A respectable effort from Team Ninja to broach the open world genre with another period piece. The familiarly tight and engaging combat elements have demonstrated to become par the course for TN. Regrettably I think they should focus more on shorter, tighter games, as this one started to grate toward the end in a way the Niohs never did. The elements that usually make open-world games fully engrossing have never really been their strong suit (Worldbuilding, game-long character dialogue, deep exploration, etc). So their first foray into putting more thought into those elements didn't rob from the great combat, but also didn't really serve to enhance the experience enough to make the open world choice a knock-out. Still a worthwhile Slashfest through the end of the samurai era.