chbachman

A quintessential example, and in fact the origin of the term, Jiminy Cockthroat - AKA an Open World Stealth Action with Crafting and Collectibles - AKA the standard Ubisoft Sandbox formula.

Let’s take a look at each part and how it’s done:

Open World

This is the most gorgeous open world I’ve ever seen. Areas have distinct feelings, the focus on the wind rustling through long grass and trees means that the world is dynamic, even in still settings, and many areas seem designed to leave amazing screenshots. I often paused just to admire the scenery, something which very few games will cause me to want to do.

However, the world is lacking in direction. A good open world draws you to its interesting points without needing to guide you there with markers on a map. Ghost of Tsushima doesn’t do that. You are constantly following its version of a dotted line. A pretty dotted line, but a dotted line nonetheless.

Now, you don’t need to follow it all of the time. Just by being pretty, the world makes you want to explore it. However, even this is undermined by the invisible walls that are constantly placed in your way while exploring. Not actual invisible walls (most of the time), but quest trigger invisible walls. An area will be completely empty, or just have nothing to do. In the beginning of the game, this is confusing. However, as you progress you start to learn that the game doesn’t want you there yet, and just leave, slightly disappointed in the total lack of a reward for finding a cool area.

As an example, early on you explore and hear so much about the town “Komatsu Forge”. It had been built up in my mind so much that I searched for it. Once I found it, it was completely empty. A ghost town. At that point, I did a bit of research and found out that you need to get to a certain point in the main quest before you can do anything there. Once you get to that point, the town becomes filled with enemies that you clear out in the course of the quest. Immersion breaking to say the least. This happens throughout your exploration, to the point that by the end, I stopped exploring and just followed the quests and small other areas the game wants you to visit.

Stealth

The stealth in this game is fine, but it's two things that kill stealth. It's slow, and it's useless. Slow is fine, whatever. But useless kills stealth. Action is just too fun, and stealth is kinda boring. Sneaking past enemies is only good as a challenge, and is basically never required from a gameplay reason. Every time I sat around stealthing, I thought to myself "can't I just slice these dudes?" And the answer every time was "yes, I can."

Action

The combat starts out easy, and gets easier as the game goes along. I had to stop myself from using the best armor and weapons I received because otherwise the game was too easy. Every enemy (with only a few exceptions) can be beaten simply by mashing strong attack and then once their guard is broken, masking weak attack. There are even armor sets that make this even easier, which further adds to the trivialization.

Crafting

Barely present in the game, and entirely unnecessary. Would have been better removed. They have so many quests that give you no real reward, but make you search the world for simple things to upgrade your armor and weapons, when those could be rewards for completing quests, to make the quests actually worth doing.

Collectibles

There are a lot of them, and they come in two forms: 1. Areas in the world 2. Things in the world

The areas in the world are great. They help encourage exploration, fit in with the world, and give tangible benefits. I was always excited to find a Fox Den, or a Bamboo Strike, because they involve the open world in a good way.

The things in the world, honestly suck. They are hard to find and lead to distracting the core gameplay, which is exploring and fighting. The collectibles you gather this way are worthless, and honestly I would have skipped if my preferred armor wasn’t bugging me about collecting them constantly.

Story

The story is both simplistic and pretentious, which is a hard combo to pull off. The main enemy of the game, the fodder the game throws at you for the entire game is the Mongol Empire. They are never redeemed. They never rise above the level of “bad guy” and you never feel guilty for killing thousands of them. They are constantly shown killing civilians and there is never a choice anywhere in the game that lets you see them in anything besides a killing force that you should be glad to butcher. The Mongols are the simplistic aspect of the game.

The game gets pretentious when it goes over the other aspect to the story, honor. As a game set in Feudal Japan, Ghost of Tsushima is obsessed with honor and which of your actions are honorable and which are dishonorable. However, this doesn’t translate to anything in the gameplay and you are railroaded into taking dishonorable actions in front of large amounts of people so that the story can have tension. It comes off a pretentious because both sides are caricatures of the main question of “Does honor matter?” One side believes anything besides charging straight at an enemy in while yelling is dishonorable, while the other side believes that honor doesn’t matter, so let’s commit war crimes, yay! There’s a happy middle ground which is never reached, and the story refuses to acknowledge.

Conclusion

After a lot of that rambling, my final verdict is that Ghost of Tsushima is a great game to explore if you just want to see some amazing graphics and beautiful landscapes. But for every other aspect, another game does it better: