Ghost of Tsushima

Fun game, beautiful graphics but the missions get so boring after the first act. How many times do you trail people in a open world setting where you are restricted to play the way you want too. That aside, the gameplay is fine for a action RPG but once again this experience can get dull once the bag of tricks are empty and the same cycle of laziness repeats over and over again. (7.5/10)

Beautiful game, and I don't generally care for open world games, let alone enough to actually finish them. The combat is smooth and fun and highly intuitive, defeating a mob of enemies while cycling through stance types to match their weaknesses just feels really great. The 2D fighter-inspired duel system is fun, though it would benefit from a bit more variety, and goes from being extremely difficult to quite easy as soon as you figure out the enemy movesets and accept that it does not have the hitboxes, timing, and canceling of an actual fighter. The lack of traditional UI overlay and reliance on environmental context clues to lead you to locations (wind movement in place of GPS, birds and foxes leading you to hidden environmental locations) is quite nice. For such a vibrant and colorful game I don't understand why there is an optional visual mode that makes everything grainy and black and white. Pointless.

A few minor technical issues bog it down. Climbing down ladders and dropping off ledges is needlessly difficult to get right, and the camera in the standoff mechanic will often get stuck behind a piece of scenery if you're chaining a bunch together. It is also confusing that, while you can buy and sell materials, you do so with the Trapper NPCs and not the Merchant NPCs, who only sell vanity items and color schemes.

All in all, probably the most fun I've ever had with this style of game.

Ghost of Tsushima falls into every tired trapping of open-world game design that we've seen in the last decade. A game where no one aspect truly excels, aside from the presentation. It's fun while it's on, but it'll leave you wanting a lot more from it.

Throughout the first act of this game, I found myself idly wondering what this kind of open world action adventure game is actually for. I know I enjoy them, but what precisely is it that I actually want them to do? Broadly I like strong stories, characters, and worlds in games, but the early signs were that Ghost of Tsushima didn't really have that; some of the side quests in particular really beat you about the head with the game's core theme, as if the writers were worried that their players might not understand that this is a game about the death of the romantic notion of the samurai and the value, or even the possibility, of honourability during war. (It's a solid theme, but it's definitely not subtle, and in these early stages it just feels like plain bad writing.) But it does look beautiful, it does encourage exploration, and it does have really enjoyable, tactical, fluid combat that allows for a variety of playing styles and approaches, all of them fun - and it seems like all that totally fulfils the brief of what 'open world', 'action', and 'adventure' literally mean. And while pondering what I wanted from this game and others like it, I ultimately realised something: much like my two personal benchmarks for open world games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [ゼルダの伝説 ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド] and Red Dead Redemption, Ghost of Tsushima functions as a role playing game in the old school, pre-video game meaning of the term, inviting you to immerse yourself in a role and simply enjoy cutting about the countryside being a samurai. That, I think, is really the benchmark I've been working from. I can happily excuse the other myriad failings of Final Fantasy XV [ファイナルファンタジーXV] because it's so good at this; I enjoyed the Marvel's Spider-Man games much more than I expected to pretty much purely because of this; I don't even think of the Like a Dragon [龍が如く] games as being open world because this isn't really what they're about; what I've played of Far Cry and the recent Grand Theft Auto games has left me cold because they don't offer me that sense of immersion at all.

So as I came to that realisation, I started to play Ghost of Tsushima as if the story didn't matter, just seeking out bases and exploring the map and all the other stuff you generally do in these games. And I enjoyed it quite a bit. But then, to my surprise, the story actually ended up getting pretty good - toward the conclusion of the first act, it really picks up the pace. The writing and worldbuilding is undeniably guilty of taking its sweet time getting everything introduced and lined up, and not doing an awful lot to make that process interesting to the player, but once things get going, they really get going. There's a lot of bold, dramatic, and effective emotional beats shot through the second and third acts, in a way that's almost reminiscent of the pacing of a classic Telltale game, that sense of structuring a story around these huge drop-the-mic moments and building up crests and swells around them. Perhaps it's a consequence of me doing so much of the rest of the game early, but I got this great sense of momentum and drive to the narrative that's rare in a game that's so willing to allow you to do things that aren't related to the plot - hell, it's completely absent in even the first third of this game. So yes, it's something you'll need to have a degree of patience with, but the pay-off is certainly worth it - ultimately I can say this game delivered soundly on both of the two things that matter to me most.

Open world blah map items blah blah repetitive side quests yada yada blah.

Sure, yeah, okay, no wheels were reinvented for Ghost of Tsushima. I've written elsewhere on this very family of sites that a thing doesn't have to be revolutionary to be good, so I'm not going to hold the game's done-beforeness against it. Everything I can hold against it can be held against it internally. That sounds gross and weird and I barely know what I meant by it. I forgot to take my sleep meds last night, and I've decided to review a game I played well over a month ago. Hi. I'm struggling right now.

Okay, you're a samurai who got his ass handed to him by an invading Mongol horde. These guys don't give a fuck, toss, shit, or rat's ass about this whole honor thing you hold so dear, and their brutal methods of conquest force you to abandon your code of honor and become something not unlike my white, western-ass's understanding of a ninja (they never say the word ninja in the game, so I don't know, man). This creates an interesting story: sacrificing an ancient structure that isn't helping anymore, for the lives of your people. Cool. Neat.

I take no umbrage with linear stories like this, in games. Pull a BioShock and literally force my hand to do something I'd rather not, for all I care; just give me a good story. So, herein lies my biggest issue with Ghost of Tsushima: it has a very linear storyline with things it wants the player to do along the way, but it leaves its levels/areas open for you do to things however you want.

Here's how my playthrough went. After the introductory levels, I explored the island and tussled with Mongols. Along the way I really took to the combat. It's fun. Taking different stances to fight different types of enemies, not having the luxury of other similar games where the enemies all kinda wait their turn... You have to think a little bit when you stumble upon a Mongol patrol and they all come at you. It feels natural, and very satisfying when you win.

And it doesn't just stop there. The game prompts you to initiate a showdown when you approach a Mongol base that the game also wants you to go all ninja on. Once you get a handle on the combat (which isn't hard; take it from me, a just-okay gamer when it comes to skill), you can very well take a base without sneaking.

Then you have actual big battle missions where stealth isn't even an option. You get a cinematic, then boom, twelve Mongols bearing down on you at the start of a long virtual corridor where you will be doing the same thing for fifteen more minutes.

Then you get into the menus, where you can spend ability points on either stealth or combat. There's a flaw in this as well, because when you have all the ability points the game has to offer, you can be maxed out in both combat and stealth.

So my question is, if the game presents you with the combat pathand the stealth path, why is the story so linearly focused on the stealth path?

There could have been very fun ways to force you to do ninja shit, just as Jin Sakai was forced to do in the story. Even on normal mode, make open combat fucking hard. Raise the stakes. If the consequence of getting spotted is dead hostages, kill those hostages immediately if I get spotted. Don't reset the level; just put up some text saying, 'Come back and try later.' Dock me points on some kind of progress tracker when that happens.

Or, make it so the story changes depending on how samurai or ninja I am. That little morality slider that feels so vestigial on games like Red Dead Redemption would have been very welcome here, if swinging to either side granted cool but different benefits etc.

The most frustrated I get with anything—games, film, music—is wasted potential. Ghost of Tsushima has the bones for something that could've been truly great.

All of that said, there are things the game did do well. Lots of people laud the visuals, and I'll confirm that it's pretty. As mentioned above, I rather enjoyed the open combat. The voice-acting was pretty great as well. Overall I enjoyed it for what it was, and will likely play it again someday. But when I do, I'll be thinking about what could have been.

This might be the one: THE most overrated Video Game of all time, certainly the most overrated Game in recent history. It is just like all the other Ubisoft pretentious generic bland Open World Games. It hides it´s ultra linearity behind stupid wind and fox mechanics that wanna make you believe that this game is so different than the rest while it´s exactly the same thing. Im not a graphic person but i find the textures in this particularly bad. And in contrast to seemingly everyone else i hate the art design. For me it speaks to the generic design of the whole game: its empty story, its fake openness and then these overcolored cliché japan graphics that seems to be made for the sheer purpose of shoving the idea "this is a beautiful japanese open world" in your face every second you play this game making sure to have nobody forget it. I really can´t stand this artificial art design. At no point have i ever felt to be immersed in a actual living breathing world. This World is like your date wearing too much make up trying so hard every single moment that your thrown off constantly. Yeah did i mention the story? Well it just lines up right there with the art design making you feel alienated and estranged from the bland pseudo characters with their pseudo tragical stories. I did not care about anyone in this game whatsoever. Neither our shell of a person protagonist nor all the other shell of a person side characters and their uninteresting fates. If immersion is the goal of a great open World Game this game fails on every level. Well i guess that is not true because there is this one thing the game does well and that is because of the combat mechanics. I admit the combat system is pretty good, especially for an open world game. And since Gameplay is king this actually kept me playing the Game longer than i wish i did cuz everything else is so generic.

Pro
- pretty good combat system

Con
- another Ubisoft Open World Simulator
- Overcolored plumb in your face Art Style
- boring story
- empty characters