It's 1860. A Samurai walks across a field of pampas grass as the wind whistles past him. His graceful figure is relaxed and yet alert, always ready and on the look out for bandits or the hated Mongol invaders who have recently come to his sacred homeland - desecrating its shrines, burning its villages and killing its defenders. He's heard a rumour that there are some peasants being tortured in a village up ahead and his code tells him that it is his responsibility to go and save them.
As he passes a broken building his tunic starts vibrating. "Oh, for fuck's sake!" he shouts, "What now?".
This is the world of Ghost of Tsushima. A video game which clearly loves old Samurai movies, enough to allow you to play everything in black and white if you want to, but also one which makes your clothes vibrate when something collectable is nearby. It's a game which absolutely nails the "Samurai as Cowboys" thing, but then makes you collect bamboo in order to upgrade your bow. A game which is beautiful, probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on my TV screen, with amazing combat, Japanese voice acting and a wonderful atmosphere, but which also gives you endless things to collect, endless icons to clear and falls prey to the same things which have cluttered up and throttled every big open world game of the past ten years. I'm not going to lie to you, it infuriates me - because God, do I love most of this game.
So let's talk about what makes this game good or rather what I like about it. I have loved Samurai movies for a long time. I'm not somebody who has watched them all, I've seen Seven Samurai maybe five times, Yojimbo, Rashomon. I've seen Zatoichi, Ran - like I'm not chasing up out of print obscurities, I'm not some authority on them or anything, these are pretty mainstream films. Ghost of Tsushima lets you basically play those movies, and you can choose to do that in garish, vulgar colour or in clean, crisp black and white - as God intended. That, to me, is amazing. That is proper "have they made this specifically for me?" type stuff. To see our hero jump onto his horse and gallop off into the sunset in grainy black and white, or talk to a treacherous villager in Japanese with subtitles is beautiful to me. It changes the whole game. I mean it's not perfect, finding a field of purple flowers is a bit more difficult than it could be, but it's damn close to it. It elevates something which already looks wonderful into something unique. It lets me live out my Samurai fantasies, now I can be Kikuchiyo wailing on somebody with a katana whilst screaming obscenities - and that makes me very happy.
And the combat itself is great, and that is, again, because it feels like a Samurai film. There are loads of cinematic touches. You can enter a standoff with a group of enemies when you see them. That actually turns out to be a simple mini game, but it is one of the coolest things I have seen in a game for ages. You raise your sword by holding a button and wait for the enemy to attack. When they do you let go and kill them before they get close. You can also upgrade this ability so that more enemies will (foolishly) also try their luck. Time your button presses right and half of their forces are dead before the battle has even started. If you're attacking a base then once you've defeated most of the defenders you can challenge the rest to come out of hiding like the cowards they are, a great thematic way to avoid having to search everywhere for the last remaining enemies. If you get the parrying, dodging and counterattacking right then you wheel through opponents like a deadly ballerina, cutting down swathes of them without a scratch. I mean, I never actually manage that, but I can definitely imagine how good it would feel. You can have duels, with the two protagonists facing off, loosening their katana in their scabbards, like two gunfighters in the Wild West. It's elegant and graceful and it can make you feel like the baddest fucker this side of Kyoto when it goes right. You learn new stances, which are targeted at people with shields, or spears or whatever - which means you are constantly changing your moveset as you glide through the enemy ranks carving your bloody arcs. It's reminiscent of Sekiro but I think I enjoyed it even more than that game, and I never thought I would say that.
And that isn't all, most games will let the character progress and grow stronger but Ghost of Tsushima does this really well. Get a few charms, learn a couple of new techniques and suddenly you're no longer this half dead Samurai, you're an avenger, a hero, able to front up to and take down groups of enemies on your own. It really is a lot of fun and, even though the side missions always seem to end in a fight you don't really mind because it's just another chance to practise your skills. You feel like you're learning alongside your character Jin, getting your parries right, learning the enemy moves - so when it all comes together it feels like you've had an input, your success is not just cos you improved your sword or got more health.
And this is kind of the vision that I have for what this game could be - a really slimmed down, beautiful Samurai game where progress is built in to the player journey itself. And the frustrating thing is that it already does this. Learning new techniques is always exciting. It feeds in really nicely to the feel of the game and gives some good variety. This could have been a game where you improve by learning yourself, where you perfect your swordsmanship, your timing. Where your character travels to learn secret techniques. Instead that's drowned by a million different pieces of busywork to improve your health, your equipment, your charms, the number of charms you can equip and the amount of resources you have. It's like the designers couldn't conceive of something that didn't include every bit of the usual open world game stuff, so they just threw their hands up in despair and said "let's do it all!". There are foxes you can follow to shrines, hot springs to find which slightly increase your health, you can find flute tunes, Mongol artefacts, banners, records, so many types of crafting materials, flowers, bamboo to hit with your sword, trappers, merchants, survivor villages, shrines, different shrines, crickets (the insects, not the game) and probably more that I've forgotten. I have no idea what half of these things are for, or what you get if you ever manage to collect all of them.
There are lighthouses you can climb, which I expected to be able to do a forward somersault into a hay bale from, but you can't. They don't highlight other icons in the surrounding area either, which is unusual, it's like they thought we'll put in the usual (Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Dying Light et. al.) stuff but then decided not to do the bit that makes it useful.
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| I mean..... |
Some of this stuff fits better than other bits (like how does some no mark blacksmith manage to improve the legendary sword that has been in your family for generations) but it all combines to make everything so bloody busy. The game has these golden birds that "guide you to secrets". You cannot move more than about twenty yards without seeing one of them, flapping about - guiding you to a fox which will then guide you to a shrine, which puts you a seventh of the way to getting a new minor charm. I mean at least the game tells you how many there are of each thing, even though it's massively dispiriting to go hunting through 5 different tents to be told that you now have 12 out of 50 Mongol artefacts.
I genuinely don't understand the thinking behind this stuff. Maybe we're all a bunch of obsessive collectors at heart but there is a real danger of it ruining this game for me. Because I can't pass it by. If my vibrating jacket is telling me there is a record nearby I will spend five minutes searching for it. If I see a Golden Bird poncing about then I will follow it. Cos I like secret stuff. But it isn't secret is it? There's a massive bird very clearly asking me to follow it. So really all this is doing is getting in the bloody way of me actually doing what I want - which is pretending to be Toshiro Mifune. I don't like feeling that I'm never going to collect all of the meaningless things but I need to accept that is what is going to happen - because otherwise I spend my time following small woodland animals or rooting through somebody's bins instead of getting out there and beating up bandits. All this stuff does, really, is make me feel bad. It gives me a choice, ruin the game by spending my time doing pointless, boring things, or ruin the game by feeling bad about ignoring the pointless, boring things. When, actually (and I keep coming back to this), I just want to be saving peasants, upholding justice and honoring my forefathers. And maybe hitting people with katana in a uniquely stylish way.
I hope that games like this mark the beginning of the end of this seemingly unstoppable urge to clutter everything up. Maybe the sheer volume here will make somebody, somewhere say enough is enough. I don't know how likely that is, but we can dream. Meanwhile my jacket is telling me that there's some iron nearby, so I'd better hop to it I suppose.
