Ghost of Yotei review: Great game held back by lukewarm story

Ghost of Yotei doesn’t fundamentally switch up anything from Tsushima’s formula. The vast open world is full of stuff to do. But this time, finding shrines and hot springs is trivialized if you can pony up for map fragments. Some can be bought while others can be obtained by interacting with NPCs. Golden Birds lead you to points of interest, but can be disabled for extra immersion. Overall, it’s just a better version of what Tsushima had to offer. The ability to set up camp is a godsend because it gives you an instant reset point to recover your health/spirit, and a dynamic fast-travel point. The cooking and fire starting mini-games are welcome additions, and while they do get tedious after a while, they offer a welcome respite from all the exploring and combat. Another relief comes in the form of paintings and playing songs on your Shamisen. Ghost of Yotei uses the DualSense’s speakers spectacularly, and I’d argue it is one of the best implementations ever. 

One of the most notable changes in Ghost of Yotei is weapon variety, a much-needed step-up from Tsushima’s stance-based combat. Balancing multiple weapons can be tricky, but nothing in the game seems overtly overpowered. Weapon switching is seamless and a necessary mechanic because enemies often carry an entire arsenal and some weapons are hard counters to others, for example, Yari wielders are countered by dual-Katanas, brutes by the Odachi and so on. The actual combat is fairly challenging, even at regular difficulty. Multiple enemies swarm at you and keeping a track of each one gets daunting. By default, the ability to lock-on to individual foes is disabled, and I’d highly recommend enabling it via the settings. Multiple aspects of difficulty, such as damage taken, enemy detection speed and enemy aggression, is customizable on a per-item basis. Think of it as a watered-down version of what Doom: The Dark Ages offers. Parries are easy to master with a little practice. To get the timing baked into your muscle memory, play with the Bounty Hunter armour that disables regular deflects altogether but relaxes the parry timings. Ranged combat gets a breath of fresh air with the inclusion of throwable bombs and a gun, for some reason. I wasn’t too fond of it, but your mileage may vary. One side-quest gives you charm that lets automatically headshot enemies with zero effort for that clip-worthy 360-no-scope. 

Overall, Ghost of Yotei is an excellent successor to Ghost of Tsushima. On its own merits, I wouldn’t classify it as a game-of-the-year contender, especially with bigwigs like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Death Stranding 2 hot on its heels. Ghost of Yotei has a lot of individual moving parts that are great by themselves, but fail to come together to form a great game. It’s as if Sucker Punch hyper fixated on perfecting the small interactions and lost sight of the bigger picture. The core gameplay loop is still stuck in the Far Cry 3 era with outpost clearing, climbing puzzles and unnecessary use of hallucinations as plot devices. Is the game fun? Absolutely. Is it something that will stick with you for years to come? Probably not.