Thursday, April 8, 2021

Ghost of Tsushima Game Analysis

You can find the video version of this analysis here.

Overview

Ghost of Tsushima is an open world action stealth game developed by Sucker Punch Productions and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment in July 2020. It has only been released on the Playstation 4 and 5. It is set in a slightly fictionalized version of Japan in the year of 1274, during the Mongol invasion of Japan.

Dramatic Elements

Ghost of Tsushima features a lengthy and involved story. Consider this your spoiler warning. If you don't want to know anything about the characters and story, please skip ahead to this section.

Characters and Story

Main Story

Ghost of Tsushima follows the story of the fictional samurai and head of the Sakai clan, Jin. His father died before his eyes when he was young, and his uncle, Lord Shimura, raised him.

At the start of the game, Jin, Shimura, and all the samurai of Tsushima have gathered together to face the Mongol invaders. Similarly to the real historical events, the initial battle does not go well for the Japanese, who are soundly defeated. Shimura is taken captive by Khoutun Khan, a fictional relative of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Jin is left for dead on the battlefield, but is rescued by a local thief, Yuna. Because Jin is young and idealistic, and frankly foolhardy, he goes to rescue his uncle by himself, and is promptly thrown from the bridge to the castle. He barely survives.

This conflict, between Jin's views of samurai honor and duty, and the more prudent path, makes its first appearance here. After surviving, Jin finds Yuna again and the two begin gathering allies, much like in Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai. You complete a few quests to gather them to your side, and to expand your movement abilities with a hook for climbing, and you set off to free your uncle a second time. Your allies include Yuna's brother, Taka, their friend Kenji, your friend and ronin Ryuzo, a famed archer named Ishikawa, and a local noble and warrior named Lady Masako.

Although you are betrayed by one of your allies, you manage to free your uncle. This opens up the middle section of the island, and you begin another round of quests to get reinforcements and allies.

This time the climax does not proceed smoothly. When you breach the castle walls and are about to enter the main keep, many of your soldiers are killed by a Mongol trap. Jin and his uncle come to a head about this: Jin insists that he should be allowed to sneak in, take out some of the Mongols, and allow the soldiers to enter with less resistance. Lord Shimura wants to do things the samurai way, which while honorable, will undoubtedly get many of the soldiers killed and may even result in a loss. Jin decides to sneak in and poison the Mongols and he has a final showdown with his betrayer.

Although the siege was a success, Jin's uncle waits for word from the shogun to put him on trial for conduct unbefitting a samurai. One of his friends helps him escape, and you begin yet another round of quests to gather allies for the final push to expel the Mongols from Tsushima.

After defeating the Mongol general, there is a short epilogue where Jin will confront his uncle. You may decide to spare his life or kill him, but this has no ramifications on exploring the world afterwards.

Character-Based Quests

There are a large number of character-based quests in Ghost of Tsushima. You will only have to complete the first step of Ishikawa and Lady Masako's quest in order to recruit them to your cause and can safely ignore them for the rest of the game if you wish.

Ishikawa is a famous archer, and his quest revolves around tracking down a former student of his who appears to be helping the Mongols and teaching them the secrets of Japanese archery. I enjoyed the nuances of this story-line quite a bit, as it becomes clear that you can see the student's actions, and Ishikawa's under a few different lights.

Lady Masako's story is a straight-up mystery revenge plot. You will probably guess who the architect of Lady Masako's misery is a few stroy beats before the finale, but it is still an enjoyable tale.

Yuna's tales all involve some aspect of her checkered or horrific past.

Norio is a warrior monk you will meet after rescuing your uncle. His stories are about re-establishing Cedar Temple, tracking down captured monks, and getting revenge against the Mongols for killing his brother.

Kenji's tales usually involve him trying to grift someone unsuccessfully, and provide a bit of comic relief.

Formal Elements

Players

Ghost of Tsushima is a strictly single player game, although there is a "Legends" playmode that is multiplayer.

Rules

Movement and Combat

Like many open world games, Ghost of Tsushima has a complicated set of rules regarding movement. Jin can walk and run around the game world, although his running is limited by an invisible stamina meter. He can also climb on buildings, vault fences, and climb rock ledges that have been marked as climbable. Jin can swim, and can hold his breath underwater for a about 20-30 seconds in order to evade the attention of enemies. After you have received your grappling hook, you can use this to latch onto specially marked points and swing or climb them. Jin can jump across quite large gaps even without using his hook. If you fall from too large a height, you will take damage and may die. Later on, you can increase this distance by unlocking the ability to roll when you land and soft the force.

You can also move around the map using your horse. Your horse will jump over low barriers automatically, and has unlimited stamina. If you fall from too large a height while on horseback, you will die and must reload a save. Lower heights will simply cause you to fall off the horse, receiving no damage. Your horse cannot be killed, and like in many open world games can be called to your side by whistling.

Combat is quite fast, and enemies have shorter tells compared to many other melee combat games. You will use the same weapons through out the game: a katana for melee combat, a tanto for stealth kills, a bow for ranged combat, and a heavy bow for dealing more damage. Later on you also get a blowgun, but this is of limited use.

When engaged in melee combat, you can use light and heavy attacks in different stances to best take down the particular enemy you are facing. Heavy attacks deal more damage, and are mostly used to build the stagger meter on your enemies when they are blocking. The Wind stance is most effective against enemies using spears or halbeards, and you can use heavy attacks to knock them off their feet and deal stagger damage to them. Staggered enemies cannot block or defend themselves for a few seconds, so staggering them is quite effective. Stone stance is best for other swordsmen, Water is best for shielded enemies, and Moon is best for brutes. When an enemy attacks you, you generally have the same options as you do in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: you may dodge, block, parry, or jump. A low sweeping attack may be jumped over, and most attacks can simply be blocked. If you block at the last moment, this triggers a parry and you may perform a counterattack. Dodging allows you to avoid the attack completely, and may be necessary quite often in the early game, as the enemies will have many unblockable attacks.

Performing parries replenishes some of your resolve, as does killing enemies. Resolve can be used to heal, and (similarly to Sekiro) also to resurrect yourself if you die in combat. Most of your legendary techniques cost different amounts of resolve to use.

In practice, however, the combat feels very different from Sekiro. First, the types of attacks that are unblockable change over time as you level up. Second, unlike Sekiro, you do not have a stagger meter yourself. You can block as much or as long as you like and as long as enemies do not perform an unblockable attack. This removes most of the feeling of standing toe to toe against a powerful enemy without flinching or hestitating.

Fear also plays a large role as the game progresses. You will unlock armors and techniques which increase the fear of your enemies. Performing these techniques will cause nearby enemies to drop their weapons and cower in terror, or even runaway.

The stance matching is also a difference from Sekiro, and it doesn't feel similar to the stances from Nioh, either. The best comparision is actually the stances from the original Witcher game, with certain enemies being most vulnerable to particular stances and resistant to others.

The last difference is with difficulty and strategy. The enemies gain more armor as you progress through the game, with enemies in the first area being mostly unarmored, and those in the last being the most heavily armored. However, it still only takes a handful of sword swings to kill any enemy, with the exception of bosses and duel partners. Even for the bosses, you can handle these using the same techniques that you use on all the other enemies, and you don't have to use particular strategies or armor to fight them.

While the combat is fun and engaging at first, and it always looks stylish and cool, I found myself using basically the same strategy with nearly every enemy encounter in the game: match my stance to whatever weapon they have, then begin attacking and building their stagger meter. Parry any of their attacks, and continue until they are dead.

Stealth

Besides holding your breath underwater, you may enter a stealth mode on land. You will crouch down and it will be more difficult for enemies to spot you. You can throw wind chimes to attract enemies' attention to particular points, and they will also come to investigate fallen comrades.

If you get close to an enemy from the rear you can stealth kill them. You may also stealth kill an enemy by leaping on them from a height, and later on you unlock the ability to chain a few stealth kills together if there are other enemies nearby.

Using the bows and blowguns further allows you to silently take out enemies from a distance.

There is also a stealth vision mode which lets you "hear" enemies through barriers and at a distance for increased tactical play.

The movement system plays a critical part in stealth gameplay. You can approach a Mongol camp from the rear using cliffs, take out enemies from above, and use towers, your grappling hook, ropes strung between buildings, and the heights of the buildings themselves to sneak around like a ninja and take out enemies with relative impunity. Some camps have signals or enemies with horns who will call reinforcements if alerted, making for an increased challenge if detected.

This smoothness in slipping back and forth between a "dirty, under-handed" approach and calling out individual enemies for a duel is at the heart of the main conflict in Ghost of Tsushima.

Inventory

Ghost of Tsushima has a simple inventory system. You have a limited number of slots for quick items, and you can replenish them by purchasing them from vendors, or finding them scattered around the world. Besides these, there many different types of resouces you can find, including something just called supplies, different kinds of wood, cloth, and metal. These are used to upgrade your armors and weapons.

You cannot drop items, and there is a cap of 500 for the crafting resources. These can be sold for supplies at vendors.

Any headbands, masks, helmets, charms, weapon kits, or armor set you have picked up will remain in your possession, allowing you to change them at almost any moment.

Level up

The leveling system in Ghost of Tsushima is tied to your progress through the main story, the number of Mongol camps you have liberated, and the number of sidequests you have completed.

As you can see in the table, completing each "legend" level grants a number of technique points along the way. It also increases your health, and sometimes gives you a charm.
Legend Title Number of Technique Points
The Broken Samurai 2
The Wandering Samurai 3
The People's Hope 4
The Unyielding Wind 5
The Shadow Samurai 6
The Hero of Tsushima 6
The Avenging Guarding 7
The Phantom Samurai 7
The Demon Blade 9
The Raging Storm 9
Ghost of Tsushima NA

These technique points can be used to unlock buffs for your four stances, improve your ghost weapons, and progress through two skill trees titled Deflection and Evasion.

Conflicts

I have already mentioned the conflict between the notions of honor and practicality. This manifests itself between Jin and himself, as he must reject some of his past and his beliefs in order to rescue his uncle, and it also appears between the two men themselves.

This appears in terms of gameplay, as you will switch back and forth between samurai-inspired sword-play and ninja stealth climbing and assassinations.

Another aspect of this is the conflict between the Japanese and the Mongols. Besides the physical conflict, the Mongols represent practicatilty and a certain Machiavellian attitude, while the Japanese represent honor and inflexibility.

Finally, you see this same struggle between Jin and the various ronin and bandits you encounter randomly as you travel around Tsushima.

Boundaries

I have already mentioned the limitations regarding inventory. Besides those, there are story-based movement restrictions. Once you have escaped from your uncle in act 3, the first two areas of the game become inaccessable until you complete a certain mission. Other areas will be blocked off until you have completed the necessary parts of the story.

Outcomes

There is one main outcome: you defeat the leader of the Mongol invasion, and drive the Mongols from the island. Your dialogue choices throughout the game, the choices you made in composing the different haiku, how far you have completed the stories for Yuriko, Kenji, Yuna, etc, whether you decide to kill or spare your uncle in the final confrontation...None of this has any impact on the final state of the game.

Dynamic Elements


The dynamic friction pattern appears in many places. First, in the beginning, you might complete a quest with a minor legend increase, and this will completely fill one section of your legend bar, giving you a technique stone. Later on, this is minor increase will fill a much smaller amount.

Second, as you move further into skill upgrades, the number of skill points required for each skill will sometimes increase.


The static friction pattern also appears in the skill trees. Most of the skills cost a single point.

 


The escalating challenge pattern makes a minor appearance in Ghost of Tsushima. The enemies do somewhat increase in power as you progress through the game.


The play style reinforcement pattern appears mostly in the form of whether you choose to clear a camp with stealth or with samurai combat. Clearing camps is one of the main side forms of receiving legend increases and technique points, which you can then use to bolster your prefered play skill set. Your main armor set usually has a small contribution to your different attack stats, and thus may be included in this pattern. The different masks, headbands, and helmets have no effects on gameplay.


The static engine makes its classic appearance as the generator for technique points. You get them at pretty regular intervals for completing side quests, main quests, and clearing camps.


The trade pattern makes a minor appearance in that you can sell crafting items to receive supplies.
The stoppping mechanism appears in the familiar places: you have a limited amount of resolve, and limited means for replenishing it, an this stops you from spamming your healling abilities and special attacks.

Conclusion

Let me mention here that I studied Japanese in college, and that since 2009, I have been living in Japan. I grew up watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and soon after that graduated to Ghost in the Shell, Berserk, Lone Wolf and Cub, and a host of other Japanese anime and manga. Although technically we don't have "belts" in Japanese fencing, I have a second degree black belt in kendo.

During my time in Japan, I have visited several dozen castles, more shrines and temples than I can count, and visited approximately half of the 47 prefectures. My wife is Japanese, and although I am not fluent in Japanese, my Japanese ability is passable.

In terms of its looks, it is difficult to think of a game that captures more of the spirit and palette of Japan. The only one that comes immediately to mind is Total War: Shogun 2, and even that game pales before Ghost of Tsushima. In many ways, it is actually more Japanese than Japan itself is. Modern Japan has huge areas in the cities and suburbs that could easily be mistaken for New York, London, or Sydney. Of course, these cannot be featured in a game set in 1274, but still...if you explore the countryside as I have, you will find vistas that would not look out of in France, Switzerland, or any other country with a temperate climate.

The developers have instead condensed the essence of Japanese scenary and jammed it all onto the island of Tsushima. Thus, although the invasion landed on Tsushima on November 4th, 1274, the early game scenary is made to feature foliage from early autumn and summer. The northern section of the game is meanwhile covered in thick drifts and a layer of snow, despite being only 70 kilometers from northern tip to southern tip in the real world. The middle area is home to a swampy area with elevated broad walkways similar to what you can find in Oze National Park, stands of bamboo that you can see in many asian countries, and dramatic sea cliffs like in Jogasaki.

Having listened to the Japanese audio version of the game, I can tell you that although there are trees with white flowers that drop in the wind like the famous Japanese cherry blossom trees, they are not called "sakura" in the game. If you are at all familiar with cherry blossom trees, you know that they bloom in the spring, usually between late February and early April. In the game, these trees are sometimes referred to as having been struck by lightning. One minor grudge with the Japanese audio is that the lips of the models are automatically synched to the English version of the game, no matter which one you're listening to. Since the dialogue is unskippable, you are stuck looking at what appears to be a badly dubbed American movie.

On the plus side, the character design and relationships are great. The characters are all voice-acted superbly, and the story itself, while not groundbreaking, is sold. There are no romance storylines, thank god, and the animation quality is top-notch.
In terms of combat and movement, the game attempts to bring to video game format both the speed and tension Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, and the fluidity, grace and brutality of a stealth ninja movie, such as Enter the Ninja or American Ninja. The cinematic references themselves mirror some of the developer's own stated influences. I cannot praise the developers enough in the first of these tasks. The combat is fun and tense, navigation is fluid and smooth, and the game simply looks fantastic. The AI has received criticism for being simplistic and making stealth somewhat easy to pull off, but that is a minor problem.

Where I have to level harsh criticism is in the extraneous game elements. In the game, you can collect banners from different samurai clans in order to receive costmetic upgrades to your saddle. You are also rewarded with chucks of story for each upgrade you purchase. But, there are 80 of these banners scattered around a large, vertically challenging landscape.

Furthermore, you can visit Inari shrines to upgrade your charms, but there are 49 of these. Following a cute fox to get a minor reward is entertaining the first 5-10 times, but 49 is ridiculous. Then there are the large navigational puzzles when you visit regular shrines, and thankfully there are only 16 of these. You can compose haiku in specific locations, and there are 19 of these. Composing haikus gives you a headband, which you will probably never wear. If you liberate all the Mongol held villages, camps, breweries, mines etc, you will have done so 57 times. There are 18 hot springs to soak and relax in and receive a slight health increase. There are 23 Pillars of Honor, which give you a skin change for your sword and tanto, most of which you will probably never use. There are 16 Bamboo Strikes, where you complete a minigame to increase your resolve. There are 40 Records, which are snippets of text written by Japanese refugees or survivors, and there are 50 Mongol Artifacts to collect, which explain more about the Mongols. There are 8 lighthouses that you can light, because apparently the developers felt there were not enough pointless activities already.

Do hot springs feature prominently in Japanese daily life and culture? Yes, of course, and they have for hundreds of years. Same for haiku, visiting shrines, etc. What I object to is the size of the island and thus the number of these activities. According to Twinfinite, the game world is approximately 29 km2, which while that might seem large, is about half the size of The Witcher III plus DLC maps. This 29 km2 is also a 10x reduction from the actual size of Tsushima, which is about 274 km2. I feel that the game could have been made half the size it is, and thus with half the number of activities. The alternative would be to slightly reduce the size, and simply eliminate some of the activities or greatly reduce their number. Increasing the movement speed of your horse might also help.

In the current game, the sheer repetition of them, which is required in order to make the large game world feel full and to increase the chances of a player stumbling on one of these activities, is onerous and tedious, and many of the activities are highly unoriginal to boot. Collecting banners has been done by Ubisoft since Assassin's Creed in 2007, which also featured climbing towers, incidentally. Navigational puzzles of the same or similar design and caliber can be found in 2007's Uncharted or even earlier in God of War (2005) or God of War II, also released in 2007.

There are seven mythic tales, which give you either legendary armor sets or new abilities to use in combat. This is the perfect number! We don't need 35 of these! There are 26 side quests that you can find by talking to villagers or peasants you rescue, and there are 37 quests that are tied to specific characters: 10 for Masako, 9 for Ishikawa and Norio, 4 for Kenji, 3 for Yuna, and two for Yuriko.

To beat this dead horse a bit more, these 26 side quests and 37 character based quests are a side effect of the size of the game world. We simply don't need this many. If they offered twists or difficult decisions the way that Witcher quests often do, it would be wonderful. Most of these are straighforward and unimaginative, however.

As explained before, Ghost of Tsushima has RPG elements. There are 7 Deflection skills and 7 Evasion skills, there are 5 Ghost Weapons, with a total of 9 upgrades, there are 7 Evolving Tactics skills with a total of 13 upgrades, and there are 4 combat stances with 4 upgrades each, for a total of 16 skills. You will probably not find yourself using most of the Ghost weapons very often, and in any case the way that you equip them involves an arcane combination of trigger buttons, D-pad buttons, and face buttons. The reason you will probably not use them so often is because they are simply not necessary. If you compare the Ghost weapons to the different combat abilities in Shadow of Mordor, the Ghost weapons come out poorly. In Shadow of Mordor, you need to use every ability you have to survive the more difficult combat encounters. However, in Ghost of Tshushima, every combat situation can be gotten through using Jin's unupgraded combat stances, without resorting to smoke bombs, sticky bombs, kunai, or the other items. The AI simply is not aggressive enough or smart enough, and enemies do not swarm you the way they do in Shadow of Mordor to necessitate the Ghost weapons.

Continuing the litany, there are five skills that have no other purpose but to unlock the ability to use the Guiding Wind to find different types of locations or items.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love RPGs. I have put over 450 hours into The Witcher series, with the bulk of that being The Witcher III. Across all my playthroughs of Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice there are probably another 700 hours or more. Dragon's Dogma: about 40 hours. Ashen: about 20 hours. Diablo III: about 50 hours. Adding in Morrowind (90 hours), Oblivion (500 hours), Skyrim (450 hours). Fallout 3 (30 hours). Fallout: New Vegas (60 hours). Fallout 4 (90 hours). Grim Dawn (70 hours). Vampyr (40 hours). About 160 hours each for the two Mount and Blade games. I hope I've established my RPG cred with this little list. There are many other games I could add, but you get the idea.
But Ghost of Tsushima does not need all the skills that it has. Similar to the activities, its skill trees have been bloated beyond what is necessary. As one example, the stances each have 4 upgrades. For some stances, these actually add the ability to block attacks that previously had to be dodged, which changes the way you use that stance in combat, but most of them are simply percentage upgrades to building stagger. This is boring and lazy design. It would have been better simply to leave these elements out than keep them in in their current implemention. In similar vein, the five skills for finding objects using the Guiding Wind in particular are simply there because the world is too expansive and finding things can be a pain. These, and the stance skills, would not be needed if the game world design was reduced in scale. Sucker Punch has been copying the playbook of Ubisoft's open world game design wholesale, and in all the worst ways.

One last item in the category of pointless things. You can engage in dialogue periodically with NPCs, and you are often given two or three choices, but these have no affect on the game. They do not alter Jin's character in any way, and they do not change his relationship with other characters. They do not take you down different paths in the story. All you do is press a button and hear a slightly different piece of dialogue.


To finish this analysis, the gameplay itself is quite fun, and the world is abolutely gorgeous. These positive elements are dragged down by rote open world activities, skill design that is lazy, and game design so unoriginal that it includes the ubiquitous red barrels that explode...in a game set in 1274! These in turn are made necessary by a world that is too large for the story it is trying to tell. If you try to complete most of the side activities, you will spoil your enjoyment of the game.
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