Ghost of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima has the look of a thoughtful samurai epic, but the façade flakes under scrutiny, revealing that it serves Western blockbuster tastes and tenets above all. It’s a game that so desperately wants to be 13 Assassins but more times than not ends up looking like The Last Samurai.

As a game, Ghost of Tsushima offers tried-and-true tropes of the genre with a story of a paradigm shift, decent swordplay, generic sandbox attractions (with zero towers and grind, though) and bearable monotony. But if you accept it as a series of living wallpapers, it’s a true PlayStation 4 gem.

A competent but shallow and overfamiliar attempt to replicate Assassin’s Creed style open world adventure in the world of 13th century samurai.

In (very) short: like the initial entry in Assassin's Creed, the franchise it unashamedly copies, Ghost of Tsushima is good but not great. I finished it to complete it, not because I was invested in the mixed bag that was presented.

The game hits a lot of fantastic cinematic highs, and those ultimately lift it above the trappings of its familiar open-world quest design and all the innate weaknesses that come with it--but those imperfections and dull edges are definitely still there. Ghost of Tsushima is at its best when you're riding your horse and taking in the beautiful world on your own terms, armed with a sword and a screenshot button, allowing the environmental cues and your own curiosity to guide you. It's not quite a Criterion classic, but a lot of the time it sure looks like one.

Some people will be okay with that and will even enjoy the open-world trappings Ghost of Tsushima offers. For me, I'm not sure if I can tolerate more riding around looking for boring filler while wishing triple-A gaming could finally deliver a truly compelling story.

Its story is excessively maudlin and self-serious to the point of pomposity - it's no exaggeration to say Naughty Dog gave us more laughs. And as pretty as the scenery is, we'd rather it didn't obstruct us so often when we're fighting; with a tight camera and no way of locking onto individual opponents, you sometimes end up cornered without realising, or struck by enemies you can't see. Combat should be an entertaining, empowering dance, and though it sometimes hits those heights, too often it can't resist throwing too many enemies into the mix. It's supposed to get messy, but not like this...When the world isn't getting in your way, however, it is Ghost of Tsushima's saving grace. [Issue#348, p.86]

Sucker Punch's PS4 tribute to Akira Kurosawa is gorgeous to behold but its sparse open-world and bloated mechanics has it falling short.

Unlike Assassin’s Creed, which always uses its historical settings as stages for its own eccentric stories, Ghost of Tsushima sticks so closely to the tropes and storylines of classic samurai fiction that it sometimes forgets to have a personality of its own. After I caught myself repeatedly checking my phone out of boredom during the story missions, I decided to abandon them entirely for a while and had a great time chasing foxes, bathing in hot springs, composing deeply average haiku and climbing mountains in search of a legendary bow instead. This is the most beautiful version of Japan ever conjured in code, and when running errands and slashing Mongol spearmen to bits gets tedious, you can always just drink in the view.

It has its moments, but like Jin Sakai in the opening hours, the past holds it back. It’s Open World: The Video Game. It’s far too easy, too - the lack of consequence for failure makes it feel like you’re just going through the motions. If you’ll excuse the wind-based pun, it’s a breeze. While playing it, I often found my mind wandering. By the third and final act, I just wanted it to be over. Like the samurai, Ghost of Tsushima feels like a relic of a bygone era.

Sucker Punch’s Kurosawa homage has atmosphere and sharp combat, but it's weighed down by the genre’s more perfunctory tropes.

Ghost of Tsushima is a fine open-world game. It ticks all the boxes of what you would expect it to do - but it doesn't do anything more than that. This is one of the last exclusive games for the PlayStation 4, and it's disappointing that it has nothing new to say.

And so, at the end of nearly 5,500 words of review, everything that I’ve written leaves me in a conundrum. On the one hand, just with The Last Of Us 2, I found the moment-to-moment gameplay of Ghost of Tsushima to be excellent and massively entertaining, if a little derivative at this point in time – the open world genre as a whole does need some new ideas. Tsushima doesn’t do anything that will surprise you if you’ve played any of Sony’s other first party games in recent years, but it does it all in a way that’s as refined and sharp as a samurai’s blade, and that is fundamentally enjoyable. I can’t stress that enough – this game is fundamentally enjoyable. However, as much as I had issues with The Last Of Us 2’s narrative, it was an American story told by Americans, and it had a thematic and tonal resonance as such. It was consistent and uncompromised. Ghost of Tsushima by contrast is a wild misfire with every narrative element it attempts, and it boils down to this: Sucker Punch decided to do a historical epic inspired by Kurosawa… and produced something that fails as both history and as a pastiche of Kurosawa. There are going to be a lot of people that love this game, but I don’t think that should be overlooked, nor dismissed as irrelevant to the quality of this both as artwork and entertainment product.