Ghost of Tsushima’s Wonderful Nuances
Many small delights make a big difference
With such a large volume of attention surrounding it, attempting to approach a game like Ghost of Tsushima is extremely daunting. Along with the swathes of key Twitch personalities streaming it and all the other YouTubers and creators producing content, it’s hard to feel like one can expect to contribute anything fresh and unique to an ever deepening ocean of opinions and analysis.
That being said, not only is Ghost of Tsushima an incredibly deep and enjoyable gaming experience, it also serves as a mass expression of cultural fandom. As a game produced and developed by a US studio, despite being set in Japan, it manages to create an authentic feeling Japanese samurai experience. While, yes, I’m hardly in a position to comment on the accuracy of its depictions and recreations, I can at least vouch that it’s a cultural fandom that builds on and improves from normal cliches to make something more meaningful.
Indeed, Sucker Punch’s six-and-a-bit-year effort to mold and shape the island of Tsushima and the journey of Jin Sakai is so highly laudable it’s made me really reconsider what my favorite PlayStation games of all time are. It’s the perfect valediction for the PS4 as a console — one that has seen many breathtaking games over its almost seven-year lifespan. While it may not quite reach the emotional and visceral apex that God of War did, Ghost of Tsushima has still managed to carve itself out immediately as an essential title for all PS4 owners. I inexorably end up gushing about it to every friend I discuss the game with. It’s a must-have.
But first, we have to ask a really key question, one that is pivotal in being able to properly place Ghost of Tsushima, if it belongs there, on the Mount Rushmore of PS4. That question is simple. Beyond the historical setting — during a 13th-century Mongol invasion of Japan — and of course the fact you’re a badass samurai, does Ghost of Tsushima do anything unique to differentiate it from the other elite titles in gaming folklore?
The short and simple answer is of course, yes. Ghost of Tsushima is indeed inspired by many of the great games that have come before it, but it brings so much more to the table. Powerfully, it’s often in the quiet and calm moments that the really incredible elements come to light. Despite maybe only being halfway through this dense and spectacular game, here are just three of the different things about Ghost of Tsushima that I’ve found charming and incredibly refreshing. It’s a mere drop in the ocean considering everything the game has to offer.
A breath of fresh air
Ghost of Tsushima does many things differently, but perhaps the one aspect of it that I like the most is the absence of a traditional waypoint. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against waypoints. In fact, just recently I was bemoaning the fact that Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary on PC doesn’t use waypoints often enough. I was constantly getting lost during campaign missions and became really frustrated by some of the level designs. Yet, Ghost of Tsushima isn’t beleaguered by this absence of a waypoint due to some incredibly intuitive game design — leading to much discussion about its unique approach.
Instead of your normal and conventional waypoint on the map or UI, clearly pointing you in the right direction (which can also end up being hand-holding depending on the game), Ghost of Tsushima instead embeds a waypoint organically within the living and breathing world of the island. This immediately differentiates it from other similar action and RPG games. Part of the reason I also love this feature so much is in the way it incorporates the Dualshock 4’s touchpad, a hardware aspect that has been massively underutilised during the PS4’s life cycle.
By swiping up on the controller’s touchpad, you trigger a brief surge and gust of “guiding wind” — pointing you in the direction of your desired location, whether it’s a main story mission, side character mission or a place of interest. Your tracked mission and a short description along with the distance from objective also briefly displays in the top left corner when the guiding wind blows. It perfectly complements the beauty of the natural world that Sucker Punch has carefully cultivated within Ghost of Tsushima. Even on the dinosaur that is my original PS4, the game still looks crisp, detailed, and most of all, absolutely punching with colour. Likewise, despite my PS4’s fan blowing hard, as if it’s readying to take off for Mars, game performance is practically flawless, as I rarely encountered frame drops and choppy sections.
The decision to incorporate such a different waypoint system into the game only strengthens and highlights this connection to the natural world. It’s undoubtedly one of Ghost of Tsushima’s greatest strengths. And this cannot be understated or undervalued, especially considering the great loss of mobility, both locally and internationally that everyone across the world is currently experiencing. Sucker Punch wants you to utilise and take note of the natural world around you in Ghost of Tsushima, instead of constantly being overwhelmed by over-complicated UIs or being stuck in menu screens.
Interactions and connections to the natural world are the absolute staples of Ghost of Tsushima as you continue to explore the beautiful island. Foxes will lead you to Inari shrines where you can unlock charm slots. Colourful birds will lead you to points of interest, like onsen baths which allow you to increase your maximum health or places you can sit to compose haiku poems which then unlock headbands for Jin to wear. The way these elements all tie together really speaks to the effort the developers went to in creating a harmonious system of gameplay, where everything interacts with each other. It’s really something special.
In the cicada’s cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die— Matsuo Bashō
Artfully animated legends
Now, this element of Ghost of Tsushima that I adore is a less prominent aspect of the game compared to others, but it is something that again, simply adds to the enjoyable beauty and authenticity of this game. The way the Mythic Tales are told and explained by various musicians around Tsushima is superbly executed. As these characters invite Jin to sit and listen, the screen comes alive with wonderfully drawn animations, sketching out in ink each legend’s story with poise and splendor, held together by great musical composition.
It may not sound like much but it really helps, I think, to treat some of the repetitiveness that you may encounter as you proceed further into the game. It breaks up the other missions that after a while can just start to feel a tad laborious. This could also be a side effect of myself bingeing the game early on, but these Mythic Tales instead cultivate an atmosphere of mystique and grandeur with their cutscenes. It’s a great reminder that despite being a fictional narrative, there is still a very real historical element woven throughout the game.
The Mythic Tales missions themselves often end with an epic standoff against waves of Mongols, or a duel against an incredibly dangerous and formidable enemy. Each of these Mythic Tales unlocks a different piece of legendary gear or move for Jin to utilise. Some of them are more or less useful however, depending on your playstyle and the kind of charm loadout you are using. The Mythic Tales also help to serve as a third unique mission type to differentiate from the main story and the side missions. Well actually, if I’m being especially pedantic, if you separate the side missions from the character-specific side missions, technically there are four overall types of missions you can undertake as Jin.
Semantics aside, I actually kind of wish these sorts of animated tales and the broader art style were used more predominantly within the game. They add so much to the experience considering how insignificant they are against the broader backdrop of Ghost of Tsushima. They’re simply spectacular and leave more of an impression, I’d say, then a conventional video game cutscene. They don’t just blur the line between video games and art, they completely sever it — showing how games continue to push artistic boundaries.
These Mythic Tales also benefit from continuing to leverage Ghost of Tsushima’s reliance and use of the natural environment in completing the missions. For instance, in one tale you are tasked with finding recently used shrines in different parts of the ruins of an old town. While your guiding wind will take you to a large predetermined area, it’s up to you to explore and discover areas of billowing smoke to location each shrine. This again, shows how Ghost of Tsushima attempts to refrain from repeating the same kind of rote-learned gameplay actions that are all too familiar in many video games. That kind of thought and attention that Sucker Punch put into these missions really made me appreciate Ghost of Tsushima so much more. It may have been a risk for them to try it, but it paid off mightily.
I write, erase, rewrite,
Erase again, and then
A poppy blooms— Hokushi Tachibana
The power of the flute
The final component of Ghost of Tsushima that I’ve really loved throughout my experience again thoughtfully uses the DualShock 4’s touchpad. When swiping left on it, Jin will pull out his flute and start playing quite a mournful-sounding tune, before eventually putting the instrument away. You can unlock more flute tracks for Jin to play by finding singing crickets across Tsushima at cemeteries, but each of them fits the tone and mood of the game, seamlessly connected to the rest of the superb soundtrack. Yet, does playing the flue actually do anything, beyond sounding touching and rueful? Yes.
Now sure, you could argue that gameplay-wise it does very little, but the fact remains that by playing Jin’s flute, you actually trigger a change in the weather. It may not be instant or that noticeable, but by playing a few beautiful notes, Tsushima’s weather does eventually alter. Pouring rain may be simply replaced by grey skies, or clear sunshine may be replaced by a thunderstorm. It perfectly links thematically with the fact that as you progress through the game, the weather patterns, in general, become darker and stormier, as Jin proceeds to battle and question the traditional samurai path while forging his own
The inclusion of such a feature within Ghost of Tsushima highlights once again that Sucker Punch didn’t develop this game simply for rote-learned actions of going point A to point B, killing the required enemies and completing each story mission in succession until the story is over. Of course, these sorts of elements are still present, but Ghost of Tsushima is way deeper than this. Elements like the flute playing, the onsen baths, and writing haiku poems all tie together to create a holistic and meditative gaming experience. Sure, the common idiom may go that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” but it isn’t until you actually start to pull apart the sum of the parts in Ghost of Tsushima that you can fully appreciate the whole experience.
It can be difficult to exactly articulate what these seemingly non-essential elements of Ghost of Tsushima actually mean. One could argue that they are simply trivial bits added into the game to distract from the lack of depth in other areas of the game, such as the somewhat flawed enemy AI. I choose to believe, however, that these sort of ad-hoc and thoughtful elements go to show, whether Sucker Punch were trying to say this or not, that video games have come to symbolize way more than a simple form of entertainment. People become engrossed with them and their characters just like they do with television and cinema.
The form is no longer a simple transactional relationship where one individual receives a product for entertainment and a corporate body receives financial compensation for the labor dedicated to creating that product. Ghost of Tsushima shows that video games can be apart of our broader lifestyle cycles, complementing healthy lives, and not replacing them. Its connection to the natural world and attention to nuances and understated beauty is a testament to that. So even though initially, it may be strange and seemingly pointless that playing a flute in Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favorite features, it’s because it perfectly encapsulates what I feel the entire point of the game is.
The cold wintry wind
Is blowing so hard that
The sun sinks into the ocean— Natsume Soseki
With video games becoming a more and more over-saturated market, decisions like the ones Sucker Punch made to craft a more niche and holistic experience, even if it’s in less noticeable and more subtle elements, really serves to set Ghost of Tsuhisma apart from the pack. Games can’t help but build on their predecessors, in the same way that all forms of popular culture and entertainment do. That is arguably the only way we can develop our culture at all — re-purposing, reinventing and improving on that which came before us.
I’ve only covered just three different elements of Ghost of Tsushima which I found especially awesome. You may have noticed that none of them are particularly core elements of the main gameplay experience. If I went off on tangents while describing them, hopefully that goes to highlight the beauty of this game. Ghost of Tsushima is designed for tangents, designed for immersive experiencing, and designed for exploring, whether it’s the island of Tsushima, the character of Jin Sakai, or yourself. It’s a game designed for losing yourself and discovering things anew — locations, artifacts, characters, and more.
There are so many more beautiful parts and elements to discover in Ghost of Tsushima that I can’t begin to touch on. For instance, I haven’t even mentioned the Kurosawa mode dedicated to the legendary Japanese film director, the breathtaking photo mode, or the dynamic and varied combat system. The game unfolds in such a way that it always has a new twist or turn, gameplay element, or sick bit of gear for you to play around with. It is, as many have already pointed out, a perfect and touching conclusion to the PS4, as we bid adieu to the current generation of consoles and wait to usher in the next.
