Ghost of Tsushima

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.