Ghost of Tsushima - The Ultimate Critique

when i started playing ghost of sushima i just couldn't connect with it it wasn't that i found the game bad or had any major issues with it or technical issues and bugs i didn't have anything like that i just could not get my brain to fire off any sort of serotonin or any sort of chemical that made me feel joy or pleasure while playing the game i just wasn't connecting with it wasn't having fun so i put the controller down and just kind of moved on a lot of you viewers out there and fans of the channel were tweeting me were sending messages on discord being like luke why aren't you talking about this game it's freaking fantastic and i heard you i tried to be as candid as i could but basically believe it or not i don't like being a cynical all the time at least i don't like trying to put a game down or critique it if i'm just not getting it and connecting with it so usually when this type of thing happens i just kind of shut up about it i don't make videos on it i don't make critiques on it i just move on because i'm not connecting with the game and i'm not going to pretend as though i am or pretend as though my critiques of the game are valid because i just don't connect with the game that wouldn't be interesting for you wouldn't be interesting for me so i just don't bother and so i and many of you guys out there just assumed that i would never make a video on ghost of sushima because i just couldn't get into it but all of that changed with the director's cut this launched in the late summer of 2021 about a year after the original game's launch and it brought a ton of quality of life improvements such as 60 frames per second on playstation 5 haptic feedback adaptive trigger support improved animation quality lower load times so you could basically immediately jump from scene to scene even full japanese lip syncing was brought to the game in addition to the multiplayer mode legends that they brought to the game everything was massively improved in almost every way that you could possibly hope for and so i decided i would give this a shot this was the last opportunity i was going to give the game to win me over so i got the director's cut i sat down on my couch and i started playing and you know what i freaking loved it i really don't know what happened in my brain that changed this that made it enjoyable for me i don't know if you're a psychologist and know what's going on in my brain i would love to hear it because i'm extremely confused one day i could not get any sort of enjoyment or pleasure out of ghost of sushima and the next day i was enjoying it and i couldn't put the controller down it was bizarre i grant you that but i'm very glad it happened because this game is amazing i don't know maybe it was the 60 fps and the pc master race proponent in me was like yeah 60fps you can enjoy the game now i don't know if you've experienced this with ghost of sushima or another game maybe like eldon ring you just couldn't connect with it until you tried it in some different way let me know in the comment section below i want to know that i'm not totally insane and out of my mind if i don't see any comments on that i will be sad but i i will deal with it the point of all of this is that i enjoyed the game i played through it and the dlc in the span of like a few days because i could not stop playing i went through every single quest line i explored every nook and cranny of the islands i loved it i had a great time and i'm here to talk about it and critique it with you today in this video enough sappy stuff let's get into it the ultimate critique of ghost stuff part one world design [Music] so the games map is made up of three component zones that stretch the entirety of the island i guess i should say islands it breaks up into smaller islands off the immediate coast for the sake of ease of narrative and speaking i'm just going to refer to it as island but know that i understand there's a bunch of little ones as well okay don't jump down my throat each of these zones is tied to an act in the game so as you get through the first act you'll move on to the second zone in the third act you'll move on to the third zone just as you would expect with each of these zones the difficulty will rise and the items that can be discovered will increase in potency which encourages exploration even in the late game you'll be exploring each of these usually by horseback and increase your renown in that area of the island by completing basic activities such as clearing camps completing world events and progressing through the core story now if that basic gameplay loop sounds familiar it's because it is it's basically the same gameplay loop that's been at the core of every single open world game for the last 10 years or so and it's also extremely similar in its specificity to the gameplay loops present in say the latest assassin's creed games and the far cry games which is why so many people have compared this game to an assassin's creed title with stealth set in japan those comparisons aren't just because it's like exploration with some melee combat and it's in japan it's because the actual world design is extremely similar to ubisoft's design but only in the good ways and not at all in the bad ways in other words assassin's creed especially in the latest few iterations leans into all of the worst tropes of aaa or arguably quadruple a open world meta development it's just painful but ghost of sushima leans into all of the best tropes and elements of that open world design and sheds all of the crap that's built up around those other open worlds now the unifying element that ties this whole gameplay loop together is the world exploration itself it's what keeps the player going and gives them an excuse to go through the world doing what they do and there's a lot of ways that you can motivate the player to do this it could be that you have really interesting items out in the world that you can only discover if you're hunting them down and looking behind corners and doing little puzzles and things like that or it could be that there are combat encounters that grant xp so if you want to level up and become more powerful to get through later game areas you have to explore and discover those difficult enemies or bosses or what have you or it could be something as simple as just the world is beautiful and captivating and you just want to explore it for the sake of getting to see more of it and that latter one is the really difficult thing to nail it's something that sounds easy make a beautiful open world that's captivating to explore for its own sake but it's actually extremely difficult to do i mean think about the last game you played that had an open world you wanted to just explore for the sake of exploring it wasn't driven by boss fights it wasn't driven by trying to find the best loot it was purely about seeing more of the world might take you a minute that should demonstrate how hard it is to do this now ghost of sushima manages to pull it off the world is gorgeous there's no other way to put it the wind blowing through the trees the tall grass the weather system that's extremely dynamic the very minimalistic ui everything ties together so beautifully it's got to be one of the most artistically gorgeous and truly breathtaking games i've ever played red dead redemption 2 was grounded and realistic and captivating in its own way this is similar but also very very different because it's much more artistic and you can tell that there's a lot more intention behind the color palettes that have been chosen the world design is not just what's practical or realistic the world has been designed in a way that's actually meant to evoke emotion as you ride through big valleys gorges fields or along cliffsides it's so beautiful it's ridiculous but in addition to exploring the map for its own sake the game also pushes you to explore by way of its main quests and side quests which give you a more guided way of navigating the world usually they'll take you to set pieces and areas where there's big scripted events that happen which are always very interesting and cool to see and they also offer narrative exposition you get to meet characters get to know them and their world and their place within this world all at the same time and notably all of the side quests and the main quests in this game tie into the main story this isn't like some other open world games we have the main story where you're doing a set number of objectives and you go along this path and then all of the side content is completely separate from that main path that you have to travel through for the main story in this game because the island is relatively small and the mongol invasion has affected life for everybody there it only makes sense that the side quests you do will be tarnished and painted with the color of this conflict everybody's worried about the invasion everybody's worried about the impact this is going to have on their family friends and fellows and it paints with a very different brush everything that you'll do in the game because even when you take a break to just do some side stuff maybe to get a cool armor set or a different cosmetic item you'll still have this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that doesn't let you fully relax because you know that there's more to do and i actually really like this i can't stand it personally when there's a really high stakes main quest and then the side content is totally oblivious and apathetic towards the stakes going on in that main story it could be something as simple as like fallout 4 where you have the main quest based around the player's son being stolen and missing your child has been kidnapped and the game developers set it up so that you can just go through the open world explore maybe craft a couple of weird houses that don't really look like houses or maybe you should be allowed to like go and just mess around in diamond city like it doesn't take itself super seriously which is okay it's escapist entertainment at its purest form but also it's hard to take the story seriously and the events going on in the story seriously when the main character doesn't take it seriously in ghost of tsushima it's totally opposite because even when you're riding a haiku and you're just relaxing in a very picturesque place you're constantly bogged down by jin being like listen i gotta get back out there i got more to do it keeps you immersed it's really cool the downside of it though is that with this constant tension will be a bit of exhaustion this game is kind of tiring to play if you are really immersed in it because you're so emotionally heightened constantly there's never really a moment of respite because there's the constant nagging feeling of impending invasion impending attacks more civilians dying i can do more i can clear more camps save more lives but i would argue that the fact you feel that while you're playing the game demonstrates just how fantastically implemented that world design is within the narrative tying into the smaller activities you perform while you're just trying to kind of clear your head jin doesn't get a break and neither do you but beyond the main story and the side quests and then also exploring the world for its own sake the other reason to explore is because there's full things to find both in terms of basic combat encounters such as clearing mongol camps or finding fox dens shrines hot springs etc that offer individual boosts to the main characters such as improved health or maybe charms that can improve your overall abilities or powers gives you reason to explore it's beautiful and relaxing and it also is a nice break from the combat but the camps are probably the most polarizing gameplay design element in all of ghost of sushima some people love these things some people absolutely hate them and i totally understand both sides of the argument you see clearing camps is pretty simple every time you walk into one that's currently being occupied by mongols there will be a list of tasks that must be completed in addition there will also be smaller challenges like kill an enemy in the smoke from a smoke bomb which offer additional bonuses if completed while clearing that camp again bringing up the assassin's creed and far cry comparisons this is very similar to far cry this is why i said at the time of the game's launch when people ask me what i thought about the quest design and camp clearing and things like that i said i think that this game is much closer to far cry in japan than it is to assassin's creed in japan because the camp clearing is so far cry it's uncanny now in practical terms what this usually looks like is you'll show up to a camp you'll find the objectives outlined clearly in the ui and then you'll begin just stealthily or bombastically killing everybody in the camp you might do the bonus challenges as well as long as they're easy and approachable and then you'll collect all of the banners that are required to collect in order to clear the camp successfully one notable change compared to far cry and assassin's creed is that it's all on gin there's no eagle to do it no drone to do it which i actually personally really like the eagle in ubisoft games the assassin's creed game specifically have always kind of bugged me because it just didn't feel fair like if you want me to be immersed in this world okay cool let's do it i love assassin's creed origins i love ancient egypt this is awesome let's go for it but then you give me an eagle and the eagle who i can't talk to because it's a bird or raptor i guess is flying over top and sees enemies and somehow that's gets like communicated to bayek and then it's tagged through walls you can see the outlines of the enemies it's always bugged me and i just i don't like it so i'm glad that these guys at sucker punch didn't fall victim to those same tropes because i think the game is actually better for it just because you can add a tool for the player to use doesn't mean that you should and the impact of that change is that combat usually ends up being all or nothing you will take people on in big hordes clearing the camp out entirely and then you'll go and collect all the banners or you'll stealth your way through the entire camp usually you'll go all in one section of gameplay with stealth or all in the other section with combat skills to be applied that's it there's very rarely a mixture of clearing out half the camp with melee and then you go in and you do stealth for the second half because if you start combat and start fighting with melee the whole camp will be alerted and you'll have to finish everybody with melee just like you would expect in real life so i think it's actually really good because it encourages the player to commit to a playstyle if they want to go through the game trying to be just as bombastic and sort of honorable as they can then they can do that or if they want to go through and fight stealthily they can do that too the option is there it's in the player's hand and it makes sense in the world ironically though there are eagles in the game that can spot characters and tag them for their operators but it's not the player's eagle yeah later in the game enemy encampments have eagles that can spot you from the air and alert the camp to your presence which i just found kind of funny like they kind of flip it on its head it's like okay well in all these assassins creed game the players have the eagles and they can do that to discover where the enemies are located what if we give the enemies that tool and make the player deal with it i just thought it was kind of a fun inversion of the trope i liked it now you'll be clearing a lot of these camps over the course of the main story campaign as you go through each of the three zones while the combat is extremely tight and responsive which again we'll discuss in the next part next monday these are largely the same camps just rearranged later on they do add some new interesting elements such as the large missile launchers called watches and brutes that are really difficult enemies but you're still at the end of the day doing the same thing over and over and over again you defeat all the mongols in the camp using stealth or melee free some prisoners collect some banners maybe a special requirement that gives you an extra gift and then you're done you move on to the next camp and repeat the process again and this is my main criticism of ghost of tsushima's poor world design it's centered around clearing these camps which frees up a section of the map it makes the people that live in sushima feel much more relieved you can even speak to them in villages and they'll become much more calm and they'll feel more secure in the areas that they live there is a noticeable and insensible impact for clearing these camps which is awesome but they're so damn repetitive that it just starts to feel dry and uninteresting by the end of the game like i said they have some new mechanisms that they bring into the whole equation but at the end of the day you're still doing the same thing over and over and over again as you clear these camps repeatedly for some people the combat will be engrossing enough that they will not mind perhaps it was just that i was blasting through the game in the span of a few days so i just had all of them densely packed together i'm not really sure but whatever it was to me these camps felt extremely repetitive every single encounter felt the same after a while it was just kind of disappointing to see because instead of reaching the end of the game with these new camps and being like ooh i wonder what challenge this will bring up it was just effectively another checklist i was like i need to clear this camp to move on in the story so i guess i'll do it but i wouldn't if i didn't have to you know and that's not what you want in your game world you want the players to want to engage with the mechanisms and mechanics at the core of the gameplay loop not to dread engaging with them in a sequel this could be relatively easily addressed with more variety in the encampments or perhaps making the different encampment sizes more variables so you have some encampments which are small and some encampments which are really big maybe you have roaming generals that have to be cleared out that offer extreme combat challenges there are currently admirals generals um and higher level enemies in these camps especially later in the game that offer a fun new gameplay challenge in addition to the larger hordes that come along at the end of the game but for the most part again it just feels like a bigger brute that you have to fight if we had many bosses within every single camp that are varied and feel markedly different that i think could add a lot of new interesting dynamism to this whole equation but as of right now it just is too repetitive now there will also be random combat encounters sprinkled throughout the world these could be little hordes of mongol invaders that have taken a civilian captive or something and you have to stop kill them all to free the prisoner who might reward you with some sort of crafting material you need to upgrade your armor or something like that it's again very common in open world games like this but it's a great thing to see there's a reason it's in so many open worlds these dynamic encounters it's because they're awesome because it gives you a reason to stop while you're just exploring from point a to point b great to see i want to see more of it or more specifically i want to see more varied versions of it so instead of just mongols taking somebody captive you could have an escaped prisoner from a mongol encampment which we saw for instance in like red dead redemption 2 which had fantastic dynamic encounters where like an escaped prisoner asks you for help and then tries to rob you if you happen to stop or it could be something as simple as like kids running through the forest who uh you have to help get back home it could be any number of things that just shake it up and offer a memorable change in pace and an encounter that's just a little different but helps the world feel more real there are again small instances of this but again by the end of the game it's all going to feel very repetitive because they copy and paste a lot of these things over the course of the game so i would just like to see more and it really is a testament to the quality of the game that one of my critiques of it is that i want more of it you know like not many games you can say that about it's like yeah my my biggest problem is that i want more of it you know that's a good thing it's a critique and it's a good thing so it's it's like a backhanded compliment you know good job you're awesome at this that's kind of what i'm doing the gameplay at the core of each of those elements is fantastic the combat's great the exploration feels rewarding because there are items to be found there's charms to be had there's cosmetic items to be discovered but the only problem is that it doesn't feel varied enough and it starts to feel like you're just doing the same thing repeatedly that's it if the game were shorter maybe that would have fixed it maybe instead of three acts if they did two acts and kind of tightened everything up maybe that would have fixed it for me but again i played through this game in sort of a fever dream because i became so obsessed with it so quickly so maybe this is just an artifact of my time being so condensed with the game if you took your time with it and had a different experience and it didn't feel repetitive let me know in the comments now the one element of the open world design that i didn't actually find extremely repetitive and boring even though on paper it should be were all of the wildlife encounters that help guide you through the open world for example the golden birds these things are scattered all throughout the island and they just pop up out of nowhere you'll be riding your horse along a beach or through a forest or a valley and a golden bird will randomly swoop up and start flying alongside you and these things might just look like a fun item that pops up dynamically while you ride your horse but they're actually very important because these things lead you to different locations just like foxes lead you to their dens which give you charms that improve your combat abilities and different stats these golden birds lead you to haiku locations which are usually scenic locations in the map where you can sit down and craft a haiku on the spot these locations are all beautiful they're a nice change of pace and they let you sort of get an inside look on what's going on inside jyn's mind it's really haunting at times because you hear what he's seeing as he explores these sort of battlefields and war-torn areas but it's also oddly peaceful because it's a beautiful scene in front of you but it's so haunting because of what's framed around that scene it is truly fantastic now these pay out these headbands which you can wear based on the choices that you make during the haiku as far as i can tell they are purely cosmetic and have no gameplay impact which to me is a real missed opportunity i think if you were to have the player answer these different options when writing a haiku you could actually have an interesting payout for example if jin responds while writing the haiku in a very aggressive way where he's focused on violence and the combat and the destruction of the island things like that he gets a payout of a headband that boosts attack power by a set amount or perhaps a headband that boosts defensive power by a set amount if he tends to answer the options for the haiku in a more defensive way or it could be if he's focused on the beauty of the island and appreciating nature around him he gets a headband that helps boost discoverability of items things like that i think it could have been really really interesting and would almost help the player role play and choose how they wanted to approach the world through gin by answering these questions when writing the haiku i think it could have been really cool and i'd like to see more stuff like that in a sequel that implements more player agency into how the character actually turns out it doesn't have to be a full-fledged rpg but just something which helps people specialize so it doesn't feel like we're all playing the game in exactly the same way but once again to be clear this isn't really an issue with the game all i'm saying is that this could be something that could introduce a new fun element that changes how combat how exploration works based on the player's choices even if a sequel doesn't have this or something like it it would be totally fine like again these are just small suggestions for what i think could be interesting to add it's possible that the developers already considered these things and didn't put them in the game for a set reason who knows this is just my best attempt at putting out a suggestion for something that i think could add a new interesting element to the next game whatever that looks like but with all of that said let's talk about just navigating the open world as i said you can climb on things you can run you can ride your horse there's a lot of different ways that you can do it but the singular mechanism that the player will use to explore the map is something called the guiding wind which i promise is not a euphemism for anything it's actually pretty cool you see ghost of tsushima uses the wind as a core element of the game's ui which i think is probably one of the coolest features if not the coolest feature of ghost of sushima because you see most open world games give you a big map or a mini map or a compass which has a bunch of markers on it that you can follow those are all fine and i don't necessarily have a huge problem with the compass i think the mini map can have issues of its own in a lot of different ways but that's a topic for a different video but what ghost of sushima does is way better than anything that those other games do because you see when you have a mini map or a compass or you have to pull up like your map and hit a marker which creates a pillar of light like in breath of the wild or elgin ring and then you follow that to your destination you end up inevitably with your eyes looking up at the compass to see where you need to go or down at the mini-map and you lose the focus on the center of the screen where everything interesting is happening if you could possibly come up with a way to keep the players on the center of the screen and still show them where to go that would be way way better and that's exactly what they did here because the guiding wind just directs the wind towards wherever your marker is if you want to go over there the wind will blow that way and it'll rustle through the trees you'll see the wind blowing through the air next to you you'll see the grass blowing in that direction and it tells you to go that way without ever having to glance at a mini-map a compass the main map anything it is so immersive and it is so much better than any of those other systems it's ridiculous it's awesome now it's not perfect there are times when this can actually be so immersive that it ends up causing a lot of frustration or headaches because you see you can set the guiding wind to lead you somewhere but the guiding winds will just blow the wind towards that item which means if there's a large body of water if there's a cliff face if there's anything that you need to navigate around it doesn't communicate that to you it just tells you that way go that way and that's it so there were multiple times when i would set a destination on my map i would be exploring i'd be doing something they'd be like oh i need to go back and do that thing and because it's so immersive you don't feel the need to pull up your map and check where you are and figure out where to go you just swipe on the touchpad on the playstation controller you figure out where you need to go which direction and you start riding and multiple times i found myself running face first into a cliff or into a large body of water that i had to ride around again it's a small issue it's one that could be remedied if i just pulled up the mini-map and and checked it you know whenever that happened but it's it's still a small hitch just a little frustrating it happened enough times that i felt i should mention it which is probably indicative that it'll happen to you a few times when you play the game or did happen if you played it now the other thing the guiding winds are used for is allowing you to equip different guiding winds to lead you to certain items or locations that will boost certain elements of your character such as discovering hot springs to boost your maximum health or these bamboo cutting drills where you can increase your maximum resolve which helps you perform major abilities and all sorts of cool stuff like that and it actually is very simple once you've equipped the guiding wind for say increasing your resolve it will just point you generally in the direction of where the closest resolve improvement task is located and you'll just hop on your horse and head that way looking around trying to figure out where it's pointing you to it'll point you in the general direction and then you climb up the hill or around the house wherever it may be you hop off you do that one and then you swipe up again to see where the next one is because the wind will start blowing in a different direction now you can cheese this a little bit because you can pull up the map see roughly which direction the wind is going to blow in pointing you again roughly in the direction of where the next place is that you need to go to and you can usually fast travel to the closest point over there in that rough area that it's pointing to which will speed up the process so that you don't have to ride your horse all the way across the island every time you try to swipe to find out where the next interesting item is that you need to get to not a big deal like it's sort of like grinding when you realize like oh i need more health like bad so you just start hunting around for these hot springs it's fine i don't think it's a big issue but i did want to point out that you can totally cheese it now it's not always super intelligent where and how it points you to for example there's this moment where i was exploring hunting down these items with these guiding winds and it actually pointed me while i was in the second zone from act two it pointed me back to the lower section of the island from act 1 which is a much bigger trek to make whereas i would have assumed that the guiding wind would keep me to the area of the map that i was in even if i had to ride a little bit further as long as it wasn't as big of a trudge to go all the way back across a large body of water for example small issue again if you could even call it an issue but it was frustrating enough that i paused and took a note on it so i found it to be disturbing to my general progression in the game it was frustrating and i should say that at first i was really kind of peeved that the way that you improve your resolve and health is by hunting down these different areas with these guiding winds i just thought it felt like such a grindy way to do it like you needed to sit down for an hour and just ride across the island hop in a hot spring chop some bamboo hop in a hot spring chop some bamboo chop some more bamboo hop in a hot spring it was just kind of frustrating that it felt like i was grinding in a game all about exploration but then i realized the grinding was exploration all the while i was hunting these things down i was exploring the island because the guiding wind was loose enough a guide that it just pointed me roughly in the direction that i needed to go so it was up to me to then discover it with that rough guidance so what i at first thought was just grinding actually turned out to be encouragement to explore further and this is what i mean when i say that the world of ghost of sushima is so coherent and cohesive everything works together with itself the wildlife makes you fall in love with the island for its own sake and it also helps you improve your abilities to continue exploring the guiding winds help you improve your character stats so there's reason to use them and they get you better familiarized with the island itself everything in the exploration ties in with the character improvement in combat whether it's improving the combat abilities with charms that you discover at fox stands or it could be as something like discovering uh the bamboo places where you can increase your resolve as you level that up all of those things tie together so the exploration improves the combat you discover more items upgrade your gear you discover some supplies upgrade your sword damage any which way like there's so many cool things that integrate perfectly it's really really fascinating how well they were able to pull this off but you know i guess this is as good a time as any to discuss overall exploration variety because when you're riding across the map hunting these things down to improve your character stats you're gonna start to notice that a lot of this feels the same you see when a game depends so heavily on exploring the map and discovering items and interesting things to do within it it's important to shake things up once in a while if you don't it's important to keep the game short so that players don't feel as though it overstayed its welcome in a game like assassin's creed valhalla the exploration variety is abysmal and yet the game carries on for over a hundred hours this makes the whole thing feel like a chore and it feels painfully boring thankfully ghost of tsushima is much shorter i'm not sure but i think most people would probably be able to finish the game in 25 to 35 hours depending on how much of the side content they did and how much of their armor and gear they upgraded before taking on the final boss encounter i will say that fully upgrading one of the game sets of armor and your weapons makes the last few combat encounters feel absolutely trivial but that's something we'll discuss next monday when we talk about the combat and how all of that works but as for ghost of sushima's exploration itself it rarely challenges the player to think creatively about getting from point a to point b or about possibilities that they hadn't considered before and i know that that sounds incredibly vague so i'll clarify the best game to point to that does this really well would be breath of the wild in the opening plateau of the game what is effectively the tutorial section there are a few different shrines that you have to unlock before progressing into the main game and each of these has a different theme it could be telekinesis fire or ice if we look at the shrine at the top of the mountain in the great plateau the shrine that will likely be the last one the players access before continuing on to the main game we can see just how masterfully nintendo was able to present these different exploration challenges namely that the second you start to go into this snowy area link will begin experiencing negative status effects of cold this will slowly eat away at your health bar until you eventually die so long as you don't get near a fire or find some other solution at this early stage of the game you don't have enough health to just recklessly run into the snow and deal with the cold and you also don't have a lot of healing items in the form of food so you're faced with a big question am i missing something how do i possibly navigate the snowy area what can i do so the player will keep looking for a creative solution and method by which you could explore the snowy area until you discover the solution in this case you'll find that near the base of the snowy area there's a bunch of peppers that you can find and if you cook these up you can actually have a long lasting impervious to cold effect that heats you up while you explore so you can go through the snowy area without taking damage simply put there was a challenge posed to the player that you deal with this negative status effect of cold and the player will figure out that okay there's got to be a solution to this this is the opening area of the game they wouldn't just have this here totally broken so you start to hunt for a solution and then you'll find these peppers and you're like peppers are hot i wonder if i cooked peppers if they get extra hot and then they'll last longer and maybe that'll help me with the cold they'll heat me up you do it and all of a sudden yeah that totally fixed it it's one of the most amazing feelings when playing a game when you have an idea maybe this will work and then it works it encourages creative solutions and when they pay off there's nothing quite like it unfortunately in ghost of tsushima the extent of the difficulties that you'll encounter while exploring are very very limited almost everything you do will be something you've already done you may come across a large body of water that you need to navigate around as i previously mentioned or you could be going around a cliff face to get to a shrine which requires you to climb up a pre-scripted path with a bunch of pre-arranged swings and climbing holds or it could be that you come across your 100th mongol encampment that stands between you and your goals requiring you to clear it before passing and progressing it's just all stuff that you've dealt with 50 times before whether it's just running through the crowd climbing up this handhold section navigating this preset path it's just more of the same there are a couple puzzles in the world where you have to sort of climb up something in a creative way i don't want to spoil it in case you haven't come across these or you haven't played the game and you plan on playing it after this video or series of videos there are some puzzles for the record but they are so scarce and so underwhelming even in their limited scope that i i wouldn't consider them notable or enough to refute this point in a sequel i would love to see more challenges to the player that require creative dynamic solutions where the player has to think outside the box and come up with something interesting to solve that problem whether it's puzzles that hide limited edition armor and gear something very special that's powerful and you have to think creatively to deal with it just something so that not every single item every single moment of interest is guarded behind combat like just something different now to be clear once again none of this is particularly egregious and it's all certainly passable as it stands as i pointed out at the beginning of the video this thing is still like an amazing game i'm just trying to point out things that they could do better the fact that it has these issues in my mind and is still incredible shows just how much potential a sequel could have if this game is phenomenal like it is they iron out some of these issues and encourage the player to think more dynamically and reward that dynamism in the gameplay loop you could easily have a 10 out of 10 game of the year no questions asked send it home signed sealed delivered no question in my mind now there are also smaller really random issues that don't have much of an impact on gameplay such as when you're clearing a village if you get to the last enemy and eliminate them the mission will be completed and the village rules will set itself to be inhabited and when you come out of the fade to black you'll see villagers just walking around like nothing's wrong but the enemy dogs will still be in the village and will still attack you even though it's supposed to be in a peaceful state this was maybe just a bug that i encountered multiple times when i was playing it could have been patched out by now but this happened multiple times where i would clear out an enemy encampment clearing up the village but the dogs specifically would stay behind and still be in an aggressive state it was just weird so again this might have been fixed but i encountered it many times well after the launch of director's cut so it's just odd but you know what all of this brings us to the central question what is the overarching feeling that we are left with while exploring the world of ghost of sushima to me i feel an overwhelming sense of tranquility i know that sounds bizarre because the entire island is being invaded by mongol warriors but the beauty and peacefulness with which the island and its natural elements are crafted is overwhelming i can't think of the last game that i played where i could just walk and take it all in no need for stopping for combat encounters or looking for collectibles or having my ui flooded with notifications and quest markers the game just confidently lets me live within it and that's really impressive the game is just totally unashamed and wholly secure in itself so many games present the player with beautiful level design carefully crafted quests amazing artwork and so much more but it's like they're too insecure about the quality of the world's design to just let it speak for itself because they flood it with ui guiding the players every single step whether you look at ghost of sushima red dead redemption 2 or breath of the wild all of these games confidently put themselves forward to the player without any filtration or needless hand-holding they're as confident in their own abilities to put these worlds together as they are in the player's ability to find the meaning and the satisfaction within the world that these developers have designed believe it or not if the world is interesting and captivating players will find things to do and their experience will be far better if they're allowed to explore by themselves without a menu yelling at them to get back on some pre-scripted track now i don't want to belabor the points while leave it there but let it be known that ghost of sushima has one of the best crafted open worlds of the last generation sure there's repetition sure there's a lot of things that are copy and pasted it's still fantastic which should just make it all the more exciting to think where they could go after this with a bigger budget with more time more employees and artists working on this now that they've proven the concept i can only imagine what a sequel might look like the world is extremely refined and incredibly consistent the map from edge to edge feels cohesive and as though it's an accurate depiction of a real place and being somebody who plays a lot of open world games for this channel and these videos i can confidently affirm that this is really rare to make a cohesive open world that's fun to explore and that feels real and living and like it could be an actual place on this planet and i know it's like yeah it's a real island and it's actually a real play i i get it i'm saying in the game this version of it feels real so often these games just feel like stitched together mini levels or like they're just big video game levels that have been crafted with the sole purpose of providing a checklist of things to do to keep the player busy but not with ghost of sushima it feels like a real place that has actual problems that you can help solve yeah it's kind of fun at times most of the time but that's sort of a side element of it it feels so real so beautiful so captivating and you're just lucky to get to explore it it really is one of the most incredibly well crafted open worlds of the last generation that does put it in the top league with the likes of red dead redemption 2 the witcher 3 and even breath of the wild and i truly mean that it's that good we'll discuss the dlc island and whether or not they found new ways to tweak this with the dlc expansion and the different island they put there if they kind of drop the ball and stumbled a bit we'll talk about all of that in part four again subscribe and ring the bell to get notified of when that part goes live in like three weeks but we'll get there all told the only issues i have with ghost of tsushima's open world design is that it needs a little bit of refinement and it needs more just more of what it's already doing so so well i love it so much i just want more of it it's like when you're eating a delicious dessert and you're like i have a big issue with this dessert i just wish there were more of it you know it's like that dad joke kind of thing i love this so much i just want more of it i want less repetition so it doesn't feel like i'm doing the same thing over and over again i would like more dynamism in how you explore and the player gets rewarded for exploring but all told like this is phenomenal it's really great part two combat [Music] to introduce the combat i want to start with a comment made by one of the developers over at sucker punch studios as it pertains to combat within the game because i think it frames this whole system very very well this is coming from nate fox of sucker punch studios and he said quote we have this phrase that we use to describe the combat in the game that being ghost of sushma and that's quote mud blood and steel and quote we want it to feel really really grounded and lethally precise if you've ever seen a samurai movie you know what it's like these men cut each other down with a single stroke of their sword and to capture that samurai movie fight is different than a lot of games because that means you can die very quickly and your enemies can too and that took us a while to get right but we're very pleased with the results and we think that it shows well on screen end quote and i love this it's one of those gameplay design elements specifically with combat that everybody feels but has trouble putting into words in effect what they're talking about here is something called ttk or time to kill you hear people talk about it all the time with regards to first person shooters like warzone or apex it basically just means the time it takes to kill another character whether that's an npc or the player character themselves the balancing of this data point will determine how realistic a game's combat system will feel how fair violent engagements will feel to the player and how many mistakes a player can make in a set amount of time before being punished with the kill screen and setting aside all the fluff and glamour of graphical fidelity building systems different shielding and and super abilities for characters one of the key statistical considerations that separates games like apex from call of duty from fortnite from valorant is this one stat this time to kill something like valorant has an extremely short time to kill it just takes one headshot and you're done whereas something like apex requires a much longer engagement a much higher time to kill which usually requires a little bit more skill as it pertains to longer gunfights not to say that valorent doesn't take skill because obviously it does you have to land a head shot and not a foot shot but still you get the point for something like call of duty it has a lower time to kill to encourage aggressive gameplay which of course leads to higher kill counts for players which makes them feel better at the game even though let's be honest it's far more impressive to get 10 kills in apex than it is to get 20 kills in war zone in the case of ghost of tsushima the developers were trying to recreate the feeling of these old samurai movies that you may have seen and it's not just reflected in the combat it's reflected all over the place both in the framing of scenes the cut scenes the cinematics that play out and hell even in just the overarching narrative which i've been told is very similar to many many samurai films that have been produced over the last 60 or so years but to replicate the feeling of those films it's a lot harder than just saying we want a fast ttk and then implementing that into the gameplay system to do this well it has to be short enough for the player and the npc that it feels like every combat encounter is dangerous but also slow enough that it allows for mistakes to be made especially early in the game and most importantly it has to be fun now fun is a really tough term for us to define when talking about video games i've talked about this before because i think a lot of the best video games in history aren't necessarily fun they may be satisfying fulfilling rewarding or even just time consuming and mindless but fun as a term to describe a game is something that only applies to a small subset of games at least in my opinion in this case with ghost of sushima i'm using the term fun kind of loosely i mean it where it needs to feel as though the engagements are fair they need to be satisfying and you need to feel as though you've accomplished something every time you go into a combat encounter and come out victorious and really at its core i think the combat system and ghost of sushma depends a lot on the rhythm and pace of combat which is something that almost turns every encounter into a dance of sorts it's a rhythmic thing which is something you'll feel if you've played sekuro for instance from fromsoft and other games from those same developers who have fantastic combat systems there's a rhythm to it and when you're feeling it it almost turns into a musical experience where it's instinctual and muscle memory it's deep deep down in you and it's not as much of a contemplative thing you just feel when you need to dodge you feel when you need to parry so on and so forth once again this is really freaking hard to do like how do you even make a rhythmic musical combat system not not easy not easy it takes some phenomenal development talent a lot of refinement and years and years of experimentation and messing with the animations and timings of attacks and deflections and everything all of that said ghost of tsushima nails it but with that being said throughout the rest of this video while we show clips of combat encounters and footage of people fighting with swords just keep an eye out for this this sort of rhythmic combat where you'll see attacks come at a steady pace it might be you know slash slash slash slash from an enemy and you get the parrying timings just right i realize i'm moving a lot and it's probably distracting but just keep an eye on it because you'll see this all over the place as we showed more footage of the game and now that i've called it out you won't be able to unsee it now within the comment there are three basic elements that need to be considered for one there's ranged with uh the bow and arrow that you have access to a short bow and a long bow and then of course there's direct man-to-man hand-to-hand sword-fighting combat which is what the game is mostly known for and where it puts most of its focus now the weapons you can use are pretty straightforward you have the sakai katana and the tanto which is just kind of a short sword dagger thing that you'll use in a lot of stealth sections you have the half bow and a long bow a bunch of different arrow types that can be used in different instances which is kind of a cool way to increase variety you'll have bombs kunai wind chimes firecrackers and even a blow gun that you get much later in the game all of these tools generally focus towards variability within the combat but they're all just set dressing around the core combat mechanics which are centered around the longbow short bow the katana and the tonto you have to master those four and then these other things kind of get sprinkled in you know you might be fighting with your katana and then there's a big horde of enemies coming at you so you throw down a bomb to escape get some space or maybe stun them so you can clear a couple those types of things come in after you've mastered the base combat and the thing that really impresses me about all of these smaller tools like the wind chimes firecrackers kunai the blow gun all of these things is that you'll be using all of them by the end of the game and that is actually pretty impressive now the way this was described to me by somebody that was going through school for game development i can understand if this doesn't make a lot of sense but it made sense to me and i've remembered it all this time so i'll refer it and communicate it to you now basically how they described it was there are bucket games and there are bin games buckets and bins some games are what we call bucket games and in this bucket is just a select few tools that you'll get to use maybe the katana a longbow you get these things you'll use them through the whole game you'll get to know them very very well you'll specialize in them and that's where all of your focus is going to go to think of something like sakura that's what that game is it's a bucket game there's a bunch of sort of tangential little tools that you can use to affect these basic overarching tools but at the end of the day it's about the small selection of weapons given to the player a bin game would be one where there's a gigantic bin think of how they use it like in the uk a big bin of stuff that you can use tons of different options as far as gameplay is concerned think of elden ring think of monster hunter world these kinds of games where there's tons of different tools and approaches play styles everything is up to the player you can engage with some of them all of them it's up to you so there's a bucket game and a bin game there are two different things both are fine both can be phenomenal in their own right they're just different in the case of ghost of sushima we're dealing with a bucket game there's a couple of core tools that you need to use and a bunch of other stuff sprinkled in but for the most part you can get through the entire game without having to mess with them if you don't want to at all but the way they've designed the combat encounters and the encampments and all of the later game missions especially once they start encouraging you to engage in more stealthy approaches to these combat encounters you'll find yourself using all of these tools the kunai the blowgun the wind chimes the firecrackers all of them very intentionally and you'll be exhausting them every time you go through a camp in a good way because you're using all of the tools given to you whereas in the case of something like sakura a lot of people will go through the majority of that game without messing around with a lot of the smaller tools that are given to the player because frankly the game wasn't designed with that intention you don't need to engage with those sure they can make bosses cheesy but in general you don't need to engage with them if you don't want to ghost of sushima designs the quests brilliantly so that you start using these tools without even realizing that you're being pushed into using them and like i said i think this is mostly because the game swaps between these two basic approaches to gameplay that they encourage you to engage with there's the ghost option and then there's the samurai option they both have narrative implications they both have uh characters which are encouraging the player to use one over the other but it basically just comes down to one is all about stealth and going the ghostly route and the other option is to do the high honor sort of stereotypical samurai approach to combat where you face your opponents on and whoever is the stronger fighter comes out on top there's no right way or wrong way to play the game it is actually up to you but by the end of the game regardless of which one you prefer the narrative will start to push jyn into situations where he has to use stealth and there's even narrative moments later on in the game which are based on these stealthy choices such as the time when you have to poison the mongol encampment in order to clear it out so that you can progress up towards where the mongol leader is currently stationed at least at that point in the game i'd say for probably three quarters of the main story it's up to the player as to which side they want to land on if they want to go mostly stealth and ranged or if they want to go right up in the faces and get in there and get dirty it's up to the player for most of that but towards the end of the game you're going to be forced into using a lot more stealth than direct confrontation so by the end of the game most players will have the skill trees fully branched out you won't have anything left to apply and most players will be very well versed in both now it should also be noted that almost every single one of these weapons can be upgraded beyond their initial starting point such as the katana and the tanto which can be upgraded to increase damage output reduce noise generated when they're in use or even change the animations which are used during executions which is a cool touch you'll do this with a bunch of supplies and iron that you discover as you explore the world it's not actually that transformational basically it'll increase your dps or damage per second that you can put out which allows you to kill grunts much quicker in case you need to travel to early game areas and it makes you feel like you're becoming more powerful as you play through the game and it also makes it easier to kill brutes at least on paper but in effect this usually just means it takes seven cuts to kill a brute instead of eight that it did right before that sure over the course of the entire game it might go from 16 hits directly to a brute to kill them down to six or seven by the end of the game but it's so incremental as you go through it doesn't feel like there's major progress being made every time you upgrade the weapon it was a little bit of a letdown every time i would go spend all of these resources upgrade my katana only to see that there wasn't really at least a major noticeable effect on my next combat encounter but it was small enough that maybe it's not a big deal to you but for me it was something i noticed or perhaps i should clarify didn't notice rather for major gameplay shifts you need to look at the armor and what you're wearing there to see major changes come into play and so i guess this is as good a time as any to talk about armor and the different options that are in the game there's a bunch of different armor sets that you can discover as you go through the story of ghost of sushma and while you're exploring some of them are more hidden than others some of them require you to clear multiple camps filled with mongol invaders before you can even get the chance to unlock it so it really does come down to what you want if you want to just go through the game with some basic armor sets you can do that but if you want to specialize whether it be stealth or direct confrontation you can do that by seeking out these specific armor types each armor set has three basic perks that help you increase the stats related to your preferred play style even in counter to encounter because of course you can change armor sets in between fights whenever you want which is a great option for difficult encounters and i can't talk this up enough really it's important that you're able to swap armor loadouts so quickly and easily it's fantastic because the armor and charms are mostly what affects your combat experience and your abilities whether it's increased damage output damage resistance to ranged attacks or anything else it's very important depending on which camp you're dealing with that you swap to the armor which is best suited for that particular encounter and they make it very very easy to do this in the menus thankfully because it allows you to specialize in counter to encounter which makes me feel as the player much more rewarded for taking the time to seek out these different armor sets it's a great touch i love that they do this i wish more games that had different armor sets made it this easy to create loadouts and stuff it's one of my favorite things from monster hunter world for example where you can build loadouts specific for certain types of min max specialties and the fact that they do it here though albeit in a much more simplified and streamlined way is great to see based on my notes i took while i was playing the game there are also perks that increase defense and damage reduction stealth and melee damage and even heavy armor sets can increase the amount of damage you can receive and heavily reduce the damage received also from arrows and range detects specifically making it so you can really specialize based on which armor set you have equipped furthermore all of these armor sets can be upgraded beyond their initial starting level and these not only have stat bonuses once they're leveled up which are not as noticeable as you might expect though certainly in effect and real they also have visual representations so when you discover an armor set it might initially look kinda lame but as you level it up it'll get better and better and better and better which again encourages the player to do it as they play through the game little touches like that are great so many games have armor sets that you can upgrade level up and make better but there's no visual representation of it so it's just kind of like throwing xp and supplies into the wind and you're just hoping and praying that it has some noticeable gameplay effect but in this case upgrading these armor sets even if there's no noticeable gameplay impact is worth it just because the visual improvement is so significant and i feel like i should know my favorite armor set even though it doesn't actually offer like any armor whatsoever it's my favorite not because of its looks but for its use it's the traveler's set which once fully upgraded greatly increases the range that's cleared on the map as you explore the island so that the map becomes much more useful it also increases your ability to discover certain things especially like guiding winds have bigger range which allows you to find more things as you explore it's great like the fact that there's an armor set specifically tailored for just exploring the world is fantastic why don't more games have this like if you're gonna be exploring the game's world why not have an armor set and they build out a whole loadout for your character that's just for exploring and finding new things like sure some games and many games that have great open worlds even elgin ring for example has abilities and certain pendants and things that can increase discoverability of certain items or increase payout of xp or whatever the given currency in the game may be but for this it was just so streamlined and well done it not just had an impact on the map that you could clearly see every time you pulled it up but also just as you explored being able to notice and discover more things around you or higher supply payouts when you discovered it out in the world it was just great to see it's very well implemented here very streamlined very well done now as for the minutia of combat let's see you've got your great armor set all equipped you've got your charms loaded up which uh are exactly in line with your play style you've got your weapons fully upgraded and you're ready to go what does combat actually look like well it's sort of similar to how neo worked where there's four basic stances that you can choose between and each of them have a specialty tied to them the stone stance is the one you start the game with and it's very very simple and it's basically used for fighting grunts and just general damage the water stance is used against people that have shields it's great for breaking shields and is received after you're killing roughly three different mongol leaders at least according to my count the win stance is available to the player after killing another five mongol leaders at camps or at least discovering them i saw some people on reddit say you only have to discover mongol leaders and encampments to get access to the stance other people said you have to actually kill them i'm not sure which it is if you know let me know in the comment section below and this win stance is used for people with spears hal beards and the like and lastly the moon stance is the last one you'll receive probably two-thirds of the way through the game and this thing is available to the player after seven more leaders have been killed discovered whatever it is and this stance is specifically for the big brutes that have lots and lots of poise they're not easy to stagger this stance makes it extremely easy to do it with a special spin move that you can use it's it's super cool to see furthermore each of these stances can be upgraded using experience points and help the player become more specialized given which stance they prefer to use going back to the idea of the bucket or bin game you're not really going to specialize in one stance over the other at least for the majority of the game especially by the end you will have almost every single one if not every single one of these stances fully leveled out so they're performing in the optimal way it's not necessarily a bad thing i just it's a little pet peeve of mine for so many games to come out and just like give you a skill tree and pretend as though they're giving the player options and agency when in reality by the end of the game everybody will be in the exact same place as everybody else it's like not every game has to be an action rpg it's okay if your game isn't an action rpg there's no issue there like don't don't pretend as though it's something that it's not so with this i mean i think they could have achieved the same exact thing if every time jyn leveled up or discovered another set of um techniques that he could use if you just tweaked it so the stances also became more powerful that would achieve the exact same thing as these weird branches that they give you it's just kind of filler it's fluff not a bad thing just a pet peeve of mine now all of these stances can be quickly swapped between during combat and so you'll find yourself as you are approached by a group of two to three mercenaries maybe one of them has a shield one of them has a spear and the other just has a regular sword swapping to the relevant stance that you need to deal with each individual opponent and it makes combat feel extremely fluid unfortunately though it's not really implemented in the most comprehensive way what i mean is that for example many bosses and bosses don't usually require you to use multiple stances in a single phase for example one boss fight may have the boss begin with one weapon set maybe it's a sword and a shield so you'll use a lot of the water stance while fighting him the next phase will swap and he'll have a hull beard and you'll need to deal with him there and so you swap stances and play most of that phase with that stance if not entirely with that stance through the entire phase of the fight so it swaps it up but only on a phase-to-phase basis whereas i think more stance swapping would have been much more interesting and it is important to note that the developers seem to agree with this criticism as well because the dlc introduces a whole new set of enemies that do just that and require you to swap stances multiple times while dealing with just that one enemy so it seems as though even the developers agree with this point in the base game everybody's just specialized and you have one stance for one enemy pretty much exclusively and then you swap stances to deal with the other enemy or big bosses it's on a phase phase-to-phase fight dlc totally shakes it up but don't worry we'll talk about that in a couple weeks now these stances initially seem extremely complicated and intimidating even difficult to master but towards the end of the game it really will become second nature you'll see a pikeman you'll switch to the wind stance until he's taken care of and then you'll see a shield wielding swordsman so you'll swap to water stance until he's taken care of it really is fluid and it will become muscle memory quicker than you might expect and all of these tied together with ease with the jumping attacks throwing bombs to stun enemies to quickly get in there and take somebody out with a knock down or a finisher all of it just works so well and integrates so well it's got to be one of the most cohesive combat systems of any game in the last few years it really is impressive now i've referenced charms a few times over the course of the last few minutes of the critique and i feel like i should give them a little bit more time in the spotlight because they do have a much more noticeable impact than i think many other systems in ghost of tsushima do now these charms are just little items that you can discover while exploring the world completing side quests or honoring shrines honoring shrines being the main way that you retrieve them and each of these has a special ability that can be used and applied to the player character that have different effects so for example one major charm might be able uh to restore a set amount of health or resolve once you execute an enemy or it could make it so you deal more stagger or it greatly increases ranged damage or it reduces the amount of sound you make when crouched and walking all of these different effects that allow you to specialize your gin at least a little bit and towards the end of the game i found myself creating loadouts for my particular playstyle which tended to be very bombastic get in there get up close and personal wipe as many people as you can and that required me to have all sorts of charms and armor sets laid out in a way that increased maximal damage output and also reduced physical damage received from melee attacks i wasn't that protected against ranged attacks which was the one fault of it but in general i would take those people out first with my longbow and then get into the camp and deal with everybody up close and personal there however like i said later in the game they will force you into situations where you need to engage in stealth so for that i used charms that i had which increased the amount of stealth damage i could do or made it so every time i stealth killed somebody i would receive health back or increase my resolve all of these different things that greatly uh ease the process of combat especially if you happen to be discovered while engaging in stealth through a particular encampment it's done very very well my only wish would be that these charms did more and there were more options to customize them most of the time you're only talking about three or four charms that are of any real use for hours and hours on end of gameplay there's not a lot of reason to experiment a lot because their effects are pretty straightforward it may be like oh this charm increases the damage i deal out this charm increases the damage that i can receive before it actually affects my health cool i'm gonna apply these and we'll call it good and that's it you'll keep those charms for a while there's not a lot of reason to quickly swap them or to experiment with different options and combinations but i mean once again this is something that probably is just a limitation of the total gameplay loop that we're dealing with there's not a lot of reason to swap them unless the mission that you're engaged with forces you into the position where you'll need to change it and experiment with it such as swapping from a direct confrontation mission to a stealth mission or an exploration-based mission which requires you to change out all the different charms that you may have equipped to ones that help with discovery of new objects or sites and scenes so it's it's a small criticism because i am sure most people don't notice or care particularly they just use the charms that feel good but these things are fun these things are cool you discover them they encourage you to explore the island while you're going about your business and take the extra time to honor the shrines that you can earn these charms that the foxes lead you to i just wish there were more reason to find more of them and there were more wacky combinations wacky things that you could do with them now speaking of stealth this is mostly used in dedicated missions as i've referenced repeatedly over the last half hour or so it's not a bad deal it's not a bad thing these stealth missions usually feel pretty fair such as this example where you have to sneak through a mongol camp into a besieged village as part of the main story it's well done well done enough but there is one major flaw in ghost of sushima that we haven't really talked about and it's because you don't see it in direct confrontations in combat because you're just getting up close and personal with people and it doesn't put much of a strain on the enemy ai but stealth is where ai is extremely important and it's just not very good now there are many things that this game does to make it feel like the world is alive and real but the second that things get out of strictly scripted sequences as part of the main story quest for example we just see the whole thing fall on its face for example enemies do everything to get to you full stop like they will even chase you off of a cliff if it means that they will get from point a to point b point a being their starting point point being being wherever you happen to be it's amazing like honestly amazing now the devs have actually referenced the ai and issues that were present at the game's launch and even within the director's cut and apparently the games ai was greatly improved after launch in the months that followed through patches and improvements that they made but even still in the director's cut the version that i played for this video or series of videos the ai is still pretty damn stupid so if they can find any way to improve this in the next game or entry i think it'll be very much appreciated now there's a lot here that just makes me think that the devs were overly reliant on the fact that most players will simply rush into enemies and wipe them before noticing how dumb they actually are but this is where ai comes in in stealthy moments and levels where the devs don't specifically tweak the ai to account for different styles or approaches that the player may take for example the mongols don't hear their friends getting headshotted with a long bow just meters away from them they give up trying to find you after only a minute or two in most cases i timed it out to almost exactly 60 seconds on any given occasion which makes me think that the devs did just that they set a 60-second timer from when the character disappears to when the mongols give up and just go back to their resting position i get it that's a simple way to code this type of thing but it's not realistic it sticks out like a sore thumb if there's some sort of dynamic system where perhaps the player leaves behind a trail or if it was a big enough distraction like somebody was killed they never go back to their placid state where they are neutral they stay on alert keep patrolling until they find this person that killed someone like little things like that that just pull you out affect the overall stealth system in a pretty significant way if i'm going through an encampment and i know that i can just quickly assassinate somebody hide behind this wall for 60 seconds and then go back out and continue doing my thing it makes me not take these encounters very seriously whereas in direct combat confrontations i need to take it seriously because that ttk is low enough that the damage dealt from enemies is a real problem and a real concern it's one of the unfortunate things in ghost of sushma is that they nail the feeling of the high-stakes combat indirect sword fighting but when it comes to stealth those stakes are completely gone and that concern or realism grit groundedness whatever you want to call it is just missing furthermore the mongols don't have any sort of schedules or activities that keep them moving throughout the camp in any sort of realistic way beyond basic patrols they may be sitting at a campfire fishing or sleeping in a stable but they don't actually do anything that makes them look like real people that aren't just plopped in individual areas within a camp now other games have managed this even other games that don't actually have any significant stealth system whatsoever like assassin's creed sorry was that what does that mean that might have been a little mean i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm a fan of assassin's creed i got the statues uh ivor's right there i i like assassin's creed but come on we got to be real with ourselves specifically i mean assassin's creed origins they made a big hullabaloo about the ai in that game and it actually is really impressive if you assassinate an npc in assassin's creed origins the guards will come discover the body look for you for about five minutes or so it's a while and then they'll pick up the body and take them and put them in a secluded area within the camp that they're hanging out in or the ruins that they are and they'll set all of the bodies in a pile over in that one location so that they can be buried later little things like that are so cool to see like oh well we found a body we gotta clear it okay i'll take him back to the corner and we'll come pick him up later okay we'll take him over there and then they go to sleep they're on patrols they rotate one guard if you follow them around the map will be on patrol and then after their shift ends they'll go back down another guard will replace them and they'll go sleep in the barracks that are set up in that same encampment way more impressive than what's going on here and that's something that could be easily or i guess easily might be a little aggressive that could definitely be improved in whatever sequel comes to ghost of tsushima better ai would be greatly appreciated and would help all of this feel grounded not just in the individual swordplay encounters but also in the stealth now all of this to say combat is really tight it feels fair and by the end of the game you'll feel like an expert and you likely will be you'll be swapping stances bows dodging between enemies like it's nothing and i don't really know how they managed this to work so fluidly but the developers somehow managed to introduce all of these systems slowly and methodically enough that it never really felt contrived or frustrating i never felt like i was training or practicing a new system but instead i just looked up every once in a while and realized that i was making a bunch of progress and i think it's probably that they managed to slowly introduce more and more enemies that challenge whatever new ability you just unlocked at a pace which feels very natural but regardless it's very impressive even great games struggle with this and can lead players to feeling like they have to intentionally train themselves into using a new ability like when new players have to learn how to parry father gascon in bloodborne you basically can't beat the boss without learning how to do this and it takes a lot of practice so you'll spend an hour or two getting the timings down on the smaller enemies throughout the level in order to prepare for that big encounter it's not a bad thing obviously but i think it's exceptionally impressive when a game has a complicated set of systems and they manage to teach the player how to use them without the player feeling as though they're learning how to use those systems but speaking of learning how to use and engage with different systems i think this brings us to the most important discussion of this part of the critique which is balance and repetition because there are concerns and some would even say problems you see a lot of people compare this game to far cry mixed with assassin's creed and i think that's fairly accurate as a summation of what the game is trying to do with its gameplay it has basic fortresses and outposts that you have to liberate and there are stealth missions which i know it's hard to believe used to be very prevalent in assassin's creed now don't get it twisted this game does a lot of stuff much better than either of those two franchises and it melds the two ideas very very well however one of the things that it shares with these games is the extreme repetition that can be felt after 10 to 20 hours of gameplay there are only so many camps that you can liberate so many times that you can defeat the same enemies and only so many times that you can write small haikus before it begins to feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again because to be honest you are this is why a discussion of pace is really important to highlight a game can be repetitious so long as it doesn't overstay its welcome the problem usually arises when a game is incredibly repetitive but acts as though its systems can sustain dozens upon dozens of hours of repeated engagement assassin's creed valhalla for example has a pretty robust gameplay loop but the problem is the game doesn't end after 20 to 30 hours like ghost of tsushima does instead it hangs out for over a hundred hours and even once we get to the dlc the same content is repeated proving that they never learned their lesson from the base game all of this to say thankfully ghost of tsushima doesn't overstay its welcome yes it's repetitive yes you'll be doing the same thing a lot thankfully that thing you're doing repeatedly is very refined and very high quality and enjoyable but the key takeaway for developers that are looking at ghost of tsushima as inspiration is that it didn't try to be a 100 hour epic experience like assassin's creed valhalla it knew what it was doing it knew what it did well and it knew when it was time to end it and that's okay it's okay for a game to be lean and mean and only 20 hours long that's okay every game doesn't have to be this huge epic five act experience it's okay keep it lean i will say now that after playing through the whole game and the dlc i feel as though i've reached a good stopping point with ghost of sushima i don't feel the need to play anymore most combat encounters feel dry and similar to others and it just isn't pushing me to go and continue exploring and platinuming the island and this again isn't a bad thing in my view everything is integrated so well i don't feel as though there were any major missed opportunities or anything like that they did their job and impressively they even introduced new systems which are super cool and interesting that flip some gameplay systems on its head in the dlc which again we'll discuss in part four so while i agree the game is definitely repetitive i think they struck gold and they stuck on it and that's awesome i think they struck gold and stuck on that vein until it was drained and then they stopped digging which is what every developer should be trying to do figure out what works follow it through to the end of its natural life and then call it good but don't get me wrong the game isn't nothing but repetition there is a little variability here for example the game does introduce small spikes of interest and challenge with these mini boss fights for example that are scattered throughout the map they're fun offer a nice little challenge and a break from exploration and i always was excited when i came across one my only critique of these would be that i'd like to see more and i'd like to see more varied combat encounters yes it's cool that we can engage in a much more high-stakes sword fight but i would like a boss that maybe comes in and plays really dirty throws dirt in your eyes or pulls out a weapon you haven't seen before just something that shakes it up a little bit more because while these do break the repetitious cycle of exploration finding a camp clearing the camp etc at its core it is more repetition because most of these mini boss encounters are just going to be identical to the other mini boss encounters that you dealt with previously all told the combat and the engagements with npcs and enemies in ghost of sushima is done extremely well implemented well it's polished it's refined and it doesn't overstay its welcome which is so wonderfully refreshing i've played so many games in the last two years that just are trying so hard to offer value to the player by giving them dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours of content even though that content is just the same thing over and over and over again it's so nice to have a game that offers you a platter you finish the platter and you're full and that's it that's the whole meal they don't pretend as though everything needs to be a buffet they just tell you that this is what we got enjoy it you enjoy it cool see you next time i know it's weird it's refreshing rewind the clocks five years i'm sure we would be like i wish ghosts of sushimo were longer i need more content but right now with this time and place in the industry it's really refreshing to have a lean mean experience and ghost of sushma offers it it's not perfect but what is here is done very very well small improvements that could be made here and there but the biggest among them is the ai definitely needs an upgrade before the sequel comes out unfortunately while the dlc does introduce some new ideas doesn't introduce any improved ai so we're stuck with that through the entirety of ghost of sushima but all told it's fantastic it's freaking fantastic but now we need to discuss the narrative the first thing i want to say is that ghost of sushima's narrative works fantastically well to motivate the players actions within the world this is something that's actually really hard to pull off well other open world games have failed fantastically at this namely a game like fallout 4. fallout 4 motivates the player to navigate the world by spoilers telling you that your son has been abducted and then you are motivated to explore the wastes in order to find your son however there is a very strict main story path that you're expected to follow if you want to find your son the problem is that doing literally anything outside of that main story campaign does not jive with what they've tried to motivate you to do it doesn't drive with the story it doesn't jive with the main character's motivations if you're role-playing in any sort of meaningful way that's because if you are looking for your son out in the wastes because he's been kidnapped and to your best knowledge he's a toddler or an infant you are not gonna stop to just explore a building or stop to just go and screw around trying to collect ammo from a bunch of raiders you're not gonna go collecting bobble heads you're gonna try to find your son because he's missing this is why the implications of the main story are so important in an open world game if you don't do this well role playing is almost entirely out the window the only way you can really role play in a game like fallout 4 is if you either blast through the main story until you resolve the issue of your son's disappearance and then you explore the open world or you just check out of the main story kind of ignore it don't take it seriously and just do everything else and then start role playing in the role of a father after the fact you know after in-game months have passed of your son just being missing and some people can do that some people can't i personally struggle with i guess doing that type of thing where i i kind of check out of role play until i reach a certain point i can't do that i want to just role play and be in the moment with the character but this is a personal thing what i will say is that ghost of tsushima it doesn't matter because they do it fantastically well you see in ghost of sushimo when you're clearing camps exploring island caves crevices to clear out mongol hideouts or you just are looking for people to fight it all makes sense within the narrative premises that have been established hell even pausing to rest and write haikus makes sense tonally in the context of the game's world and this is probably the singular best thing about ghost of sushima's narrative and why i'm starting with it because it unifies the combat and gameplay experience so well with the main story you're trying to defend the island from mongol invaders and literally everything you can do in the game's world reinforces that idea and it's so well done and it makes immersion so much easier now in the last part when we discussed combat we outlined that it gets pretty repetitious you'll be doing a lot of the same thing over and over and over again and that's just part of what happens in these games there's only so much you can do but one of the things that makes it easier to deal with that repetition is that all of the side quests and the main story content while the core gameplay mechanic at its core is repeated throughout the individual motivations for each of those quests are changed and there are interesting stories tied to them for example this quest is called lost at sea and it's pretty simple a father has had his daughter kidnapped and so he asks you for help and if you agree he'll row you out to a small mongol ship for you to save her it's just a combat challenge but that combat challenge has its own narrative context and motivator so it's the same thing you've been doing the whole game but it's unique and stands out in your memory or this quest called the burden of theft which is probably the most memorable side quest that i did in the entire game i'm not entirely sure why but let me explain it you find a monk that's died trying to seemingly hide a small statue the mongols seem to have gotten the jump on him and he died after frantically burying this small statue in a small flower bed it seems like this statue held some sort of religious significance to the monk so he was burying it to protect it and keep it out of mongol hands so after you clear out the mongol invaders you take the statuette and you'd bring it back to the temple where it came from just nearby but soon after you arrive at the monastery you're instructed by the remaining monks that the one you found on the street burying the statuette was no monk at all rather he was a thief you see he was a peasant that was staying at the monastery once the invasion started but he ran off in the middle of the night with the statue assuming that it was valuable and he also stole one of the other monks robes so that it would seem like he was a monk just like they were and perhaps would be left alone if jumped by the mongols but of course the mongols didn't care and once they found him they just jumped him and tried to kill him so even though it seemed at first like this was just another examples of the mongols being terrible and the people on the island being pure and totally blameless it's showing an instance of the types of people that take advantage of wartime situations who take advantage of other people's kindnesses and it shows the necessary consequences of those types of things and it just stood out as a very memorable questline because it could have been that it was just a monk who got jumped by mongols while trying to go to a shrine and that's all it is but instead the writers and the designers added in this extra stuff to add complexity to that quest's narrative make it more memorable and make it stand out it's that little bit of extra effort that makes things like this memorable and stand out and i love it i mean even now a year after i first played this quest i still remember it like it was yesterday and one thing that makes me appreciate it even more is that it is on a very small section of the map near ben keys falls i think it's pronounced and it's an area on the main map that really isn't utilized in the main story very few people will find this unless they are actively exploring the world which of course you should be doing because it's fantastic and finding a small quest like this that only triggers while you're exploring this portion of the map just makes the player go wow that was awesome i want to explore every nook and cranny of this map because if stuff like that happens at just random locations i wonder what else i could find and that's what helps these worlds come alive and feel worthy of exploration it works so well it really does deserve high praise however it's not all perfect there are issues the first thing i have to say and the reason i put it in the narrative section is because it's tied to cutscenes when the game launched almost every single scene was bookended at the beginning and end by a fade to black an aggressive fade to black literally everything you did fade to black fade back in you walk over here you press interact fade to black fade back in it drove me absolutely nuts i hate fade to blacks i think they should be used very sparingly i think they are sort of like the lazy copy and paste transition i just think it's stupid you shouldn't use fade to blacks unless absolutely necessary come up with something a little more creative or interesting and they used it very aggressively however this apparently was a technological restriction with the engine on the base ps4 with the director's cut on playstation 5 this really is not very noticeable at all because the fades are so quick you really can't tell or notice that it's a thing in the ps4 version of the game it fades to black to transition models out between the cutscene versions of the models and load back in the gameplay versions of the models of characters and higher resolution textures and things like that but with the ps5 ssd you don't even have to worry about it so this is an example of one of those things that seems like an artistic choice at first but it was actually born out of a technological restriction and i'm glad to say that in the director's cut on ps5 this isn't really an issue but if you're playing on ps4 it will drive you insane but okay with that pedantic kind of whiny complainy thing out of the way what are some things the narrative itself does that isn't that great well i've got a couple of examples for one i'm just gonna say it it doesn't make any damn sense why the mongols would leave jinn unattended after he's captured he is literally the most dangerous man on the entire island and he's also the most valuable man on the island especially to the khan and so it doesn't make any damned sense why they would take the risk of just leaving him sitting here totally unattended and unwatched they know that he's capable of doing great feats of stealth of assassinating people of escaping tight situations because he's done it many times in their camps before so it just doesn't make any sense why they would leave him alone when all it would take would be a couple of mongol guards to sit here and stare at him for 24 hours a day to make sure he doesn't wiggle out of his restraints it doesn't make any sense at all it's not a big deal but i just would have liked to see something a little more thought through than just oh he was abandoned and then he escapes wow that's crazy it doesn't feel natural it feels contrived and it's one of the issues i've had with other games such as the last of us part two where things felt very contrived the writers wanted x to happen so they had to make sure everything aligned for that to occur if they want z to happen they've got to line up y so that it leads to z and the reason that's a problem is because it totally ruins the immersion if you're paying attention to the story and you're trying to think what makes sense to see some enemy do something that just totally is illogical and objectively really dumb pulls you out of it it's not to say that enemies or people in real life don't do dumb things of course they do but when you're writing a story relying on people's stupidity doesn't really work for me and i'm just trying to be consistent i criticized the last of us part two for having contrived sequences such as having abby just happen to stumble on joel and tommy in the middle of a snowstorm that happened to be going on right as they arrive from seattle after months of travel i thought that was contrived i thought it was a little silly especially because other introductory sequences would have worked just as well with abby and her squad actually going into jackson and getting familiarized with the town and the townspeople earning their trust before jumping tommy and joel when they had the chance that would have made more sense and that wouldn't have felt contrived but they chose to construct that scene in a way where everything just lined up perfectly for this thing to happen that they had decided they wanted to happen in the first place and there's a few instances in the game of small details like this where you can tell they had decided the story beat before they wrote how that story beat occurs so it just kind of feels like they had to push things into position to make them happen again it's not a big deal and it's something that very few people will actually give a crap about but it stood out to me i have to mention it not a big deal but it's there one thing i was surprised was not present at the game at all were these temporary status effects that i think could have been really really cool in the game especially later on when you're dealing with really cold climates as you head further north and i know that they thought about this and wanted to draw this out even further because jyn even has dialogue saying that it's very cold in the northern lands and that he needs to stay warm to stay safe and so it could have been interesting to add things such as an extra layer of armor or specialty armor that you need to wear when in the snowy sections that perhaps slows you down a lot making combat more difficult but it keeps you warm so that you don't have like a steady health depletion from the cold effect just something small like that i think could have gone a long way and helped with the immersion of being in a further north area of this part of the map being totally different from this part but it's not really here except for in one spot the only time they actually do a status effect is when you get close to the mountain top or begin to climb it and this is because there's a quest related to the hike up the mountain that will give the player access to the flaming sword ability and to get it you have to climb up the mountain and stop at campfires along the way to stay warm it could have been a really cool moment to try and get the player thinking outside the box to climb up the mountain fast enough or even just to test how efficiently somebody would be able to explore the trails die and then remember the route that they had taken up the mountain could have been interesting but they don't really do it here it's just about running basically from checkpoint to checkpoint to checkpoint one of my frustrations is that when i first arrived at the mountain i didn't trigger the quest that allows you to stop at the campfires so i just started trying to climb up the mountain thinking that it was just a challenge to me as the player to navigate or find the secret passageway up in time so i spent a solid half hour just running up the mountain from different angles and trying different routes before i realized i was probably missing something i know i know not every game can be breath of the wild not every game can offer you the chance to eat peppers to heat you up or to light torches to stay warm i understand that but having that level of dynamism and having that amount of player exploration and experimentation goes a long way and i think even something as simple as finding a nice armor set that has externalities in terms of effects on combat exploration speed of navigation could have been really interesting and i think it would have made this whole thing more dynamic i mean as has been the case with most of the critiques we've made in this series a lot of the things that i find frustrating about ghost of tsushima aren't major issues they aren't issues that are foundational and are problems with the main story writing or the justification for the narrative like cyberpunk 2077 with all of its foundational issues core design choices that just don't work together that's not here this is a very fluid and very competently put together game our critiques here are mostly to just refine the experience to try and make it just that much better add a little bit more a little salty little pepper it's basically a phenomenal steak a fantastic waigu beef steak and all it needs is a little bit of seasoning to make it really explode it's already fantastic but it could use just a little bit of something to complement it and make it work a little bit better so don't take these critiques as me just trying to tear the game apart because even trying to come up with things to point at to to improve and fix or or change it's hard to come up with stuff because ghost of sushma is so fantastic but there still are things that can be refined added and that i think could be done in the sequel to make it really stand out and speaking of things that are really hard to critique let's look at a couple of examples of fantastic narrative touches that i think are worthy of praise there's a moment towards the end of the game where your horse dies that you've been playing with for the entirety of the main story and it's actually a pretty solemn moment i didn't expect this to hit me very hard but it's actually a very sad story beat you spend so much time with your horse over the course of the game you actually do build a real connection that i didn't even realize was being built while playing i also really like the focus on stealth beginning in act 2 and moving forward and especially i like the use of poison and hallucinogenic darts and other tools in the stealth category that are used later in the game especially because narratively they come back to haunt gin almost immediately once jin starts using poison on the mongols the mongols discover that same poison and start to use it on civilians it just goes to show you what goes around comes around and if you're playing dirty your enemies are probably going to start playing dirty too and sometimes rising or perhaps lowering to your opponent's level isn't always the right thing to do and that's a theme that's carried through the entire main story the idea that jyn needs to use honor he needs to fight like a samurai he shouldn't be doing this stealthy ghostly stuff he needs to stand up and fight the mongols like an honorable man but the whole point is that sometimes that's not actually a viable option sometimes you need to get in there and fight dirty in order to win you know your pride and your nobility and your honor is valuable but you have to weigh that against the pragmatic consideration of what's going to be effective and it's something that jinn fights with his uncle constantly about throughout the main story and it really hits a peak towards the end of the game when of course jyn uses poison on the entire mongol encampment killing dozens of them in one fell swoop it's a narrative beat that i would have loved to see explored in a game like assassin's creed valhalla the idea of having a viking who starts to use stealth everybody around him he's like what are you doing you're a viking go out fight crush skulls do this like go crazy but then he's using stealth to further his clan's standing and protections and all of that i would have loved to see this type of discussion on tactics and the implication of those tactics in the narrative actually explored in a game like valhalla but i mean they they just didn't they had a hundred plus hours of gameplay to do it and they just didn't an example of why a game like ghost of sushma stands out as exceptional in comparison to you know a standard ubisoft game because that type of opportunity is just totally missed in valhalla whereas it's focused on and really explored in ghost of tsushima very very well in the same vein the final moments of the game remind me a lot of the play the crucible the idea that pride and one's commitments to tradition and their own beliefs must supersede above all else otherwise there's no foundation upon which anything can stand it's really interesting to me jin's uncle is devastated at the thought of having to take the life of one he considers to be his son but he knows that he has to do it if his beliefs in honor and tradition hold any merit at all in the same way that john proctor at the end of the crucible decides to face a death because it will be the only thing that retains his honor his name he has to choose that otherwise he has nothing backing up who he is at his core it's one of those moments when you're fighting your uncle at the very end of the game you don't feel good about it you don't feel bad about it you understand why your uncle feels the need to engage in this fight with you because everything he's ever believed would require that action to be performed even if he doesn't want to commit or perform that action so in many ways engaging with him in that combat is an honor to him and the last moment as you honor your uncle with a warrior's death after fighting him you can actually feel jin's heartbeat increasing in the dual sense controller on the playstation 5 as he works up the courage to do that which isn't easy but that which is honorable in his uncle's eyes it's a fantastic touch for anybody that says quality vibration and haptics is not actually a beneficial thing that can be used in a game in any sort of meaningful way this is a fantastic example where you're actually feeling the heart rate rise as the character works up the courage to do this thing he really doesn't want to do it's a phenomenal touch and even now like i'm talking it gives me chills it's it was so cool really but all of this to say ghost of sushima's narrative is fantastic it ties together the combat the world exploration everything thematically works extremely well it's cohesive it's fluid it's competent it's refined there's really not a lot that can be said to criticize it i'm not going to do the thing like i saw in one one review back in the day somebody was like i'm really bummed that there aren't a lot of romance options for jyn i would have loved to see that like that's so stupid like not every game needs that i'm not gonna do that kind of thing i think what's here is lean and serves the purposes of the game story world the thematic choices fantastically well sometimes less is more and sure we could say that jyn is a little bland in terms of portrayal we could say that there's not a lot to show a ton of vulnerability but as far as i could tell that's in character for jinn it lines up with the family traditions it lines up with cultural traditions it feels very fair to the character especially towards the end of the game when you see jin torn down just about as low down to the bottom of the barrel as you could possibly be and then he builds himself back up to take on the the con once and for all and it feels very reasonable at the end it doesn't feel contrived in any way for a sequel i don't know what the story looks like i don't know if they move to a different island and try it again i don't know if you have a different protagonist set in the same islands i don't know what that looks like and i'm not sure if i have any suggestions or ideas on what they should or shouldn't do but i would be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments section if you have any ideas for what they should do for a potential sequel whether it's spiritual successor or a direct sequel i'm not sure it's one of those things like it's done so well in this game i don't know what you add in a sequel that wouldn't just feel like you're cashing in on the franchise name once again you know it's my frustration right now with horizon forbidden west it doesn't feel like it adds enough to really be a standalone phenomenal game it really feels like they're just doing horizon zero dawn 1.5 which is good it's a good game don't get me wrong but it doesn't excite you it doesn't make you feel like there's a lot that's here that's worth exploring in and of itself in many ways it feels like you've already seen all of this you're just seeing it again in a bigger scale if that makes sense but ghost of sushima man oh it's fantastic so the dlc for ghost of tsushima is all about a new island called iki island and thematically it's a lot darker a lot grittier and interesting i think than the island of sushima the base game's map and narrative structure was very monochromatic everything was about the mongols invading and you defending your land from the invading forces nothing particularly revolutionary about that and there's not necessarily an issue with that design obviously i really like the base game as i've said for the last three parts but it is nice to see them take a different approach to the dlc where not just are you fighting against the invading mongol forces but specifically you're defending an island that doesn't like you you're defending an island that's filled with residents that hate clan shimmura that hate you jin as the player character for very fair reasons basically jyn's dad just massacred tons of members of the island because they wouldn't basically kneel or bow to clan shimmer's rule so it makes sense why they don't like you but it's an interesting thing because stories are all about conflict and to see this implemented in this way is refreshing because like i said in the base game there's only one conflict really that we're dealing with which is the mongols versus the island's inhabitants but in this dlc we get the island inhabitants with the ghost of sushima and the mongols and everybody's angry at each other it makes things much more interesting now with that said the dlc is very very short it in theory adds about 10 to 15 hours of gameplay but in practice the story is only about four hours long if you're going from mission to mission which to be honest most players are going to do they're just going to blast through the story because going back to the idea of narrative compulsion that we talked about in the narrative section of this critique for the base game when a story motivates the player or asks the player to chase down a villain that is performing viciously cruel acts upon the innocent if you are even slightly immersed in the story you will go and do those things first and explore freely climb some shrines and collect objects that really have no immediate importance later you're not going to get sidetracked if you're taking the story seriously and i get it like it's a video game and you should be able to sort of disconnect and play the gamey sections over here and then do the story over here i understand some people are like that but me personally i take these stories more seriously just like i think the games want you to take them more seriously and as a result i find myself going through the main story first and then exploring the side content after when there's no immediate threat on the civilians of the island but speaking of the side content it's important to note that in the dlc it's not going to be extremely varied from the base game a lot of the same stuff you've been doing you will continue doing clearing out camps fighting brutes and more generals which is great but it's gonna be more of the same so if you're coming off of the base game going straight into the dlc it won't feel that refreshing but if you're like me and you went into the dlc after a short break from the base game you'll find yourself feeling right back at home more of the same but it's good stuff so you're happy to have it now there's a few new mechanics and design elements that they introduced which are great additions in my mind such as the variable ability enemies which i find absolutely fantastic these are just big brute enemies that are able to switch how they fight which forces you as the player to switch the stances you're using for that enemy alone in the base game how they did this was they had a bunch of enemies that would attack you all at once they had a shield man and pikeman then they had a regular sword fighter and then they had the brute over here and they just threw them all at you at the same time so you'd be swapping stances but it was for one stance for this enemy one stands for this enemy and so as you whittle down the numbers it became very predictable where it would go and it was much easier to handle here with these variable ability enemies you actually have a lot more to juggle because at any moment they might pull out a shield or they might pull out a spear or just a sword it keeps things way more dynamic way more interesting i can't believe these guys weren't in the base game they're fantastic i mean if they were in the base game i didn't run into them in like 35 plus hours so maybe they were there and i just never came across them i find that hard to believe or maybe i forgot and blocked it out but what i do know is i love these i know i've been like signaling that for this whole like critique that oh they do something really cool in the dlc with the enemies to shake this up oh wait till we talk about the dlc this is it this one enemy archetype is so great i love it and it is so wonderful i can't believe it wasn't in the base game like really it's that good furthermore the introduction of the horse charge which is an ability where one riding a horse you can just charge into groups of enemies it's something that feels great and it also feels like it should have been in the game from the beginning and these design elements are exactly what you want from a dlc you want the dlc to introduce things that feel so at home that you can't believe they weren't there to begin with that's what you want from one of these games it's the same thing that we saw when we talked about the just cause games in a video that just went live on the channel when we went through that entire series as they introduced these new gameplay mechanics with like the zipline and the tethers and then the wingsuit all of it felt so at home you couldn't believe that it wasn't in the base game to begin with that's how these editions feel they're that good that you're like i don't know if i could ever go back i don't know if i could play the base game without the horse charge and without these different enemies doing all this this is what you want from additional content now the other thing they introduce here is a new villain which is somebody that goes by the name of the eagle and basically she runs the eagle clan of the mongol invaders she's very powerful basically a shaman archetype and she has some weird abilities which initially seem to be purely magic related but as the dlc goes on it turns out that she's basically able to use some sort of chemical concoction or herbal brew to control the minds and wills of citizens of the island and her own recruits and she actually uses this on the player character jin a couple of times and after she does it the first time you will start to hallucinate as you explore the map constantly and this is actually a really cool thing about this whole hallucinogenic drug that they infect you with because it allows them to give you flashbacks it allows them to bring up narrative beats from the base game that tie into the narrative here all with it still feeling relatively grounded they don't have to constantly do flashbacks flash sideways like in lost they can just have this sort of hallucination as you ride through the world and through a beautiful field and that's a really good way of handling this type of thing and i also have to give them praise because they didn't rely on just magic for things to work they actually tried to explain it a little bit i still don't love the trope of a grounded story just using drugs to make things that are supernatural explained away it's like in far cry 5 with the sister who is just like floating through the air doing all this magical stuff and they just explain it away with well it's drugs there's drugs so it's okay it's drugs hand wave it away it's drugs who cares i i just don't find it very compelling i criticized it in far cry 5 i criticized it in assassin's creed valhalla when they let you go to asgard because you were tripping balls and i gotta criticize it here i just think that it's kind of played out at this point i i'm bored by it like i get it you might want to do some more interesting things with the gameplay with the narrative with flashbacks and and all of this stuff i get it but sometimes the answer is not to just do a supernatural thing and then claim drugs and claim that the player was tripping balls there's more creative ways of doing it and i think there are more interesting things you can do while still remaining grounded in the real world i don't think you have to rely on massive acid trips to do it but that's just me i i will acknowledge they did attempt to explain it in a naturalistic way and they also did it in the dlc not in the base game like in far cry or valhalla so if there was ever a time to experiment a little bit it would be in the dlc so this one's not a big deal but i felt i should mention it but beyond this i find the eagle painfully uninteresting as an antagonist she's just bland i've tried to pick apart what exactly i don't like about her what i find lacking in compulsion i i just can't come up with anything because i think she's just remarkably bland and part of it i think is because the dlc is so short that none of these characters ever really have time to flex their muscles and really show what they're made of and it's just an artifact of the length and i think that's part of it they didn't have time to develop the character to a point where she would be interesting but it doesn't excuse or change the fact that she is bland and uninteresting it just she is there might be excuses for it reasons why she's uninteresting but she is that's it now as for the island design itself iki island does a much better job of giving you long distance goals while you're exploring and navigating the map in the base game the terrain is so varied from moment to moment that it's really hard to spot something in the far-off distance that makes you want to chase it unless you're at the top of a mountain or a hill or something of the sort so often you'll just pick an objective on the map and then follow the guiding winds to it but with iki island it seems like they really took this criticism to heart and re-thought how they would structure the game's map now players can see things in the distance from much farther away and they can decide they want to go there and they can pursue that objective point without any real inhibition or object in the way i mean i'll say myself multiple times in the first hour or two of the dlc i would see something in the distance and i would just run that way to discover it i didn't remember that happening very often in the base game mostly because the map was either so incredibly flat that you couldn't really see anything far off in the distance or because the biomes were so restricted to themselves that you'd be in one area you might see something nearby go chase that and you would just kind of ping along the map as you went or you were going based off of map objective markers with guiding winds leading you there which are better than nothing but still not the same as seeing something in the distance and deciding you want to chase that and pursue it for its own sake furthermore iki island has a lot of really dense contrast when compared to the base game there's a lot more dark and depressing areas directly next to sprawling fields of flowers and reeds there's also some cool new stuff like flute sections but again most of what they're doing here is reworking the formula of the base game to get it refined and working even better than it was before there's not a lot of reinventing the wheel here which is totally fine i add an entire section of this critique on how well the world of ghost of sushima's base game was built i still stand by that the base games map is fantastically well put together iki island they just improve it and refine it even further seriously eeky island is very very well put together but all this brings us to the overarching consideration which is the big fatal flaw in this dlc the one thing that holds it back in almost every single regard and that is the pace and the length without a doubt the dlc story is way too short there are so many things that they could have done with this so many interesting avenues they could have pursued and all of them fall flat because they only have a few hours to play around with and it's really too bad and i know what some of you are thinking oh well luke if it's only five hours or four hours of really quality content who cares a four-hour really quality experience is much better than a 20-hour bland experience and i would agree with you but the problem is the pacing is so screwed up you'll reach the end of the dlc and not even realize that it's over like by the time i reach the final battle of the dlc it felt way too early like i was actually braced for a fake out where they introduce a whole new area of the map or something it was that bizarre that it came so early and furthermore the last boss fight feels like it comes out of absolute nowhere you just show up and all of a sudden you're fighting the eagle in a final boss fight that granted is very flashy and pretty well done but it just feels like it showed up way too early and furthermore i think generally it's just unsatisfying this final boss fight against the eagle i didn't find very compelling at all i thought the fight was too easy and sure there's a couple times where you can get stumbled up or where you can get knocked down but after a couple of attempts it's gonna be a walk in the park and it really is just too bad because there are really interesting narrative topics brought up here such as the theme of growing beyond your parents the whole dlc jyn is questioning the role his father played in his childhood and he's been looking up to his father for all this time but now he's not so sure if he's somebody worth looking up to if he should find an identity outside of his family how that should work there's so many interesting narrative concepts to play around with here and it's just so much of a bummer that none of it gets to see the light of day because there's just not enough time to develop any of those ideas to any significant degree so all told if i had to rate the dlc i'd say it's solid it's probably worth playing if you have it in the director's cut or if you have it already downloaded i personally wouldn't pay very much for this if it was something i had to pay additionally outside of the base game but all told i feel like it adds some interesting things and i'm glad i played it though i'm disappointed it's not more substantive but all of that brings us to the closing discussion of ghost of sushima of the long lasting legacy of the game in the dlc and where we're at with this because i think there's so much that's done in the base game that's remarkable the dlc introduces some really interesting ideas that i think show the developers are aware of the potential they're dealing with here there's a lot that they can still do that's worth doing in a sequel all told ghost of sushima is great it's phenomenal i highly recommend it i think there are some things they did which were a little confusing such as the legends multiplayer mode which felt interesting but really underdeveloped it seemed like it was a cool concept that somebody came up with like what if we did this thing where we have co-op and multiplayer and it's online we could do this we can introduce it for free i tried it it's just not that compelling i just didn't find it particularly fun i'm sure some people find it really fun but it just wasn't for me so i'm not sure if they're going to lean into one of those ideas over the other for a sequel i guess we'll just have to wait and see but what is clear is that there's a lot of creative juices flowing over in the development team's minds and it's just a matter of who kind of gets the creative lead on the sequel to lean into one of these concepts over the other i hope they lean into more of the narrative concepts that they developed in the dlc some of the interesting things they were bringing up there but that's just me but if we look at the game not just in its own bubble but in the the context of the broader gaming community and industry i think it's worth pointing out just how remarkable this game really was at the time that it released because for one a lot of people were excited by it and thought it looked interesting but specifically when compared to where assassin's creed has gone in recent years it shows that this formula of stealth and open world exploration mixed in with quality melee combat but with an interesting story too it can work and it doesn't need to be filled with micro transactions it doesn't need to be filled with excessive grind the story doesn't need to be a hundred hours long to be compelling you can do a lot in 25 to 35 hours with a lean mean story and quality mechanics backing it up you don't have to go the route that ubisoft has gone you really don't and it sort of is heartbreaking for me because i like assassin's creed i like that franchise i grew up on them and i have a special place in my heart for them and to see them just totally abandon the classic way of designing those games in favor of where they've ended up going it's heartbreaking to me it really is and so to see a game like ghost of sushima come along and say no that way of designing games isn't dead like it's actually very very much alive and we're going to show you how to do it well and then they come out and just nail it on their first attempt at it it's so impressive to me i think words escape how to accurately explain it obviously this is an established studio but for a new ip to come out and just nail it the first time out is is extremely rare and i think is worth high praise and i will say as i mentioned at the beginning i really struggled with getting into ghost of sushima when it launched i really really struggled i don't know why i tried to play the games i tried uh well games i tried to play the game i tried to get into the dlc i tried to get into legends uh the the multiplayer mode i just couldn't do it i it just didn't trigger serotonin in my mind it just didn't work and then the director's cut came along 60 fps i'm vibing i'm cool we're going at it i love it and i'm so glad i was able to connect with the game so i i mean a plea to you guys out there if any of you haven't played through ghost of sushima because you were iffy because you didn't connect with it now's the time to try it okay give it a shot trust me it's it's worth it i think you'll be very glad that you did i highly highly recommend it and i couldn't get into it at first either but i did and i now regard it as one of the most remarkable games of the last five years that's launched it's really really that good but that does it for me that's the end of the ghost of critique let me know what you thought of all of this if you have a game you want to see me cover put that down in the comment section below underneath the like button i'd greatly appreciate that as always i am uh very much open to suggestions and ideas some of you guys threw out the idea of breaking this critique into multiple parts so that's what we did we tried that and um it's worked okay i think nothing too amazing but just fine so let me know if you want us to go back to the regular way of doing it with the one big upload instead of the four small uploads i'm good either way it's just a matter of what you guys prefer you guys are the ones that make this happen after all i'm just the guy that's kind of along for the ride so i appreciate you guys more than you know i love you very very much everyone from here the stevens household and on the stevens team making these videos happen we thank you for watching we'll see in the next video hugs and kisses bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 55,832

Keywords: luke stephens, ghost of tsushima, ghost of tsushima critique, ultimate critique, analysis, ghost of tsushima sequel, review, critique, assassin's Creed, assassins creed Japan

Id: 79WHERbHLXc

Length: 127min 30sec (7650 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022