DipDopDooopidy Ghost of Yotei Review

I would not recommend this game at full price. My overall feeling is disappointment. I played Ghost of Tsushima for the 1st time about a month and a half ago, so it's still fresh in my mind when playing this game for the comparisons I will make. Although the weapon variety is improved, and the weapons feel more balanced this time around, and it has an incredible secret boss fight, the gameplay is extremely stiff and took over 10 hours to really get accustomed to it. I thought that maybe I was in the 30fps quality mode because it felt so restrictive, but I was in performance, which makes this much stranger. They also hid very key gameplay elements until very late in the game, like listen mode for stealth, which made stealth more irritating until late game. Also, they hid the Ghost stance until you are about 80%+ through the campaign, which feels like a bizarre decision. Although the inclusion of the bounties and minigame with the coins is a nice treat, there is a distinct lack of memorable side stories in this game. In Tsushima, there were several deep stories in its side content with their own character arcs, where you got to see different perspectives in the Tsushima conflict. In Yotei, there is almost none of that, and the few teachers who had personal stories like the Kusarigama teacher felt too short and didn't go into very much depth, which is a real shame. This also leads me to the main story's problems. Although Atsu's path for revenge has its own character arc, it feels rushed and poorly paced, and is an extremely generic story that we've seen a thousand times already. It doesn't help that it isn't executed well, with very rushed character development later down the line. The ending also feels very unsatisfying because of how predictable it was going to be with the inclusion of a certain later character shown in the story. I was thinking, "I think we all know where this is going." When comparing even the art direction of Yotei, it felt like a graphical downgrade compared to Tsushima, which is a disappointment since it's their 1st, from-the-ground-up PS5 game. It just felt like this game has so much that is rushed, poorly executed, and just feels like there isn't even close to the type of passion from their previous work. It's shocking because of the development time to make this title. I'm not saying this is a bad game, but just a disappointing step down from their prior entry. It still has a lot of the cool combat you would expect from an entry into this series. It's still an above-average open-world game, but with game prices the way they are, I'd wait until a price drop happens before purchasing this game.