Gideon’s Perspective
Reviewing Ghost of Yotei is interesting to me because I loved Ghost of Tsushima. Furthermore, Ghost of Tsushima had some initial issues for me that were later fixed, and Yotei comes with those changes right out of the gate. Yet, I’m still not as warm on Ghost of Yotei as I was expecting to be.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
I think it’s largely because the overall game is more or less a mirror image of Ghost of Tsushima, and the game didn’t age quite as well for me. There’s also a matter of optics. Some systems are pretty much the same, but are presented in a different way that feels somehow wrong in Yotei, such as the weapon system that I’ll touch on in a bit.
That’s not to say Ghost of Yotei is a bad game, it isn’t. It’s a perfectly adequate sequel experience.
| Gideon’s Bias | Ghost of Yotei Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment |
| Hours Played: 40+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PlayStation 5 | Platforms: PlayStation 5 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Third Person Open World Action |
| Mode Played: Hard | Price: $69.99 |
Curse you Spider-Man Onyro!
Ghost of Yotei is yet another revenge story, but a fairly interesting one. Atsu watched her family get murdered, and her homestead burned while she was left to burn with it. However, she survived, and after 16 years of battle-hardened survival, has returned to Ezo to bring justice to her family by hunting down those responsible, the Yotei Six.
I…can’t take that name seriously. It sounds like a cadre of Spider-Man villains, and honestly, with characters such as the Snake, the Oni, and the Kitsune…it’s not far off.
That aside, Atsu’s story isn’t groundbreaking, it follows fairly predictable tropes, but is still an enjoyable one. Despite the seriousness of the story, she meets a lot of fun characters that can add some needed, yet grounded humor to the otherwise blood-soaked tale.
Atsu herself is a far more interesting character than Jin was. Jin felt bland to the point that I questioned if it was intentional for him to serve as a self-insert for the player. Atsu is more fleshed out, she is witty, and confident, but not infallible. She has limited experience in being social, and it shows in a fairly realistic way. It’s interesting to watch her grow as the story progresses.
Exploring Ezo
Much like the first game, Ghost of Yotei emphasizes organically exploring the world as opposed to checklists. Sometimes this approach works for me, and other times it falls flat. The thing about checklists is that they let me choose what I want to do and when, which is sort of the point of an open-world game!
While it is very cool to just go out and explore and find things, it was also somewhat distracting. Essentially, as you travel, you will see things like smoke or someone broken down alongside the road. Oftentimes, a golden bird will begin buzzing around you, and if you follow it, it will lead you to a place of interest.
The side effect of this method is that whenever I tried to go do something specific, I was constantly accosted by birds like Atsu was secretly a Disney Princess. I could ignore them, sure, but what if I didn’t come by the same path later? I could miss out on what the game was trying to show me. It’s certainly possible, especially if you fast-travel a lot. So I’d end up getting sidetracked four times out of FOMO before I actually reached my destination.
I think one of the main takeaways I have after playing both games is that the exploration is really just an open-world checklist with extra steps. It’s just masking it. The thing is, I like those open-world checklists, I like planning what I want to do and when. The extra steps in Yotei aren’t for me.
That said, I do love that the side activities, even small ones, almost always rewarded me with something tangible. Shrines gave me new techniques, Wolf dens offered me neat wolf abilities, others increased my max health or spirit, or gave me charms and new cosmetics.
Ezo itself is a beautiful place to run around in, and the game offers some neat minigames, such as a coin flicking game or some button combos to cut bamboo. I’m not always a fan of the method in which they reveal themselves, but the side activities are interesting with meaningful benefits, and I like that.
Except for the long platforming sections. I’m completely over these sections in almost all games. There is nothing engaging about sections with zero challenge or friction where you climb walls and jump from ledges with very little input from the player. Either give the concept of traversal some mechanics, or stop making me do them.
It’s one thing to jump and climb around an outpost while sneakily attacking guards. But holding the left stick to watch several canned climbing animations and jumping from several ledges with no meaningful challenge for 10 minutes to get a charm is just an exhausting waste of time.
There is also a camp system where Atsu can start a fire and cook, both with completely frictionless minigames, but you can skip those. The camp system is neat, though. You refill your spirit and get a cooking buff, and it’s where you can craft ammo and consumables.
Sometimes, an NPC you have previously met will show up and offer their services, be they goods or upgrades. Sucker Punch alluded that this system was meant to replace traveling to merchants, but I never found that to be the case. At the very least, you still have to return to your father’s forge to upgrade your melee weapons, and I still found myself fast-traveling to the others as well.
Paper, Scissors, Odachi!
Ghost of Yotei, just like Tsushima before it, blends combat and stealth into a great little package. I played on Hard, and I appreciated the fact that the game’s enemies were dangerous enough to prioritize stealth rather than going in swords blazing. It paid off to thin out an outpost’s numbers ahead of time, and something I loved about Tsushima that is present in Yotei is that stealth isn’t all or nothing.
The enemies in the game don’t share a psychic link. You can come out of stealth, accidentally or intentionally, in one section of an outpost, fight the enemies there, and the rest of the outpost will be none the wiser as you slip back into the tall grass.
That said, if you want to go through the front gate, you can open up with a showdown, allowing you to thin out the numbers via a samurai showdown quick-time event. The choice is yours.
You’re given a lot of neat tools to play with, too. Bows with various arrow types, bombs, blinding dust, and more. That said, trying to use those things in the middle of combat was frustrating. Switching weapons could have really benefited from more slowdown, like in games like Horizon. I often opted not to use bows or bombs outside of stealth because attempting to switch over got me hit.
The combat is fluid, looks awesome, and feels just as good when you get into the flow of things. Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel fantastic as you feel like you’re hair’s breadth from death with every swing the enemy makes.
The weapon system, on the other hand, feels a bit strange. You actually end up with 5 different melee weapons to switch between, and on paper, that sounds awesome as they have their own animations and movesets. However, Ghost of Yotei uses them to replace the stance system from Tsushima.
This makes the weapons function in a very rock-paper-scissors format that feels very gamey and arbitrary. It’s clunky to switch between them in combat, but the stagger bonus you deal to a good match-up can’t be ignored.
The matchups are also a little eyebrow-raising. Your spear is good against dual-wielding enemies, but you’re duel-wielding Katana’s is good against spears? Why is an Odachi good against large enemies and nothing else? Why should you always use a Katana against another Katana?
It’s not that weapons shouldn’t have strengths and weaknesses, it’s that those strengths are very dull in Yotei. There isn’t a technical advantage to using them against certain match-ups, it’s a simple statistical one for vastly more stagger damage that can break their guards. That felt like a better concept for stances in the original game. It feels like a poor use of weapon types in Ghost of Yotei.
Then there’s the other thing, most of the enemies you fight wield a Katana, especially in the boss fights, so you end up using a Katana the most anyway. The boss fights are also a bit limited in scope and repetitive, just like in the first game, and that’s a shame.
Verdict
Ghost of Yotei is an adequate sequel if nothing else. Whether or not adequate is good enough for AAA titles that continue to go up in price is in the eye of the beholder. Is Ghost of Yotei worth 4 Silksongs or 2 Rimworlds? For me, no. It’s not.
The thing is, there’s nothing blatantly wrong with Ghost of Yotei for me to pick apart. There’s nothing I’ve said that’s remotely universal. You might not care about climbing sections or the weapon system. You might love the exploration in ways I didn’t. I praised the hell out of Ghost of Tsushima, and most of my complaints could be tied equally to it.
Ghost of Yotei is a safe sequel, and in some ways, that’s a great thing and will be precisely what a lot of people wanted. For me, however, I was hoping to see some large improvements from Ghost of Tsushima, rather than a reskin.
