First things first: I went into this game hyped as all get out. I wasn’t tracking any of its development, but I was keyed in closely once it came out and got rave reviews. It sounded like a game very firmly in my wheelhouse, what with feudal Japan and samurai and my living in Japan and loving the culture.

Things started heating up as I got a PS5 and three weeks later went on a five month long deployment. During said deployment, the Director’s Cut for GOT got announced for PS5, and it dominated my game thoughts and Google searches from the awful aircraft carrier internet for months. I knew I would play it as soon as I got home, and before I ever touched it, I kind of decided I would love it. As it turns out, I loved it more than I thought I would. What follows are my usual loosely assembled notes taken throughout gameplay with not very much structure, edited for clarity.

Okay so for those who don’t know, the wind is the in-game pointer for how you get to your next objective. Whereas normally there’s some tacky onscreen prompt showing you exactly where to go, this keeps the screen clean, and the effect is moody and artistic. Watch the occasional wind line or note the leaves, grass, or snow blowing to stay on track.

When you first encounter the mechanic, you’ve washed up on a beach. You see a flashback where your uncle hands you your now deceased father’s sword and says his spirit is in the sword. Your uncle says your father’s spirit will guide you from the afterlife. Back in the present, you face the island, back to the water, and the wind blows in from the ocean onto the land.

In Japan, there is a holiday that is vaguely Día de los Muertos-like, where spirits of your ancestors can cross into the physical realm and interact with their living descendants. And the spirits come in from the ocean onto land. Just like the wind that comes in, as if your dad’s spirit is telling you where to go.

Freaking insane. I don’t know that they did that deliberately or not, but the connection is astonishing. This happens very near the beginning of the game, and as it turns out, this was just a taste of what was to come.

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That title card. That reveal. Omg. The presentation in this game is top tier.

The story. The set up. The characters. Jin’s resolve and his failures and his hurts and his ghosts are poignant and personal. His devotion to honor and duty and defending the defenseless and dying for a cause and everything. All of it resonates so much. Being haunted by the ghosts of his failures but wanting to fight and succeed and rise above them is just so emotionally rich and moving to me.

Loving the discourse about breaking the code vs. bending it, making the society better by bringing order and delivering justice in the open. And isn’t living to fight the Mongols better than dying by a code? It’s all really meaty stuff and dovetails with kind of broader ethics of war discussions.

The controller has a little touch pad thing with a button and also swipe gestures. It took me a minute to figure out the swipe gestures besides up for wind, haha. The game even tried to tell me but I wasn’t picking up what it was putting down.

I love that there’s draw and sheath sword commands and that there are so many different animations for them.

Also I did not realize the dismount button was circle for a long while. Kept jumping off the horse like a buffoon and wondering why they designed it that way 😂

I am absolutely absorbed in this game. It takes its cues from a lot of the best of the genre, so I’m catching on quicker than I have in some of the more daunting games I’ve played recently. And the atmosphere/presentation is simply astonishing. I want to do everything, see everything, take in everything.

There’s a pleasant amount of unexpected humor and good characters in this game. The stories of each one are compelling and take some interesting turns. More than once, you’re blindsided with some news that Japanese have defected to helping the Mongols, or a lady who you’re helping get rice back from bandits actually lied to you about the situation. It’s all pretty interesting, and we’ve come a long way from the Spider-Man 2s and Assassin’s Creeds of the world where you do the same four overworld missions over and over again.

One thing is, I turned off enemy status indicators and put the game on hard from the outset, at my brother’s recommendation. This gave the game a bit of a steep learning curve. Putting it on hard meant at first, you die fast, so you die a lot, and it made it hard to get in sync with the game’s combat, so there was a bit of a vicious cycle of dying because I wasn’t getting good, and not getting good because I was dying.

At first, I kept wanting to compare this game/play it like Shadow of Mordor, but I couldn’t. Enemies do NOT attack you one at a time, and you cannot interrupt many of your attacks in order to parry or even guard, unlike Mordor when you can hit counter at any moment and it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. This combat is going to require a lot more mastery, which I think fits and makes its combat a little less cheap, but more demanding.

I remain impressed by the level of detail that goes into so many of the would-be throwaway side missions. Some of them unravel into these multi part mini missions that have the same level of care put into them as main missions.

One gripe with this game: the various gadgets and tools and abilities you progressively unlock get kind of lost in the sauce. It’s true of Spider-Man and Batman as well, but both those titles give you marginally better quick fire options and less dense sub-menus for assigning slots or equipping things. Tsushima has a lot, and they’re sort of confusing. I often don’t even end up using what’s available to me since equipping it before you need it is hard to do before you know you need it, and equipping things on the fly isn’t always feasible, as the game doesn’t fully pause to let you choose.

I will note as the game went on, I got a little better at this and more used to its different menus for this. (Even calling them menus isn’t accurate. More like interfaces.) But at the end of the day, you can assign one ranged weapon at a time and one quick fire weapon/gadget at a time, and you almost have to just pick one and commit to it rather than trying to produce the appropriate one in the heat of battle. For instance, if you’re in a pinch and want to throw a smoke bomb to make a getaway, it’s kind of too late to use it if it’s not already assigned. Again, once I got the hang of the interface, it became a little more manageable, but what this often boiled down to for me was either living or dying by the sword. Half the time I didn’t even use whatever quick fire gadget was assigned because I wasn’t thinking about it.

I think one of the keys to making the Arkham combat systems work lies in this concept. Arkham combat is about making you feel like Batman: invincible, unstoppable, untouchable, resourceful, unflappable. The highest gratification comes from flawless free flow, effortlessly dancing from one enemy to the next, chaining strikes, counters, stuns, dodges, and a variety of special gadgets and combo moves to be the Bat. The game rewards you for mixing up your repertoire and spreading your energy across the diverse web of abilities.

Where Arkham seemingly rewards players for straying to the periphery of Batman’s abilities to become increasingly more capable and resourceful, I find myself pulled to the core of the combat in Tsushima: swordplay. I occasionally dip into the periphery of items, but whether it’s my preference or the game’s intent, it seems embodying a samurai and going whole hog in this feudal Japan simulator means wielding the blade—and that is what I generally do.

I’m still finding out so many beautiful things about this game. I just checked the wind direction and Jin produced a red maple leaf (momiji 🍁) and released it gently into the wind.

Every time I think I’ve seen all the game has to offer, particularly I mean environmentally, it keeps throwing new things at me. It’s mind blowing how diverse the environments are and how seamlessly the game stitches them all together. You can look at the map and see a patch you haven’t explored before, go there to explore it, and find something truly special, and you’ll ask yourself how you missed it. In that way, it reminds me of Breath of the Wild, whose map has countless diverse, beautiful areas which all manage to have a distinct feel and identity. You can drop me into a place on Tsushima or in Hyrule, and I’ll know whether I’ve been there or not, which is more than you can say for many open world games whose environments may look samey even as they look nice.

++++SPOILERS++++
THEY DID NOT JUST KILL KAGE NFW. Omg. He has his own burial scene and his own gravesite you can revisit 😭 It’s a testament to Sucker Punch’s storytelling that I was more emotionally invested in MY HORSE than in most other movie or game characters I’ve seen die recently. Naughty Dog is not the only studio out there doing great storytelling, y’all.
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One thing I really appreciate about this game is 1) they put in the work and make every single side quest and mission unique and part of the overarching narrative for either the characters or the island as a whole and 2) the main characters you pal around with all have serious doubts and struggles and flaws and find themselves at odds with Jin sometimes.

I wish Jin’s onsen meditations lasted longer.

It would be stellar if you could sort or filter items on your effing map. The game gives you zero control over this.

Okay so I am writing this outro after 82 hours of gameplay. 662 screenshots. Every quest and collectible and trophy. By the time I finished, I had seen the entire island, maxed out my legend, gotten every ability, and basically did/bought/unlocked every thing in the game except a number of cosmetic items. I have absorbed Ghost of Tsushima into my soul. I love it. I live and breathe it. It’s the only game I played besides some Phoenix Wright for almost three months.

I think it’s fair to say I’ve mastered it. By the time I finished, I could actually hold my own against enemies on the Lethal difficulty mode, which advertises that you will die in about one strike, but what I didn’t realize the first time I tried it is that your enemies die faster, too. It creates exhilarating combat when the stakes are so high, and your enemies die so fast that you feel extremely accomplished after even a mundane encounter.

I have more to do. I want to play Iki Island and some of the cool multiplayer features, and some day (maybe soon) I will do a new game+.

I have endless good things to say about this game. I adore its story, its characters, and its presentation. It’s one of the tightest, most meaningful, well realized stories I’ve seen in a game. I found it moving and powerful. The game is pornographically beautiful, with both nature and Japanese culture being represented in dumbfoundingly gorgeous ways. Painfully beautiful to look at. It’s also an amazingly fun game. I got absorbed by the island and all its secrets and things to do, but I can see where some people would yawn and get tired of it. Didn’t bother me in the slightest though. I wanted to scour the island and suck the marrow out of it.

Tsushima is very much a character in the game, a stand-in for the people you’re defending and sacrificing for. It helps that it’s stunning to behold and be a part of, and I feel similarly about Tsushima as I felt about Arkham Knight’s Gotham City, which is to say, the laundry list of exploring tasks on offer give me a sort of guided tour through the whole island and its hidden nooks and crannies, which I love.

In fact, I realize now I haven’t really discussed the graphics at great length. Bottom line, it’s probably the best looking video game I have ever played. What’s astonishing about it is not that its lighting and weather look so good, it’s that they’re dynamic and look so good. It’s a categorical difference to see a gorgeous vista in, say, Uncharted, which was scripted and always looks the same at that part of the game, versus Tsushima, whose weather and time of day constantly change and must perform anywhere in the game world. And they DO perform, to my often slack-jawed amazement.

Graphic flourishes abound. There are leaves to kick up as you run, footprints to leave in the snow, blood on clothes, armor, blades, and the ground, light penetrating leaves and paper shoji doors, sweat and tears on faces, and so much more. Some of the animal animations are a few clicks into janky territory, but the character animations are amazing, and it looks terrific at 4K and/or 60 FPS (which on PS5 it basically maintains both). I can’t get enough of the combat animations, and the team is to be commended for how they made the fighting look both brutal and elegant.

The soundtrack is great, and the sound design too. It has one of the greatest photo modes I’ve seen yet, although every game I’ve played has some photo mode features unique to it or done way better by it than the competition, and Tsushima’s could use some of those features. I wish it had a motion blur setting, and I would’ve enjoyed a little more variety from the color filters. (We don’t all have to be Spider-Man though.) I also wish it gave you more control over disappearing characters out of frame. Uncharted particularly gives you a lot of control over this.

Okay this part was supposed to tie the notes together, but as I looked at the notes, I realized that I quickly stopped taking notes and just guzzled down the gameplay, so I’ll wrap it up here for now. I may add another review here once I do Iki Island and some of the other features, but till then, I’ll just say that Ghost of Tsushima has claimed a place in the pantheon of my favorite games of all time.

+++SPOILERS++++
Jin, upon hearing that the shogun disbanded Clan Sakai and that he is no longer samurai: “I sacrificed everything for my people. And I would do it again.”

“You have no honor.” “And you are a slave to it.”
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