4/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Ghost of Tsushima.

Ghost of Tsushima was a game I was hesitant about for a while. Seeing some of the early gameplay and trailers, I was very unsure of how the game actually played, and the only bit of gameplay I had any particular affinity toward was an early bit of stealth gameplay. Fast forward to the special Ghost of Tsushima State of Play, and I finally got what I wanted. There was an in-depth presentation of how the game played, the kinds of things you'll be doing, that kind of thing. I couldn't be happier. It looked very cool and I was already in love with the era. So, do those initial impressions of mine reflect my final opinion? First, let's talk about the story. To sum this up without giving spoilers, you play as Jin Sakai, a formidable swordsman with training as a Samurai, as he fights to push the Mongolian invaders out of his home and save the island of Tsushima and Japan itself. It's a neat story and there are, of course, twists and turns and more intricacies to the story but, as I said before, I don't really want to spoil it, so in order to move on from the story, I'll quickly give my opinion. I think it's very good and very well executed. It's not particularly deep or anything I haven't seen before, but seeing as they were going hard on mimicking and taking inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Samurai films, I think that's perfectly fine, and the story is still very interesting and fairly engaging. Moving on from that, I'll talk a bit about the presentation. Starting with the world, while not the best looking game I've seen on PS4, it's still incredibly beautiful. The island of Tsushima is packed to the brim with varied environments. Parts of it being covered in fallen leaves, other parts completely drenched in snow, and others still having a more natural green look. It's quite impressive how many different types of environments are on this one island. With combat, every sword hit draws blood, having a gush of blood spurt out, the animations are fast and really cool looking. Attacks feel like they have weight to them as well. It's kind of like a combination of a flashy and practical looking system. Very neat. Now to get into the gameplay. Combat-wise, starting out it took me a bit to get used to. I kept reflexively hitting the shoulder buttons for dodge for some reason and got hit a few times for it. After I got used to it though, it is very stylish looking and makes me feel like a badass Samurai ninja. In the game, you have two basic attacks: a light attack and a heavy attack, which are performed by pressing the ☐ or △ buttons. There is also a heavy attack that you can activate by holding the △ button. These can be chained together to do combos. The combos in this game are fairly basic feeling, but they get the job done. I'm unsure if there are any super different combos in the game as I mostly was just mashing ☐ or △ back and forth. There are a few △ button combos and one ☐ button combo that get unlocked by purchasing upgrades and they are super helpful, but they don't require any sort of complex button input, most only asking you to hold down a button and then mash, or delay your press of one. There may be something more complex within the game itself, but if so it doesn't make it apparent. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing though. Complex combos aren’t really what the combat system is about. What you really need to master is parries, perfect parries, and dodging. By pressing the L1 button, Sakai will put his sword up to block. Blocking, while it can be useful for projectiles, is definitely not the best way to deal with attacks, and I rarely ever used it. What you really want to focus on is parries. By timing your button press to the moment when the enemy is attacking you, Jin will parry the attack. This gives you a free hit on your opponent, usually a single three-hit combo, but you may be able to squeeze in a few more hits than that, depending on the enemy type and combo you are doing. This is the best way to deal with enemies and will be expanded and improved upon as you purchase upgrades. The combat does expand and get better with additional upgrades, but these are the basics you will have access to and explains generally how the game plays combat-wise. To delve into the stealth side of the game, stealth in this game is handled fairly standard for this type of game, with some neat Assassin's Creed influence. Sneaking around is done by crouching. Crouching in this game quiets your footsteps, and makes it easier to not be spotted by enemies. While crouching, you can hide in patches of grass. While in the grass, you are pretty much invisible (which is a pretty standard mechanic for stealth for non-exclusively stealth games) unless an enemy is *really* close. If an enemy does spot you, it has a detection meter above its head, as you might expect, very much like games such as Dishonored or AC Origins. As long as you get out of the enemy's line-of-sight before the meter fills up, you'll be fine. As for taking out enemies, you have your standard stealth kill which you can perform by sneaking up behind an enemy, but you also have an air assassination which is where some of the AC influence comes in. With upgrades, you can even do double and triple assassinations which is pretty awesome. You do gain a couple of other stealth tools such as a blowpipe (with poison and berserk darts, which is also very AC-esque), and a bow. These are very useful tools that you obtain throughout the story and make stealthing through enemy encampments much easier. Speaking of upgrades, let’s begin to get into that. This game handles upgrades by using somewhat of an experience system, but it’s not a traditional one. Every “event” in the game gives you “experience.” Events in the game are classified as one of the various side-activities you see in the open world, defeating the random patrols of enemies you see roaming around, or completing main or side quests. The experience gets added to your experience bar. Along the bar are certain points that are marked. Every time you manage to reach one of the marked points on the bar, you will get a skill point. Once you manage to completely fill the bar you “level up,” which is called increasing your legend in this game. This allows you to get access to a new type of tool to help you deal with enemies. You will also be entitled to gifts from the people of the various towns in the game, and these are usually extra materials for crafting. There are more levels than unlockable tools so I’m unsure of what exactly the point is in reaching max level other than for better gifts (which don’t show up *that* often). Now the skill points that you earn can obviously be used to purchase upgrades for your character. While I won’t get into the specifics of each upgrade, I will let you know that almost every upgrade felt significantly substantial. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve played a game where upgrades made such a huge difference. A lot of them are absolute game changers and make major improvements to your game experience. The other upgradable things in this game are your armor, sword, and capacity for your various tools. This is done via a crafting system where you gather materials in order to go to a vendor who can craft the upgrades for you. The armor and capacity upgrades, while nice, aren’t incredibly necessary, but that may depend on your gameplay style. I ended up upgrading them all for completionists sake, but I only really ever wore the Ghost Armor and Traveler’s Attire consistently, and the only tools I frequently used were the Bow and Blowpipe. The upgrade I feel you should focus on the most is the sword upgrade, more specifically the smaller dagger you use for stealth kills. Upgrading it increases the speed at which you can perform stealth kills and also makes them much quieter. This was the first thing I maxed out and it does make a significant difference to your stealth kills (the style I chose to play in for my time with the game). The main sword upgrades just make it do more damage, which is always helpful, but not incredibly so for this game. Glitch-wise I did experience a few throughout my time with the game, the main one being an odd time when the reins of my horse permanently attached themselves to my hands and feet. This made it difficult to move as I was being pulled back toward my horse, and also caused my guy to spazz out when standing still, which was quite funny. It was fixed upon exiting to the title screen and reloading. I did end up completing this game 100%, even doing things not required for the platinum trophy, like buying all of the outfit colors and upgrading the armors and weapon capacities (if you are going for the platinum though, it’s pretty easy and just a little time-consuming). This was mostly pretty easy and only really required some grinding for materials which did take like 4 hours. I did so because of OCD, but also because I did really enjoy playing this game and wanted to experience as much of the game as I could. Which makes a good segue. The side content in this game is mostly pretty standard. As far as traditional side missions go, you’re usually just killing a bunch of enemies, doing investigations (which consist of going up to an object and pressing R2), or following tracks. Now, these do begin to get a bit repetitive, but not too much. The stories of most of the side quests are just fairly basic open-world stuff, with random people asking you to go here or do this. However, there are a couple of subsets of these which are pretty neat. First, you have the musical bard quests. These consist of having a tale of a famous, powerful figure in the history of Tsushima being told to you by a musical bard. They recount the story of this specific figure, focusing on a particular ability or item which made them so powerful. This leads to you going on an adventure to find this particular ability or item, and that’s pretty neat. While the missions themselves don’t consist of anything too interesting (outside of the one that has you find certain areas surrounded by flowers using a neat in-game map.) the rewards do make up for it. Most are legitimately super cool and make these side quests worth doing. The other type of sidequest is those focusing on the supporting cast of the game, and these are also fairly good. The Masako and Ishikawa sidequests especially are excellent and tell very interesting stories. The other ones in comparison aren’t quite as great, but still are the most interesting side quests, story-wise in this game, and are definitely worth your time. The other side activities are very of the genre for open-world games, and nothing I haven’t seen before. However, I will give special attention to the Shrines in this game. Shrines in this game are platforming challenges requiring you to use your parkour abilities to climb up to the high places these shrines are located. I found these to be very fun and reminded me of the tombs and crypts from AC2 and Brotherhood. Now, the parkour in this game isn’t nearly as complex as those games and is much more similar to the Origins/Odyssey style of just pressing a direction, but still, the Shrines were my favorite piece of side content in this game outside of the official side-quests themselves. It was very fun challenging myself to go through these as fast as I could without making mistakes. This game took me about ~60 hours to complete, which is a good length. Without the side content though, I imagine that being closer to 40, but still very nice. Sucker Punch is a developer that I always have appreciated (the Sly trilogy in particular, are some of my favorite games of all time), and they always deliver fun experiences. I will say though, that this is probably one of my least favorite games of theirs. It’s not bad by any means, it’s good, it’s just taking in some of the more basic parts of this game, and comparing it to other PlayStation exclusives and past Sucker Punch games, the game just kind of pales in comparison. I’d probably place it near inFAMOUS Second Son around the bottom in a ranking of SP games, if that gives you an idea. I do feel like this game does have a solid foundation though and would like to see how it improves in sequels (I also wouldn’t mind a patch adding in New Game+ mode). I’m definitely on board for what they’ve built so far. Overall, I think this game is good. I liked it; my time with it was enjoyable, I just don’t feel it’s quite there yet in what it could be.