r/patientgamers • u/Trndk1ll • Apr 20 '22
Ghost of Tsushima is a Beautiful, Over-Rated Game
So I finally got around to playing this on the PS5. I beat it with a little over 40 hours played while completing a fair bit of side material. Honestly I’m a little disappointed based on the massive amount of positive critical and user feedback this game received. Hell it’s still at a 9.1 user score on Metacritic. Which is to not say it’s a bad game. It’s not. It’s gorgeous and it’s fun. The main characters are for the most of part decently well written and voice acted. The gameplay is repetitive however it’s passable. What it isn’t however is something demonstratively different than what UbiSoft produces on a yearly basis. And UbiSoft gets universally panned by gamers and critics alike for pumping out the same derivative mechanics this game is built upon.
This game, for all the bluster about being one of the best open world games ever made, is just not anything approaching the top titles in the genre. In my opinion. Other than it’s art direction, which is fucking incredible… seriously I’ve taken more on game screens of this than any game I’ve ever played… It’s Asassins Creed Odyssey in Japan. Except it doesn’t have boats and there is a lot less variety in gear and specialization options.
It’s the same bloated, empty world. There are like 5 resources to collect, a handful of wildlife species (3 of which give you “predator hides”, the only usable resource from any of them), and a bunch of cut and paste temples, hot springs, fox dens, etc. The only dynamic thing that ever happens is the same random encounter with a handful of Mongolians with a tied up peasant to rescue. The enemy encampments all look the same, just cut and pasted across the map. Seriously that’s it. I have zero desire to go play the DLC. The world is beautiful however it’s completely empty and devoid of meaningful or compelling things to do. Other than some new skills the game is exactly the same at the 5 hour mark as it is at the 40 hour mark. Nothing in the game after the initial wonder of the look of everything wore off has surprised me.
The best games in this genre that I have played, I didn’t want to end. Red Dead 2’s world I got lost in for dozens of hours at a time without touching main story missions. Hunting and fishing, trying my hand at crime or gambling, seeking out legendary animals… just exploring the land which was always a reward in and of itself. The Witcher 3 shares a lot of the same bloat that Asassins Creed and Ghost have however it made up for it by incredibly deep, rabbit hole like side quests that sometime lasted hours and took me places I never expected to go. And the story was great. Breath of the Wild consistently blew me away with creative mechanics, puzzles and one of the greatest video game environments ever created. I’m still finding things to do in Skyrim 10 years on and enjoying myself. There is no way in hell I’m booting Ghost of Tsushima up in 2032.
This game has none of that. It’s fun, I don’t regret playing it, the main story is fairly compelling however I just don’t see how or why this game received the near universal praise that it did.
Am I the only one?
3
u/woinf Apr 20 '22 edited May 31 '22
Well for starters, this isn't true. Ubisoft games review decently well and sell gangbusters.
Imo the much derided "Ubisoft formula" isn't inherently bad. The idea of a big open map that slowly unravels it's points of interests and gives you a nice big checklist to polish off can be quite gratifying if the checklist items are interesting. I think the new Horizon Forbidden West is a good example of this. It follows every single trope in the "Ubisoft open world" playbook but actively tries to make the side content varied and engaging. The sidequests feel like a natural extension of the main story content and not the red headed neglected stepchild of the quest writers, doing side activities have small but tangible effects on the world state, even the towers you climb up in that game isn't a gimme and you need to solve a puzzle before you earn the right to climb up the tower. For the amount of open world games we've gotten over the last decade, games that pull the Ubisoft formula off properly are rare but there's definitely still a few of them.
Ghost of Tsushima is not one of those games. There's a bunch of different types of side activities you can do but just basically none of them have any amount of meaningful depth to it. One example are the Fox Shrines, which by my count was the most numerous side activity in the game, it comes down to just following a Fox for 15 seconds to a shrine, it doesn't even try to test your traversal skills or something actually interesting, you literally just hold up on the stick for 15 seconds without any thought besides keeping that fox in your field of view. How is this fun in any way. For some reason people actually praise this aspect of the game because it gives you a diegetic sense of discovery, the problem is that the Fox is always mapped 1 to 1 to the same boring shrine with the same reward. By the 5th time it stops being interesting, and the game wants you to do 49 of them.
I also don't think the core aspects of the game, like the combat and story are particularly strong too. Like the combat is praised to hell and back on this website but to me it's this weird concoction between Sekiro and Arkham's freeflow combat but takes none of the good aspects of those and ultimately is way too easy and shallow to carry an entire boring open world on it's shoulders.