(All images are screenshots taking with the Photo Mode feature, or from story cutscenes.)
I hadn’t heard much about Ghost of Tsushima until it came out, but when it did come out, I was pleasantly surprised by the love and effort put into the research on Japanese history and culture. I bought it with only my surface knowledge of the story and gameplay; all I knew was that it was a samurai game set in the first Mongol invasion of Japan in the 13th century on the very real island of Tsushima.
The game opens with Jin Sakai and his uncle/surrogate father Lord Shimura, the jito (steward of the land) of the island, riding with 80 other samurai warriors into battle against the seemingly insurmountable Mongol forces. As I was thrown into the battle with nary a clue on how the combat worked, I was stunned by the high octane introduction into the game. Though the invaders fell left and right, the brave samurai warriors were clearly outnumbered, defeated by the empire’s cumulative knowledge and weaponry from conquered nations like China and Korea. With the defenders crushed and Jin’s uncle captured by Genghis Khan’s (fictional) grandson Khotun, he is rescued and nursed back to health by a lowly thief, Yuna, who asks him to save her brother if she is to help him free his uncle.
But how can a single samurai and a lowly thief take on an overwhelming enemy force? Surely, walking into a Mongol stronghold by yourself with nothing but a sword can do attitude would spell certain doom. Jin, foolhardy as he is, does just that, charging straight into enemy territory and challenging the Khan. As you would expect, he gets overpowered and is thrown off a bridge, presumably falling to his death. There, Jin’s journey to become the legendary Ghost begins - a vengeful spirit of a samurai fighting to destroy the invaders and liberate Tsushima’s people.
During the story, there are cutscenes that introduce flashbacks of Jin’s backstory as a young samurai, when his uncle taught him lessons on honor, sacrifice, and loyalty to his lord. He emphasizes that when taking a life, a true, honorable samurai looks his enemy in the eyes, and that dirty tricks like striking from the shadows are only reserved for cowards.
The theme of honor is demonstrated rather well with the “standoff” feature: as you approach enemies, you get to boldly call out to them as you face one of them in a duel. Standoffs challenge your reaction time as you hold a button, and release it right before your opponent attacks, cutting him down in a single strike. Of course, the title isn’t "Honorable Samurai of Tsushima Who Faces His Enemies Head On", but rather, Ghost of Tsushima, and a game with “ghost” in the title would be misleading if it didn’t have stealth in it.
At one point in the game, you’re forced to play the game stealthily and break the samurai code. His first stealth kill is a cutscene where he sneaks up on a guard, covering his mouth to silence him, and stabs him multiple times. But it's not like plunging a knife into a bad guy's back and he falls over silently like in a certain game with stealth mechanics - it’s a visceral and very real moment, one that portrays the struggle of silent murder that other stealth games usually gloss over. After toppling to the ground under the body of his dead victim, Jin is out of breath and in shock of his actions. That moment births the titular Ghost, a legendary figure that the people of Tsushima have come to put their faith in. As the Ghost, Jin becomes a ruthless killer to all who threaten the people of Tsushima, and he resorts to underhanded tactics to destroy his enemies, ranging from guerrilla tactics to psychological warfare.
Gameplay wise, one could easily misconstrue the stealth as dull; one could even say it makes the game too easy, but it's actually quite rewarding if you know what you're doing. At first, assassinations are slow and clunky - Jin struggles with his victim and is visibly tired after a kill. But after an in-game upgrade to his tanto, or short blade, there is an obvious change to his effectiveness and ruthlessness as a killer, as his kills become smoother with each progression. From then on, assassinations become the go-to method of killing just from speed and convenience. Even on Lethal mode, the game’s hardest difficulty, the A.I. is pretty much deaf when a Mongol soldier is killed near a comrade; Jin’s silhouette barely registers to their eyes even in broad daylight unless you remain in direct eyesight for a few seconds. Though they alert their friends when a corpse is spotted, you can easily take them out before the alarm is sounded. In Ghost of Tsushima, it would seem that silently killing enemies is a low risk high reward method of overcoming your challenges. I don’t think this is an oversight on the developers’ part, but rather an intentional feature of the game to emphasize on the comparison between maintaining one’s honor by facing your enemies head on and taking the shortcut to victory by any means necessary.
Throughout Jin’s evolution as the Ghost, his morals and his relationship with his uncle, and by extension his honor, begin to decay into a ruthless crusade of hatred and rage for his enemies. As Jin’s cognitive dissonance increases between his adherence to the samurai code and his drive to do whatever it takes to save his people, so too does your anxiety for the story. It’s important to note that this is a fixed story, so no matter how much you try to stick to the honorable route, Jin’s actions in the story remain the same, so you can’t help but worry for Jin’s sanity as he continues his journey and witness atrocities committed by his enemies.
As a player, I felt compelled to stick to the samurai code and face my enemy head on, and with each kill from the shadows I could feel Jin’s moral decay grip his actions as he justifies stooping down to the invaders’ level. The power of assassinations is intoxicating, as stalking and stabbing Mongol invaders like a horror movie murderer was much easier than facing every single one of them in face to face battle. I could feel Jin’s shame, but I could sympathize with how his emotions justified his actions because he was ruthless only to the enemy, and that he was doing what he had to in order to save Tsushima and its people.
And that’s only the first act out of three. The game gives you so many more tools to kill your enemies as the Ghost and not as a samurai. Not only do you start off with kunai, smoke bombs, wind chimes and firecrackers to distract your enemies, and various other tools of stealthy murder, the game later gives you a much quieter ranged weapon: the blow dart, along with two dart variants. The standard poisonous dart kills its victims in a gruesome fashion. The second variant, a hallucination dart, causes enemies to fight everyone within their immediate vicinity, be it friend or foe, which is an excellent distraction tool or a way to recruit temporary allies. None of these tools are what samurai consider to be “honorable”. Even clan Sakai's old caretaker and provider of the poison, Yuriko, laments that “poison has never been the Sakai way”.
With these tools in my arsenal I began to feel unstoppable, and after a certain part of the game would I become even more terrifying to the invaders. As the legend of the Ghost continues to grow, Jin later unlocks the “Ghost Stance”, the game’s answer to a rage meter. It terrifies all nearby enemies and lets you cut three of them down in one hit. From that point on, I could feel Jin fully embrace his identity as the Ghost, and that there was no turning back. Throughout the latter half of the story, I would sneak into a Mongol camp, stab a few guys, snipe a couple of archers with a bow and arrow, and slice their leader’s head clean off, and proceed to clean up with the Ghost Stance and wreak havoc. It’s cathartic in a sense, but that feeling of shame never washes away.
Sure, the standoff feature is cool where you can cut down a foe in a duel, but there comes a risk of being overwhelmed by a sheer number of enemies at once, and once I continued on my path as the Ghost, I realized there was no turning back. An often missed detail of Ghost of Tsushima is that as your methods become more violent and your path as the Ghost is filled with more Mongol blood, the weather in Tsushima turns equally more violent, as storms become a common occurrence, much like the typhoons that initially staved off the Mongol invasions in real life history.
As I continued Jin’s journey to become the Ghost of Tsushima, I began to doubt whether or not what he did was just. Is breaking the samurai code and becoming a ruthless killer necessary to saving Tsushima? Then I remembered something. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was mentioned at one point in the game, and Jin quotes him, saying, “Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay the price.” Jin paid the price for saving Tsushima, by throwing away his honor and becoming the fearsome Ghost. Another quote by Sun Tzu exemplifies what Jin has become, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy”, and Jin Sakai strikes fear into the hearts of Tsushima’s enemies as a dishonorable revenant.
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