Recycled review from Director's Cut:

As if Sucker Punch didn't already put Ubisoft to shame with last year's release of GoT, they went and did it twice in a row this year with a cut that added an expansion and more things to the game in a way that made it better than last time how Ubisoft wish they could with all of their DLCs as of late.

Started and finished the Iki Island story line on day one of release it was that good, dare I say the story was even better than that of the Tsushima story in some areas. Seeing an in depth analysis of Jin's father and the people who killed him was exciting to see and something I wanted in a potential sequel.

Aside from that, the Director's Cut improves on everything else. There's now lock-on in combat which will make the combat that more easier for people who had struggles with the camera work beforehand. There are new animations and ways to do things in combat and in parkour/stealth, and personally the colour scheme aesthetic for me is also improved, everything fits the black, white and gold theme now in the button prompts. You are also able to replay camps/duels which is something fans wanted for awhile, giving you more to do in your free time when there's nothing else to do.

Other additions I really liked was the ability to charge at enemies on your horse, the addition of the flute as a duel sense mechanic and being able to pet deers, cats and monkeys alike.

Overall, a solid cut and DLC expansion. Hope Sucker Punch continues with this franchise because it's definitely the magnum opus for PlayStation exclusives in my opinion.

Been really hyped for this since it was announced. Having more content for GoT be released is very welcome, considering how excellent the original game was, and the Iki expansion really delivered. Despite being smaller than any of the individual sections of Tsushima Island, Iki isn't lacking on content. New side activities like archery challenges and animal sanctuaries are nice additions, along with the new campaign being a great side story to follow up the original plot.

I also appreciated the extra upgrades the player is given. Keeps things fresh even if the base gameplay isn't changed much. Adding the ability to replay missions and duels is also a very nice feature, since the duels are, in my opinion, one of the best aspects of GoT. I'll definitely be replaying the final boss for the expansion as well, as it's one of the best in the entire game.

Overall, I'm very happy with how it turned out. I didn't know how far they'd go in adding new content, but revisiting GoT through Iki was a joy to do, and well worth the price.

Overall: Iki Island is more of the same from Ghost of Tsushima with a few wrinkles, but nonetheless is worthwhile for anyone who enjoyed the main game.

Pros: Same outstanding presentation and open world exploration, new side events such as archery contests and animal songs, combat gets a few new wrinkles, strong storytelling.

Cons: Not enough new content for those who got 100% of the main game complete and had extra resources & skill points.

Iki Island is a somewhat meaty expansion to the original game, I think if someone enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima, they're going to like that one as well. The story feels more personal, and the setting while not that different, has some cool places to visit. Probably the main strength of the expansion is the fact that with the added activities, wildlife and enemies, there seems to be a lot more variety in exploration, though the gameplay loop remains the same. Overall, it's a short, worthwhile experience.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

good expansion. I think I prefer the story here to the base game, it feels a lot more personal and character focused with it mostly being about Jin dealing with his past on an emotional level and going into more detail on his father and the kind of person he really was. It's also more critical of the samurai and how violent they were rather than exclusively painting them as not violent enough which was something that bugged me with the base game.

Not too much to say, it's more Ghost Of Tsushima with some fun extras like cats. It feels like they had the confidence to put some weirder stuff in since it's DLC which makes it stand out along with the story, it's still Ghost Of Tsushima though and more of it if you want that.

Just as all DLC, it's not as grand as the main story. Nor are its side quests as inventive as the base game's side quests, but there's truly compelling character development here dealing with trauma, guilt, and ending cycles of violence. I cried at the end because Jin's story here is so touching. Iki island's distinct, slightly more tropical vibe and varied wildlife was also fun and refreshing. I got all the trophies and officially put this game away after about 76 hours. Such a smooth, cinematic, impeccable gaming experience that I'll never forget.

An expansion that checks the boxes for what bonus story content can provide. We get satisfying backstory on Jin and his relationship with his father that doesn't do anything unexpected, but is still good for the narrative. It's also more outright critical of Samurai culture than the main game which is good to see. A couple new enemy types add wrinkles to the combat without destroying its flow (FUCK those brutes with the dual-bladed swords) and a solid final boss make this a worthy final boss make this a great experience for anyone who liked the base game. Playing the flute for cats and monkeys is the best open world "checklist-marking" objective I've seen in a game like this in a long time.
A shame about the weird Far Cry hallucination sequences, though.

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.

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.

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.