Second in the Ghost series, after Ghost of Tsushima. I played Tsushima courtesy my friend @synapse, who lent me the disc. After finishing Yotei, I can see why he didn’t like Yotei. My thoughts on the game:
Things I liked:
- Great visuals
- The “throw weapons to kill” mechanic is absolute fun
- The option to level-up quite a bit in the early game made a lot of boss fights better
- Clearing a camp is really fun: throwing weapons, heavy arrows, Khusarigama pull and stab, chain assassinations, slaughter — one of the most fun I’ve had in this game is clearing camps
- Lot of trophies to get easily through the game, I wasn’t planning to Platinum the game, but I like collecting trophies
- Stand-offs ending with a gun fight look great
- One ending, I needed a break from the multiple ending BS inspired by From Software
- Linear storytelling made simple even though this is an open world
- I got all the weapons and did a LOT of the side quests because they were short, simple and fairly linear within the quests
- Using scorch bombs for crowd control, lot of fun when you landed one
- The ode to Jin – love the Storm Blade L1 + R1
- The unexpected ode to The Last Ronin
- The Bounty Hunter costume (must-have solution to fight Takezo, I only looked into this armor since @dtox suggested I look up why am I struggling with this optional boss), and the Ginji armor for deflecting bullets
Things I disliked:
- The puzzles: annoying
- Too many cutscenes: I can’t even begin to explain how boring irrelevant, annoying and frustrating the cut scenes were
- The boss combat is one of the single worst things in this game: there’s this weird gravity pull or “anchor on boss” that keeps pulling the boss to you, restricting your movement, and makes the controls absolutely unintuitive
- Camera angles during a boss fight: having to manually fix the camera with the joystick so the boss is in front of me, infuriating
- Boss attacks from outside the screen: why the fuck did someone think this was a good idea? You don’t know whether it is a red attack or blue attack or a regular attack, absolutely dumb
- The story was underwhelming, I couldn’t care less about Atsu’s backstory or side story
- Jubei’s fate: Having this in the middle of a boss fight was a waste of my time and a story arc; for one, I didn’t care about Jubei, and two, I am in the middle of a final boss battle, I want to lock in and fight — stop with these annoying cut scenes
- Western background scores: I just couldn’t connect to the world with this western music
- Can’t save my tunes: In Ghost of Tsushima, there was no good way to save the final haikus, and in Yotei, there’s no way to save the tunes I create
- Un-skippable dialogs with weapon-selling NPCs: Whoever came up with this should not be allowed to touch a computer or smartphone for a month as their penance for making me sit through the same shitty dialogs after I purchased bullets, kunai or scorch bombs
The Action Sequences
Some Screen Captures
