Developer: Sucker Punch
Available on: Playstation 4
When I was a kid, Sucker Punch made the Sly Cooper series, which was for a time my favorite video game series. When I was a teen, Sucker Punch made the Infamous series, which I also greatly enjoyed. Then they went completely silent for six years. They went so silent that most people, myself included, just kind of assumed they had been quietly dismantled. But in fact, they were working on Ghost of Tsushima.
In Ghost of Tsushima, you play as a samurai named Jin Sakai and your goal is to protect the isle of Tsushima from the invading Mongols. The game is open world and has a heavy emphasis on melee combat and stealth.
In the buildup to its release, Sucker Punch had heavily advertised the game’s guiding wind feature. The developers wanted to omit minimaps and much of the UI and have more organic tools to help the player explore. Instead of a traditional open world where you mindlessly go from point A to point B, they wanted to create a sort of Breath of the Wild experience where you roam freely and explore things based on how interesting they look. The wind will guide you to your destinations. Smoke in the air will indicate towns in trouble. Foxes will lead you to shrines. Birds will indicate places of interest.
Their complaints about minimaps is one I share. In many open world games, you spend virtually the entire time starting at the minimap following the waypoint you set and not soaking in the world around you.
However, although Ghost of Tsushima very effectively solves the problems of minimaps, a Breath of the Wild experience it ain’t. Yes, the wind guides you and foxes lead you to shrines and smoke indicates places where Mongols are and birds lead you to places of interest, but ultimately, Ghost of Tsushima is still a traditional open world game in which you mindlessly travel from waypoint to waypoint.
There’s also a problem with the camera. When walking around or riding on your horse, it’s zoomed way too far in. Jin takes up a third of the entire screen and that makes it difficult and frustrating to look around.
That’s not to say these exploration gimmicks like the wind and the animals are just gimmicks though. In fact, they all contribute to creating a beautiful and zen-like atmosphere that the game creates so well. The outdoors have never looked so pleasant.
Also helpful towards creating the atmosphere is the game’s minimalist UI. Where the developers could, they omitted HUD elements and symbols in favor of more natural indicators. For example, instead of using symbols that appear on screen to warn the player about incoming projectiles, archers will shout “duck!” before firing, effectively giving the player an audio cue for when projectiles are incoming. When following trails, players have to search for the physical footprints themselves instead of following lines that the game draws. In many instances, the player is told to search for something based on a drawing or a description, like a mountain with blue flowers or a field of cherry blossoms. Through options in the menu, you can reduce the UI even further, taking away enemy health bars, threat indicators in stealth and various controls that appear on screen frequently.
I was less impressed by the game’s Kurosawa mode, an option that promised to make the game resemble old samurai films from the mid-1900s. Ultimately, all it does is make the screen black and white, add a slight grain effect and give the audio a filter that makes it sound like it’s coming out of old speakers. Stuff that requires color, like the indicators in combat and certain visual clues (like finding the mountain with blue flowers) were given no workarounds. I also would’ve appreciated a lower frame rate to match that of older TVs and adjustments to the particles and wind to make it look more like an old samurai film and less like, well, a video game that came out in 2020. As it is now, it feels more like a quickly put together gimmick and less like an attempt to recreate old samurai movies.
The writing and story of the game are just as beautiful as the scenery. Samurai follow a strict code of honor. Jin was taught by his uncle, Lord Shimura, to follow the law, enforce the law without passion, face his opponents head on and never fight dirty. However, when the Mongols invade and kill virtually all samurai on the island using every dirty tactic in the book, it becomes clear to Jin that they stand no chance against the Mongols with their current way of thinking. In an effort to save the island, he begins to develop new weapons and use stealth and fear against the Mongols.
Lord Shimura, the only other surviving samurai on the island, disagrees with Jin’s new way of thinking and conflict between the two of them arises. The writers could’ve easily just portrayed Lord Shimura as a fool and Sakai as the only reasonable person on the island as I was afraid they would, but they didn’t. Every character in the game, including Lord Shimura and even the antagonist, Khotun Khan, are portrayed as genuine people who fight for what they believe is right, and none of them are pushovers in a debate. As a whole, the game very eloquently explores complex issues pertaining to warfare, particularly the debate between fighting with honor and fighting to win.
Then there’s the gameplay, which is also great.
The combat itself is very similar to that of Fallen Order, where attacks can be dodged, parried and/or blocked and enemies have block meters alongside their health bars. Blue lights indicate attacks that cannot be blocked and red lights indicate attacks that must be dodged. Compared to, well, basically every other game out there with swords, the animations are very simple, grounded and realistic. There’s still plenty of visual flair, but as a whole swords fights feel like real sword fights. Every hit, every dodge and every block feels satisfying. And at the end of every fight, you can make Jin wipe the blood off his sword and sheath it like a badass, something that never gets old.
Stealth is also very fun (which of course it is, this is the company that made the Sly Cooper series after all). In a lot of games involving stealth, the exact moment an enemy sees you, it’s over; every enemy within a mile radius suddenly knows where you are, and it’s quite frustrating. In Ghost of Tsushima, when an enemy sees you, you still have a brief window of time to stealth kill him. Additionally, even if you are caught, only nearby enemies are alerted, meaning it’s possible to keep the fight local and re-enter stealth afterwards. Hell, sometimes you can even kill half the Mongols in an encampment in a head-on fight while the other half remains completely oblivious to it. It’s not realistic, but it’s much more preferable to the alternative, which is enemies swarming you the moment any single one makes eye contact with you.
In the end, I completed Ghost of Tsushima 100%, which these days is pretty rare for me. It had become the perfect game to play when I just wanted to relax.
Summary
Ghost of Tsushima promised an experience comparable to that of Breath of the Wild during the buildup to its release. Ultimately though, it’s still just a traditional open world game where you travel from waypoint to waypoint and everything between, while beautiful, is barren. That being said, Ghost of Tsushima might be my favorite traditional open world game out there. It has a very calming atmosphere and everything, from the combat to the UI to the writing, is well thought out and well executed.