Minjun S. reviewed Ghost of Tsushima

I came to this off the back of about forty Kurosawa and Kobayashi films and I expected to find the homage embarrassing. It isn't.

The standoffs are the tell. They're mechanically simple — time a button, kill up to four men — and they're doing something no other open world does, which is treating violence as an event with a beginning. Most games make killing continuous. This makes it punctuated, and the pause before it is where all the tension lives. That's a genuine understanding of the source, not a filter.

Kurosawa mode is a gimmick that stops being a gimmick about ten hours in. The wind replacing a minimap is the best navigation idea of that generation.

The writing is the weak part — Jin's internal conflict is stated more often than dramatised — but the form is so confident I don't mind.