Tenchu:  Fatal Shadows Evolves the Role of Female Heroines in Video Games

The video game series Tenchu has from its inception provided an innovative type of ninja-based video game.  While many successful game franchises, like Ninja Gaiden, have put forth masculine action-oriented video games that appeal to the sword-play and lethal fighting tactics of Japanese martial arts in a variety of settings, Tenchu stands alone as a game series centered around stealth and assassination, invoking a more historic use of the feudal Japanese art of ninjutsu with one twist:  an equality shown between the female and male protagonists that the player uses in the games.  In this way the characters of Tenchu adhere to what Helen Kennedy writes in her work “Lara Croft:  Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?  On the Limits of Textual Analysis,” about “a strong ‘bimodal’ appeal in that [the games] manage to engage a large following of both men and women” (Kennedy).  In a stunning move Tenchu:  Fatal Shadows, the sequel to the Playstation 2 game Tenchu:  Wrath of Heaven, went beyond the male and female protagonist staple of the franchise and created a game based entirely around two young assassins, two women, Ayame and Rin.  No male character is available to play in this game, and this essay will attempt to bring to light what impact Tenchu:  Fatal Shadows might have on the view of female heroines in video games, just what audience the video game’s creators targeted and what sets this Tenchu game apart as a landmark for critical thinking wherein women and men are regarded as equals.

There are symbiotic relationships, between pairings, where the individual parties can no longer be viewed as separate; the two cannot be viewed or imagined as one existing without the other.  It is, to paraphrase Taoists, the “yin” to the “yang.”  One particular pair, which has been irreparably intertwined from the day in which the mother gave birth to the son, occurred on the day June 23, 1991.  This was the day of the release of the Sega Genesis videogame Sonic the Hedgehog.  This game gave birth to Sega’s icon, who would go on to rival Nintendo’s Mario:  “The 16-bit Sega Genesis…quickly became the most popular home videogame system in the States with…Sega’s prickly new mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog” (Burnham 336), writes Van Burnham in her book Supercade:  a visual history of the videogame age 1971-1984.  It was no accident that when firing up many of the Genesis Sonic games, the “SEGA” icon came up on the screen and was run over by a speedy Sonic, as a voiceover blasted, “SEGA!”  The two were becoming synonymous. 

Stony Brook University is on the cutting edge of the study of one of the newest media forms in existence. As Professor Guins says about Stony Brook’s video game classes, “we have five, we have the two taught by myself, we have two taught in computer science…there is also a games course in technology in society…it’s an important medium…I would anticipate more games courses in the future.”

“How do we understand histories of technology? How do we understand the very process of making sense of cultural histories?” These are just two of the many questions posed in the classroom by Raiford Guins, the professor of the Video/Computer Game History and the Video Games Culture courses at Stony Brook University.

Video games are their own art, and one can study them from a variety of different perspectives aside from just the historical one. Professor Guins rifled off the “narrative [perspective], the play, interactivity, reflections of societal issues, the sound and the design process” without even thinking about the question.

“Games are the newest form of popular culture that the university is now taking seriously,” says Guins. Across the country, some of the most academically acclaimed universities, “such as N.Y.U., U.S.C. and Georgia Tech offer degrees in [video] games, or interactive media” and S.B.U., M.I.T. and the University Of Michigan all offer rigorous courses based on video games.

Do you yourself or anyone you know play some type of video game at home, in public, or on a cell phone?