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.
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.