Ghost of Tsushima spoiler thread (This thread has full unmarked spoilers for the game)

I noticed there wasn't a spoiler thread for Ghost of Tsushima and people who had finished the game so I decided to make one.

My overall take on the story is that it's incredibly dry and straightforward. Almost everything is telegraphed and right before the final fight with your uncle I kept hoping the game would be brave enough to not make you duel him, or even cut to credits after both men raise their swords. At least they let you spare his life so the game doesn't force you to essentially commit patricide. I really didn't want to do that. What did other people decide to do in that final moment?

I thought it was weird that you have your uncle's armor in your hideout even if you don't kill him. Maybe the option to spare him was made at the last minute?

I also want to say that I'm pissed that they killed off my horse. The game told me it would be with me through the whole game and I chose the color and name I liked best. It felt very emotionally manipulative, and I kind of hate my new horse. You're NOT a good boy, Nobu. You're sure as hell no Kage! You may carry my armor but you'll never carry my heart.

What were your thoughts on the story? Any moments or themes that stood out? I was disappointed that the game played the "samurai are noble warriors who would sacrifice everything for their people" myth so straight, and was so stereotypical about 'honor' and its other themes. It all felt very perfunctory, even if at times it was well told.

I like the people in the story a lot, which is vital because yeah it’s absurdly straightforward.

But I like pretty much all of the Tale characters and even Jin grew on me as the game went along.

I like the final confrontation but it being a choice feels weird. Like the narrative for the entire game feels pointless if you then decide honor IS actually important enough to kill new dad.

The horse thing did also fuck me up maybe in part because I named it Trust.. besides it was just a few arrows! I ghost rode that bastard off cliffs into camps many times. He was made of sterner stuff.

Still haven't beaten the game, but don't mind the spoilers since the buildup is more exciting to me. Others may disagree but whatevs. I knew the betrayal was coming from that one fucker who was still bitter about having gotten bested in a duel. His saltiness was a dead giveaway a betrayal was coming. The fight against him was pretty neat. The first straw hat duel in the marsh was neat, too, and I cannot wait to learn their attack patterns after many trial and error sequences, and get that perfect kill as I did with that one tengu boss for the longbow.

I can see the fight between uncle and nephew coming. It's obviously brewing since Jin has strayed from the ways of the samurai.

@efesell: I never really grew attached to any of the characters except Yuna and kind of Taka. Even they were pretty rote. The rest just seemed like total stereotypes, the grieving proud warrior woman, the stern but regretful teacher, the sleazy sake merchant. It's all stuff you've seen variations on a billion times and I didn't think any of these particular variations stood out. It's not that they're awful, it's just that they're part of the typical narrative.

The characters you meet in random tales are even less defined and sometimes irritated me in how much they hero worship Jin. There's one random tale where you find a sealed hut and the women inside won't let you in because they're afraid after you used poison on the Mongols. Then you go gather supplies for them (yet another cookie cutter mission clearing a small base) and return, only to find the hut on fire and everyone dead. The only survivor (who doesn't last long) uses her final breath to praise you and say she was wrong not to open up before before she dies.

She's not even a character!

I feel like killing Lord Shimura is more about following his wishes than actually agreeing to his code of honor. At least that's why I considered it before deciding to spare him. I also feel like the symbolism in the game up to that mission (and the fact that you have his armor after the fight) implies that it's the ending the developers were more invested in. They really did like pushing those tragedy buttons throughout the game.

Your horse being invincible until the plot decides it dies was a dirty trick. Mongols hit him with arrows and weapons before and he just dumps you off and then runs a safe distance, but a few arrows to the flank and he dies. Although really he dies because Jin pushes him too hard when he's wounded, so that's just one more crime the ghost has to answer for. #Mongolsdidnothingwrong.

It doesn't make sense having his armor no matter what decision you make because he isn't even wearing it for the final segment. Unless you are supposed to imagine that you, wanted outlaw, kill your beloved uncle to honor his last wish and then go back to his castle and steal his armor for a trophy.

@efesell: In my headcannon if you killed him he might have left it packed on his horse or something.

I mean Jin carries like 10 changes of clothing at all time, so his uncle could get one set of armor packed in his saddlebags!

Also.. less spoiler but more just something I have to acknowledge..

The Khan looks like fuckin' Steven Seagal and I could barely deal with it.

@efesell: I like the final confrontation but it being a choice feels weird. Like the narrative for the entire game feels pointless if you then decide honor IS actually important enough to kill new dad.

I honestly don't understand why Sucker Punch keeps doing that. I thought it was whatever in the first Infamous, but with the sequel it already looked laughably dumb when the huge choose your ending prompts showed up again. Especially when you know (based on their history) they'll be choosing a canon ending anyway for the sequel.

I don't mind the prompts that much it's just jarring because this just hasn't been that game until right at that moment. InFamous at least is full of decision points like that and you can be relatively consistent with how your character behaves.

Jin's arc in this game is what it is, even if you play the game in the exact way that Shimura would be proud of the cutscenes are still full of "Jin wow that's fucked up what you did" even before the big pivotal poisoning moment.

I can kind of see it, but he's so obviously based on his voice actor Patrick Gallagher that it's hard for me to see anyone else.

I got the platinum tonight, which mostly involved going through and finishing the companion stories.

I have to say that playing that many missions in a row really drives home just how depressing so much of this game is. Of all the companions, only Ishikawa's storyline ends on anything like an upbeat note, and it goes through a whole lot of depressing slaughter to get there. Yuna gets revenge but her friend hates her and she doesn't seem satisfied by it. Masako has to kill the last bit of family she has and learns that it was her own sister who murdered her grandkids. Norio has to kill his mutilated brother and turns into a psycho monster who is filled with joy by burning someone alive.

Like dude, I get that this game takes place during a brutal war but it's darker than The Last Of Us Part II in many ways.

I am more convinced than ever that the canonical ending is that you kill your uncle. It fits much better with the rest of the game than letting him live.

I finished it this morning. The game was fine. I enjoyed the combat and I liked the characters, but the story was extremely generic. A been there, done that, easy to guess what comes next (even down to what line a character will say next) kind of experience. It wasn't bad, mind you, just nothing new. I also found it hard to want to play it for more than a few hours a day as I wasn't into the typical open-world stuff of checking things off of the map, and the world, as colorful as it could be at times wasn't diverse enough from one place to another to grab my interest.

I was playing on the hard difficulty and while the first several hours of the game were a decent challenge, soon you have so many different ways to dispatch foes that it didn't become much of a challenge anymore. The horse death was probably the saddest moment of the game (I actually felt more for it than I did in the moment of RDR2), and yet for most of the game before that, I hadn't ridden the horse (which I named Nobu; Kaze was the second horse near the end). I played the game in Japanese and I appreciate that they added that in there. Ghost of Tsushima is a well-made open-world game, but nothing special. Honestly, the story was so cliche and ultimately uninteresting that I am not that interested in watching the handful of spoilercast videos I see around the internet. There's not much to talk about.

Edit - Oh, in the end, I spared his uncle because to me it represented Jin's departure from the way of the samurai. I don't think either choice is good or bad.

@bigsocrates: Maybe it is the canonical ending, although I don't necessarily think that killing him is an unhappy ending because if you kill him, it's the way his uncle wanted it to happen and it's about honor. I agree though, while I didn't come away from this game feeling depressed as I did The Last of Us: Part II, this game is a lot about revenge and less than ideal endings for characters.

@ntm: I think anytime you have to kill your beloved father because he has become disgusted at what you've become that's a pretty horrific ending. At least if you spare his life there's a chance for reconciliation later on.

Imagine if The Last Of Us Part II ended with Ellie killing Joel. That's pretty much the equivalent of Jin killing his uncle, except that Jin and his uncle had an arguably closer relationship than Ellie and Joel, especially because his uncle raised him from when he was younger than Ellie was when she met Joel.

It's really dark stuff. And everything else in the game is dark too. There are so many sidequests that involve incredibly dark events or end on a massive downer. It's part of why I think the writing comes off as so average. It's just not good enough to convey the themes that are in the plot.

I disagree with you that Ghost of Tsushima is nothing special. I think it's something special, because its open world is among the most beautiful ever made. As an overall package it ranges from below average (woof to that climbing stuff) to above average (the combat) to spectacular (the open world) but I think that the world design will be influential for many years to come. It's not afraid to be stylized and beautiful while so many other games focus on being "realistic."

I named my first horse Kage and my second horse Nobu so we reversed that. I kind of hated the second horse though. Just because he wasn't Kage.

Overall I think Ghost is the release I've enjoyed the most this year. Ghost is a real testament to how much Art Direction and Artistry within the world you've created matter in a way I wasn't sure I fully understood before. I have not played a game that just the beauty of the game alone got me super invested in playing it.

Breath of the Wild is close, but it isn't just the look of that game that made me fall in. It is funny to think about how mediocre any game made by Ubisoft in the last decade looks despite likely having higher fidelity in some cases.

Lighting and use of color raised a game that I would otherwise describe as pretty alright into something spectacular. Light and color made every shrine something I wanted to do despite the platforming being very stuck in the past. I wanted to soak in the moonlight as I would travel with Yuna. I would slow walk with every character that the game would let me just to have quiet moments to observe the world (and occasionally see bears Yeet Mongols 10 feet into the air).

The Japanese VA did a superb job in lifting what felt like a somewhat average overall story that had some beats that didn't quite hit or I flat out disliked (you really don't need to kill the Horse that was noted specifically as a Samurai Horse early in the game to symbolically convey to the player that Jin is no longer Samurai). Also while nice that they tried to convey the road into being honorless based on the actions you used in gameplay it did not work considering they really tie that into one specific plot beat a type of issue that has always plagued AAA games( I remember having a big beef with this in the Tomb Raider reboot).

As for the ending, I found giving the player a binary choice very strange. Jin supposedly has broken bonds entirely with the code of Bushido seeing it as useless in serving the people so I don't see why you wouldn't take a stance and say that he wouldn't kill Shimura even though Jin clearly knows that Shimura would likely kill himself to maintain his precious honor that Jin clearly scorns at the end of the story.

At the end of the day, I platinumed this game because it was extremely pretty to look at it and I had a good time. Also, Yuriko's side story was exceptional.

@bigsocrates: I saw the environmental design to be somewhat repetitive as throughout the world it's filled with pampas grass, seaside locations, a lot of shoin-zukuri, and rockery to climb. You get the feeling of different seasons with each new location, but to me, it wasn't enough to not feel monotonous. There were very few locations that made me go 'wow, this is different'. Yes, it was at times beautiful, especially the first area of the game, but many open-world games have beautiful environments, just in a different way artistically.

We haven't seen an open-world game set in that location and period. As I got further in, I was thinking that the game would have been better if it was smaller. I wasn't a big fan of clearing the fog of war, then hitting each question mark on the map before doing all the side/companion quests, then the main quests. It was simply a different approach to what is essentially the same thing in other open-world games. I appreciated the wind mechanic as a waypoint finder, but I don't think that'll be something other games adopt.

As for the ending, I'm referring more to how it makes the player feel and how one will rationalize it rather than realistically if I were in that situation. As a player, I can see why killing him makes a player more content, as to some if you let him live, it puts Jin in a negative light.

@ntm: I don't think the environments were particularly repetitive for an open world game set on a real world island. It had big open fields, mountains, snowy areas, swamp areas, bamboo forests, tree forests, beaches, towns, burned out muddy battlefields etc... It's not quite as varied as a Skyrim or BOTW or whatever, but more varied than most open world games, especially set in a real world location.

It's the way it's stylized that's going to be influential. A "realistic" game with big bold colors and so many uses of leaves and particles is pretty much unprecedented. Most games grounded in reality and set in a natural environment are still too brown and gray and too afraid to fully embrace the opportunity to do stylized visuals in a realistic style. Ghost of Tsushima has hills covered in purple flowers, forest areas with golden leaves constantly falling, and so many scenes out of a painting. It opens up the visual palette so much more than pretty much every game that's not in an explicitly fantasy environment and other developers are going to take note. I expect to see more bold color choices in natural environments within a few years and Ghost of Tsushima will be able to take some of the credit for that.

In terms of the gameplay and story...those are pretty pedestrian. You definitely don't have to hit all the question marks or do all the side quests (there are way too many side quests and they are mostly unsatisfying with bad and even repetitive rewards) so I'm not sure that's really a problem. The mainline story is actually pretty short, and the companion stories can each be done in a few hours too.

I am pretty sure other games will adopt some version of the wind mechanic. It's much more elegant than either staring at the minimap or the "navigation line overlayed in the field of play" mechanics that most games rely on now. It will vary from game to game but it's the kind of innovation that's easily replicated, though it's not a massive change.

@aristotled: I agree that Yuriko's side story had some of the best writing in the game, with some real subtlety and character work that was lacking elsewhere. I don't know why everything else was so straight forward when they were able to convey Yuriko's relationship with Jin's father so much better by not being explicit about it. I also thought that Yuriko flirting with Jin was an uncomfortable moment that felt real and not cliche, and again I don't know why they weren't able to do that elsewhere. Instead they had this big plot where even though you save Tsushima and possibly Japan as a whole pretty much on your own the Shogun and your uncle are all pissed at you because you didn't do it the way they wanted and that's just not how leaders act. It would have been more interesting to have your uncle get suspicious and jealous of you for becoming a folk hero and worry you were going to usurp him, but instead he's like "sure my way got all the samurai killed and me captured and you had to rescue me using ghost tactics, and then you killed the Khan and saved my island and my rule, but I'm super pissed that you used sneaky tactics against a bunch of invaders instead of just charging them head on."

No ruler actually hampers himself to that degree when fighting invaders. It was just silly.

Oh I have no issue believing the way that Shimura acts to be honest. History has its fair share of equally idiot rulers acting in cross purpose like that. Our own modern crisis isn’t be handled much better..

Also worth noting that the Shogun is explicitly angry at you for teaching the peasants that maybe we don’t have to listen to this handful of shitty samurai in their castles..

@bigsocrates: I don't disagree that it's doing things differently in terms of colorful, animated flora, but I don't necessarily agree that it'll be that influential in any way. Games will probably start having more of that on next-gen, but I don't think it's because Ghost of Tsushima did it. To me, the best time with the game is when you've only uncovered the first third of the map (or, Act I). At that point, I was thinking, at least from a gameplay perspective that it's arguably my favorite game of the year. I enjoyed the stealth/combat early on, it's just that the more you upgrade, it becomes very easy where the act of having to block and change stances isn't as required as it was before.

Combat and stealth were, still, my favorite part of the game. No, you don't have to do the side stuff, but I like uncovering the entire map, so it is an issue if that can't grab me. Near the end of the game, I stopped but ended up doing it all anyways as the main goals were on the way. That said if you're playing on hard, or the new lethal difficulty, those side activities are helpful. Early on I was impressed by how vivid the game was, almost reminding me of Breath of the Wild, and the lighting as trees block the sun, but as the game goes on, I quickly became less invested in the world and to me did feel samey. I found myself sprinting to every question mark and doing all the side stuff just so I could see the story and companion quests through. Also, as always, I was hoping something would pique my interest environmentally, so that's part of why I explored too. My favorites were Ronin's side mission locations.

The wind system will probably only be a Ghost of Tsushima thing. It'd also get tiresome if developers took that specific thing and implemented it into their game. Developers are always trying to find a way to improve the waypoint system, so I don't think many, if any, will look at Ghost of Tsushima and say they got the idea to do something because of that game. Perhaps more so than the wind, I liked that the birds would show you the way to side stuff. It would have been better if the map had no question marks and it simply had you follow the birds so it didn't feel so much like checking boxes.

I do wonder how much more fun this game would be and how much better it'd look if it was 4k/60fps. I think the checkerboard took away from some of the prettiness.

I'm playing the game now and the word that keeps coming to mind is "meat and potatoes." This is a very meat and potatoes style of action game with really none of the cinematic flourishes that AAA gaming have increasingly have. I imagine that there is a vocal group ecstatic over the game because "it's just a game" rather than making a statement.

So far, I"m enjoying it. However, this is very much an open world game and contains pretty much all of the genre's pitfalls. And for a world that is gorgeous, it's pretty disappointing how hollow it all is. It's surface level polish that really could use the vibrancy or storytelling of "The Witcher" or the sense of humor of the Yakuza games. The plot is simply there so you can go and kill stuff and collect shit.

It's good, but I kind of can't see how people are claiming this to be the "best of the year."

@kemuri07: I dunno, sometimes it just turns out that you want some really well made meat and potatoes.

@efesell: Sure! The problem is is that it's open world nature sort of exacerbates the issues that normally plague Open World. I think Ghost of Tsushima works when it takes its cues from Breath of the Wild. The game is at it's best when you randomly happen upon a squad of Mongols and merc all of them in brutal fashion.

It's when the game tries to contextualize this stuff in the game's story that it falls flat. Namely because none of it is really compelling. I don't need to be ART like TLOU2; but I do need to care what's going on, and I certainly don't really care about Jin or his quest to free his uncle. A lot of that is down to how much of a blank slate Jin is. His only real deal is that he's honorable, but also plagued with self-loathing for having to use Ninja abilities--which doesn't really factor into the gameplay that much in general. But also the writing itself is just bland. It's purely perfunctory. All it does is just get you to the next mission. Nothing more. So yeah, "meat and potatoes." But it's missing that specificity that makes old school Samurai films so entertaining to watch. So all of the gorgeous aesthetics just feels hollow after awhile. It's pretty and nothing more.

Don't get me wrong--I am having fun. But this is a game that I kinda do wish a Japanese studio worked on instead.

For those of you wondering about canon I saw someone say that on Ep. 30 of the Kinda Funny Gamecast one of the developers confirmed that letting your uncle live is considered the canon ending. I have not confirmed this since I don't particularly like Kinda Funny, but the poster said it's around the 28 minute mark.

@chrispaul92: I'd say there is no way it isn't the canon ending, honestly. For one it doesn't really make sense for Jin as a character to suddenly say honor over all else (as someone else said) but also, just from a character perspective, I think that there is more they could do with Shimura in a sequel alive than dead.

I finished it last night and it was fine. I too saw everything coming from a mile away, aside from them murdering my horse (because as someone else said, that truly did feel like a dirty manipulative trick considering what Nobu -- my first horse -- CAN survive up until that point), but it was all fine. The choice at the end was stupid, but it always is in Sucker Punch games, IMO. I don't think I'll be getting the platinum, just because as much as I needed a kind of just good, almost relaxing box check game, I think I'm done with it now. Too much of it just feels like filler and on top of that, the whole "yes, you completed the game but because this is an open world game there are stragglers you must still take care of -- this is our excuse to let you finish the side stuff" just doesn't ever do it for me. I appreciate the care, because just locking people out of that stuff SUCKS, but I just wish if they were going to do it they'd just find a better way. I feel like Sucker Punch did this in all of their games that aren't Sly? Unless I'm misremembering.

I think this game just misses at so many turns for me. It's kind of crazy how close it comes to being something super fun and entertaining, but at every turn it kind of opts for the boring approach.

A few things I liked:

• I like that this kind of feels like the origin story for samurai Batman.
• Having side characters who stick around through the whole game really made things feel like they developed as they went along.
• Not popular opinion apparently, but I think the horse death is surprisingly effective.
• Leonard Wu's performance as Ryuzo, specifically at the scene where he's forced to burn somebody.
• During big battles seeing your homies rolling around cutting guys up felt like Dynasty Warriors in a good way.
• The environmental mountain climbing puzzles.
• Every duel that is just sword vs sword.
• Kenji.

Things I didn't like:

• The wind way point stuff. So often I had no idea where the fuck it was trying to point me. And sometimes it just decides to not work? Just tell me where to go.
• Every single time I have to scour the floor for clues.
• The boss fight with Khotun Khan is just a fumbling fucking mess. Completely unsatisfying.
• Actually, that whole final battle sequence was pretty lame. They did it better earlier in the game.
• Fox dens and dumb shit haikus.
• All the superfluous gear. I found a very solid set of charms like ten hours in and the rest just cluttered up my inventory. Pretty much every single non-cosmetic reward in the second and third act were worthless.
• The weird moral choice at the last minute in the game felt pointless.
• Again, fox dens. Fuck 'em.

I forgot to mention that part. I hated the final sequence. For one, it felt MUCH less bombastic and exciting than the final mission for Chapter 2 (hell, it was less exciting than just some basic regular gold Tales), and then you have this protracted encounter with Khan and it's just...a mess. An absolute mess. He isn't particularly challenging or imposing, but you're getting shot at from an area you can't reach, and occasionally attacked, so I just found myself running around to get some distance between Khan and I, shooting archers or taking out fodder enemies, and then just back to Khan. I honestly couldn't even figure out what it was they were even going for in that sequence.

The attack against the village felt a little anti climactic. Chapter 3 is set up like the first two where it felt like you were going to go around preparing for a big epic thing but it was really just.. okay I got the weapons let's fuck em' up, and then you do so largely without issue.

I like the actual fight against the Khan a lot though, but I think the best bits of gameplay involve kicking a hornets nest and squaring off with a few dozen guys so maybe it was just right in my wheelhouse.

The wind mechanic always seemed super obvious to me where it was pointing, although like anything involving the touchpad actually activating it can be frustrating at random times.

@sethmode: I ended up just running around farming the fodder enemies to get the random ghost weapons to throw at Khan. Between sticky bombs, kunai, and smoke, he couldn’t really touch me. My biggest threat was the archers hitting me in the blind spots. I didn’t feel like I was doing it the way it was designed, but I have no idea what the intention was there.

They set up so much for that last battle. Come to think of it, where was that storm they were talking about so much? I don’t think that was really happening. Your uncle showing up just in the middle of things felt so flat. Like it’s a cliche, but they should’ve had him show up just in time to save your failing attack.

The thing about archers is that they're all fake.

One you learn that skill that deflects arrows Jin obtains perfect spatial clairvoyance and so long as you throw up a guard when you hear one shout the arrow is useless.

There's also a very good accessibility option if you have trouble determining the warning shout that puts up an onscreen indicator if an archer is readying a shot off camera.

@hatking It was interesting how it differed from Act 1 and 2 in terms of prep. In 3 you leave a note for your uncle which narrative-wise was pitched as a longshot (although as a player we knew he was coming to save the day even though it was truly the most neutered "We're here" and cut away), and then you come back and everyone else is like, we got the Hwacha, we got the troops, we have a plan let's go!

And then it is just kind of a very average run and fight and that was that. Compared to the end of Act 2, it just fell really flat for me.

@efesell: Admittedly, I didn't get the deflect arrows thing for a bit, and then would CONSTANTLY forget about using it (in favor of dodging -- which is a stupid move on my part but it was what I was used to at that point) and then I didn't realize until even later that you didn't have to be facing them to parry the arrow, so it was hard to make my brain change.

As an aside of all the intentional anachronisms in this game I was really irrationally annoyed when the game suddenly called attention to them having Hwacha.

I guess everything else is close enough to fudge it but Hwacha are not even in the fuckin' ballpark. Someone on the team just thought they were really cool.

Which.. Fair I guess.

@efesell: Yeah, it was definitely interesting to see largely defensive weapons Koreans invented like hundreds of years after this game takes place as part of an invading Mongol force. Just a very interesting and bizarre way to try and turn history on its head in the interest of, I guess like you said, something that is cool.

@sethmode: Yeah, for sure the last battle is the least interesting in the game. When it got to the point where I was supposed to sneak in, it wasn't super clear where it wanted me to go. I would follow a rope to a building that looked like it was leading me to a cliff edge and then I'd get a timer counting me out of the mission area. I just ended up picking off all the enemies walking around the based to clear a path to just run up to the Khan fight, because whatever stealth path it had in mind was not clear to me.

The best thing I can say about Tsushima: It's a solid foundation for a potentially fantastic sequel.

The game is gorgeous

the combat is fun

It's just missing that piece that ties everything together to make it more than simply a fun collect-a-thon.

Am I the only one here who killed the uncle? I just hate an anti-climax. (I also thought he would kill himself if I didnt)

I feel like Sucker Punch are going to shaft me again much like they did with Infamous and also like Arkane have with pretty much all of their games and DLCs.

Why even give you a choice if they're just going to disregard it? (I realize it's not even confirmed that this game is getting a sequel, personally i'd rather they made something else)

I thought the story was very bland much like the characters, I didnt dislike anyone though, i'm not sure if thats a good thing. (I hated most of the cast of TLOU2 but at least I felt something)

The game was okay overall but I think Sucker Punch are much better at making shooters than melee based action games, going from this back to Nioh 2 it's night and day.

@kemuri07: I was kind of thinking this feels like an origin story for some sort of vigilante character, but I guess I don't really know where they go from there. Maybe Jin just travels west and fights crime throughout Asia and Europe. Just go full fucking Zorro with it.

@hatking: I mean he’s a proper wandering Ronin now there is literally no end of cinematic inspiration to draw upon.

Damn after reading this I'm so glad I didn't waste my time on this rote experience. Really confused how this happened. Maybe the story and scope kept changing until word came down they had no more money to fuck around with and had to settle on a basic "man goes down a dark path" story.

@development: I dunno if that's necessarily a fair assessment of it..

@efesell: I agree. The story doesn't seem rushed at all, especially if you include the side stuff. There are a ton of missions, a ton of dialog, lots of long cut scenes, and the game definitely feels like it was built around this story. I think the problem is that the story they built was not very interesting and the writers and actors just didn't manage to pull it off well enough to justify how unrelentingly grim it is. The Infamous games also had lame stories but they were comic book wacky so at least the cut scenes were kind of amusing in a "oh the second boss is a psychic homeless man? That's...a choice" way.

Tsushima is very serious, and to do serious well you need more nuance and character depth than the game has. That's why the Yuriko stuff works. Her story is very sad but it's told with subtlety (nobody just comes out and tells anyone what's going on, you need to read into what she says and does) and has a lot of time to build characters and relationships, while also reflecting on Jin's relationship with his father.

The game's problem is that for most of the rest of the game it's all tell don't show. Lots of conversations with your uncle about how you have to defeat the Mongols with honor and how he can't wait to adopt Jin because they are so close.

There's a lot of "two weeks away from retirement" energy to how often Shimura talks about adopting Jin.

I look forward to reading through this thread, but I'm jumping in before ultimately finishing it so, with that in mind...

Reading the notes about interviewing the Khan made me feel pretty early on that Shimura and Jin would duel each other, I'm just surprised to find it's literally the ending of the story when it felt like the inevitable conclusion to Act I.

I really enjoy the gameplay, honestly, but I don't play too many open world games and especially not melee focused ones as I hate Assassin's Creed so it all felt pretty fresh to me. I played most of the game on the Brutal difficulty since I hadn't finished Act I before it was patched in and I loved the duels and some of the bigger set pieces. Unlike Jeff, I found the juggling of stances pretty damn fun in a way that was a little surprising considering how much I hated the prescribed nature of DOOM Eternal's combat. Part of that might be a lingering bias for Sucker Punch games, another might be that it was really just an on the fly adjustment to what surrounds you while wielding the same weapon so it feels a little more like reading the room than satisfying a game designer's end goals.

There were a handful of moments that felt really shoehorned into the game, though, none more than what I just finished, which was dueling Masako for no clear reason only to not kill each other, clear an area of mongols and then remember we still had to finish our quest line together with one more hunt. It's kind of funny how derided Last of Us 2 was in certain circles for its focus on revenge and violence despite this game, especially on Brutal, being a far more viscerally violent game featuring far more intentionally violent characters pursuing far less thematically rich results.

I think the Japanese voice acting helps a lot, and I really enjoyed playing the game in Kurosawa mode...in fits and starts. It's basically a non-starter on Brutal, but when I was playing on Normal prior to that difficulty's release I really loved how they adjusted the camera and the sound design to make it feel like an older film, not even necessarily a Japanese / Kurosawa production.

I was also really primed for the story to wade into some pretty interesting waters only to back away with very little nuance due to some remarks from Austin and Patrick during Waypoint's discussion of the game...sure enough, there are some really interesting hints at what it means to be a member of the privileged/ruling class in the back half of Act II that are entirely thrown out the window in Act III and never really come up again. Once it's clear that Jin is the only one focused on saving the island's citizens at the expense of "honor", the game quickly reverts back to this uncomfortable middle ground where every unimportant NPC is merely a "peasant" and they invariably bow to you in your fancy armor and crazy mustachioed masks.

It's especially surprising considering Sucker Punch was always striving to be at the forefront of morality in video games, and while the inFamous series remained heavy handed in that aspect it's just weird that this game is so focused on a binary morality and then finds zero ways to implicate the player in that binary. A major source of the fun in the inFamous series was deciding to go Hero or Infamous and watch the skill tree evolve accordingly, and it feels like such a missed opportunity to not adapt that kind of development into the story of this game itself. Especially, not to bring TLoU2 into this one more time, this game comes so closely on the heels of a game that only let you make morally vacant choices with no input from the player that a studio so known for incorporating that into their stories however vaguely decided to eschew that part of their DNA entirely.

Ultimately I've really enjoyed this game, but it slots perfectly into what 2020's (and many of 2019's) big games have represented to me which are games with really big ideas and two or three really killer selling points that are also constantly mired in some half-baked concepts that make it completely understandable if the game was not for someone else as much as it was for me. Compared to the halcyon days of 2017/2018 when so many games felt fully formed and intentional in every aspect, this game often feels like a really good knock off of a Jackson Pollock piece, with every bit of 2010s game design applied to it and nearly all of it done well but almost none of it done just right.

If it wasn't for Persona 5 Royal this would of been my favorite game of the year.

Three things really stood out to me. First the combat, I'm totally all for super power fantasy games and boy was this one. As everyone has said the game basically becomes too easy, but I kinda loved that and felt it actually matched well with the legend of the "Ghost" growing, because damn you really do just mow down everyone. Another huge thing I loved, as with most, is the way it looked. Wow this game is just beautiful. Personally this game is right in my wheel house of the aesthetics that I like and not only was it the style I like, but they just made it so beautiful. Lastly the voice acting, I played in English and felt it was amazing. I especially loved Jin's performance. Just felt it matched so well.

I think I'm a bit different then most here on the story. People seem to overall be a bit down or meh on it, but personally I liked it. Also it seems most are saying how predictable it all was and I'm a little surprised. I agree that overall elements can be a little cliche (student betraying teaching and him hunting them down, vengeful monk), but how each played out I don't think was this generic predictable mass of stories. I mean for Ishikawa sensei's story, his student just leaving for the mainland and him being like, ok, didn't seem like it would be the natural outcome. Did honestly no one thing that one, or both would die? And Lady Masako eventually hunting down her own sister and having her sister end her own life was something I didn't see coming. I have to say though that Lady Masako's story in general, seemed fresh, I mean how often to we get angry, remorseful, vengeful grandmother/mom stories? Usually mom's are killed off.

The final ending choice I enjoyed. Seemed like a nice way for you to chose how your Jin will be sent off.

I don't think the story that it tells is bad or anything it's just very serviceable. It won't be one of the things I remember when I look back on the game, fondly or otherwise.

Which is fine, it wasn't what I went into the game looking for and it didn't hold back the rest of the experience either so it all worked out.

I guess for me, it's not that it's "predictable" because most stories are predictable if you go into them trying to stay one step ahead of the writers. I find some critics suffocate themselves in tropes and CinemaSins type dialogue attempting to prove they're smarter than the writers because they...thought of the same thing the writers thought of before they saw/read the writer do the thing?

But I was let down when Act II starts drifting into the stuff with the Yarikawa Rebellion, Tomoe perhaps not being who Ishikawa initially presents her to be, Masako's clan's undoing perhaps being more of a Parasite situation than she realizes...but then you're a few minutes into Act III and all those class issues are just tossed aside for a number of revenge stories that all felt a little desperate to end. And a lot of the back half had that feeling of "well, we committed to this story beat, so here it is!" Jin getting snuck up on and knocked out from behind, Masako turning into an enemy and then a friend again within a minute, Jin getting hit with a poison arrow fired from a camp teeming with Mongols and then...just walking slow until he passes out and survives because?

Again, playing in Japanese I found the acting really elevated these scenarios, but everything I've seen of the English portrayals comes off so stoic and dry, especially when paired with the PS2-era Grand Theft Auto style that most of the conversations have, if even that. I didn't actively dislike any of this really, but as somebody who hunted down all the records and side quests and everything I did spend a lot of time playing a game in which I needed to read the subtitles to know what was going on instead reading my newspaper subscriptions and forum threads.

serviceable is the right way to describe this game. And the more I play, the more it kinda goes down in my opinion. I need a compelling character to make me care about what's going on, and Jin is not it. He's a humorless cypher of a character who grumbles about honor--and that's it. Someone already said that if you're going to do grim and serious, you need nuance--and boy this game does not have it all.

An example: There's a mission in which a woman tasks you to go and take back the rice from a group of bandits who stole it from her. You go find and deal with them. You take the rice back to her. Turns out, the woman was lying because she felt she was more deserving of the rice, effectively sending those men to their deaths. Jin lightly chastises her for, you know, being a fucking sociopathic asshole--and that's it. That's the mission. It does nothing with the fucked up morality, or you were basically sent to murder innocent men. Nope. You just get a small bump of exp. And there's a lot of moments like this in Tsushima. Where the game makes half-assed declarations about the morality of Samurai, but doesn't really mean it because it doesn't really care about any of it.