BinaryMessiah Ghost of Yotei Review

When Sony releases a new exclusive title, it's an event for me. They don't release games at the frequency they used to. We might get one or two a year. Ghost of Tsushima is an all-time classic. While I don't remember much about the story or characters, I do remember the game being a beautiful exploration of Japan with great combat and the world itself being fun to explore. Yotei is no different. Atsu is a much more memorable character, and while the story seems to follow the modern trend of Sony Revenge Stories Atsu changes throughout the story, and she shows growth instead of constant anger or doing anything to get this revenge, even if that means losing everything. Atsu had her parents murdered as a child by a Samurai named Saito. His companions are all masked during the murder, and Atsu soon remembers the Yotei Six. These six masked demons must be murdered to exact revenge for the death of her family. There are excellent plot twists and changes throughout the story to keep you hooked. However, I spent most of my time exploring the world of Yotei. Combat in Yotei is simple to understand but can be hard to master when facing many opponents or the tougher bosses. Atsu has many things at her disposal. Five different weapons she can switch between for starters. This seems like an absurd amount, but certain weapons are stronger against others. The Odachi is a massive sword that's best against large characters and clearing the area. The katana is best against a single katana, while the yari (spear) is great against kusarigama (sickle and chain), and vice versa. The dual katanas are best against yaris. It's important to flip between weapons depending on the enemies' weapons. This keeps you on your toes and adds a level of challenge and depth to the combat. Atsu will eventually acquire multiple quick-fire weapons such as the matchlock pistol, kunai, smoke bomb, fire bomb, oni flame (lights your weapons on fire), and many others. These can also be used outside of combat during stealth or to clear groups of enemies. One-on-one fights are the toughest, and these require mastering the parry and dodge techniques. When the enemies' weapon flashes blue, you can press the block button to parry. Red glints must be dodged, and this opens them up to attack. Yellow glints mean they are doing a disarm move, and you either need to dodge or hold down the heavy attack button to disarm them on the parry. If you get disarmed, you must find your weapon or switch to something else. There are also environmental elements to combat, such as grabbing throwable weapons, which can do instant kills, as well as finding sake jars to stun enemies and shooting barrels. You will always need to be on your toes and look for environmental weapons or use what you can to knock everyone down. There are also some other combat elements, like mounted horse combat by slashing at enemies or jumping from the horse. You can also unlock an ability to ram the horse through enemies. There's even an armor that allows you to parry bullets, which is neat. There's a little of little sprinkles over the main dish of combat. This includes stealth combat. You can assassinate an enemy from behind in the beginning. This includes drop-down assassinations. Eventually you can chain assassinate or have a partner help you. When you get the kusari-gama, you can pull enemies towards you for stealth kills. Stealth isn't required in most of the game, but it can be better than fighting two dozen enemies. You can hide in tall grass, disappear into tents, climb watchtowers, or pick off enemies with a bow (you have a longbow and shortbow as well as various arrows), or you have the choice to stand off with the entire group before you're seen. This gives you an opportunity to duel enemies by holding the heavy attack button and letting go when they launch. Eventually you can chain these together and end it with a pistol shot. Then there's the Onyro's Howl and Ghost Stance abilities you can use when you get enough parries or kills chained together. This allows for invincibility and plowing through a few enemies with ease. You can sometimes even scare enemies into fleeing altogether. As you can see, there's a lot to the combat system. There's so much here that's slowly introduced to the character. During the story missions, players find masters of these weapons and receive training to wield them effectively. Same goes for most of the throwables and quickfire weapons. They are all given throughout the story so as not to overwhelm the players. Most of the story missions appear to consist of similar gameplay elements. The exploration, which includes climbing, fighting, stealth, and more climbing, is where the core of the game lies. You should aim to find all the optional armors, masks, and hats, as well as collect more dyes to create cool-looking gear. This game has some fantastic-looking gear. You can kit yourself out to be an all-black shinobi or a massive samurai with crazy armor. There are a few puzzle elements thrown in, but none of them are very challenging and are some of the weakest parts of the game. Spin a few statues to match symbols on walls, etc. There are also some puzzle boxes you can find, but these offer no challenge either. There are various side activities you can partake in, such as finding shrines similar to Tsushima, bounties, vanity gear hunts, fox dens, wolf dens, and many others. There are nearly 30 hours of just side content here, and it's all a lot of fun. It's done quick, it's easy to find, and it allows you to explore this beautiful world. The wind guide is one of my favorite gameplay ideas of all time. You can swipe up on the touchpad, and the wind will help steer you in the right direction of where your marked spot on the map is. This makes finding gear and various other items a breeze. Getting to them is the challenging part. You may need to climb something, blow open a hole, or tear down a wall. There are also bamboo strikes in which you press a combo of buttons to slice bamboo to increase your spirit. You can upgrade your health by finding hot springs. There are dozens of charms throughout the world, and these are used to give you passive boosts to various stats or abilities. You can equip up to six, and this allows you to create your favorite build. Want to boost stealth or ranged combat? There are charms and armor combos for that. You can also find shrines to upgrade various abilities, but I honestly felt the upgrade tree just slowly unlocked abilities and felt a little tacked on. You have to pretty much unlock everything in a row so you can focus on one thing or the other. The game world is stunning, and Yotei is one of the best-looking games ever made. On the PS5 Pro with ray-tracing and VRR the game can hit 60 FPS, which is fantastic to see. The bright colors pop with HDR and the various areas all have their own color palettes. The game doesn't focus on seasons, but each area has a different weather pattern. One area might have yellows and greens, while the next area is all snow. Snowstorms can cause your health to slowly freeze unless you find a fire and will temporarily limit your health. The game is just a dream to look at, and the load times are instant. You can fast travel anywhere, and you're playing in about 1 second or less. Sucker Punch really utilized all of the PS5 hardware to make this game beautiful and play wonderfully. The DualSense controller is well used here with great vibration implementation, and the triggers are used well. It's a very immersive game, but there are a few issues I haven't talked about yet. While the combat has all of these little elements sprinkled in that make a much larger combat system, it can get rather repetitive. The only challenge ends up coming from timing parries and dodges, especially in boss fights. Most of the combat is held back by the heavy attack armor breakdown. You have to break down every enemy's white bar to even start to attack them. Tougher enemies will regenerate one or two of these before you can kill them. This also goes for boss fights. They have a large armor bar above their health bar, and you have to heavy attack them, dodge, and parry to whittle this down just to attack. A lot of attacking and time is wasted on this feature, and I wish it wasn't there. I can understand large enemies or enemies with tougher armor, but every single enemy has this to some degree. I also found that the structure of the main story missions consists of a repetitive mix of similar activities. Climb a bunch, run around, fight a bunch, do a stealth area, open a door, climb a bunch, and repeat. The gameplay primarily consists of a combination of these three or four distinct types. You usually have a boss fight at the end of each mission with not much else to do. This was my issue with Tsushima as well. While all of these are more refined here, some may not like this type of gameplay loop. I found it worked well during exploration and finding all of the gear and upgrades, but the main story should have some other things thrown in. A scripted horseback ride doesn't really count. There are a few occasions in which you get to equip a cannon, but these are later in the game and only happen a couple of times. I also found the story, while entertaining, didn't have the greatest dialogue. It's very dry in spots and doesn't get very exciting often. There's a lot of standing around and talking with little else. Most of the side content cutscenes are skippable and not memorable at all. Sadly, there are very few memorable characters here outside of Atsu and a couple of the main characters. I do appreciate the new game plus mode and various filters to make the game look like older Japanese films. I found the music good, but nothing worth listening to outside of the game, as it works well within the context of what's happening on screen. Overall, Ghost of Yotei is a fantastic game with a lot of content to offer despite being wrapped around a few of the same gameplay loops. The story is entertaining, and Atsu is a great new character to add to the PlayStation roster, but most of the dialogue is dry, uninteresting, or nothing special. There aren't a lot of well-written characters, and this issue was clearly never resolved from Tsushima. The main story missions are a mixed bag of the same gameplay loops as well, with nothing super exciting or anything that really stands out. I spent most of my time enjoying the exploration of the world and finding all of its secrets. If you loved Tsushima, you will love this, but those who don't care for open-world action games will find that this game won't change your mind.