in half the time: Aragami is a mediocre game on a weak engine that plays like someone really enjoyed Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored and tried to mash the two together. If that’s all you needed to know then thanks for visiting, but if you want to find out what I mean then let’s get into it.
The game’s title is the name of your main character: a shadow creature and spirit of vengeance who gains its powers from darkness and loses its ability to do much of anything in bright light. Your primary abilities are the shadow teleportation that I mentioned earlier and the ability to create pools of shadows which you almost always use to teleport between regular shadows that are too far apart to reach normally, but you can unlock more powers with scrolls that you find throughout the various levels. The problem is that nearly all of these powers and the gameplay style that goes along with them is almost identical to how one might play Dishonored, albeit Aragami‘s gameplay is generally lacking in verticality and also quite frankly worse in every possible way. Dishonored‘s teleport is limited only by how much energy you have rather than only working in shadows, Dishonored instantly turns killed enemies to ash while Aragami needs you to stand over the body for a few moments, and (for the sake of not listing every power that Dishonored does better while also showing the massive power gap between these characters) Aragami does have the ability to turn invisible for a few seconds but in Dishonored you can just FREEZE TIME for exactly the same sort of effect while also having so much more flexibility at the same time. This all leads to less of a power fantasy of being a terrifying blade made of shadow and more just an overall sense that your powers are missing some final upgrade that never comes.
So you move through areas, generally teleporting rather than walking because why walk where enemies can see you when you can just teleport everywhere, and either kill anyone who gets in your way or avoid them depending if you’re going for one of those “no kill” achievements or not. So far so Dishonored. However in Aragami it can sometimes feel like enemies are a little too observant to the point where killing them can feel like a necessity (or at least a helpful crutch) and that’s where the comparison to Mark of the Ninja comes in. For those of you that didn’t play it (and you really should) Mark of the Ninja was a 2D stealth game that was all about darkness and sound, where you could be all but arms length from your enemies and they couldn’t see you due to the very simple feature that you were either in darkness or light and there was no middle ground. It was a game that stuck to its own rules and you could always rely on them, which is very helpful in a stealth experience and unfortunately is something Aragami lacks as well, despite it loving the darkness even more than Mark of the Ninja. Sometimes teleporting next to an enemy won’t get their attention, sometimes they’ll see you appear from twenty feet away, and sometimes they’ll see you if you aren’t moving in darkness at all despite the game’s own rules (and one of the only rules they explain when it comes to darkness) saying that being motionless in the shadow will make you undetectable.
I could blame this on how shoddy the game feels, with awkward, stilted animations that are only worse when they try to have action play out in cutscenes in the latter half of the game, but outside of a feeling of the engine holding the game back (thanks, Unity) I only ran into two major glitches, though they were frustrating ones. The first happened at least once a level where an enemy would be stuck spinning in place, constantly rotating every half second as the AI was desperately trying to get back to its patrol route but whatever programming error wasn’t letting it disengage from its spot. Obviously this made traversing some areas very difficult without either killing the poor pixel man or letting him think he saw me so that he would leave his “post” to investigate me, after which he’d return to his programmed route. The second was actually more funny than upsetting, as after being spotted by some guards I restarted from my previous checkpoint but only I reset and the guards were still hunting for me, which triggered some deeper questions in my head about game development in regards to what actually goes into a checkpoint resetting. But that’s probably a question better served with a better game.
A stealth game that doesn’t follow its own rules is frustrating, and a stealth game with mechanics that are better done elsewhere is a missed opportunity, so where does that leave Aragami? Well based on the fact that Aragami 2 has decided to stop being a half-baked Dishonored game and has decided to become a quarter-baked Sekiro clone, I’d say not anywhere good. If you absolutely MUST play Aragami then wait for it to be one dollar or something in a bundle like I did, as there are certainly worse games that you and I have both played, but it’s not worth your time or money otherwise.
