Ghost of Tsushima's beautiful open world is inlaid with engaging action gameplay and touching character stories. But not at first.
At first, the story is painfully vapid: Mongols are invading Tsushima and all these characters will talk about is "honor" and "code." Like, I get it, the Samurai are philosophically unprepared for the Mongols' tactics. And they will not. Stop. Droning on about it. In utterly emotionless dialog, no less.
The uncharismatic main plot steered my focus toward the game's other activities, which are... kinda good! Tsushima is rife with side stories, from the supporting cast's multi-stage tales, to small scattered vignettes -- rescuing a guy's family, getting revenge for a widow, investigating reports of ghosts in the forest.
Even at their most dramatic - like when the musician Yamato sends you on scavenger hunts to recover legendary weapons - none of these stories are exactly mind-blowing; they're mostly low-key insights into townsfolk's day-to-day lives. But they fit so well in the game's world, and engross you in it as you ride through pastoral flower fields, suffocating bamboo forests, and foggy graveyards.
This part of the game squeezes some of the same juice as Breath of the Wild, though lacking Zelda's exploratory climbing and hidden secrets. Roaming across the map, just existing in this world, is calming and satisfying.
And that's about all I can praise about the early game. Aside from an underwhelming main plot, the "combat" part of Ghost's combat-sneaking-hybrid action is ... pretty broken. I don't just mean that it's hard, although, it is hard, leveling significant demands on a player's response time and gamepad muscle memory -- but also, several implementation details seem wrong.
In open combat, enemies surround you from all sides, but the camera is zoomed in too closely to show them all; it doesn't follow your action, often parking uselessly behind some scenery; tilting the left stick is supposed to target that direction, but frequently enemy closeness overrides it and you attack something other than what you aimed toward.
Enemies and combat stances implement a rock-paper-scissors system, such that swordsmen require one stance to break their defense, shield-holders another stance, pikemen another stance; but the combat stances are unlocked gradually, meaning that until you've made enough progress, you just don't have the ability to feasibly attack certain enemies.
To switch stances, you need to hold the R2 button and then press a face button for the appropriate stance. But R2 is also the "pick up item" button, for example, when a felled enemy drops some loot! So you've killed some Mongols, their friends are still attacking you, you need to switch stances to fight them, you press R2, Jin leans down to pick up loot and gets hit in the back like an idiot. This happens all the damn time.
(R2 is also the "climb down cliff" button, so heaven forbid you're fighting Mongols on a cliffside.)
The thing is... this stance-based combat system, using diverse enemy types to keep you engaged and active, can be really fun - once you've got all the stances - aside from those mechanical fumbles. On the Easy difficulty.
I can't recommend this enough: I switched to Easy fairly early on, and although it is quite easy, I still had a lot of fun! Certainly more fun than dying suddenly because an enemy I couldn't see ate half my health bar in one attack.
As the game goes on, technique upgrades (read: level-ups) add even more variety and spice to combat -- and the main story does heat up in its back half, once Jin truly embraces the dark side of dishonorable tactics, leading to dramatic conflict with his mentor and father figure.
It's unfortunate that the game's third act, set in the snowy north of Kamiagata, is low on side-stories and replaces Izuhara's and Toyotama's gorgeous landscapes with barren, bland snow. And whoever's responsible for Mount Jogaku can go straight to game design hell. But by this point the story and combat are finally strong enough to hold their own.
In the end, Ghost suceeds in turning itself from "fascinating Japanese milieu piece" into "badass simulator with tragic character arcs." Slaughtering Mongols with a fully-upgraded Jin is a blast, and his allies' stories are ultimately fulfilling despite almost all of them sharing the same revenge-obsession flaw.
If Sucker Punch's next open-world game can pace its storytelling better, and fix those clear mechanical shortcomings, they could rival some of the genre's heaviest hitters.
Better than: Assassin's Creed III, and almost all the other Assassin's Creed games I've played.
Not as good as: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Batman: Arkham City, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Oh, and as for the online Legends mode: I got through the tutorial and already hated it. Forcing subsets of gameplay into class-specific selections is bad enough, but -- why are the button mappings different than in the main game?
Progress: Finished on Easy, killed all the invaders.