3/5 ★ – fez219's review of Ghost of Tsushima.

Style over substance. Although I really enjoyed the game at first, it eventually became an open world slog that fell into too many of the genre's trappings. It feels like a game you’ll love if you power through it, but if you stick around too long, the flaws become more and more apparent. There's lots to like here! It's art and design work is amazing; Ghost of Tsushima is easily one of the prettiest games I've ever played. The environments are stunning, with so many beautiful details like waving grass and other wonderful effects work. A highlight for me was the random little touches you notice, like Jin running his hand through grass as he rides through a field. Jin's various armors also all look fantastic. Faces look a bit dated though, especially in Japanese because the lip-synching was only done for English. The voice acting is great. I played in Japanese, and recognized quite a few heavy hitters. For example, Jin's Japanese VA is also Zoro from One Piece, which is fitting and rad. GoT has a cleverly minimal UI plays into the game's overall aesthetic. There's no compass or minimap; instead, the "guiding wind" naturally points you to your next objective or marker, without taking up any screen space. There is also a firefly to naturally guide you to closeby collectables, and birds that fly to points of interest if you spot and follow them. This makes exploration somewhat more natural than beelining to the next spot on your minimap like Assassin's Creed. It also makes for an uncluttered experience across exploration and combat with a very cinematic presentation. It really nails the presentation pretty much across the board. The combat also looks and feels REALLY cool. I'll get into my problems with it below, but it's very satisfying when it works. The animations are smooth, the sounds are brutal, and the Kurosawa aesthetic looks great — especially during the standoffs, which I really liked. But as beautiful as the game is, I felt that it was often hollow, and lacking in the most important areas. First off, I found the story very mediocre. The overarching theme of honor was interesting, but too little was done with it. Most of the main story just felt repetitive and basic. I wasn't very interested in most of the characters and side quests, with a few exceptions. Sensei Ishikawa and Lady Masako both had interesting quests with fun missions and cool themes of betrayal. But too many side quests and main missions just felt like same-y filler. And although the Kahn seems interesting at first, him and the Mongols are shallow and not explored nearly enough. I think part of the problem was quest and dialogue design. I felt like this game begged for a Witcher 3 approach to dialogue and questing, but nearly everything is predetermined. Most dialogue is automatic and static — and extremely slow, with no skip feature — and there's just too much of it. Every hostage you rescue, for example, has lines of unnecessary, stilted dialogue that you can't skip through. It sucks! And most of the dialogue and story is not memorable, which just makes the game drag. Dialogue choices that effect the world would have been nice to make players even a bit more interested in the mediocre story, but they are extremely few and far between and generally only change a line or so; the game is not an RPG. There is a cool choice at the ending, and the ending of the game was good! But too much of the game on the way to the end was stretched out and boring. A few big battles and story beats are cool and memorable, but the writing in this game is vastly inferior to some of the better open-world story-driven games of the generation, like Witcher 3 or Red Dead. Besides side missions, there are quite a few side activities and collectibles to find around the map. I actually liked most of these! They all have direct buffs and effects on gameplay that incentivize the player to do them, and they're all unique and help build out Jin's world. Some can be cheesy, like haikus, but I had a lot of fun with each thing I found. But I did not enjoy going around looking for these activities. Clearing out the map is not all that fun, because you're stuck constantly flipping to a map screen to check if you've found anything nearby as you clear out fog. I would HIGHLY recommend prioritizing completing the game and missions over finding every single side activity, which is not the way I played. The game never tells you, but liberating every area actually clears that chunk of the map and shows every question mark. I realized this AFTER completing the game and finding all the side activities through painstakingly unfogging every inch of the map. And while the map is pretty and most of the side activities themselves are decent fun, it also feels empty and lifeless. It's not dense or intricately designed like BOTW. It's closer to something like AC Origins, where there are question marks to find that turn into a few types of decent but repetitive side activities, but not much worthwhile between these. But while AC Origins had an incredible rendition of Egypt that was exciting to explore despite this, Tsushima — despite its undeniable and consistent beauty — just isn't nearly that interesting. It at least does have more of a visual element to exploration, with clear audio and visual cues of when something of interest is close, compared with the Ubisoft approach of "just plop all the question marks down and beeline to the waypoint after you unlock the towers." But It's nowhere near the organic world full of worthwhile discoveries and exploration of something like BOTW; it feels more like you ride around aimlessly hoping to find stuff than purposefully going off the beaten path or navigating organically. It was really draining for me to explore mostly empty (but pretty) traverses to do the same activities over and over, even if I enjoyed the activities when I actually found them. Some activities have clues around them to lead you there, like arches on the pathway to temples or fireflies surrounding shrines, but too much of the map is too flat for that to matter. Even if you find stuff naturally some of the time, too much of the time you find stuff by running around brainlessly clearing fog and flipping the map on and off. More organic exploration like BOTW would have made finding side activities much more fun. Still, even if you're rarely going to high points to scope out the world like in BotW's far more natural open world, at least exploring hills and mountains is satisfying. Climbing is intuitive, and the grappling hook is a blast to use. I actually wish the game did more with it! But exploring shrines and areas with lots of vertical traversal were a good time. The combat looks great, but the more I played, the more I found the combat to be cheap, unintuitive, and lacking in variety. I never found the game too difficult on normal, so the cheapness usually didn't matter. But I found that some enemies and bosses had attacks that were difficult or impossible to read. Like dodge red attacks? That makes sense. But certain red attacks do massive AoE damage unless you dodge away, and some enemy combos are completely impossible to predict or react to in boss fights without rote memorization. It's not intuitive at all when bosses have attack openings, and I shudder at playing this combat on higher difficulties. The game was just too unclear and finnicky about how to react to certain enemies and bosses, compared to something like DmC or Souls. Too much of the combat felt the same, too. There's little variety to how you attack beyond whether you mash strong attacks or weak attacks after blocking or dodging. The basics are fun and satisfying. Dodging and countering rank and file enemies feels great and intuitive, and attacks feel crunchy and powerful. But there's too little to stretch out over the game's massive run time and world. There are stances and different enemy types, but it doesn't feel like they have real gameplay effects. They just force you to switch stances that have extremely minor actual attack differences beyond doing block damage to that enemy type (i.e. only spear stance can get through a blocking spearman). I much prefer NiOh, where stance differences have massive effects and are viable for different situations, to the rock paper scissors stances here. I want to switch stances to gain access to different attack styles, not just because I do more block damage to that enemy type with that stance. And making the stances less viable against all other enemy types (i.e. spear stance doing no block damage to anything but spear enemies) means that switching stances to anything but the one for that enemy type is disincentivized. So maybe spear stance has a cool kick, but you'll be at a disadvantage for all other purposes than using the kick if you use the stance. That's bad game design! While melee combat is limited to the pretty but shallow and unintuitive sword combat, Jin does have a few other tricks up his sleeve. You have a short and longbow, both of which are very satisfying to use and powerful. You also have "ghost weapons," which are all incredibly OP, but fun. I rarely used stuff like sticky bombs or kunais because they feel like a free pass through combat, but they certainly make Jin feel strong. And there's stealth, which is brutal and satisfying, but pretty basic — hide in the grass and on roofs, and you're good. We've seen it a million times before. The one thing I loved about the combat was the standoffs. They are so fun and satisfying! And they make for great photo ops. I used standoffs pretty much every time I got the option to. There are a few other gameplay features here that I didn't feel were executed well or necessary, but I guess every 8th gen open world game needs them now. Jin has a sensory mode that highlights enemies, but I think this made little sense for the game. Stealth is already easy enough; batman-vision is a bad fit for a samurai game and makes it too easy. There are also investigations, but they're pretty lame. I get that following footsteps can make questing feel more natural, but it's repeated so often that it gets old quick. A few higher quality investigation sections could have been cool, but Sucker Punch just doesn't execute the investigative segments well enough to warrant their all too frequent inclusion in the boring questing. I did like how the various (and awesome-looking) armors give you useful and different buffs! Unlocking them and upgrading them was really fun. But one hyper-specific nitpick I have is relegating exploration aids to an armor set. I think traveler's armor should have had different buffs, and clearing a wider area of fog and collectible tracking should have been a bonus you unlock but share in all of your armors — not something that only the traveler's set does. If you want to just explore, these buffs were too difficult for me to pass up. So I found myself rarely using other types of armor, even though the game begged for more experimentation with armor. Overall, I found myself enjoying this game less and less the more I played it. The story and characters never grabbed me, and there wasn't enough to the beautiful but shallow world and sword combat to suck me in. It's an impressive piece of technology, but after a few dozen hours, its sheen wears off and the seems in its world and combat show. It's certainly not a bad game, and it's clear a ton of dev work and design love went into it. I think, if nothing else, there's a great foundation for a sequel here. The characters and setting deserve to be explored more, especially with how beautiful it is, and could really shine with better writing, a more engaging approach to dialogue, and a more organic world. But GoT still doesn't hold a candle in any of the most important departments — story, world, or gameplay — to the real greats. It might sound like I hate the game, but I don't! I certainly think it's a bit overrated, and that other games have done open worlds and melee combat better, but it's not a bad game by any means. It's beautiful, feels crunchy and satisfying, and has more than enough interesting gameplay stuff to warrant trying. Where I had issues with the world and exploration, someone who just powers through the game might have a better time. I'm still interested enough to check out Iki Island to see if the dlc brings new stuff to the table. And it's at least cool to see a big Sony studio try a new IP. A sequel with more substance could be great!