Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) Review

 Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) 8.5/10

“You have no honor!”

“And you’re a slave to it!”

Hello everybody. Today’s review is Ghost of Tsushima, a Playstation exclusive title released on July 17, 2020 and produced by Sucker Punch studios, who made the Sly Cooper and InFamous series. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too excited for this game when it was released. I was mainly supporting Sucker Punch because they are one of the few good gaming studios out there (and because they made my favorite game of all time, but that’s a discussion for another time). As I was playing this game, I slowly began to love the game and it is now one of my favorite games in recent years. The game does have its share of problems though. Before I begin, a quick disclaimer. I am aware of the Director’s Cut and the online mode Legends. For this review, I’ll be strictly going over the main story when it first came out. Let’s begin. 

The year is 1274 during the Kamakura period. Mongols have invaded the island of Tsushima and are planning on using it as a launching pad for an invasion to mainland Japan. Our story follows Jin Sakai of the Sakai Clan. After a devastating loss at Komoda Beach, Jin is saved by a thief girl named Yuna. After recovering his sword, Jin must bring down the Mongol invaders and kill their leader Khotun Khan by any means necessary, including breaking his code of honor. As he continues down this path, he will don the persona of The Ghost and give the people of Tsushima hope and courage to fight against the Mongols.

The game starts off very strong as you help lead the charge at Komoda Beach. After this, the game slows down a little bit to build up its story, planting seeds for plot points and characters. The overall plot is an amazing story about doing whatever it takes to save your home and its people, even if it means disobeying your leaders for the greater good. I love Jin Sakai. He reminds me of Bayek from Assassin’s Creed Origins. He’s a samurai lord and he’s willing to lend a helping hand in any way, similar to Bayek’s role in Egypt. Anyway, I love how the story constantly tests Jin’s conviction with him being The Ghost.

Alongside Jin, we have a decent cast of characters. First, and one of my favorites, is Yuna. She’s the one that taught Jin his stealth skills and assassinations. She’s a timid woman and is constantly looking out for her brother Taka, who is a blacksmith. After her is Lord Shimura, Jin’s adoptive father. After Jin’s father was killed, Shimura took him in and trained him to become a samurai. Some shit happens with him later in the story, so I won’t go over him. Next is Ishikawa-sensei, the samurai archer. His story is that his former pupil Tomoe has turned on him and has joined the Mongol effort. To right this wrong, He hunts her down and destroys her efforts. Along the way, you’ll learn about how he wanted to officially adopt her and you get to learn some deep, personal stuff about him. This is honestly one of my favorite quest lines in the game. Next is Lady Masako of the Adachi Clan. Her entire clan has been murdered and her quest line is her finding the killer. This was actually the weakest main quest line as I felt Assassin’s Creed 2 did it better. Next is Kenji, the shady sake salesman. I love this buffoon as he swindles people out of their money to help with the war effort. He means well, but he keeps getting tied into bullshit that will get him killed. The final character I want to go over is Norio, the warrior monk. This guy had my favorite quest line in the game and possibly ever in any game. I don’t want to spoil his quest, but some shit happens with him and I love it. Khotun Khan is a great villain. He commands this overwhelming force, but offers peace to Lord Shimura and Jin multiple times, like a true Mongol warlord. Nothing really deep or personal about him. He’s just this main antagonist that Jin needs to kill. There’s also Ryuzo, but his whole thing is spoiler territory, so I won’t touch it. Overall, I love the cast of characters here, albeit a couple of them are forgettable.

Graphically, the game looks great. It is not hyper realistic like Last of Us 2, but it still looks amazing. Graphically, the game looks like a PS4 launch title, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Sucker Punch chose to focus more on gameplay and story instead of intense graphics, which is appreciated. But not to take away from how beautiful the game looks. I took plenty of pictures with the photo mode and I found myself getting lost in this beautiful world on many occasions.

Sound design is amazing. The game utilizes a lot of stealth, so the sound design has to be top notch, which it is. You can hear every footstep, birds whistling, the wind rushing past you, and even crickets. The voices for the game are great too. You can play in either English or traditional Japanese with English subtitles. Both sound great, but there were some lip synching problems with the Japanese dub, so I stuck with the English dub. Music is phenomenal too. Easily one of the best OSTs in recent years. Using traditional Japanese sounds and instruments, the score perfectly matches this world. When fighting against Mongols, the music will switch to Mongolian drums and chants, which just gets you pumped for combat.

Now to gameplay. This is an open world exploration game (similar to that of Assassin’s Creed, but better). As you progress through the story, you’ll be stumbling upon Mongol controlled towns/forts, Fox Dens, Pillars of Honor, Bamboo Strikes, Hot Springs, and Shinto Shrines. Doing these will benefit Jin in multiple ways (increase health, increase resolve, gain charms, etc). You’ll also find plenty of side quests for you to do. A lot of the side quests were interesting and fun. It sucks that I can't remember them, but I remember enjoying all of them.

Combat is fucking amazing. Combat seems to be a combination of Assassin’s Creed Origins, Sly Cooper (or any stealth based game), and a bit of Horizon Zero Dawn. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock different sword stances for you to use. Each stance is effective towards a different type of enemy (sword, shield, staff, and brute). You’ll be constantly switching between these stances on a whim and it’ll make you feel like a real samurai. You can also utilize your bow and many Ghost weapons (sticky bombs, smoke bombs, blow darts, etc). There’s 3 ways to approach your enemies: Samurai where you charge in and slaughter everyone with honor, Thief where you stealthily kill everyone, and Ghost where it's a mixture of the two and you utilize all of your tricks and swordplay. One of the things I love about this game is that you, the player, will slowly transition to full Ghost mode because the enemies just become too much for any normal samurai to deal with. This is some InFamous level of deep gameplay and I love Sucker Punch for this. I’ve only ever seen this done with InFamous and the Star Wars: KOTOR games. I know there’s probably many games that can match what I said, but I’ll go more in depth with this another time.

As you go through the game, you’ll stumble upon Mythic Tales. These are special side missions in which you’ll unlock a new sword technique or suit of armor. With the sword techniques, these can become insanely powerful, especially The Dance of Wrath. With the armor sets, you can get special outfits that can give you perks. Like take Tadayori’s armor, which grants you perks with the bow, or the Traveler’s outfit which grants perks for exploring. These armors can make a huge difference if used in the right scenario. Because I was going for completion and I had to search every inch of the island, I found myself mainly using the Traveler’s outfit and the Ghost Armor for combat.

In this game, there’s a photo mode. I wish more games had a photo mode as this is one of the best parts of the game. The game is stunningly beautiful and with the photo mode, you can make any environment look even better. You can tweak the filter, weather, wind speed, particles in the air, basically everything. This is probably the most detailed photo mode I’ve ever seen.

So you know that touch pad on the Dualshock 4 that hardly sees any use? Well, Ghost of Tsushima utilizes this thing to the max. Because of the swipe feature, you get 4 extra buttons. I really wish more games used the touch pad like this because it opens the door to many more uses.

So I had some minor problems with the game. Small glitches, clipping, and texture failures. Nothing to bitch about as the game does have safety measures in case these things occur. There was one major problem I had. A couple of times as I booted up the game, I had negative technique points. I don’t know how this happened, but I lost 2 XP points because of this. Of course I was still able to max out Jin long before I reached the end, but this still occurred and I have to dock a point from my rating because of this. So far I haven’t seen anyone get this glitch, but it still happened. Although through one of the many updates, this was fixed. However, I still lost 2 technique points because of this.

Anyway, I love this game. Beautiful story, tight gameplay that’s fun as fuck, gorgeous music, and scenery is breathtaking. If you are into samurai culture, I highly recommend this game to you. If you are looking for a game to lose yourself in, I highly recommend this. If you are looking for a game to help you forget Last of Us 2, I highly recommend this. Overall, this is going to be a game I won’t (hopefully) forget for a long time. Thank you Sucker Punch. You guys are still one of the good ones.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.