Gonna go against the grain and say I had a great time with Ghostwire: Tokyo. I was really excited for it to come out and it didn’t really disappoint me. If you’re able to engage with it on its own terms and recognize that the combat is, yes, not fantastic and will get a little old by the end of the game, I think you can have a good experience.
This game got essentially no press, so I feel it's worth pointing out how excellent the open world truly is - it’s like Kamurocho in terms of the player:building scale and detail but spread out over a much, MUCH larger distance. This is probably one of my favorite open worlds in gaming and if you’re into the type of virtual tourism of Japan that Yakuza or Persona offer, I think you’ll get something out of this. The first area you really get to explore does a great job showing off the amazing number of unique objects and rooms and textures they managed to stuff into this game. Signs, objects, buildings, etc. All of this in a PS5 game that only comes out to 18 gigabytes! Which does lead me to the actual looks of the game, which are great! Okay, the framerate is lower than it needs to be and the FOV should be higher, but this is a damn good looking game with some excellent lighting. I spent WAY too long in the photo mode just snapping pictures of cool alleys and buildings. I’ve actually gone to the trouble of selecting a few of those screenshots and compiled an album of them if you’re interested - [album coming soon when I can find my USB3->C adapter].
One of the best ways to approach this game IMO is more of a ghost / supernatural meets modern world art piece with a focus on cultural exchange rather than a pure game. I say this because the combat is, as noted by many people, not incredible. In general, you have 3 types of ammo to fire from your fingertips, fulfilling basically an SMG / handgun, shotgun, and grenade launcher archetype each. You have a fairly ineffective shield with a perfect parry and a really bad melee attack as well as a bow to use for stealth encounters. Every fight will basically boil down to swapping between your elemental types and keeping a variety of the enemies at bay as they charge you or fire projectiles. Now, I played about half of Ghostwire at launch in March of 2022, and then came back to it a couple weeks ago. In that time, Tango pushed more than a few updates to the game, adding a bunch of pieces of content and extra missions, but more importantly a whole new set of mechanics as part of the “Spider’s Thread” update. The key addition being new alternate firing modes as well as the INTENSELY needed dodge. The fact that this game shipped without a dodge is kinda baffling, since your insanely slow walk speed and the limited camera use on PS5 meant that combat, especially hectic combat, could be really overwhelming and you could be left with few options for escape. The dodge isn’t amazing, but it does the job well enough and you can bind it to different things. They also added new charms, new tags, and an aerial ground pound and a chain assassinate technique, which I used often in the final hours. The actual enemy designs are great, I love how each draws from different parts of the Japanese cultural consciousness - the lady with the scissors, the child lost in the rain, etc. - and they have pretty disturbing looks. In terms of gameplay, they don’t usually impress too much and one or two are way too annoying to deal with, but they have a variety of different attack patterns and can feel threatening and the game keeps throwing new ones at you throughout the 25+ hours. The bosses are actually a pretty great highlight. I really enjoyed the Ko-Omote fight, which forces you to deal with the boss in a completely different way. Long story short, the shoot ‘em up gameplay is not deep enough to make the player seek out a fight for fun, but it will stay more or less engaging enough as the game progresses, especially with the additions made in the most recent update.
I love how genuine the whole thing feels, from the loving recreation of basically an entire ward down to the extremely detailed historical summaries and cultural contexts of the food items carried in your inventory. Tango and their localization team went the extra mile to give you tons of information on every single detail of the game’s world, down to the consumables and fill in the checklist collectibles. Sometimes it can feel like Atlus, for example, releases only make it to the West incidentally, like they never actually thought a Westerner would play their games but hey, cool if they do - Ghostwire feels like the opposite, like a game made by Japanese devs with the Western audience explicitly in mind. The post-launch support has also been really good, so it’s clear that Tango / Bethesda were listening to criticism and player feedback.
Most climactic moments include a lead up, whether that be making your way down into the bowels of the subway system or climbing up through a tiered shopping center / department building / office building, usually culminating in a big setpiece wherein the spirit haunts the area, messing with reality and sometimes outright placing the player in an alternate dimension. These are easily the best part of the game. The art team clearly had a great eye for interior design and the stuff they do to show off the “haunted” nature of any place is really neat - shifting objects in the room, flickering shadows, textures that flow from room to room, and my personal favorite: a hallway floating above the whole of the open world - and add a ton of character to these moments. In a way, it takes a page out of PT's book with the emphasis on these room and indoor segments - juxtaposing the go anywhere (and relatively rote) exploration of the open world with the controlled and contained experiential setpieces of the indoor.
The side cases are the best showcase of the aforementioned ideas and are usually pretty unique and fun, like mini ghost hunts. They often take classic ideas from Japanese cultural folklore and ghost stories to craft a little investigation for you. The bathhouse and inkwater dragon were particular favorites of mine.
The main story itself is nothing to write home about. The setup is genius, and the scattered clothes and empty streets of Shibuya are an absolutely prime setting for the game which never wore off for me - but the actual plot is kinda whatever. Hannya is creepy enough but he’s the only real character besides Akito and KK. His reasons aren’t super deep or super complex and the game’s beats are relatively cliche. Still, I enjoyed the banter between KK and Akito all the way throughout and they do feel like partners by the end. I did actually play the short little VN ahead of release, which, while hilarious in its own way, hardly adds anything to the game’s story or background. Hannya should’ve been built up a bit more or there should’ve been a few spoken characters running around Shibuya besides you that could act as allies or enemies, other sorcerer / detective types, perhaps? The calls from Ed and Rinko do not do nearly enough to fill that void.
The bulk of the fun of this will be down to the player. Do you enjoy the exploration of a gorgeous, nearly 1:1 recreation of a ward of Tokyo while doing Jujutsu Kaisen-esque modern-day onmyōji type stuff? You’ll have a good time. Are you looking for a deep story and deeper combat? Probably look elsewhere. For me, it ticked the right boxes.
This game got essentially no press, so I feel it's worth pointing out how excellent the open world truly is - it’s like Kamurocho in terms of the player:building scale and detail but spread out over a much, MUCH larger distance. This is probably one of my favorite open worlds in gaming and if you’re into the type of virtual tourism of Japan that Yakuza or Persona offer, I think you’ll get something out of this. The first area you really get to explore does a great job showing off the amazing number of unique objects and rooms and textures they managed to stuff into this game. Signs, objects, buildings, etc. All of this in a PS5 game that only comes out to 18 gigabytes! Which does lead me to the actual looks of the game, which are great! Okay, the framerate is lower than it needs to be and the FOV should be higher, but this is a damn good looking game with some excellent lighting. I spent WAY too long in the photo mode just snapping pictures of cool alleys and buildings. I’ve actually gone to the trouble of selecting a few of those screenshots and compiled an album of them if you’re interested - [album coming soon when I can find my USB3->C adapter].
One of the best ways to approach this game IMO is more of a ghost / supernatural meets modern world art piece with a focus on cultural exchange rather than a pure game. I say this because the combat is, as noted by many people, not incredible. In general, you have 3 types of ammo to fire from your fingertips, fulfilling basically an SMG / handgun, shotgun, and grenade launcher archetype each. You have a fairly ineffective shield with a perfect parry and a really bad melee attack as well as a bow to use for stealth encounters. Every fight will basically boil down to swapping between your elemental types and keeping a variety of the enemies at bay as they charge you or fire projectiles. Now, I played about half of Ghostwire at launch in March of 2022, and then came back to it a couple weeks ago. In that time, Tango pushed more than a few updates to the game, adding a bunch of pieces of content and extra missions, but more importantly a whole new set of mechanics as part of the “Spider’s Thread” update. The key addition being new alternate firing modes as well as the INTENSELY needed dodge. The fact that this game shipped without a dodge is kinda baffling, since your insanely slow walk speed and the limited camera use on PS5 meant that combat, especially hectic combat, could be really overwhelming and you could be left with few options for escape. The dodge isn’t amazing, but it does the job well enough and you can bind it to different things. They also added new charms, new tags, and an aerial ground pound and a chain assassinate technique, which I used often in the final hours. The actual enemy designs are great, I love how each draws from different parts of the Japanese cultural consciousness - the lady with the scissors, the child lost in the rain, etc. - and they have pretty disturbing looks. In terms of gameplay, they don’t usually impress too much and one or two are way too annoying to deal with, but they have a variety of different attack patterns and can feel threatening and the game keeps throwing new ones at you throughout the 25+ hours. The bosses are actually a pretty great highlight. I really enjoyed the Ko-Omote fight, which forces you to deal with the boss in a completely different way. Long story short, the shoot ‘em up gameplay is not deep enough to make the player seek out a fight for fun, but it will stay more or less engaging enough as the game progresses, especially with the additions made in the most recent update.
I love how genuine the whole thing feels, from the loving recreation of basically an entire ward down to the extremely detailed historical summaries and cultural contexts of the food items carried in your inventory. Tango and their localization team went the extra mile to give you tons of information on every single detail of the game’s world, down to the consumables and fill in the checklist collectibles. Sometimes it can feel like Atlus, for example, releases only make it to the West incidentally, like they never actually thought a Westerner would play their games but hey, cool if they do - Ghostwire feels like the opposite, like a game made by Japanese devs with the Western audience explicitly in mind. The post-launch support has also been really good, so it’s clear that Tango / Bethesda were listening to criticism and player feedback.
Most climactic moments include a lead up, whether that be making your way down into the bowels of the subway system or climbing up through a tiered shopping center / department building / office building, usually culminating in a big setpiece wherein the spirit haunts the area, messing with reality and sometimes outright placing the player in an alternate dimension. These are easily the best part of the game. The art team clearly had a great eye for interior design and the stuff they do to show off the “haunted” nature of any place is really neat - shifting objects in the room, flickering shadows, textures that flow from room to room, and my personal favorite: a hallway floating above the whole of the open world - and add a ton of character to these moments. In a way, it takes a page out of PT's book with the emphasis on these room and indoor segments - juxtaposing the go anywhere (and relatively rote) exploration of the open world with the controlled and contained experiential setpieces of the indoor.
The side cases are the best showcase of the aforementioned ideas and are usually pretty unique and fun, like mini ghost hunts. They often take classic ideas from Japanese cultural folklore and ghost stories to craft a little investigation for you. The bathhouse and inkwater dragon were particular favorites of mine.
The main story itself is nothing to write home about. The setup is genius, and the scattered clothes and empty streets of Shibuya are an absolutely prime setting for the game which never wore off for me - but the actual plot is kinda whatever. Hannya is creepy enough but he’s the only real character besides Akito and KK. His reasons aren’t super deep or super complex and the game’s beats are relatively cliche. Still, I enjoyed the banter between KK and Akito all the way throughout and they do feel like partners by the end. I did actually play the short little VN ahead of release, which, while hilarious in its own way, hardly adds anything to the game’s story or background. Hannya should’ve been built up a bit more or there should’ve been a few spoken characters running around Shibuya besides you that could act as allies or enemies, other sorcerer / detective types, perhaps? The calls from Ed and Rinko do not do nearly enough to fill that void.
The bulk of the fun of this will be down to the player. Do you enjoy the exploration of a gorgeous, nearly 1:1 recreation of a ward of Tokyo while doing Jujutsu Kaisen-esque modern-day onmyōji type stuff? You’ll have a good time. Are you looking for a deep story and deeper combat? Probably look elsewhere. For me, it ticked the right boxes.
bamdumtss
10 months ago