Like clockwork, certain friends of mine text or IM when a big video game is about to launch. I'm the guy they know who gets games like a new Smash Bros. or Half-Life before the general public, and they love to push my embargoes to the limits with questions like "does it live up to the hype?" or "no spoilers: should I buy it?"
With Ghost of Tsushima, likely the last major new first-party game for Sony's PS4, I got a surprising number of these questions over the past few weeks. You might say they were surprising because Tsushima is an entirely new game series, not a hotly anticipated sequel. But the surprise came in a different form, as all of my friends came out of the woodwork to essentially ask me the same question: "Is this new Sony game hopeful?"
PS4 fans are likely still reeling from the console's last major exclusive, June's brutal Last of Us Part II—a game that revolves around the biological and social devastation following a global pandemic. TLOU2 is a brave, challenging, and compelling game, but the consensus I've gathered is that people are hungry for a different kind of adventure right now.
So I'm starting my review of Ghost of Tsushima by loudly and emphatically saying yes, this game is hopeful in all of the best ways. The latest adventure game from Sucker Punch, makers of series like Sly Cooper and inFamous, has come out of nowhere to blow me away. I'm stunned in part because I nearly wrote the game off as an Assassin's Creed clone when its gameplay was revealed in April. You wouldn't be blamed for doing the same; we're now roughly 400 years into the "open-world adventure" trend, and these games sure do blur together.
There's no blurring here, though. Tsushima stands out for many reasons, perhaps most crucially because it does something I haven't seen in the genre since Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: it nails the world-building relationship between the player, the protagonist, and the supporting cast. I rarely lost my sense of purpose or place while striving to bring honor back to my family and country as Jin Sakai, the game's hero. When he made friends, formed alliances, meditated on loss, or faced tragedy, I was there with him every step of the way, and this feeling was aided by a smartly paced stream of new samurai superpowers.
Ghost of Tsushima is by no means a perfect game, but it nails the important stuff: its 30-hour quest will make you feel like the star of a story about revenge, principle, and inner peace.
Gorgeous visuals, ambitious “Kurosawa filter”
Before we dive into how the game plays, we should start with how it looks, because, goodness:
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Every screen in this article was captured directly from my time playing the game on PlayStation 4 Pro. All screens came from apparent real-time gameplay, not prerendered cut scenes.
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The pink-and-purple skyline, the high-res shadows on the stone, the variety of trees in the nearby horizon, and the vast detail stretching into the distance... this is just GoT by default. Not even a special cinema scene.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Screen-space reflections look better in lakes and rivers than they do in the ocean. Also, you can track that smoky spire in the distance to find an objective.Sucker Punch / SIE
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When you discover a haiku platform in the game, you'll pause to pick various poetic phrases, and these form a 5-7-5 haiku.Sucker Punch / SIE
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If you're wondering, yes, there's a battle as you get closer to all of those hanging dead bodies.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Fire effects are convincing, thanks in part to a good smoke-particle system to match.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Elements like time of day, precipitation, and cloud cover can all be manually edited when you take in-game photos, should you desire.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Sunset bathes Sakai as he reflects in a mound of tall grass.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Another example of how the game's color palette explodes as the game's sun either rises or sets.Sucker Punch / SIE
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I followed a fox to the top of this mountain. The in-game bonus I got for doing so was great, sure, but so was the journey.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Crepuscular rays.Sucker Punch / SIE
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All of that foliage moves to the rhythm of any winds.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Steering your horse through fields of these white flowers never gets old.Sucker Punch / SIE
See how diverse and gorgeous that gallery is? What if I told you that all of the above images are captured from the game's first 12 hours and that there's even more beautiful stuff waiting for you in the final game?
The complete game is stuffed with moments worthy of screen grabs, which might be why GoT dedicates a d-pad button to a photo tool, as opposed to burying it beneath a pause menu. Freeze the world midgame, and the photo tool will give you total camera and visual-filter control while leaving the animation systems live. That part is crucial, because GoT follows the legacy of PS4 exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of unbelievable grass, tree, and foliage animation—then goes further with an unbelievable lighting-and-shadow system that bathes any region, indoor or out, with appropriate, attractively saturated sunlight (or moonlight).
Those windy, floaty-particle effects matter in this game, by the way, and I'll get to them in a bit.
In even better news, you can expect a mostly locked 30 fps refresh, much like with TLOU2, whether you play on standard PS4 or on PS4 Pro. PS4 Pro owners also get to choose between a 30 fps lock at 1440p and an unlocked frame rate at 1080p. However, the frame-rate difference between these Pro options is hardly perceptible, since the frame rate never seemed to jump beyond 40 fps in my testing. I opted for the locked 30 fps option to avoid frame-pacing judder, and I wonder if this option was left specifically as a quick-and-dirty bonus for eventual PlayStation 5 players (assuming it's forward-compatible, which Sony hasn't yet confirmed).
Performance on a current-gen console isn't just about the frames per second, however, and GoT is a beast in one other department: loading times, or lack thereof. This open-world game lets you run or ride on a horse through its worlds, but if you just want to tap an icon on your map and fast-travel—or if you die midmission and try again—the wait time is rarely more than 10 seconds and usually far less.
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The "Kurosawa filter" toggle isn't shy about leaning into its inspirations.
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As captured here, the filter is clearly designed for dramatic in-game cut scenes between missions and battles.Sony / Sucker Punch
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Notice the whiteness of the rain drops? That's not an accident. Sucker Punch has gone to great lengths to tone-correct each scene to look clear even with color removed from the frame.Sony / Sucker Punch
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Sakai looks all the more intense with color drained from the tense sequence.
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The worst part about this filter is that it doesn't include the flashes of color you get from standard combat. Red and blue flashes mean different things when trying to block, parry, or dodge attacks.Sony / Sucker Punch
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As a result, I recommend switching to the filter when outside of combat and doing things like enjoying cut scenes or marveling at the game's landscapes.Sony / Sucker Punch
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In bad news, the added "film noise" filter cannot be reduced or adjusted, which I point out primarily because it never looks as good as a fake add-on as it does on real film stock.Sony / Sucker Punch
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Again, notice here that the important elements are crisp. Also notice how your character stands out against the rest of the black-and-white environment. It's really phenomenal how well Sucker Punch pulled this off throughout the game.Sony / Sucker Punch
GoT also includes a dramatic and compelling "Kurosawa filter" as a visual option. This homage to the iconic Japanese film director (Seven Samurai) works as you might expect: all in black-and-white with a film-grain effect and a mild audio filter. The best thing about this filter is that Sucker Punch has gone to great lengths to adjust the shades of backdrop objects and the contrast of foreground ones. Foliage-lined paths, crowds of foes, and towns carved by dramatic moonlight all look clear and are easy to navigate with the black-and-white filter enabled, and that's quite a technological feat.
Unfortunately, as of launch, this handsome filter disables a crucial color-flash system during combat, which helps players react to attacks based on whatever color flashes. (Coincidentally, players also cannot choose which colors flash during full-color gameplay; bad news if you're colorblind.) I wish Sucker Punch had come up with an alternative visual tell for these attacks, like a giant series of flashing icons. But thanks to that issue, I had to disable the Kurosawa filter so that I could survive the game's later combat sections.
The sound of wooden mantles clapping
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Jin Sakai rides into GoT's opening battle.
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The Khan stands in his way.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Flashing back to lessons from your uncle before the game's opening battle.Sucker Punch / SIE
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This is but one of many dramatic camera-angle pulls to set up critical battle sequences.Sucker Punch / SIE
Luckily, this aesthetic majesty is matched by an inviting, compelling quest.
The game's sweeping introduction plummets your hero Sakai into an historical battle: the late 13th-century assault of Mongol forces on the Japanese island of Tsushima. Sakai is among the 80 local samurai who faced off against the invading forces, only to be overwhelmed. The game's story diverges from real-world history by having your hero—and his uncle—survive the assault. You try and fail to rescue your uncle, even going toe-to-toe with the infamous Mongol chief Kublai Khan, only to be saved and nursed back to health by a sneak-and-stealth thief named Yuna.
When you hear a story about your uncle surviving and being held prisoner, your mission crystallizes: save Uncle Shimura and liberate the island's various villages and farms. You'll need the help of surviving samurai, blacksmiths, monks, and even thieves.
This introduction sets the table for GoT's constant cinematic presentation, as the game's best dialogue and battling moments typically begin with the camera pulling out and framing people on opposite sides of a perfectly balanced frame. A pause for silence. A wisp of traditional Japanese musical instruments. A hand hovering, slightly twitching, over a sword's mantle. A simple grasp-and-yank, the sound of wood clapping. En garde.
After this largely linear intro sequence, GoT fumbles its transition into a standard open-world adventure. "You figure it out," Sucker Punch seems to say, as it bombards players with possibilities. This is worth explaining, because it gets to the game's eventual successes.
A bird on a cliff is worth two by the hot springs
GoT begins in earnest by offering two primary objectives; one that Sakai is invested in and one that Yuna suggests. (You'll eventually need to complete them both.) Pick one via the map interface, and you'll get a nifty "wind guide" within the live action. This blows leaves and particles in the direction of where you need to go, and it's a more organic version of your typical "giant digital arrow" in these kinds of games. This system is wonderful, by the way, with wind nimbly gusting around hills and mountains when those paths are legitimate (and whoosh-ing up and over giant structures when climbing is your only option).
While running to your chosen objective, distractions emerge like crazy, and GoT struggles to marry this abundance of content with helpful video game context. At the very outset, a bird might appear after you've run 150 meters and chirp incessantly until you follow it. Do so and you'll discover something like a mountaintop poetry platform. Climb a cragged wall Uncharted-style, see a beautiful view, and receive a prompt to pick various phrases, each floating over a different landscape, to generate a 5-7-5 haiku. Once you do this, Sakai will read it aloud, then be rewarded with a headband. Why are we writing a haiku? What does this new headband do? GoT doesn't clarify (yet).
If you ignore that bird and take a slightly different angle to your next marked quest, you might notice something else, like a Mongol-held compound. No explanation appears for what to do at this place, but if you march in, combat begins. (They're clearly not interested in chatting over sake.) Should you start killing every Mongol in sight, a "leader" may appear and square off with you in what appears to be a boss battle, complete with a transition to a new camera angle. GoT doesn't explain how this battle differs from others in the game. Worse, it doesn't explain that there's a whole "follow and listen to the leader" system that rewards players an extra bonus should they wait to kill the guy. (Spoiler: you still have to kill the guy.)
Check your gaming fluency
In both of those cases, and in quite a few others, I eventually ran into Tsushima denizens hanging around various villages, shrines, or hot springs. They explained the appropriate tutorial, all while my hero character replied like an idiot. "I don't have time to write haikus," Sakai said in response to one poetry-tutoring character... even though I'd already composed a few haikus at that point.
All of which is to say: GoT peppers its tutorials through its world the same way classic JRPGs did. Remember going to a town in early Final Fantasy games and having one of its citizens offer vague advice about, say, battle strategy? GoT does the same thing, and it's a shame Sucker Punch didn't punch up its dialogue system so that Sakai can reply in these instances with "Why, yes, I am familiar with this topic."
I eventually figured all of these systems out, and my enjoyment of the game wasn't ruined. But I'm also fluent in video game language. Anyone who comes to GoT because they're a manga or samurai buff, as opposed to a gaming fan, will likely struggle more than I did.
Combat: Stance-switching like a transmission’s clutch
As you hop from mission to mission, the game's pair of battling styles emerges: the honorable samurai and the elusive ghost.
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It's hard to see, but this showdown sequence instructs you to hold down the triangle button. This is a battle of wills, as you must wait for your foe to commit to a lunge, then let go of the button at that moment. They complicate matters by stuttering and fake-stepping to bait you into jumping the gun—er, ahem, the sword.Sucker Punch / SIE
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A better explanation of how the pre-battle standoff works, but only if you tap a button before you get too close to foes.Sucker Punch / SIE
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The resulting, killing blow when you win a standoff.
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You'll need to rotate through all of the game's stances during battles to succeed. Hold R2, then tap one of the face buttons for each stance. This one more quickly stuns shield users, while other poses work better against classes like swordsmen and spearmen.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Here, I switch to the wind stance, to contend with the spear-toting foe.
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Meanwhile, I can more quickly shatter shielded foes' defenses when I attack in the water stance. (That white icon above his head means his shield just broke, and I can either kill him or redirect my attacks elsewhere while he's dazed.)
For the most part, Sakai crosses swords with a cast of grunts, yet Sucker Punch delivers surprising enemy diversity as you advance from the southern tip of Tsushima to its fortified north. As each major "act" unfolds and new locales emerge, the Mongols' weapon intensity and combat patterns evolve in subtle, appreciable ways. Basically, right when you get bored with "one-sword guy, two-swords guy, and big-shield guy" as a common enemy pattern, GoT adds a cool little jolt, like when the archers start shooting arrows more quickly or when the gun-wielding brutes start becoming a pain in your samurai's butt.
Combat splits the difference between the awkward need to manually aim your every attack and the brainless, smooth-and-automatic stuff of Batman Arkham. Sucker Punch pulls this off by teaching players how to work out the rhythm of battling stances, which open up by the time you've gotten a hang of the basics. Does an enemy only wield swords? Tap a quick two-button shortcut to switch to the stone stance. Is a shield-clutching foe rushing behind him? Take care of the first guy, then use a button combo to switch to the water stance.
At first, players can ignore these poses and mash a mix of attacks, dodges, and sword parries. By the 8-hour mark, however, the game's open battling segments become crowded with considerable enemy variety, and there's no winning these fights without pressing the right-trigger button like a manual transmission's clutch, then tapping the appropriate stance-switch button while time slows down. You have to aim the right stance at the right type of foe to stun each class of enemy and better contend with a big crowd. (This is different than the Souls-like series Nioh, which has its own "poses" feature but focuses more on one-on-one battilng.)
GoT's ranged attacks become crucial to survive these battles, as well, but they're more clumsily assigned to a mix of face buttons and triggers (and combinations thereof). I frequently had to pause the game and consult a guide to remember which trigger controlled which battling gadget, because GoT has four different sub-menus to manage in the middle of combat. And while some of these slow time down when you access them, others don't. A single radial menu to sort this arsenal—two bows with multiple arrow types, multiple types of bombs, two types of "distraction" gadgets, and an insta-stun array of throwing knives—would have been appreciated here.
Stealth: Not as “dark side” as you might think
These ranged attack options also figure into stealth sections, which the game does a weird job of introducing.
You begin the game with an emphatic flashback about the honorable path of a samurai: you must always introduce yourself proudly before entering battle, instead of resorting to sneaky or guerrilla tactics. Yet early in the game, you must assist the thief Yuna in a mission to save her captured brother, and you're firmly warned that you should not announce your presence while infiltrating a prisoner camp. If you do, you're told, you'll fail the mission and get the prisoners killed.
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Spend in-game experience points on a variety of upgrades. Some, like this Unyielding Spear Parry, requires a few unlocks in its skill tree.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Others must be earned by completing special quest lines, like this Heavenly Strike.Sucker Punch / SIE
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More miniature skill trees. These pretty much all stem from the lessons learned from non-samurai combatants.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Charms can be found either by completing quests or by climbing and platforming through beautiful, complex shrine challenges, which play out like Uncharted's wall-climbing parkour sequences—only with more challenge. They're a blast, honestly, and as a bonus, they help you find the game's most memorable mountaintops.Sucker Punch / SIE
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You'll eventually unlock armor sets with decidedly different bonuses. How do you upgrade them?Sucker Punch / SIE
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The farther you get, the more weaponry you can wield. These sticky bombs can decimate a full crowd of foes when aimed correctly.Sucker Punch / SIE
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By picking up supplies scattered around both the wilderness and various homes and compounds.Sucker Punch / SIE
Thus, while teaching you about sneaky tactics and offering you level-up options focused on stealth and silence, the plot loudly reinforces that it would be highly unsavory for you to use any of these. GoT's first 10 hours fail to spell out a compelling reason to stab foes in the back or kill them from afar while hidden.
It gets worse: the first sneak-and-kill mission ends with you cruelly assassinating four guards, only to learn the person you sought wasn't even there. All of that dishonor, and for what?! Hours later, a mission includes a "bonus" notice at the top-left of the screen (without clarifying what that bonus is), encouraging you to use a specific stealth-kill maneuver. You follow this order, having otherwise played every mission (outside the aforementioned stealth-required moment) with "honor." As soon as you kill the foe using stealth, the game pauses and flashes back to your uncle admonishing you for even thinking about killing this way. What? Were you being punished for following the game's guidance?
I belabor this point because you may come into GoT expecting a clear reward for playing as an archetype, like in Sucker Punch's inFamous series. Instead, GoT takes its time explaining that players will need to switch between battling styles without serious plot repercussions. By the end of the first act, Sakai will be accused of using brutal tactics no matter what, and you'll eventually receive plot guidance that tells you, d'oh, you could've been a sneaky jerk all along.
And while GoT's stealth sequences aren't nearly as captivating as the active combat ones, later missions include some lovely sneak-strategy maps and options, aided in part by a handy grappling-hook system that unlocks at the 8-hour mark. The results aren't nearly as strategically knuckle-clenching as TLOU2's best battles, but they do include satisfying climbing-and-grappling twists—not quite the rapid-fire movement of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but fun all the same.
Helping others, finding secrets, and petting foxes
The aforementioned plot fumble of honor and stealth is a curious one. Otherwise, as I said earlier, GoT masterfully infuses its gameplay with compelling plot and stakes.
The game is bold enough to call out Kurosawa directly with its black-and-white filter option, but the same cannot be said about its storytelling conventions. This is not the slow, quiet, and somber stuff of a classic samurai film, where so much story must be told in less than three hours—and leans on metaphor, not button-mashing, to tell those tales. To its credit, GoT understands and appreciates this.
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The game opens with Ishikawa helping your hero's journey, but as the quest evolves, you'll be helping him plenty, as well.Sucker Punch / SIE
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A younger version of Jin Sakai, training with his uncle.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Missions begin and end with the camera frozen on a specific moment and a dramatic title frame.Sucker Punch / SIE
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I captured pretty much every one of these dramatic title-card moments. They're all cool as hell.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Kenji is an obvious highlight in terms of comic relief.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Yuri, the woman who saves Sakai's life, quickly becomes a crucial part of the GoT story—and she's badass in all of the ways that matter.Sucker Punch / SIE
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Whenever you find a "mythic tale" as a quest, it opens with a musician strumming a song and telling Sakai about a legendary weapon, item, or outfit. These sequences include stunning ink-animation transitions.Sucker Punch / SIE
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In one "mythic tale" quest, I received this painting as a hint, then had to find its match in the game world. I love this sort of thing.Sucker Punch / SIE
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The Khan is not an agreeable fellow.Sucker Punch / SIE
Sakai's introduction as a warrior may be epic, and it may come with a tragic setback and a somber flashback to childhood tragedy. But because this is a video game—designed to play out for many, many hours—what follows is a chain of plot morsels that outline the world of 13th-century Japan largely through the perspectives of the people Sakai helps. Some are hell-bent on revenge. Others are drunken fools. Between those extremes, all of the characters masterfully reinforce four important plot tenets: their own tales, those of Sakai's history on the island, legends that have lived on the island for years, and the story of what the Mongolian invasion has wrought.
As such, I grew to really like and appreciate each major character. Every mission typically focuses on one of Tsushima's denizens as either a companion or an omnipresent quest-giver, and Sakai is a brilliant hero-foil for their flaws and foibles. On the surface, he's a goodie-goodie honor-roll student—a descendant of an important Tsushima family and rich with honor. Yet GoT's events force him to grapple with the identity crisis of discovering his destiny—and how it may not live up to important people in his life, even when he appears to be aligned with their principles. This turning point gives him room to furrow his brow and judge certain characters—usually to comedic effect—while also being brave enough to admit his own failings and offer enjoyably meditative insights.
On top of these, a series of "mythic tale" missions are doled out by various music-performing storytellers, each unraveling an island legend about a supernatural new item Sakai can find. These all begin with gorgeous ink-drawing animations of battles, demons, and mysteries, and they send Sakai through the game's darkest and weirdest corners, which often end with the game's dramatic "boss" battle sequences—one-on-one fights that require Souls-like attention to attack speeds and patterns.
Remember what I said earlier about a bird chirping to get my attention? The island is full of these birds, along with yipping foxes and other visual indicators of missions to steer your horse toward (from massive, tree-topped mountains to plumes of distant smoke). Follow any of these to discover a new surprise in a game map that's arguably the densest on a current-gen console. That means you're generally being led from one encounter, mystery, or plot point to the next, and it's an absolute testament to Sucker Punch's storytelling prowess that this content fits together to feel like a really great season of a TV series no matter what order you play it in. (Eventually, some of that organic momentum is dulled by no-plot "save these farm" missions, but they're optional, and I encourage deprioritizing them for the sake of a better GoT experience.)
Sakai is among the PS4's elite
An open-world adventure can nail tropes like graphics, combat, stealth, or modes of transportation and feel amazing at first blush. But what keeps us hooked to the required repetition of the genre once players get to a game's 10th or 20th hour? Some open-world fans may opt to skip dialogue and plot sequences while clearing missions and killing foes, hooked to the basic rush of gameplay mechanics. GoT is fine in that respect—a good measure above "competent," though not revolutionary.
But the reason I am absolutely captivated and excited by this game is because it marries all of that content—how it looks, how battles play out, how quests are linked together, how good it feels to ride its horses through giant fields of dramatically lit flowers and trees—with a sense of purpose, which Sucker Punch constantly reinforces in surprising ways. Sakai ranks among the best Sony video game heroes in recent memory—and, gosh, that's high praise, considering what Sony Interactive Entertainment has produced in the PS4 era. But that's arguably because everyone and everything in his path feels so real, so human, and so alive.
If you need to get lost in over 30 hours of heroic gameplay right now, in a single-player adventure with no online connectivity gimmicks or content locked away as DLC, Sucker Punch has you covered with an instant contender for 2020's game of the year.
The Good:
- A rare open-world adventure whose stories, characters, and conflicts maintain their quality for most of the game's lengthy runtime.
- Combat never lets up, thanks to satisfying swordplay, a clutch-pumping stance system, a dazzling variety of enemies, a useful array of superpowers, and some thrilling boss battles.
- Mission density on the massive island of Tsushima is beyond compare, and the game does a remarkable job organically leading players between bigger and smaller missions for the sake of satisfying momentum.
- Uh, did you look at those image galleries? Are you kidding me? You're going to wear out your "screenshot" button playing this game.
- The score leans on traditional Japanese instruments with memorable compositions, and as a dynamic system, it subtly ramps up in intensity based on any given event in the game.
- The joy of following an excited fox through a flower-filled forest, then up to the top of a mountain, to honor a shrine. Then, after pausing to enjoy the wonderful view, noticing that the fox is still there, waiting to be pet.
The Bad:
- The game does a weird job clarifying that "dishonorable" gameplay doesn't deeply affect the plot.
- The hauntingly gorgeous "Kurosawa mode" is missing a crucial visual tell, so it's hard to recommend outside of the game's intro mission.
The Ugly:
- Skip the glut of "farm" missions that eventually pop up.
- Could Sucker Punch please patch in radial item-selection menu as an option?
Verdict: Buy.
"Review" - Google News
July 14, 2020 at 09:00PM
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Ghost of Tsushima review: An open-world haiku of honor, stealth, and revenge - Ars Technica
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