3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Ghost of Yōtei.

Ghost of Yotei is no Ghost of Tsushima. While it's basically the same game it manages to take a lot of what worked about Tsushima and make it worse. It has a way worse story, bland open-world design, and just a lack of anything remotely unique. I'll say this now, if you just wanted another Ghost of Tsushima game, one that doesn't challenge it's audience or do anything unique from it's predecessor, you'll probably like this, but as someone that expected more from Sucker Punch I can't help but feel disappointed. Something both Yotei and Tsushima excel at is the combat. It's still just as slick and cinematic as the first game and I loved every moment of that. I wasn't particularly a fan of the stances in the first game, as I found myself getting confused at what stance does what pretty often. But here it's as simple as one weapon is good against certain types of enemies, while this other weapon can kill these other enemies. It might not sound like an improvement when I put it like that, but I honestly found it a lot more intuitive. On top of this game just looking incredible, even more so than the first game, It really just blew me away at points. The music does so much heavily lifting for this game that I'm surprised it didn't win some sort of award. Even if I didn't particularly care for the story, the music made me feel what the story was supposed to make me feel at points. The open world of Tsushima wasn't particularly ground breaking either, but here It feels like they've learned nothing and just did the same thing over again. There's still hot springs, there's still bamboo cutting, It's all here, and yet the new side content feels almost identical to the first game. It really does feel like a mediocre Ubisoft game at points, instead here it's carried by it's visuals. One thing I personally didn't really care for was the PS5 controller mini-games, whether that be painting with the touchpad or cooking with motion controls, it all just felt like a gimmick that didn't add anything to the experience. Easily the worst aspect of Yotei is its story, I'm not going to pretend that Tsushima had this amazing story, but for what it was It did a decent job at least being engaging. Here in Yotei everything is boring and something you've already seen told a thousand times over. It's a simple revenge story, and every time I expected Sucker Punch to go in an interesting direction, they just spell everything out for the audience. This game starts with the main villains brutally slaughtering a child's family and leaving them for dead with smiles on their faces, right away these villains are doing something irredeemable in my eyes. So why is it that almost the entire game tries so hard to redeem their actions and humanize them. I wasn't conflicted I was just confused as to why the story chose this extremely safe direction to bring the story toward a "revenge bad" fable. I gave a lot of shit to The Last of US Part 2 when I first played it, that too tells a pretty simple revenge story and while I still don't really like the story of that game, it does a good job at conveying why Abby wants revenge for what Joel did in the first game. Joel did what he did out of fatherly love for Ellie and the connection they built up over an entire game. Now Imagine if instead Joel was just smashing babies heads in with hammers and laughing manically, that's what the villains of Ghost of Yotei felt like, just over the top evil characters and yet somehow they still try and paint them as human beings. I would have much preferred it double down on the revenge aspect as nothing is redeemable about these characters and trying to humanize them just doesn't work, but instead they went with the classic "revenge bad" plotline. WE KNOW REVENGE IS BAD, you don't have to put your story on some superficial moral high ground, WE GET IT, this is an M rated game you don't have to treat your audience like they're toddlers. It really annoyed me just how often cruelty towards children here is used as a simple plot device that is smashed over your head again and again throughout Yotei's 30 hour runtime. It'd be one thing if they did something unique with it, but nope, the deepest it goes is "You killed my family". I know video game stories are notoriously not very good, especially compared to other mediums like movies or even tv series, but when your entire game relies on that story is when I start to have a problem with it and it becomes something I can't forgive. Overall though Ghost of Yotei was fine, It did nothing to surprise me and it feels like one of those games that I'll forget I've played after a few weeks go by. At $70 this honestly felt like a waste of money, even if you're a fan of the open world genre I'd still hold off for a little until the price goes down.