"Ghost of Tsushima" Review - 2020's Most Pleasant Surprise

Available for: Playstation 4

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

In the months leading up to Ghost of Tsushima's release, I was calling it "Blekiro: Bladows Blie Blice." Judging from what I'd seen of the gameplay, it looked like Ghost was going to be just like last year's Sekiro or the vastly inferior Nioh games: a tough-as-nails soulslike samurai/shinobi game. The general lack of marketing hype surrounding this game didn't help that impression, and developer Sucker Punch's portfolio in no way suggested that they could do something like this right. As much as I enjoyed the Infamous titles (even Second Son, flawed as it was), those were lighthearted superhero games, while Ghost of Tsushima is a work of historical fiction that deals with actual moral questions. The writing seemed to be on the walls. So, imagine my surprise when I got through Ghost of Tsushima only to find that it's one of the most magnificent gaming experiences in recent memory! If you own a PS4 and haven't yet picked up this exceptional game, then what are you even doing with your life? Now, let me tell you why this game is so exceptional.

The year is 1274, and on the Japanese island of Tsushima, the Mongol Empire's invasion of Japan has begun. As the invaders land on the beach, a band of 80 samurai led by Tsushima's Jito, Lord Shimura, wait to challenge them. Bound by their code of honor, all but 2 of the samurai fall at the hands of their foes, who are bound by no such code. The only two samurai that survive are Lord Shimura and Jin Sakai, who is both our protagonist and Lord Shimura's nephew. After Lord Shimura is taken hostage by the Mongols, we step into Jin's shoes as he makes his way to rescue his uncle, but after witnessing the power of Khotun Khan, leader of the Mongol forces, Jin realizes that honor will not be enough to win. What follows is a shockingly well-done tale of a samurai embracing dishonor in order to save his people, one that I was sure was going to be as black-and-white as, say, the morality in everything else Sucker Punch has done. Jin's internal conflict is consistently compelling, and his descent into becoming the force of nature that the peasantry calls "the ghost," is paced excellently. Furthermore, the moment-to-moment plot itself is packed with enough twists, viscerally exciting standoffs and sieges, and tearjerking tragedy to make it an easy standout in 2020! Maybe it's just because I came into this game off the heels of The Last of Us: Part II, but I really want to emphasize that this is a game that will make you feel things. At times, it had me laughing and saying "yeaaaahahaaaaaaa!" to myself as Jin leapt off his horse and onto a Mongol trooper at the start of one of the aforementioned exciting sieges. At times, it had me feeling like an unstoppable badass as Jin lead a group of peasants in a fight to take their village back from the mongols, all the while screaming things to the effect of "LEAVE NOT ONE INVADER ALIVE!" At times, it had me feeling like a true figure of legend as my violent slaughter of an enemy caused the rest of the enemies in the area to flee the battle, screaming in fear. And yet, in some instances, it had me on the verge of tears. In particular, there was one series of side quests in which Jin cares for an elderly loved one, and the ending of the final quest in this series made me put the controller down for a second to sob into my hands, so similar was the situation to the state my late Grandfather was in during his last days on earth. Nothing else in the game got me quite that much, but the amount of times this story made me feel crushing sadness was...unexpected, to say the least. Equally excellent are the characters in this game. Jin has been accused of not having much in the way of personality, but I can't say I agree with that. Maybe it's just because I played with the Japanese voices and I don't have a way of interpreting Japanese inflections, but while not the most exciting character in the world, Jin more than got the job done as a protagonist. Similarly, though people seem to like the rest of the characters, they've all been accused of being too serious. Indeed, most characters in this game are very serious, but it's all believable, at least, and they're still compelling characters anyway. I think the best way of generally describing my relationship with this cast of characters would be to say that there was one character that started rubbing me the wrong way. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I would just kind of roll my eyes when he talked. Then, something awful happened to him, and I instinctively let out a silent, devastated "No"! I cared about even the character that was annoying me, and I wanted each character to succeed in the goals they worked towards for the entirety of the plot. One character in particular that I want to spend some time talking about is the game's antagonist, Khotun Khan. If you look at him, chances are good you'll think, "yep, that's a Marvel villain!" but in reality, he turns out to be an unbelievably compelling villain. To explain why, I feel it best to bring up a famous quote from Sun Tzu, author of "The Art of War," which characters in this game at times mention they've read. The quote is: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Khotun Khan is the embodiment of this war philosophy. At the very beginning of the game, the Khan talks about how he prepared for his invasion of Japan. He learned the local language, the religious beliefs, the code of the Samurai, even logistics about the various villages so that he'd best know which villages would offer up slave labor and which would be easier to just destroy. This is a conqueror who obviously knows himself and makes an effort to know everything about his enemy, and given the rigid code of honor the Samurai live by, this means he knows how to fight in ways they can't counter. And when Jin begins fighting dishonorably against the mongol forces, he knows exactly how he might be able to use that to break Lord Shimura's spirit ("you can save your nephew before he loses his honor entirely...if you'll have your people submit and end the fighting"). So, though his character design makes him look like all you'd need is to make his skin blue for him to fit right in to a forgettable Thor movie, Khotun Khan is actually a credible threat, and a truly interesting villain. I have to applaud Sucker Punch for the work that went into this character, especially given how weak their villains have tended to be in the past. So the story and characters, in case you haven't already noticed, are pretty great. But what about the gameplay?

Also pretty great, as I'm sure will come as no surprise. There are essentially two types of gameplay: honorable/open swordplay and dishonorable/stealth. Both of these are fun, but in...very different ways. I'd like to start with the way of dishonor, of stealth and assassination. You've seen this kind of thing before: you hide in tall grass, sneak up behind enemies, and kill them silently until you're spotted and then have to fight out in the open. This method is fun mainly because the Mongol Empire, an empire that killed enough people to literally cool the planet (assuming that isn't a fake fact), was evidently made up mostly of dum-dums. Yeah, the enemy AI when you're undetected is...not the brightest. You'll shoot a mongol in the head with an arrow while in tall grass, and his friends, having seen the direction the arrow came from, will walk right up to the edge of the tall grass, put their hand over their brow, and bend slightly so that they can get better line of sight on the open parts of the camp past that tall grass right in front of them that somebody could easily be hiding in. And it's hilarious, every single time. Then they might sound the horn to let the rest of the camp know that somebody is here, and when you shoot the mongol that came up to investigate the scene in the first place in the head with an arrow, some other mongol will see the two bodies by this patch of tall grass that somebody could easily hide in, walk up to the edge, and once again start surveying the open area past the tall grass. By the time you've killed the fifth member of the most devastating conqueror army in human history at this patch of grass, the sixth one that comes up starts shaking in his boots and thinking "wherever this guy is hiding in the open area past this grass, he's not g-g-gonna get me!" So if you're the type that doesn't necessarily need challenge or would prefer to have a little bit of a laugh (and maybe channel the dialogue of a certain Chinese character in South Park), stealth may be the route for you. Now, there are times when stealth is required, but it isn't frequent, and if you aren't good at stealth or you just haven't been playing that way because you want to be as honorable as possible, it's even easier in these missions, so you aren't going to end up feeling frustrated. On the other hand, if you do like playing stealthily, these required stealth sections are incredibly fun in spite of the increased easiness. When I say that stealth is easy, I'd like to emphasize that I came back to this part of the section in the middle of writing the next one because I legitimately forgot about the aspect of stealth I'm about to break down for reasons you'll soon see. In my example of the way enemy AI functions while you're undetected, I mentioned taking them down with a bow, but that's not the only tool you have. You also have non-weapon tools to aid you in remaining (or regaining your status as being) undetected. You can use wind chimes or firecrackers to lure enemies to or away from certain points, and if you're spotted, you can use smoke bombs to break line of sight. Here's the thing, though....I 100%-ed this game, and over the course of the long time it takes to do that, I never...not even once...used any tools other than the bow in stealth. Nor did I ever remotely feel the need to do so. I'm serious. I didn't even throw a wind chime or firecracker just to try it out! I was able to clear out entire camps stealthily while utilizing none of the tools the game wanted me to use. So when I say that stealth in this game is easy, I mean it's eeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaassssssssssssyyyyyyy. Like I said, though, it's fun to do and it's always a good laugh. But enough about that, let's talk about fighting with honor! Just about every potential combat scenario begins with the option to trigger a "standoff." Essentially, when you aren't detected by a group of enemies, you have the option to make yourself detected in spectacular fashion by calling out to the nearest foes and challenging them to fight you one-on-one. What follows is something resembling "chicken." You hold down the triangle button and wait for your enemy to charge at you before letting go of the button. If you successfully let go of the button between when they launch at you and when they strike you, you'll kill this enemy in one cinematic, slow-motion swing. If they hit you before you let go, you simply take the damage and regular combat starts up. If you let go prematurely, however, the enemy will strike you and leave you with barely any health left. So, it's something of a gamble, and this becomes even truer as you unlock upgrades to increase the amount of foes that can be one-hit-killed in standoffs and as enemies gradually start faking you out. As for me, I eventually started really, really sucking at standoffs and abandoned them entirely, but they're always satisfying to win! Once the standoff is over or the stealth jig is up, combat is a game of parries and smart attacks. The overall way combat operates will be familiar to most people: square is a light attack, triangle is a heavy attack, etc. In this case, however, the heavy attack is mainly built to wear down an enemy's guard, and the light attack is mainly built to actually deal damage to an enemy once you've broken their guard. So it's kind of like Sekiro in that respect, but breaking guard is simpler and it's half of the work you do instead of 90% of it. You go through this dance of breaking guard with heavy attacks and inflicting damage with light attacks across 4 "stances," each of which is effective against a certain type of enemy (stance 1 breaks the guard of swordsmen faster, stance 2 does the same with shield-bearers, etc). So the moment-to-moment gameplay of open sword combat is going through this dance whilst switching between stances depending on the enemy that comes into your sight next. By killing enemies and parrying attacks, you earn "resolve," which manifests in the form of yellow circles above your health bar. You can use resolve to heal or unleash special attacks, so like all the best gameplay formats, you have to actively engage in combat in order to survive it. As you unlock more and more upgrades, you get more bells and whistles like bonuses for perfectly-timed parries and the aforementioned special attacks, but in terms of the basic gameplay formula, that's what it is. Now, there is a bit of a learning curve here, so be warned of that. There isn't a lock-on feature like one might expect from a game that seems so similar to Sekiro, but unlike in a game like Maneater, getting used to operating without a lock-on is never an issue in Ghost of Tsushima. Furthermore, you start out with only one of the stances and unlock the rest gradually by killing Mongol leaders, so the early hours mainly serve as a way of breaking you into the basic process of guard breaking and damage dealing, with the intent being not to make you get used to stance switching until you've seen enough combat to be comfortable with its absolute basics. What this means in practice is that the early hours are easily the hardest part of the game, and while it wasn't an issue for me, I could 100% understand that being a negative for other folks. Once you're past the learning curve, you still can't rest on your laurels in combat, but you'll always have a handle on it and no challenge will seem even remotely insurmountable. 

When you aren't killing Mongols, chances are good you'll be indulging in collectible hunting. Like all modern open world games, Ghost of Tsushima features a smorgasbord of things to do and stuff to find across the map, and if you think you already know how you feel about that, I'd encourage you to reserve judgment and let me talk a bit about how Ghost does it. I'm the kind of person who likes to 100% these kinds of games, and I find that the ones where I succeed in doing so (meaning, the ones that I enjoy enough to do so) are the ones that give me a mindset of "oh boy, I get to play more!" The first game I ever 100%-ed was Far Cry 3, and I did it entirely because I wanted to experience literally everything the game had to offer. Ghost of Tsushima had that effect on me, but it also provides plenty of in-game incentive to track everything down as well. Every little activity and collectable in the game world gives you something. The most important things to find are arguably the hot springs, which increase your maximum health, the bamboo strike mini-games, which increase your maximum resolve, and the Mongol camps, which can ultimately help you out in unlocking the combat stances and also contain the collectibles that just teach you about history or Mongol culture. On the next tier of importance are things like various shrines to the Kami (Gods), which provide you with incredibly useful charms (equippable items that grant small gameplay bonuses), and the Inari shrines that both let you pet foxes and grant you new slots for those aforementioned charms. Finally, the least important items/activities to locate (exempting the historical artifacts and logs that just come with the Mongol camps) all reward you with cosmetic items. This can be different sword styles, new hats, special clothing dyes, etc. Now, given that I've assigned importance to these open world fixtures, you may be wondering why I'd still recommend tracking as much down as possible even if you aren't the type who likes to 100% games. Well, regardless of their actual impact on gameplay, each of these items provides a secondary benefit: a fast-travel point. Across the plot, you'll unlock plenty of fast-travel points in cities and villages that Jin's journey takes him to, but if you take the time to engage with the map and track things down, you can end up with potential fast-travel points at just about every corner of the island. The reality of big open world games like this is that there's always the possibility for the player to get frustrated from having to spend so much time getting from point A to point B, so in spite of the fact that Sucker Punch has made the most gorgeous open world ever (more on that later), they still took that possibility into consideration and provided the player with the ability to dot the map with as many ways to cut down on in-between mission travel as they feel like working for. My recommendation that you track as much down as possible only gets stronger when you take into consideration just how simple it is to do so. See, the game doesn't utilize map markers like other open world games. Rather, you follow the wind to get to whatever objective you're tracking (again, a bit more on that later), and the wind can be made to track every last one of the collectibles. So, you can set the wind to track bamboo strikes, and one-by-one, you'll be lead to every bamboo strike that is currently open to you. So, not only do you get gameplay/cosmetic benefits and fast travel points from going around and finding things, but the act of doing so is as simple as can be.

Now it's time to talk about what is simultaneously Ghost of Tsushima's biggest strength and weakness: the technical side of things. Let's start off with the good: I never noticed any texture pop-in, animation glitches, framerate drops, etc., nor did I experience any hard or soft crashes....and all of that is especially amazing considering that this is the most beautiful game ever created. Period. The Witcher 3? Horizon: Zero Dawn? All the games that have held that mantle before this? They're all dwarfed by the incomparable beauty of Ghost of Tsushima. I swear, the sheer amount of times where I had to just stop and look at the screen with my jaw on the ground is unbelievable, and I even decided to make use of photo mode on more than one occasion to capture the moment! I never use photo modes in games, but Ghost of Tsushima is just that beautiful, and the game puts that beauty in your face at all times. Like I mentioned earlier, there aren't map markers that you walk towards, but what I failed to mention was that there's very little in the way of HUD at all. In combat you have your health and resolve and what not at the bottom of the screen, but outside of that, there's no minimap, no compass, no nothing, just the beauty of the world, which serves as your guide. By swiping on the PS4 center pad, you can summon the wind to kick up hundreds of leaves and blow the grass in the direction you need to go, so even the act of trying to see where you need to head next is made stunningly beautiful. If you happen by a secret that you aren't tracking, you might have a gold bird fly into view or a fox cross your path to lead you to that secret, meaning that once again the world guides you to content. I could go on for hours about how ridiculously gorgeous this game is, but I mean, just look up some video and you'll see what I mean. But you know what's almost as beautiful and wonderful as the look of the game? The game's soundtrack. Composers Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi have struck gold with this OST just based on the quality of the music alone. The soundtrack combines gigantic string sections with smaller ensembles of traditional Japanese instruments to produce everything from the soothing ambient "Tsushima Suite" pieces, to Lord of the Rings caliber combat tracks, to heartbreaking swells such as the game's main theme, "The Way of the Ghost." But perhaps more importantly than having a good soundtrack on its own, this is a game that truly understands how to utilize a good soundtrack. Earlier I mentioned that this game makes you feel things, and the soundtrack at every one of these moments is used in a way that drastically amplifies the effect. There's a very early example of this that you can look at to get some proof, which I'm linking here (it's not a spoiler). This isn't even an emotionally charged moment, so you can imagine how well the developers use the soundtrack when it really matters. Before I get to the last technical positive I want to touch on, there's a particular design choice that I want to call out as something for game developers to take notice of. In many open world games that are filled with collectibles and enemy camps, there's a particular problem that tends to pop up if you're focused on exploration and collecting everything you can before going to the main missions: you'll liberate an outpost or some other place on the map in your free time, and then a story mission will have you going to that same outpost and doing it all over again because the game can't acknowledge that you already put in the work because that would ruin the linear story. Ghost of Tsushima is the first modern open-world game I've ever played that doesn't have this problem (at least in recent memory). For smaller areas like little farmsteads, if the main story or even a side quest has Jin going there to liberate the area from Mongols, then the area will be totally untouched until you take that side quest on. So, if you happen through the farmstead before the side quest, the game acts as if the Mongols haven't quite gotten there yet. For bigger areas like enemy strongholds, they can't exactly pull the same kind of organic world-building stunt, but they still do something. When approaching a stronghold that a future quest will have you conquer, a message comes up on screen saying "Warning! Entering an area of overwhelming enemy force!" So, for instance, if you're following the wind to try to find all of x collectible and you see that message, you know that you can leave it alone for the time being and the story will send you there eventually. I found this incredibly helpful, especially in acts II and III. It's probably not the kind of thing anybody else noticed or cares about, but for me, this was an answer to an immersion-breaking problem I've experience in just about every game of this kind, so major props to Sucker Punch for their work to address that! Beyond everything that's been mentioned so far, there's one other thing the game does exceptionally well. It probably would've been more organic to include this aspect of the game in the previous section, but I believe that the platforming in this game is best discussed as a technical feat rather than a gameplay aspect. The platforming in Ghost of Tsushima doesn't even really feel like platforming, it feels like any other method of exploring the world, that's how well done and responsive it is. Jin leaps between ledges on the sides of cliffs with ease and unrealistic speed, and unlike in sagas like Assassin's Creed, Jin knows where you're trying to go...almost always. See, another reason for having the platforming discussion begin here is because it provides a smooth segway to the technical negatives. In spite of how good the platforming is, Jin is perhaps a bit too good at not screwing it up. The result is that he has a bit of a sticky feet problem. Many times throughout the campaign, I had to make a conceited effort to get Jin to hop off a log and onto the rock that the log was resting on. To make sure I'm getting my point across, imagine a log that was placed on top of a rock (no open air between the log and the rock, in other words, it's literally right on top of the rock), and the log's height is such that you just need to step down in order to reach the rock. Those were the moments in which Jin had a bit of trouble. He was so desperate to not disappoint me by Ezio-ing to his death that I needed to actively force him to jump off the log all of 2 inches to the right to land on the rock. In practice, this just requires an intentional jump to the side, so it's not like it's a big deal or anything, but it happens frequently enough to be funny or mildly irritating, depending on the context. The next technical negative to discuss is one that I think everyone agrees on: the camera. The camera's main goal in Ghost is to be cinematic. This works great when you've just completed a standoff and sliced through an enemy like an overly serious anime character using .02% of his power, but it's not so great when you can't see the Mongols surrounding you because the camera thinks throwing the tree at the top of the hill behind you into the frame will make the action more epic. It's not the kind of technical problem that's really going to get you killed or crash your game or anything, but the camera does frequently mess up, especially in tight quarters. Oddly enough, it never happens during platforming, but I won't complain about that. Beyond those bigger things, there are also a couple of small design choices that made me scratch my head. For instance, in many quests, combat will end and the next thing you'll need to do is talk to a character. That kind of structure is common in games, but what is less common is this character needing to walk to a specific spot before you can talk to them. To give an example of how this might go, you might end up killing all the Mongols quite a distance away from the gate to a stronghold, then a character will say something like, "Sakai, let's plan our next steps!" then proceed to run for a solid half minute up to the gate, turn around, and only then become interactable. It's never a big deal, but it happens very frequently, so it's noticeable. Another small design decision that I want to mention as a negative is one that I can understand the reasoning behind, but it doesn't change the effect. In Act III of the game, I noticed that the usually varied weather had changed to almost exclusively violent thunderstorms. You can use your flute to change the weather to whatever you want at any time, so I was always able to get rid of the thunderstorms, but it seemed like they just kept on coming and coming and coming, and it started to really irk me. Lo and behold, the day after I started really scratching my head about that, I stumbled across an article stating that the weather comes to reflect your level of honor. I'd been utilizing stealth quite a bit, and thus the weather was more violent. So, I set out to start fighting more honorably, but nothing I did seemed to work. I'd use my flute to drive the thunderstorms away, come across a group of Mongols, standoff against them, and kill them all with as much honor as possible, and when the battle ended, it was back to incessant thunderstorms. Even by the end of the game, nothing seemed to have changed. So, while I understand the thematic reasoning behind this design choice, I found it quite annoying. So, Ghost of Tsushima is kind of an odd case in that all its small technical negatives add up to be its biggest drawback, and yet its technical positives are what amplifies the already solid foundation.

I'll be direct: In case I haven't gotten this opinion of mine across, Ghost of Tsushima is a must-have if you're a PS4 owner. Simply put, it may be the best PS4 exclusive on the market, but I'd need to do some more direct comparisons to be sure. In terms of its basic structure it hardly reinvents the wheel, but the little tweaks it makes and the polish that it puts on the wheel are what makes it stand out. This game tells an excellent story with excellent characters that ends on a perfect note. It boasts combat that strikes a stunning balance between player empowerment and challenge, even if stealth gameplay places perhaps too much of a focus on player empowerment at the expense of believability. It foists the player into the most gorgeous game world ever created for an exploration experience that is as immersive and breathtaking as it is organically driven. It's well aware of its strengths, and it plays to them exceptionally well. No game is perfect, and this one has its share of technical oddities, but make no mistake: Ghost of Tsushima is the kind of game you owe it to yourself to experience, even if you aren't going to do everything it has to offer. 

Let us review:

Technical flaws and some poor design choices - 1.0

The final score for Ghost of Tsushima is...

9.0/10 - Exceptional

Excellent work, Sucker Punch, excellent work!