What am I seeing here?
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Original PlayStation memory card icons are really small — only 16 pixels square! That’s awfully tiny for today’s screens so I’ve created 2 versions of each icon: one at 32 pixels that is closer to the original size and a much larger one at 256 pixels
FUN FACT
Shinobi-Gaisen is a Japan-exclusive re-release of the original Tenchu featuring revised missions, added content from the Western release, and most notably a Mission Editor. I’m not quite clear on the translation as the kanji can apparently be taken a few different ways. It can be read literally as ‘tiger scroll’ or more loosely as ‘cheat sheet’ or ‘study guide’. I believe a more formal, and maybe more fitting interpretation is ‘book of trade secrets’. Given the uncertainty I’ve just decided to call it “Mission Editor mode” which is how the Western release of Tenchu 2 refers to it.
Shinobi-Gaisen is unique among all of the Tenchu titles as it uses a different animated memory card icon for each of its Mission Mode environments. You can see the order and title of each in the gallery above. Normally you’d have to complete the game in order to unlock all of these environments but after a few hours of digging I found a cheat code to instantly unlock them. BIG time saver. I also found a massive Japanese fan site dedicated to the series which includes loads of user created levels. The whole site was a wonder to discover so I wanted to link to it also.
Check out the rest of the series too, there’s a unique little tidbit to discover about each game.
