All of that panoramic showing off feels decidedly disconnected, for instance, from the game’s plot, which drops you into the boots of hardened vengeance seeker Atsu (Erika Ishii, at least in the game’s English voice track). As quickly sketched in Yōtei’s opening minutes—and then fleshed out with early flashbacks that mark one of the game’s rare narrative high points—Atsu gets her motivations straight out of The Big Book Of Plots You’ve Seen A Million Times Already: Happy childhood, murdered family, list of mask-themed murder targets who’ve each conveniently migrated to one corner of the game’s massive, icon-strewn map. When not distracted by the nine million chores waiting to intrude on her quest for solitary vengeance, Atsu masters new weapons, pursues her targets, and serves as the subject of god only knows how many lectures about the pointlessness of sanguine revenge.
I will note, for the sake of transparency, that I have not finished Ghost Of Yōtei, with this review representing 20 hours of dedicated play. It is certainly possible that the game’s later sections contain at least one narrative moment that I had not already seen in any five other movies or games you might care to name on this topic; if so, I’d suggest Sucker Punch move that moment forward, so as to make their game’s first-through-twentieth impressions a little less dire. As is, Ishii gives a low-key but winning performance as Atsu, but the dialogue is so flat, and the stories being told so rife with samurai film clichés, that I found myself actively heckling the writing as I made my way through beat after tired beat. Even when the game tries to make a plot moment zig or zag—would you believe, dear reader, that the bad guys have internal lives and motivations that lend shading to the cartoonish cruelty with which they orphaned our heroine?—the overall tone is so relentlessly dour that you can predict every single emotional pivot of every single character’s arc with only the barest understanding of how these kinds of stories usually go.
This basic unwillingness to present players with anything they haven’t seen before extends equally to the game’s play. Combat is presented with exciting trappings, with enemies hitting hard enough (and in big enough groups) to frequently put Atsu on her back foot, forcing you to burn resources to heal. But after a few hours (and a few upgrades), the game’s fights essentially solve themselves, as you learn to spam parry/block for everything except the handful of enemy moves immune to it, while switching between Atsu’s growing arsenal of weapons in order to counter different foe loadouts. (Each new weapon involves studying under a different master, allowing Yōtei to add training tropes to its gigantic grabbag of clichés.) Big climactic fights can be exciting, as the game’s intimidating boss enemies run Atsu through her paces. But by that 20th hour, I was starting to take hits in mook fights not due to difficulty, but because I was getting so bored of the fighting that my attention would flag—a death knell for a game where the thrills of combat are among its biggest ostensible selling points.
Yōtei is somehow even less innovative, meanwhile, in its exploration gameplay, as Atsu takes time out from her critical race towards vengeance to paint pictures, hunt bounties, climb mountains, cook food, pray at shrines, gobble up hundreds of pieces of crafting litter, and befriend the wildlife of Hokkaido. No one instance of this stuff is offensive, and a few of the mission types, like a series of map objectives that see you rescue hunted wolves to empower Atsu’s occasional animal companion, can round out to being pretty exciting.
But just as equally, no one instance of them is something you haven’t done in a game of this type before, whether it’s summoning your Magically Teleporting Horse to come running up from behind you, or climbing carefully color-coded rocks, or poking around at the Dual Shock 5’s touch pad to do little extra bits of interactivity like lighting fires or cooking fish. And none of it will ever leave you alone. Repeating Tsushima’s one truly great map game trick—the blowing wind that guides the player to their chosen objectives—to massively diminishing returns, Yōtei constantly reminds you that there’s more crap to pick up just over that next beautifully realized hill. With collectibles glinting in the sunlight, navigation-aiding birds and foxes suddenly swooping into frame, and the air itself pushing you toward yet another completion point, the game sometimes feels like reality itself is screaming at you to do more, get more, play more. No individual reward (beyond the initial slate of skill points that gets Atsu’s basic combat powers online) feels terribly meaningful, but the game’s Skinner box side has been carefully calibrated to keep you moving toward the next thing on the horizon, basically forever.
Some of the gameplay elements that Ghost Of Yōtei so aggressively replicates are fun, pretty much by default. Sneaking around an enemy camp and slowly merking every single guy inside it, for instance, is always going to carry a thrill, even when developers choose not to do much new with the template. (With the exception of the ability to sometimes call in your wolf pal to help you, stealth combat is pretty much unchanged from Tsushima: Sneak, stab, get caught, giant fight, repeat.) Everything presented here, with the exception of the word-to-word writing, is baseline competent, and frequently fun in small doses. As a way to turn hours of human life into a vague sense of accomplishment, the game ticks all the necessary boxes.
But, god, there’s something spiritually draining about seeing this much effort, and this many resources, thrown at a game that doesn’t seem to have a single creative idea running through its pretty, massive head. It’s not just that Ghost Of Yōtei has nothing new to say about revenge. (Like I said up top, pretty much no vengeance-minded story seems capable of cracking that one.) But it also has nothing new to say about sword combat in video games. Or open-world map design. Or crafting systems. Or sibling relationships. Or melancholy. Or how climbing should work in games that sure have a lot of it, while paradoxically not seeming to give two shits about how it feels. It feints at some of these things, some of the time. It throws dozens of upgrades, cosmetic changes, and other little customization elements at you, constantly, to create an illusion of choice. It pours enormous amounts of time and energy into creating the tone and texture of the samurai movies its creators are so clearly obsessed with.
But none of it arrives with any genuine impact, because genuine impact would get in the way of easing the player toward the next simple set of tasks, to keeping them hooked on the ride. The fact is, you’ve played this game before. You’ll almost certainly wind up playing it again. It’ll pass through you like water—or maybe a gorgeously decorated bowl of gruel—and that’s both Ghost Of Yōtei’s blessing, and its curse.
