Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Executive Producer: Shinji Mikami
Producers: Masato Kimura and Shinsaku Ohara
Director: Kenji Kimura
Tango’s latest game is a new IP. After playing all of these Japanese games which star American characters, it’s refreshing to finally play one which takes place in Japan and is firmly rooted in that culture, complete with a Western version that retains the Japanese audio and opts for subtitles. The game is otherwise an unsurprising thing for Bethesda to be releasing these days — it’s a first person open world game with a skill upgrade tree and light stealth elements. There’s quite a lot of verticality in the level design, so it feels a lot like if someone crossed an Arkane game with the open-world segments of The Evil Within 2, throwing in a hint of the Arkham games for good measure.
The story begins as a man named Akito is rushing to the hospital on a motorcycle to see his dying sister, Mari. He gets in an accident and appears to be dead. The spirit of a paranormal investigator who goes by KK then inhabits his body. Soon after, a fog descends over Shibuya, lifting everyone else’s spirits out of their body. The streets are now empty, inhabited only by specters. A man in a Hannya mask (the main villain) shows up on the street TV screens and announces that he is everyone’s only salvation. He steals Akito’s comatose sister’s body, intending to use her as some sort of vessel. Akito initially resists KK’s possession, but agrees to work with him after realizing he can help rescue Mari, as KK provides him with psychic powers that allow him to harness the elements as weapons and find hidden things in his environment.
The story isn’t particularly dense or fleshed out, nor are the characters particularly well developed. The villain especially feels like more of a plot device than a character — we never even get to see his face. It’s the world-building where this game really shines. There’s a database filled with educational information about Japanese culture and food, all based around the items you can pick up in the environment. It teaches you about the neighborhoods in Shibuya, and also characterizes the enemies (‘Visitors’ — faceless malevolent ghosts) in interesting ways, as victims of their own negative feelings in life.
The graphics and art design are excellent — it’s an extremely moody title, taking place on rainy city streets at night, filled with neon lights, dark corners, and reflections. There’s also an option to turn on ray tracing, if you want to make it look really flashy. I actually preferred the vibe with ray tracing turned off, as the ray tracing made it brighter and less moody. Nonetheless, the ray tracing is surprisingly well optimized, to the point that it was almost workable on a mere GTX 1070.
Akito’s arsenal includes harnessing the power of wind (which can essentially act as a machine gun once upgraded), water (which acts as a broad and powerful shotgun), and fire (which can cause burn damage or explosions). Each of these powers can be used in multiple ways, depending on how much it’s charged up and on whether you choose to use the special form of each attack. Ammo for these attacks is found by breaking spirit items in the environment, which include things like the ghostly specters of bicycles and vending machines hovering and twitching in mid-air.
There’s also a bow and arrow, and several types of talismans which allow you to do things like blowing yourself high up into the air, creating obstructions, and stunning enemies. Combat involves wearing enemies down until they get stunned and their crystal core is exposed for a limited time, at which point you have to get close to them and smash it — a task that can be difficult when surrounded by enemies. You can also sneak up on enemies from behind and rip out their core in a single move. There are areas of spiritual corruption blocking your path at times, which can be removed by finding their core and destroying it with a projectile.
The combat is quite difficult and tedious at the start of the game, but upgrades fix that relatively quickly. It can still get tedious, as the enemies feel very spongey if you don’t use exactly the right techniques, and it takes just a little too long to charge up your moves in the field until the late-game upgrades. However, all of this just gives you more reason to rely on stealth, and the game provides some segments which force you to do just that. The stealth system is rudimentary, based on line of sight, but it gets the job done. There’s usually enough stuff built into the environment to hide behind, and at a certain point you become able to create new temporary obstructions to hide behind.
This is exactly the kind of open world game I like, with a relatively small game area packed densely with stuff. The level design is quite appealing. The problem with this particular open world is that the streets start to look indistinguishable very quickly, so you’re basically forced to rely on quest markers to know where you’re going. It’s just large enough for this to become a problem, plus there’s a fast travel system, which makes knowledge of the streets even harder to obtain. It clearly wasn’t designed to be traversed from memory — there simply aren’t enough landmarks. Despite this, there’s a side quest series where you have to track down the locations in photographs, with no quest marker help. I didn’t even bother to do more than a couple of these.
The side quests are centered around resolving unfinished business for lingering ghosts in order to allow them to pass, and there’s a good bit of variety in how that goes down. The reason spirits remain can be anything from a child getting separated from her mother to a suicide to someone… running out of toilet paper? I guess the implication is that they simply weren’t ever able to find a way to wipe their butt, and thus just died on the stall? Anyway, resolving these situations can range finding the ghost haunting a building to getting involved in a big fight to finding someone a roll of toilet paper.
Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of generic open world collecti-bullshit chores— save all 240,000 of the spirits hanging around the city (you collect around 100 at a time, but still… it’s a lot), find all the graffiti, find all the tanuki hiding as objects, capture all the yokai (folklore spirits hanging around the city, which can be anything from flying weasels to haunted sheets of cloth), find the case reports, find historical artifacts to sell to magical cats (yes, you read that right)… well over half the game is devoted to finding all of this stuff. The main story only takes about 10–12hrs, but the rest of the content inflates the game to nearly 4x that length.
This leads the pacing to be just as wonky as The Evil Within games, only this time it succumbs to the classic open world trap of disrupting the momentum of the main plot with endless distractions. It’s one of those games where the clock is ticking on an important plot point, but instead you end up aimlessly running around trying to find stuff in order to make yourself more powerful. It’s all quite fun at first, but starts feeling a bit repetitive in chapter 3, and intensely so in chapter 4, when ends up being the longest chapter in the game by far thanks to all of the side stuff.
The fifth and sixth chapters, on the other hand, are quite short, consisting entirely of walking, cutscenes, and 3 quick and easy boss fights. Most of the emotional substance of the story happens right at the end, and it is quite moving — thought it would’ve been even more moving if more time had been spent fleshing out the characters, and less on running around aimlessly. The ease of this final segment makes all the grinding that preceded it feel especially pointless, so I would recommend only focusing on the main story and side quests.
Every open world game these days has to have a post-game where you return to the open world and finish doing whatever you were doing — but it doesn’t make sense here with the way the plot wraps up, so continuing the game after beating it just drops you back at the end of Chapter 4 (albeit with all upgrades intact). I’d finished all the side quests before tackling the ending, so it truly felt like there was no reason to continue all the collectible stuff — I quit the game just a minute after returning.
On the whole, Ghostwire: Tokyo is an enjoyable title. It isn’t quite fresh enough to defeat open-world fatigue, as the collectibles are the game’s biggest weakpoint (and indeed quite fatiguing), but the concept feels novel and the immersion in Japanese culture is refreshing. Tango Gameworks have yet to release a remotely well-paced game, but at least the grinding is optional and unnecessary. Avoid the temptation to collect all the stuff, and you’re likely to have a blast, even if the game isn’t likely to be particularly memorable.
Prelude: The Corrupted Casefile
Ghostwire: Tokyo was released with a free prelude — a brief visual novel introducing us to a group of paranormal investigators in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo who have been investigating a number of disappearances caused by ghosts. This novel sees them investigating the case of a phone-addicted teenage boy who lost his friend. It isn’t voiced, aside from the occasional explanation — you just click through text. I’m not sure how standard that is, as I am new to visual novels.
The art design is quite nice, stylized with outlines of negatives around everything. There’s just a teeny bit of gameplay — tracing a sigil, and then a single battle where you can select from 3 different attacks and defenses, preferably in an order that keeps you safe. It’s not likely to make you run out and buy the game — the writing isn’t exactly amazing — but it’s a cute little introduction to this world. It’s not essential at all, as the important plot points are summarized in a readable in the main game.
The Spider’s Thread
A free update included some extra content, including some extra side quests. As if there weren’t enough Arkane similarities already, it also included a bonus roguelite game mode called ‘The Spider’s Thread’, in which the player must progress through 30 stages presented in random order without dying. If you’ve attained powers or upgrades, you get to keep those for your next attempt — but they are not the easiest thing to obtain! It’s a pretty large addition, adding another 10–20hrs to the game. While it’s definitely more fun than all the collectible stuff, I have yet to explore this mode too deeply, as I felt perfectly satiated by the main title.
