Tsushima Island, 1274. A quiet Japanese island lying in the straits between Korea and Japan is suddenly invaded by an expeditionary force of the Mongol Empire, led by Khotun Khan. Lord Shimura leads a stalwart defence but is captured in battle; his nephew Jin is defeated and left for dead. Rescued by Yuna, a thief, Jin vows to help liberate the island, rescue his uncle and drive the invaders back into the sea.
Ghost of Tsushima is an open-world, action-adventure game that was originally released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 in 2020. The game has now been reissued on PC in an enhanced format, with its expansion Iki Island included.
The game plays like a lot of other open-world games of this type. You control a dude with a sword and have to direct him around a map covered in icons, committing spectacular amounts of violence. The game mixes together main story missions, as Jin continues his operation to liberate the island, with stand-alone side stories. The game also has a mechanic where Jin builds up a band of loyal companions and can undertake further quests to solidify their loyalty and learn more about their backstories. Finally, the game sprinkles in optional activities like bamboo-cutting, archery contests, shrine-visiting and, er, lighthouse-igniting.
Mixed in with this is combat. A lot of combat. Jin is a samurai skilled with his sword and the game goes all-in on depicting the complexities of sword fighting, at least as much as it can. Jin can make light and heavy attacks, dodge and parry, but also has four stances of differing utility: he has a solid stance for dealing with swordsmen, a fluid one for getting around people with shields, a dodge-based one for dealing with pikes and a stance that combines weapon and unarmed moves to take down larger enemies. These mechanics can feel a little daunting at first but the game's learning curve is solid enough to let you get to grips with them. Jin can also use two types of bow and an assortment of tools and weapons, including smoke bombs and, slightly incongruously for a 13th Century-set game, a grappling hook as good as any you'll find in a contemporary-set stealth game.
The key thematic conflict of the game is that Jin has been trained to be honourable, to only face his enemies head-on in direct, fair combat. But to take down a numerically superior enemy of astonishing brutality, Jin soon finds this is not practical. His rescuer Yuna encourages him to learn the ways of stealth, moving quietly, stabbing enemies in the back and luring enemies into traps, skills which Jin learns reluctantly but soon realises are necessary. As the game continues, the invaders become more brutal and merciless, forcing Jin to become the same, until some of his former allies no longer recognise who he has become.
Nothing hugely new here, but the execution is superb. In fact, Ghost of Tsushima's crowning success is that it doesn't really do anything new at all, but it looks and plays so well you don't really care. Graphically the game isn't throwing around as many polygons as a 2024 release, but the art style is so vivid and often beautiful that it's irrelevant (with the bonus that the game plays incredibly well on even older hardware). Sure, you're running around doing a lot of busywork, but that busywork is thematic: finding fox shrines, locating inspirational spots to compose haikus, challenging a local warlord to a tense duel or liberating enslaved villagers. Presentation and, as the youngsters say these days, "vibes" go a long way to making a very familiar structure really enjoyable. You can enhance this further by playing the game in Japanese with subtitles (my preferred approach) or even in black-and-white "Kurosawa mode" (although I found this to be more satisfying as a gimmick rather than for long-term gameplay). My main problem with the game was one of my own making: I played this game in close proximity to Horizon Forbidden West, a completely different game in terms of setting and story, but virtually identical in terms of structure and format, and that occasionally left me feeling a little burned out on visiting another question mark on a map.
Combat is pretty good, with some great setpiece battles, but even swordfights with random raiders can be enjoyable. The game is certainly not Dark Souls, but it's fiendish enough in that enemies will anticipate attacks if you just spam the "hit" button, forcing you to change stances on the fly and adapt to circumstances as they evolve. Combat can be surprisingly tactical as you weigh up stealthy and loud approaches. In fact, more than a few missions made me feel like I was playing a zoomed-in version of 2016 classic Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, such was the wealth of options at hand for infiltrating a castle or enemy camp in an underhanded way. The game throws in boss fights on occasion where the normal combat options go out the window a bit and the game almost turns into a beat 'em up with large enemy health bars and very specific tactics being needed to take them down. The expansion even adds cavalry and mounted attack options which spices up the endgame.
The open world map is typically massive, although the game doesn't suffer from the same scaling issues that other games set in real-world locations do. Being able to climb El Capitan in Yosemite and see San Francisco in the distance in Horizon: Forbidden West is a bit silly, but Tsushima Island is much less famous and the massive map is able to capture the 40-mile-long island a bit more convincingly in terms of scale, even if it's not a 1:1 representation. The environmental graphics are absolutely superb, with some atmospheric moments achieved solely through exploration, like stumbling into a forest carpeted with bright flowers with deer running around (or, less fun, a hostile bear).
The story is solid and Jin's characterisation is pretty good as the game unfolds. Your companion characters Yuna, Lady Masako, Sensei Ishikawa, Monk Norio, merchant Kenji and ronin Ryuzo all have elaborate story arcs of their own, including their own enemies and demons they have to confront before they can join you for the final battle. Voice acting is exemplary throughout, and some of the animation for these characters is extremely effective.
One complaint is that the game does not do a great job with reactivity. Throughout the game you explore the problems of being honourable versus dishonourable, but the game doesn't really track what you are doing. If you play the game as honourably as possible, always defeating enemy in open combat, never stab anyone in the back etc, the story doesn't really react to that and instead pretends you've been skulking around the island like a ghost (which becomes your nickname). Alternatively, if you do sneak-murder your entire way through the game, other allies will chide you on being too generous and enjoying the stand-up fight too much, endangering yourself and the cause too recklessly. It's a bit weird.
The game also has an odd approach to difficulty, by making difficulty apply to everyone. Play the game on Easy and you gain a lot of extra health, but the same happens to the enemy, leaving them tedious arrow-sponges that taken an age to kill. Playing the game on Hard paradoxically makes the game easier, as enemies drop in just a couple of hits (so do you, but you can mitigate that straightforwardly with better armour and increasing your health through side-tasks).
These are not major issues. I did find some elements of combat a little questionable, such as un-dodgeable attacks and some wonky physics where you'd be sent flying in completely the opposite direction to where you should be according to actual science. But minor amounts of jank in an open-world game are to be expected, and Ghost of Tsushima is actually better than most at this.
The Iki Island expansion offers an extended coda to the main game as you return to the island where your father died crushing a rebellion, and have to try to ally with the inhabitants (who have not forgotten your family's brutality) against the Mongols, creating a set of knotty moral quandaries. Unfortunately the main villain on this island is tedious, and the expansion has them capture and drug you at the start, meaning you periodically suffer weird-out visions. This sometimes has you trying to find a new dye or archery competition and then suffering some freak-out vision for five minutes that you could really do without. Still, most of the expansion is very good in terms of the story and new enemy types it introduces.
All told, I completed the main game and expansion in a combined 68 hours, which felt okay, maybe a little overstuffed. Obviously you can bring that down a fair bit by not trying to 100% every side-activity, so the game has some flexibility there.
Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut (****½) is a highly enjoyable game. Yes, it is another find-the-question-mark map game, like so, so many others, but a beautiful visual style, excellent voice acting, challenging-but-exhilarating combat and some good writing make it a constantly engaging experience. Just remember not to play it too close to other open-world map games, otherwise you may end up experiencing a little burnout. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
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