I have ever seen so why am i so bored exploring it Music, hello, people of the internet? My name is nick one of the four brothers of the most consistent high quality and humble youtube channels that is called sofa, bits and i’m here to pick a bone with sucker punches ghost of shoes of tsushima. But before i get to that, let me first say this: go suzushima is a great king. While it does have his flaws i’m. Looking at you climbing sections, it is still a game. I would recommend to anyone who would try it. I really like this game, but i almost loved it, and that is solely down to the side step now. What do i mean by side stuff? Well, i’m, talking about the inari shrines, the mythic tales, the bass liberations, the lighthouses, the bamboo strikes. Don’T know if i said that one already all the side side missions themselves i’m talking about anything that that little yellow bird will lead you to let’s begin by talking about those inari shrines. Now these little events occur when you find a magical yellow tree. That has a fox den beneath it now an adorable little fox will pop out, it will say hello in an adorable little sound and then scurry off, asking the player to follow it. To one of these shrines, you pray to it and you get a little charm. Now you’re saying to yourself nick that sounds positively delightful.
Why would you hate that, and i will tell you it was delightful the first couple of times, but there are 49 of these 49. Eventually, it begins to feel like some uninteresting chore when they’re placed seemingly every 500 feet from one another, but imagine if they did this as you go along your journey, you find a denser part of the forest and, as you peel back the branches, it exposes a Large grove, the magical tree at its center at the base, you find the fox and it leads you down. A hidden stream covered in moss, flowered branches from above are raining petals upon you as you go deeper and deeper, and then under the roots of a large looming tree, you find the shrine lightly lit with candles you pray to it and the kami bestows upon you. A special and powerful trinket the next time this happens, it’s in a cave behind a waterfall or in an old abandoned shrine, but this only happens three times, because every time it would be special and individual and 49 is way too much. Just ridiculous and half the time the shrines are just behind a rock or something you could just happen onto like you, don’t even need fox mcleod to find these things, and this feeling of too many things is furthered. When you look at the 16, bamboo strikes the 18 hot springs and the completely forgot about them, but the 23 pillars of honor.
But i will give credit to the lighthouses uh, the shinto shrines and the haikus. They seem to fit a lot more in the world. So they’re less intrusive, let’s say, but when you add up all of these different things together, you get 149 events across the island of tsushima 149 events that are filling up your map with little question marks: i’m, not even including side missions i’m, not including the mongol Territories that you have to liberate outside of those 149, it just becomes this daunting amount of repeated content that just mashes together into this just it’s. Just like a lot you know, and what sucks is that there’s a lot of really great ideas being wasted here? Let’S, look at the yellow bird, for example. Now this guy organically leads you to all of this side stuff without the need of a compass or intrusive hunt. But this magical moment loses any sort of sense of wonder. When tweety bird is on your shoulder every five seconds telling you to get up and get going, you see this repetition diminishes the value of all these separate great ideas. Finding these unique fox shrines or writing haikus and majestic landscapes or reflecting in the waters of hot springs, are all better served as crafted individual events rather than being cut and pasted and thrown into a map filled with markers to be checked off a list because that’s What they feel like they feel cut and pasted.
After a while, they were so cool the first time, and then you have to do them over and over again, it just loses its luster, but with the collectibits out of the way let’s go to the before mentioned. Mongol territories now these are bases that the player has to go and clear out a series of enemies using a mix of stealth and full frontal assault. I don’t really know what much there is to say about this um other than i’ve played far cry 3 before so done with this it’s just it’s, not like it’s, not bad, but every time you see it it’s, just like yeah. Okay, next let’s take a look at the side missions. Now i will first say that the characters themselves and their stories are great but it’s, just how they told the stories is what kind of bugs me for each of the characters. They have. This sort of loyalty mission that is separated into parts so for one character and their story, it could be like nine missions now this isn’t inherently bad, but this is how it felt: hey, look: it’s ishikawa! I wonder what’s going on with this rogue student. Hey look! It’S me ashikawa, my rogue student. I think i found her down at one of those camps. We got, we got ta, go check it out. Okay, man, let’s let’s, let’s go and then you’re on the horseback ride, there’s like backstory, and then we clear out the mongols.
Ah geez she wasn’t here, but when you’re ready meet me on the other side of the map and uh, we can look for her over there. Oh okay, i guess i’ll just i’ll look around here. Oh there’s, there’s, tweety bird, there she is, and by the time i met up with ishikawa on the other side of the map. I i had forgotten parts of his story. I still don’t remember what the student’s name was and overall i felt kind of disconnected to this intriguing person’s tale. So the fun times of assembling your team assembling the squad. You know just felt kind of meh. I guess they also do this weird thing. At the end of missions, where they use this very distant camera angle, so that any exposition they’re giving seems completely not important like as the player, i need to see the emotion between the two characters so that i feel involved in the story. I don’t want to see two character models, just kind of standing near each other, with like particle effects going all around them and cool nature. This it’s just going to take my attention away and guess what it really did again. The stories themselves are good. The mythic tales are fantastic and i completely this is the first time i talked about those completely forgot about those but they’re great, but the way they told these stories left me feeling a bit disconnected and it kind of felt like they shot themselves in the foot.
To me, all of my critiques can be solved with just less the design of the explorative elements and the side stuff seem more concerned with filling up a map rather than delivering impactful moments for the player. And, of course, i see this in other games, you can fit in any open world game. You want here um, but this this one got to me because i’m, a huge sucker for samurai i’m, a big fan of the way this thing looks and i’m just a just. A huge fan of this game. It’S, just so close again, i’d like to reiterate that this is a really good game. I didn’t touch on the gameplay, which is good, and i didn’t touch on its amazing story. There are plenty of reasons that this game could be worth your while. I just thought that this unnecessary, padding and bloats that, while it’s not unique to the ghost of tsushima needed talking about – and you may be sitting there going like, hey nick, why don’t you just not do the side stuff and just focus on the main story, and You have a better time and to that i say no i’m way too invested at this point. I’Ve i’ve gotten this far i’m gon na finish it the way, i’m doing it so there so overall, the side stuff in the ghost of tsushima burned brightly in the beginning, but ultimately diminished its good ideas with needless repetition. So there it is.
Those are my thoughts if you enjoyed this video. If you agree with me, you disagree with me anything you want to say. Let me know down in the comments below. I will be looking at them, of course, also if you want to see more content like this from us. Let us know this is my first time kind of doing like a video essay thing. I don’t know how it went um, but yeah uh subscribe like uh. Do a backflip i don’t know, but i’ve been nick uh, the eyebrowed editor from sofa bits.rFd1Nh7eMEU
