The story in Tenchu: Dark Secret starts with you protecting a small village from guerrilla troops who want to plunder the small community. They have also noticed the princess is staying in town, which makes them extra eager to get in. Logically their plan has gone from plundering to kidnapping the princess and now you have to protect her too. They have already managed to get a little closer to their goal than the mayor likes and he is sending you after them to kill them in their own territory. The grand plan: exterminate the samurai guerrilla.

To do this, you’ll have an entire arsenal of ninja weapons at your disposal like shurikens, bamboo-traps, smoke bombs, … just name it! They’re all highly effective against those villains in the woods. But what if you run out of gadgets? Well, then you use your sword (of course you can use it even if you still have gadgets, so you can kill them without having to throw shurikens at their heads or pushing them into bamboo-traps).

All the killing got poured into different missions which keep on repeating themselves. Save a villager, kill all enemies, save some villager again, kill them all once more, … It all just keeps coming back every three to four missions. You guessed it, REPETITIVE!

So the single player is nothing more than a boring, repeptitive campaign and the multiplayer isn’t that much better or more expanded. Apart from a versus mode there isn’t that much to do anyways. Here you have to kill one another with identical weapons as are available in the single player and the only difference is that you're facing a human opponent.

Fortunately there’s the soundtrack to save some of the honors. They bring some variety by implementing a grand number of Asian songs and give some life into the whole ‘kill kill kill’ routine. The graphics on the other hand aren’t helping the whole getting any better. It’s counting pixels ladies and gentlemen. Even though it’s still a handheld game, this is somewhat out of proportion. (Even Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest looked better!)