I'm focusing mainly on the Iki Island DLC here. For the strengths and weaknesses of the actual game, read this:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/pali/review/608138

This addon is a great addition to the main game. The environment and atmosphere are still fantastic and there are a few new mini-games and more optional collectables. Especially the shrines which give you armour reminiscing of other Playstation titles are neat. But the best thing is the story. Lowkey, it is just another island that is attacked by Mongols. But this time they bring some sort of poison with them trying to subdue the Iki inhabitants. Jin is struggling here even more with the loss and earlier actions of his father which happened on this very island. Will Jin follow in his father's footsteps or will he weave his own destiny? Another adventure of trust, strangers, old and new friends and blood-thirsty enemies is about to happen. If you liked the main game then Iki Island will expand your gaming experience greatly. It is more of the same and better.

Honestly, the quality of this DLC made me question if I just judged the main game too harshly. I really liked Ghost of Tsushima, but it read to me more like a good game and not a great one. Iki Island, though, was great.

There's definitely still some of the issues here I had with the main game. Controls for combat and platforming are still a bit clunky, and some visual elements don't look super great despite the fantastic art design.

Besides that though, I don't really have much to complain about here. The new story was awesome, giving us a new epic tale while also delving further into Jin's past. The new open world elements were a welcome breath of fresh air and were very fun to seek out and complete. We also got some returning favorites from the main game, and the sidequests, especially the Legendary Tales, were high quality as always. We even got a new mechanic with the horse charge which was super fun to use!

Overall, this is a sizable but not overwhelming expansion to Ghost of Tsushima. If you liked the base game, you really owe it to yourself to play this as it's pretty much everything you would ever want in an expansion. I would even say it takes a nice step forward for the game itself.

This was a really strange experience for me. While I might agree that Ghost of Tsushima is a much bigger game than it had any need to be, I was also one of those people that was really grateful to have so many excuses to keep putzing around in its world. Like fellow Sony exclusives Horizon: Zero Dawn and Spider-Man before it, Ghost of Tsushima was the rare game I clicked so deeply with on a mechanical level that I found myself pushing into Hard and eventually Lethal difficulty just to get a rush.

And yet here I was, back in this game I loved pushing through Act I on a New Game + save to get to the DLC section and I was strug-a-ling on Lethal+. I knocked it back down to Medium+ and continued to struggle though at least I wasn't dying anymore. And then the DLC arrived.

One thing I've never loved in modern video games is designers' obsessions with trying to portray psychedelic experiences or supernatural phenomena. It wasn't all that novel to me even when it was novel to the industry when Rockstar got weird in Grand Theft Auto V, but in a post-Baba Yaga in Tomb Raider world it feels like it's a 50/50 shot whether an open world adventure game will turn its DLC into an internal struggle with tribal medicine designed to interrogate what it all means for the player character.

I suppose it doesn't help that, for as much as I enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima back in 2020, I never did care much for Jin. I found him flat in English and merely stout in Japanese, a strange attempt at making a sympathetic nobleman at a time when working class scrubs like me really were not in any way looking for heroes in rich boys with daddy issues. So I can't say I'm interested in this attempt to give him more depth and sympathetic layers - I'm still on the side of all the NPCs with no better name or designation than "peasant" here.

There are also few enemy types I find less interesting than the magical buffer dude that hangs out in the back and re-arranges pretty much every encounter he's involved in so that he's suddenly the most important guy in the room until he's been taken care of. This isn't just Iki Island's primary addition to the Tsushima formula, it's a part of every.single.fight in this expansion. This bummer is made more stark by their other, less "clever" but far more grounded introduction of enemy types with multiple weapons. It's stunningly obvious, but it never got old watching an enemy switch from sword and shield to spear or big sword to small blades or whatever - I wish they'd have spent more time on the significance of THAT than the shamans.

I also found the design of some of these missions just baffling. It really, really sucked trying to get that super cool horse armor (though I'm open to this being a meta commentary on the most infamous horse armor ever conceived) and during several other missions I found myself straight up confused where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to want to kill. I can't remember how often I felt this way during the game proper, though my time with Act I this year didn't serve up any of those same feelings.

So...I'm walking away from this DLC with really weird feelings. The weirdest of which being something that I'm actually gonna worry about for at least several months onward: are the L1 and R1 buttons on the DualSense actually a little too sturdy for games designed around precise parrying? This is the first game of this sort I've attempted on this controller, and like I said I felt pretty useless on Lethal+ (despite most of my 12 hours with this game on PS5 that I'd Platinum'd over 75 hours on PS4 being spent on that difficulty) and over time I couldn't stop wondering if it was myself or the throw on the L1 that was the problem. I hate that that's going to sit with me for some time now.

So why 3.5 given all this complaining? Well, because on a pure aesthetic and gameplay level, the original game was my second favorite game of 2020. I love the animations, I love flipping between regular and Kurosawa modes (despite the game part of the game clearly not being designed with the lack of color in mind at all) and checking little meaningless tasks off my to-do list and I love, love, love sticking a sharp blade into fools (virtually, of course). The Iki Island expansion doesn't let go of any of that stuff, but it does expand on them in ways that aren't super appreciated, and that's on every front from narrative to core mechanics. It's just that the base game set such a high bar for pure fun that, despite one disappointment after another, I'm left admitting I had a real good time with this thing.

Fingers crossed the L1/R1 issue is all in my head.

I kind of love Ghost of Tsushima. A basic bitch open world game it may well be, but it's easily the best in it's class and it uses it as a vector for some outrageously beautiful visuals and some pretty good storytelling. And in the base game, it ends just about right. Just as the new techniques are drying up and the combat starts to feel like a solved game, it gets to a big emotional climax and the credits roll. It's a huge game in it's own right, there's no need in this world for just more Tsushima, and as the Legends multiplayer expansion showed, maybe there is more value in doing someting a bit different than just giving us another slice of a good time.

Iki island is another slice of a good time. Ostensibly a post-game expansion to Tsushima that adds a whole new landmass of shrines, mongols to slaughter, and ridiculously beautiful landscpaes. And for me, that leaves it needing to justify its existence. If this is just more of the same, its a missed oppurtunity.

And, really, it is just more of the same. Gameplay deviations are very slight, mostly amounting to improved horse combat and a few extremely new cool charms which alter things. Enemies will now also switch between multiple weapon types, and a lot of little things. The world is another slice of beauty, and the quests follow very similar structures to that of the base game, albeit occasionally with some twists.

The story content on offer here is great though. Iki island leans way harder into the semi-supernatural angle seen in the mythic tales and the legends expansion, with Jin getting high on some mongol LSD and being forced to reconcile his relationship with his father and the commonners of Iki island through the medium of cool visions. The entire questline of Iki island is almost entirely focused on Jin, and basically serves to give him a set of tales like Masako and Ishikawa have in the base game, and it really helps a character who's presence in the base game is fine, but a underdeveloped. Particularly if you play Iki before act 3, it makes his motivations a bit more clear and is generally good stuff.

And that's really what Iki does in general. Nothing here is absolutely crucial, but the small amounts of gameplay changes, the story snippets, the absolutely adorable animal shrines, some great new cosmetic options and the general vibe - it just really rounds out tsushima. Whilst Iki is a very purely additive expansion to a game that's already bursting, it puts the new stuff in places that needed it - Both in jin's characterisation and providing more options for specific playstyles which might run out of steam in the later game - especially bow and parry based ones.

It's also fortunate it's pretty short. The main questline can probably be breezed through in a couple of hours, and the island itself is about a sixth of the size of the main game's map, making the whole thing much more of a slight detour than an ugly growth on the main game.

I think if one was to play it when it's clearly intended to be as a post-game thing, it would lose some of it's stength, but as another 4-hour segment in that long, long act 2 of Ghost of Tsushima, its one well worth taking.

I has been some time since i last played GoT, it took me some time to get back in the groove, i love the game when it release and this DLC expands more on the backstory of Jins dads death and how he blames himslef for not veing able to help his dad. If you like the main game you are going to love this DLC, is more of the same but they have added extra activities to comple, i was ok with the proce of yhe DLC, got it during the black sale, im removing a star as uou need to pay extra to get the PS5 upgrade. I hope we get to see another game like this in the future.

100% of trophies earned, complete playthrough, all tales completed, all gear upgrades, 100% of tracked collectibles obtained. An impressive expansion to an already excellent game, Iki Island sees protagonist Jin travelling to nearby Iki, overrun by an offshoot Mongol tribe led by enigmatic shaman, "the Eagle". With some interesting further exploration of Jin's earlier life, alongside expanded combat mechanics including enemies able to switch weapons and receive buffs via chants, there's plenty here to enjoy.

More of the same as the main game, but gives us a peek into Jin's past and introduces some cool characters. Feels just right length-wise, meaning doesn't feel too short and doesn't overstay its welcome.

Just like the base game's regions, the titular Iki Island is a pretty place and gives us a colorful tropical backdrop, and similarly to the base game, Iki made me stop at times just to admire the vistas.

A solid experience overall.

Ghost of Tsushima is a very special game to me. It is my favorite open world game of all time, and romantic elegance of the game's design, art direction, and music won me over easily. Coming into this expansion, I was just excited to be given a chance to spend more time in the game's beautiful setting. By the end, that desire has been fully satisfied, and I can't help but fall in love with Ghost of Tsushima all over again.

Before we start, I would like to disclose that I played the Director's Cut on PS5, and the game pretty much looks and performs like a true next-gen title.

Let's start with the story. It is a personal tale about Jin Sakai's self-discovery and redemption, as he seeks to not only save his people from the Eagle Tribe's dangerous plans, but also understand the perspective of a group of people that he has indirectly wronged in the past. The new cast of characters that Jin meets are pretty good overall. I particularly like Tenzo and how his relationship with Jin progresses as the game goes. I also enjoy seeing the Eagle's constant threatening presence, thanks to her hallucinogenic-driven psychological warfare against Jin. While the story can feel a bit rushed pacing-wise, it still manages to resonate with you like the main game did, and it is very much a story worth telling.

From a level design perspective, Iki Island is as engaging as Tsushima, with nearly the exact same open world structure, but it feels more dense due to the island's relatively small size. Thankfully it has many landscapes that feel unique to the island, like the Senjo Gorge and the Thunderhead Cliffs.

The familiarity of the expansion will feel like a warm blanket to anyone like myself, but it has quite a few new tricks up its sleeves. Some of them you might even miss quite easily. The new enemy type, Shamans, adds an extra sense of urgency to the combat. There is a new ability introduced early on, which enables you to ram through enemies with your horse in a violently satisfying fashion. The island is filled with new kinds of side activites, like the addictingly simple yet challenging archery mini game, and the spiritually appeasing animal sanctuaries (which also helps in building Jin's character). The new armor set and the variety of charms that are introduced here are not only fun to play with on their own, but also enables older armor sets to achieve new heights of capabilities. The hallucinations that Jin experience makes for some very interesting moments, many of which are optional. Finally, there are secret events/rewards you can get, either by solving riddles or stumbling on a place unmarked on the map, and it is perhaps one of my favorite parts of this DLC.

To put it simply, the Iki Island expansion is the kind of DLC that doesn't happen very often. It has a story that is meaningful and important to the plot of the main game. It has polished many aspects of the main game while putting it all in a very digestable package. It also introduces new gameplay aspects, which it uses to spice up the mostly familiar base ingredients. And most of all, it does all of it effortlessly, giving you the impression that Sucker Punch was still holding back when they made the main game. I think that is the best part of this expansion. It lets you imagine what a possible sequel will be like, and it reminds you once again that Sucker Punch will not rest on their laurels.

Iki island is more of Ghost of Tsushima, in the best AND worst way possible. The game still is absolutely gorgeous, the combat is fun and the collectibles are well made and stylish. But I still don’t care for the inhabitants of this world, npcs and world building are still terrible, the open world feels empty no matter how many samey mongol camps you put on the map to fight through. Mission design is uninspired and straight up boring. I platinumed the main game and I hated the latter half of doing it, I guess that’s why I burnt out on iki island so fast. It just feels tedious and boring to play this game and that’s a shame, because I won’t get to see all the beautiful places the island probably had to offer.

The DLC to Ghost of Tsushima really surprised me. Its story was a psychological adventure through the mind of Jin Sakai, exploring his past and his journey of forgiveness for the death of his father. Iki Island was a fun 4th area to explore, with vivid landscapes and even more wildlife that adds so much to the world. The new animal sanctuaries were also GOATed as now you can pet cats. It's truly adorable. The side quests also felt more engaging here, as many of them came with compelling stories and decisions that felt impactful to Jin's morals. The gameplay here is just as good as the original game, with stealth still not being a truly engaging way to play, as I found myself sticking to my sword as a one-man army instead of playing as a ninja. Still, Iki island is a fun DLC that really adds a lot to the lore of Jin and his life.

'Ghost of Tsushima' was my favorite game of last year, and this is an excellent expansion of the story, the game systems (horse combat!), and the world. I really like Jin as a character and enjoyed learning more about his past. I didn't love that you're trapped on Iki Island until you finish the expansion quests. And if you're a stealthy player of the original, know that you'll need to be more aggressive here. There are very few hiding spots on Iki Island. On PS5, the game is stunningly beautiful. All told, this is an excellent expansion of an excellent game.