At this point I can now pretty confidently state that Ghost of Tsushima fails completely at everything it sets out to do, except for emulating the aesthetics of Kurosawa samurai films and some admittedly impressive technical achievements like its fast loading times.

I can state that I am surprised at this, although my artistic expectations for it going in were low; I was confident it would be a fun video game on basic levels that matter, that it's combat would be good, that its open world would be engaging. But it fails on even these levels.

Everything about it is cheap and perfunctory and absolutely lacking in joy; there is no craft, no love, no sense that any of that good ol' Sony first party budget was really being channeled anywhere, no statement, no purpose. Only some aesthetics.

I'm always down to dunk on Assassin's Creed and other Ubi Open World games, although I acknowledge the actual appeals these titles do bring to bear while "scratching the open-world itch", as we like to say.

All to say; Ghost of Tsushima is a discount Assassin's Creed knockoff.

I can't stop thinking about how you can pet the fox.

I can only imagine that at some point during development someone important was alerted to the existence of @CanYouPetTheDog, and saw the potential for some Brand Engagement. Sure enough, the pact was sealed. https://twitter.com/canyoupetthedog/status/1261301718240935944

There is a single animation for petting the fox. It looks awful. The fox's body invariably clips awkwardly through the terrain. Jin briefly touches its head. It turns around and repeats some of the same idle animations it uses normally.

It was obviously not originally planned.

Point of further note; you actually cannot pet the fox most of the time. Usually the fox will disappear after it has led you to its shrine. Only in select (open-ish, flat-ish) areas will the fox respawn nearby and display the Pet prompt.

A couple of in-game characters, and some marketing, push the idea that while you are exploring, you should keep an eye out for foxes, who might then lead you to hidden shrines.

In fact, foxes only spawn at designated points on the map, which you seek out like any other map icon.

I bring all this up to drive home that absolutely everything about Ghost of Tsushima, taken purely as a video game, is tedious, and nobody seems to have had any idea when they were building it what they were trying to accomplish by it, other than something something samurai.

There are really only two things you do in this game; fight Mongols to clear an icon, or play extremely rudimentary minigames to clear an icon.

(I *kinda* like the Bamboo Strike button tapping mini game, and in retrospect I'm very curious how it plays with accessibility toggles)

Fox Dens, Hot Springs, Haiku, Pillars of Honour, Bamboo Strikes; these things are all different flavours of nothing. They have nothing going for them save for the aesthetics, which are the same as everything else in the game anyway.

This leaves the fighting.

The fighting is *basically* fun, in that the classic light-attack heavy-attack block dodge and parry is a classic for a reason, it's just that the game never really delivers anything new after the first hour or so. It's all extremely rudimentary.

There are little facets of the combat that might have been interesting wrinkles in a parallel universe. You've got ghost weapons, which are different flavours of instakill. You've got stances, which toggle who your heavy attack is effective against.

The combat is balanced in a way that's clearly intended to demand an extent of mastery at all times, but it's never really interestingly difficult, and enemies cheat a fair bit the same way they do in eg. God of War 2018.

There's things you can learn and master and character growth buttons you can press, but these mostly just end things quicker or let you skip them.

The game gradually introduces some new enemy types as it goes on, but never seems to ask that you change how you play in response to any of them.

There are no interesting unique enemies. Instead, there are duels.

Duels are exactly the same as ordinary fights except the enemy is a health sponge and you cannot use half of your weapons for Reasons. Each duel aside from climactic plot ones begins with an identical cutscene.

There are some notionally tactical choices to your load out but they very quickly fade as you inevitably improve at the game, so you'll probably just stick to the one that helps you clean out the map but has no combat utility.

You might also have some aesthetic concerns about loadout, but there's no capability to mix and match stuff from different loadouts or sword kits or anything. For all the sins of eg. Nioh I really appreciated that they obviously understood how important the aesthetic side was.

The result of all this is that every single quest and objective is just an interminable and interchangeable sequence of fights and walking segments, and it's the same in the last hour as it is in the first.

Basically, there is just absolutely nothing to get excited about and no room for any kind of choice or expression in how you play.

The combat evolves, incrementally, as you level up but not in any way that you haven't already seen in a hundred other games. Mostly you just flip switches that turn unblockable unparryable attacks into unblockable parryable ones. You can upgrade a single number on your sword.

You can upgrade your stances, but this just slightly extends some combos or make them do slightly more effective damage against the designated target enemy that stance already deals effective damage to with the single attack that all stances have that deals effective damage.

I'm so fascinated by these stances. The developers have been keen to stress in interviews that the Stone, Wind, Water and Moon stances are all real and authentic and researched. Okay, but in the end they are utterly uncharacteristic. I don't give a shit about any of them.

Contrast, since I've brought that game up already in this thread: Nioh. Nioh has your high, medium and low stance (per weapon!) and by god does Nioh ever make you get intimately familiar with the pros, cons and applicability of each, and make you engage with them as a system.