Ghost of Yotei [Review]

One of the biggest challenges of open world games in my opinion is being able to not only make them pretty and vast, but also fun. Ghost of Yotei has a linear story in a non-linear world, and it uses this dichotomy to enhance its setting and characters, making traversing around unexpected, natural, and, of course, fun.

Yotei makes the right decisions when faced with open world design. It keeps the “wind” and “environment” hints of where to go next that makes the 'pauses to look at the map' that much minor. What is new is how side quests and some side activities are shown to the player, with a smoke often coming out from someone's camp that needs my help, or a sound of a mystical instrument from a storyteller, or the blinking of a single firefly. It is not about opening a list of activities and deciding where to go next, but carefully looking the world, its pretty vistas and its hidden activities, to then proceed to what I wanted to do.

When playing other big games with big maps, it is common to feel the world as somewhat empty. There's always an excuse for it – a toxic rain, a shadow realm – some gimmick to excuse the world emptiness. In Yotei, a refreshing approach is taken: the world is… NOT empty! People will travel between camps in a way that makes sense, in groups, trading, talking, sharing tips and what else. It is nice to travel on the main roads because they really feel like that. It is not an immersive sim or a fully fledged RPG by any means, but getting elements from these genres and implementing them onto the world really worked for Yotei.

Another great choice on Yotei's map is dividing them in roughly 4 “closed, self-contained” areas, instead of a single big one. This approach, in my opinion, similar to 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition and other recent games like last year's Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It works really well, and each map has its own style, fixing some of the samey areas that the predecessor had. Yotei almost always feels fresh and unique, with different places looking and feeling different, including their activities.

Repetition is something inherent to open world design, and it is not different here. I feel that if each of the four areas had more specific “structures” and activities from one another the repetition would be less felt, and while Ghost of Yotei mostly nails the variety of what to do, unfortunately by the end of the game, some activities started to feel like chores. It took a while for me to start feeling like that, but it happened, eventually. Either way, I had fun and was hooked on the about 60 hours playtime that I had with the game.

Making the battles quicker and harder was a good idea. With a myriad of one hit kills and a good power progression, Atsu (the protagonist) always feels strong, but her strength is largely a result of this game more active and chaotic approach to battling. With 5 different battle styles, each weapon wins against a specific another, so juggling between battle styles and understanding the enemies is the key to breeze through battle content. Some bosses felt unbalanced on the “hard” difficulty, but most those of side activities. Overall, battling is fun, faster than I expected and somewhat arcadey, with fast loading times and not that punitive retries.

There's a gearing system here, but it is only about effects, using 5 different charms, and not new or stronger weapons. It is about creating a specific loadout for a specific playstyle, but because the game forces constant changes of battling styles to deal with enemies and bosses, I've felt less encouraged to really navigate and create specific builds, since some of them would be good only against 1/5 of the enemy types. In the end, I stayed with a pretty simple build because the many other ones weren't making me feel really that stronger. A nice aspect of gearing other than the charms is with the clothing itself, because it can get marginally better with level ups that changes the visual of the piece, like Ghost of Tsushima before it.

The overall story was, unfortunately, way less unique than Ghost of Tsushima was for me. The script, text and character growth, though, is leagues ahead here in Yotei. Atsu and her Wolf Pack grows in very unexpected ways, and I felt intimate with her and her close friends turned found family. I cried with Atsu's journey, she touched me, and the themes of the game were well applied. There's so much a story can be when it is “I will kill the x amount of people that were present at my family assassination”, at this point, a gigantic trope of AAA game stories. Still, Yotei most of the time is more than its generic story because of its great characters and a good written world.

Technically, it is flawless. I had no bugs whatsoever, rock solid 60fps performance on one of the prettiest games that I've ever played in my life. I even created a post here for this, before writing the review. It is scenic and matches a realistic asset and modeling with unrealistic lighting and foliage added some stylized fog, blood, and smoke effects. It sings. It is really that pretty. There are some “rendered” cutscenes that have higher polygon models than common gameplay, so there are moments that the characters themselves outside cutscenes can look uncanny, stilted and a bit ugly, but when the story is on, it is never like that, only when talking in the world. Maybe this is the next challenge for a game of this proportion, because outside of it, really, it feels like a dream.

Ghost of Yotei is ultimately a beautiful game, with great characters, cool battling and narrative twists that are sometimes held beck by a generic overall story and so-so gearing system. An amazing game, because first and foremost, it is absurdly fun to play and to get lost in.

9/10