Menty’s Breakdown (of Games)

I promised myself NO NEW GAME PURCHASES in Q1 but I guess that's over.

I finally finished Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut and I’m very glad I played it and experienced it. I really am. But I’ve got a lot of conflicting thoughts.

I don’t usually bother rating games out of 10 in this thread because I’ve said before it’s kind of pointless. I do enough research before I commit to a major time investment that I’m simply not going to come in here and say something I played was a 5 out of 10. I’d have dropped it and moved on, or more likely never picked it up in the first place.

THAT SAID, I feel compelled to rate GoT as an 8 out of 10 game. It’s a very impressive game. It’s a very good game. It’s just also a game that could have potentially been a masterpiece if it wasn’t for the few things that held it back. It flirted with brilliance on so many occasions and just didn't QUITE step over the threshold fully for me.

This might be the purest form of an 8 out of 10 game I’ve ever played.

For context, this was a game I’d always liked the look of back when it was a PlayStation exclusive. Every time I saw clips or screenshots I thought, yeah, I’m definitely playing that when it hits PC. So when it finally came out on PC, it was an instant buy.

In my head, I honestly thought it was going to be a 40 to 50 hour game. A big open world game, sure, but not insane. And you probably could hit that if you mainlined the story and ignored most of the map. I don’t know why I assumed it would be that length. I guess I expected a more cinematic and streamlined experience.

But I’m a completionist by nature. I don’t go into games saying I’m going to platinum it, but when a game shows me a map full of icons, I usually fall for it. I should have known better.

What I thought was going to be a 50 hour game ended up being more like 120 hours all in. That matters, because the game simply is not built to stay fresh for that long if you do everything.

Now, what it absolutely nails.

The art direction is insane. Flat out 10 out of 10. One of the most beautiful open worlds I’ve ever played in. Not because of cutting edge tech or ray tracing gimmicks, but because of composition, colour, lighting, weather, framing. It’s cinematic without being obnoxious. I never got tired of looking at this game, even when I was sick of ticking off the map. This game justifies every inch of its open world through sheer aesthetics. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

Beyond the visuals, the general direction and production are also really impressive. This is clearly a game made with care. The world feels cohesive and respectful of its setting. Nothing feels slapdash or cynical. Even when I was frustrated, I never felt like the devs didn’t care. If anything, the problem is that they cared too much and didn’t know when to stop.

Combat is solid and satisfying. Not revolutionary, but polished. Swordplay feels good, stances make sense, stealth works, and fights are readable and fair. It’s not Sekiro or anything, but it’s consistently enjoyable.

I also loved the amount of gear and customisation. The number of armour sets is genuinely great, and they’re not just cosmetic either. They meaningfully change how you play, and visually they’re excellent. Same with outfits, masks, hats, dyes. There is a LOT here.

The story is serviceable to good. It’s not groundbreaking, but it doesn’t need to be. Jin’s arc works, I connected with him, and he’s a likeable protagonist. The writing isn’t mind blowing, but it’s decent and fun, and it carries you through.

Iki Island in particular has a stronger narrative hook than I expected, especially the angle with Jin’s father and how perspective changes everything. That part was genuinely interesting.

And honestly, if you haven’t played a ton of open world games in this style, I can see Ghost of Tsushima absolutely blowing you away. In a lot of ways it feels like the best possible version of an Assassin’s Creed game that Ubisoft never actually made. Cleaner, more tasteful, better directed.

Now the problems, and these are the things that stop it being a 9.

This game desperately needed an editor.

The repetition is the big one. None of the individual activities are terrible. Fox shrines are cute. Cat sanctuaries are cute. Archery challenges are fine. Camps are fine. But doing these things dozens and dozens of times becomes absurd. They don’t meaningfully evolve, they just get reskinned.

The old idea of “more content equals better value” just doesn’t hold up anymore. In a world where everyone has huge backlogs and endless alternatives, if your game isn’t doing novel things all the way through, you start burning goodwill at the end.

And for me personally, traversal was the one part of the game I’d call below average. I never got happy with it. It annoyed me the whole way through. This is a very polished game and nothing is inherently broken about Tsushima as an experience, but the platforming stuff is clunky and it’s a chore.

This bothered me even more because I’m coming from games like Breath of the Wild and even stuff like Genshin (which apes BotW traversal) where traversal just feels free and fun. Obviously that style of traversal doesn’t fit every game, but I really felt the limits here. When you hit a cliff edge and have to spend five minutes looking for the spot you can rappel down, you start to miss glider traversal a lot. I know it wouldn’t really work here, but it’s still something I missed.

The worst part is that Tsushima keeps insisting on doing platforming sections and shrine climbs, even though it’s not good at them. It’s not that it’s brutally hard or unforgiving, it’s just annoying. It’s the kind of annoying where you’re never thinking “this is fun,” you’re thinking “right, let’s get this out of the way.”

Then there’s Iki Island.

Oh boy.

Iki Island is not DLC in the modern sense. It’s a full expansion sized chunk of game. When I first went there, I genuinely thought it was going to be a short epilogue. A few hours, a tighter story, a little bonus.

Instead it felt like I completed Ghost of Tsushima and then played Ghost of Tsushima 1.5.

Iki Island is fecking huge. Obviously not as big as the main game, but it’s not a million miles off either. If you want to clear it properly, you’re looking at 20 plus hours easily, maybe 25, maybe closer to 30 if you’re thorough like me with my sunk cost platinum fallacy.

It does try to re-skin activities and add a few new things, and you can tell it was made after the team had already built the main game. They’ve learned a couple of tricks. The pacing is a bit better. The story hook is stronger. But it’s still not enough novelty to justify how long it can take if you have that completionist mentality.

And the really weird thing is the off ramp. There’s no proper “we’re done here” moment on Iki. No credits, no big send off. You just kind of mop up the map and close the game. I got a couple of rare trophies right at the end and that was basically that.

I didn’t do Legends, and I didn’t do the banners, and I didn’t do the dyes and vanity gear grind because that is just another chunk of busywork for no reason. But I absolutely eked out everything else. And I want to be clear, that is kind of my fault. I cleared EVERY single question mark on Tsushima and Iki which only a tiny percentage of players do. So might frustrations with grind are a bit self inflicted and even when it was too grindy the world itself was so unbelievably beautiful to look at it wasn't THAT bad. Anyway, I'm rambling....

Final verdict and TLDR:

8 out of 10.
10 out of 10 art direction.
The open world is the star and it earns its existence.
Strong production values and obvious care.
Good combat and a ridiculous amount of gear and armour sets.
Decent story and a likeable protagonist.
Bloated structure, lots of repetition, needed an editor.
Traversal and platforming are the low point and never became fun for me.

It sounds like I’ve ragged on it a lot but I do recommend it. It’s really good and 8 out of 10 is still waaaay above average. But I absolutely do not recommend it for completionists unless you really care about platinum hunting. If you mainline the story and sample the side content, you’ll probably have a great time. If you clear maps like I do, the game will eventually grind you down.