If this game was made by Ubisoft it wouldn’t get nearly the praise it did. I feel like it’s a giant game of fetch quests and the only real saving grace is the terrain and the combat. A lot of its design choices get a pass simply because the game presents itself as serious and cinematic. If you strip that away, what’s left is very familiar open-world padding.
Ghost of Yotei
The Pros:
- The combat is excellent. They took the Arkham formula and formed it into a Samurai game. It’s not without its flaws, but it is easily the best part of the game and carries most of the experience.
- The visuals, when you’re not right next to someone, are gorgeous. The environments do a lot of heavy lifting.
- Bounties were cool and at least tried to break up the routine.
- The story is ok. It works, but it’s nothing special.
And it ends there.
The Cons:
- The game LOVES to tell you how beautiful it is by making you do lazy parkour up to mountain tops over and over again. This feels less like intentional design and more like a way to distract from how unimaginative the moment-to-moment gameplay really is.
- How many total lines did they record for this game? Do I really need the lady at every village to tell me the same thing about following a fox? This kind of repetition constantly reminds you that you’re playing a system, not living in a world.
- I’m playing on performance mode, but the graphics up close are horrendous. Some of the worst facial animations I’ve seen. People legitimately look like cardboard during emotional moments.
- The boring puzzles in one of the ranges were just lame and felt like they existed purely to slow you down and pad out playtime.
- I should probably put the bounties in the middle tier. While they were one of the better parts, there’s still a lot to be desired in terms of depth and variety.
- There is ZERO immersion in this game. You save a village and then immediately loot some old lady’s house. It feels strange and completely takes you out of the experience.
At this point I’m basically hate playing just to finish it, and I’m almost done. The biggest problem is that they did nothing imaginative to really differentiate this from the first game. Running around hunting for fox charms, hot springs, and painting locations was fine during the first map, but it got old very quickly. By the second stage I was bored out of my mind.
They had a few moments where world events actually happened, but those were far and few between. Most of the time you’re just performing the same activities again instead of being surprised or challenged in new ways. Once you understand the systems, the game stops pushing back entirely.
In my opinion this would have been much better if they focused on a more limited open world and kept the narrative flowing. They could have put those resources into bigger set pieces, better character models, and more interesting traversal and parkour. Having someone actively hunt you throughout the game could have added tension and led to a meaningful final showdown.
The whole game felt lazy after the first section, and if I had to score it, I’d give it a 6/10 strictly for the combat and the views. It’s polished, but not creative, and polish only carries you so far.
