Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022)

I played this for almost the whole thing, but at some point had to give it up. I'm really impressed with the attention to detail and walking around the empty streets of Tokyo in the rain is just an incredible vibe that this game really nails, apart from the absolute sprinkle-fest of bullshit objectives to do.

Where the game lost me is with the combat, that's just beyond repetitive. I don't know whose idea it was to limit your ammo but it's just beyond annoying. It's not fun, it's not tactical it's just straight-up annoying. Enemies takes way too much health and there's waaay too many of them and there are only five types and NONE are fun to fight against. I wish I could have breezed through it on easy mode, but even then they are just sponges, aaaand my ammo keeps running out.

I was even pretty stoked to see where they would take the story, they had some fun ideas and concepts in there... But alas I might never see it through now.

City itself isn't really that interesting. Tokyo is a ghost town and static so that was an immediate disappointment. Rewards of exploration are very limited. Combat is okay and features some nice mechanics and upgrades via skilpoint system. While blasting monsters with magic is fun, the combat itself not very fun or engaging and gets repetitive. Boss fights okay due to weak point targeting. Hunting souls for XP feels pointless, as do most sidequests. Overall feels a bit bland and boring. Feels like Watchdogs or something, with a convoluted story. Stealth approach annoying and usually not worth the trouble unless max upgraded.

Feels full of the bloated kinda AAA game prefab, bleh. Oh well it's fairly short and fun for a bit, i'm glad its not bigger than it is.

1. I hate first person anything.
2. I love horror as a genre, but I don't play horror games because I am not about trying to aim and shit when rabid enemies are flying at me. Just everything about the gameplay is stuff I hate.

I grabbed this from PS+ while just snagging a bunch of games on a whim, not paying attention to the fact that it was in first person because I didn't remember that from when I first saw clips way back.

Almost immediately dropped it once I realized, especially after the first damn area is a hospital crawling with spirits, but now I'm 11 hours deep because there's so much cool stuff, and am powering through my absolute lack of ability in this sort of game.

Starts off pretty strong, and if you are into Japanese folklore and mythos it has a lot... on the surface. It spatters some interesting oni etc. into repeatable quests on a bloated map, wikipedia slices on some collectibles and calls it a day. There are far better ways to present a part of culture in a video game (Ghost of Tsushima did a far better job, while being far less "gamey").

Combat falls flat rather quickly, despite being flashy. So does character progression and development (both mechanics and story wise).

There are redeeming qualities, and some more unique side quests, but in the end only the visual side of the game really holds a really high level, with some setpieces and special quests being really creative. It just just a shame that more parts of the game could not have the same creativity.

I'm playing 2 games at the moment. The first being, Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor Martyr, which i am enjoying. I like the top down style, like POE, Van Helsing, Dungeaon Siege, Victor Vran, Torchlight and Diablo. I don't really understand a lot of the stats, but i am adding points to defence, speed, and a few others, so i don't die to quickly, lol.

The 2nd game I am playing is Ghostwire Toyko. Which I am enjoying also. The concept is pretty good and I like the powers you have and maybe it's me but I love to roam around the parts of the city I have unlocked and just search for items and spirits and anything else I can find. The side missions are mostly cleansing objects or spirits, but some are interesting. The story so far is interesting but not unique.

Is there anymore games like the top down style, that anyone could recommend that maybe I haven't heard of before.

First, the positive.

It's very pretty. The game runs great overall on my machine and there's a lot going on to see and a ton or detail and uniqueness in the environments. Also, the hand motions to perform attacks are just flat out cool looking.

That's about where my enjoyment dropped off.

I felt like this game was trying to cram about a dozen ideas into a single experience, and suffering for it. It just couldn't execute them well.

I think if I were in a world where gaming time was unlimited, I'd have seen this through to completion. . . . In a reality of too many games to play, I'll just cut my loses and move along.

~David.

I'm really starting to get annoyed with how many open world games just phone in system design.

You want overlapping systems and a feeling of wonder when building your character. Instead we get the same 4% increases in damage.

Vertical and horizontal progression are needed to make the open world game fun, either in weapon choice, build choice or skill choice.

Divinity 2, Skyrim, New Vegas, and very recently Elden Ring have taught us this already. Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over.

This game is let down by not being linear, it should have been linear.

I recently read that Ikumi Nakamura, creative director on Ghostwire Tokyo takes inspiration for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and that may contribute to why I enjoy the general atmosphere and low key storytelling of Ghostwire Tokyo. I can see several affective parallels with films like Cure, which is one of favourite horror films. But even the general emptiness of spaces in the game feel familiar to anyone who's watched his film Pulse and the way it deals with emptiness and malaise. Maybe this gives me a thread that leads to why this game feels as effective as it does to me.

I'm excited for anything her studio Unseen has in the works.

I knew very little about this game going in. Despite being an Evil Within fan, I didn't realize it was a Tango game until the opening logos popped up. In some ways I'm quite glad I knew so little as while there are some highs to this game and things I really liked about it, my rating would probably be lower if I'd gone in with higher expectations. I'll start with some of the things I thought were an issue and that held the game back from being great.

First, the story was mostly whatever. I wouldn't say it's cliche as in a lot of ways it really isn't. I simply didn't find it all that engaging or compelling given how suddenly you're thrust into being a paranormal investigator with magic powers in a Shibuya full of monsters and your only immediate ally, KK, does a poor job of explaining things to you. Eventually, you learn a lot about KK and his past crew and their interactions, well...at least a lot more than you really learn about your own character. That was perhaps the most jarring aspect of the story, I felt the whole time like I was playing the sequel to a game that doesn't exist that was all about KK's life and adventures, to the point I actually had to look up and confirm that there isn't such a game. Our protagonist is involved and has some backstory of his own, but it kind of falls by the wayside for a lot of the game, making him feel like "some dude" dragged into all this.

Second, I found the combat really stale. Frankly, I'm not totally sure why I felt this way as, on paper, there was a lot about it that was really cool. You get multiple elements that look really flashy and each works better for different things and there's quite the skill tree, something I tend to enjoy exploring. But for whatever reason, I just found fighting most of the enemies to be a chore. Enemy types were a bit repetitive and that was part of the problem, but I also just never really enjoyed the combat on a basic level. Now, as one important caveat that totally has to do with me being stupid...I somehow didn't realize you could page over on the skill tree. This means I didn't see any of the combat skills until I discovered my mistake about 2 hours before finishing the game. That probably would've helped a ton as I was constantly complaining about how long attacks took to charge up and how the game really needed some progression to make me actually hit harder and faster and well, it totally had just that and I missed it somehow. It's hard to say if I would've liked the combat significantly more with that discovery, but it definitely made a difference.

Third, and probably the most significant overall, the game is just generally very repetitive. With the exception of the main story, it's got a serious case of open world syndrome where there are numerous little tasks littered throughout the map to do, but they're all basically a slight variation on the same few things in a slightly different arena. As well, while I think the side quests were a plus in some ways (more on this in a bit), I think they had way too many and the quality of them suffered for it, which is extra annoying because I think they had a ton of potential. The game would've benefitted a ton from simply cutting things out, especially toning the side quests down from 42 okay and repetitive quests to maybe 10-12 really interesting ones.

So while I have my complaints above and they're fairly significant, the things this game does well, it tends to do really well. And most of that is just the general look and feel of the game. Graphically, it's very strong, if not quite the best out there. But beyond that, the game artistically is just gorgeous and the visuals are incredibly striking and immersive. While the area is devoid of life, you really get such an evocative picture of nighttime Shibuya, full of high rises, neon lights, and some really pretty rain effects (I love rain irl and am a sucker for good rain effects).

While I complained about there being too much stuff and some of it feeling like it just needed more substance, nothing about the artistic design of the world feels lazy. I was constantly blown away by a close attention to detail and an outright refusal to just copy/paste assets. I mean, sure, there are definitely going to be some duplicate assets here and there, but so so much of the game doesn't. I was especially impressed when going indoors and looking at the bookshelves which will be filled with a ton of different books with a surprising degree of detail, actually looking like some reference books here, then several manga series lined up with totally different designs to each, and never just having 300 of the same book copy/pasted (I tried to Google some images of this but apparently I'm the only one so impressed by bookshelves). There's so much realistic debris and random items in the game that this lack of repetition was a bit mind-boggling to me and I can't imagine how much effort they must have put into that. The enemies as well, while I didn't enjoy fighting them, have a lot of good details to hit the balance between human-like and otherworldly entity.

While generally, core gameplay is pretty important, and just roaming around is rarely going to be engaging enough to me to make or break a game, this game probably comes the closest to selling me on it. Even beyond the aesthetics, there's just so much about the world that immerses you deeply in its Japanese setting. Throughout Shibuya are various ghosts, monsters, and entities from Japanese folklore, most of which can be defeated/captured/etc to grant you a power-up. But while several of the same ghost are littered throughout the world, there's a good number of different yokai with different puzzles or combat encounters to deal with them. Naturally, the encounters for the kappas are all basically the same, and the encounters for the itten-momen are all basically the same, etc. It would've probably worked better to have just one or two extended encounters of each rather than like 3-6 of each yokai which really took away from their unique looks and encounters. Similarly, the side quests find you assisting ghosts with this or that problem that deals with a bit of Japanese urban legend. While the mechanics of those side quests could be pretty repetitive, the stories behind them definitely expanded on the theme in place.

Lastly, while it's not something I liked or disliked, I was personally not really sure what genre this was going to be. But while it's got "spooky" vibes and you're constantly fighting spirits and monsters in a mostly-deserted Shibuya, I'd describe the game more as "paranormal action-adventure" than horror, as apart from a few haunting sequences, the game never really feels like it's trying to be scary or disturbing.

All in all, my rating may be closer to 3.5, but I'm happy to roll up to 4 simply because the game feels very unique and it was such an interesting experience that I doubt I'll forget any time soon. Perhaps my biggest disappointment is that if they just improved on some of the things I didn't care for, even a bit, this game could've been really incredible. While that does leave a bittersweet taste in my mouth, I'm still really glad I played it.

I really don't get why people didn't like Ghostwire Tokyo. Personally, I had a blast with it! I wasn't expecting to have as much fun as I had with it. Definitely surprised me in a positive way.

For starters, the thing that I loved the most was the setting. If the game were just purely exploring and photographing the amazing attention to detail put into Shibuya I'd still play the shit out of this. The city feels great (although dead, literally) to travel through, find collectibles and complete quests. It also looks beautiful as hell. I don't know how accurate this depiction of Tokyo is to the real one, but it felt solid enough to me.

The way they incorporated Japanese folklore and horror stories into the whole experience was amazing as well. I'm a sucker for those tales and seeing them as they are in the game was fascinating. The entire conundrum of the experience revolves around those myths in fact. It just enriches how well put together it all is. Enemy design helps a lot, too. Unfortunately, variety is scarce and their placement ends up being a bit overused.

And that leads me to the story. While the writing is just ok, I found Ghostwire's plot to be really touching and often creepy. It deals with death and closure in a sensible way, with its build up to certain events paving the way for a solid character development. It's good, not great, but packs a good punch. The ending is bittersweet, leaving me with Fatal Frame vibes.

Sidequests were also a highlight! They were all very interesting, with cool little short horror stories, filled with new mysteries and engaging/fun narratives. Try not to skip out on them.

So what prevents Ghostwire from being a better game? To be honest, its major flaw is the combat. At first, I found it quite original, but then I saw through the cracks. It is stiff and repetitive, packing some very clunky aiming and uncomfortable shooting that lacks impact, sense of proggression and, well, fun factor. Stealth is barely useful as well. Not to mention that some enemies were VERY annoying to fight. And you do fight A LOT! It is a huge bummer.

Some other things started to get stale around the final couple of chapters. Like, I love the city and its sidequests, but I don't really enjoy its 'collectathon' aspects. It brings nothing new to the campaign and it's always the same things. Acquiring spirits got old really fast, bosses were boring, enemies are overused, some story questions are left unanswered and I fucking hate having to find hidden statues and pray for them to give me, like, ONE extra ammo.

Ghostwire Tokyo was a surprise. A good one. Its traditional Japanese horror roots really got to me and this "free" trip to Shibuya definitely won't leave my head so soon.

I am not sure how to feel about this game so far. Two big things are detracting from the experience. First is the native Japanese dialogue. Since I don’t know Japanese I have to make do with subtitles and that is very hard when I am also running around the world. There is also a huge loss in the emotion and the expression by just reading the text. Secondly the tutorial constantly stops the entire game to explain some mechanic and it throws a lot of them at you in the first half hour. It definitely should have slowed down and made the introduction of each power more engaging with more opportunities to play with each one for a bit, and a lot less text heavy.

Overall I wish they had leaned into the mysteriousness and a stranger in a strange world aspect more than they did. There is so much bizarre setting and monsters and powers that we as the player are learning that could have been leveraged. Instead our companion just explains everything and mostly acts like it is no big deal.

Felt like less of an adventure through a fantasy/horror/sci-fi Tokyo and more like a grindy open-world ubisoft-esque fps. Far too many collectibles. Far too many repeated assets, animations, voice lines, interactions.

An Ittan-momen encounter might be more exciting if each and every one didn't begin with the same camera angle, the same companion voice line, the same chase instructions, and the same animation upon catching it; it doesn't feel special. The dogs around Tokyo could have been wonderful additions if they didn't appear every 2 blocks (or less), display one of five text "thoughts," trigger one of 5 companion KK voice lines, and get stuck on any and every environmental item while running to a spot to dig for coins. It's all so tedious and repetitive and void of feeling.

A greater focus on unique side missions and reduction in repeat encounters and collectibles would have done wonders for this game.

The story felt oddly rushed and dragged out at the same time.

Beautiful environment, enemies, elements, etc... all art was just wonderful. The nods to, and incorporation of, culture and lore was a big draw for me. But these things were unfortunately held back by formulaic gameplay. This is a fun game, but it is not the epic adventure that it should have been.

There are so many clues that this game faced the brunt of a troubled development right in the middle of the pandemic, and with the art director Ikumi Nakamura leaving the project before it was done, the clues were there for sure.

The game has an extremely annoying first person combat system that tries to go for the flow of something like Doom, when the game is only at its best when it's a spooky yokai detective simulator. There are a lot of really cool creature and environment designs, but there is no story!

It's like the main characters all disappeared and we're supposed to just believe how cool they were from second hand comments. A very repetitive and grindy feeling mess that could've been so much more as a focused horror/exploration title. I'm glad Tango could make Hi-Fi Rush after this tho.

I am really confused about how I feel about this game. One second I love it and the next I can't unsee all the problems with it. Had some really memorable moments, but those same moments became disappointing later on. Overall I think it's a fine game, but you should know what you're really getting yourself in for when you buy it.

Ghostwire appears to be an Open World Action RPG, and this is simply not true. It is an Open World game yes, but it is a FPS disguised as something more. You only really have 3 weapons/guns/"spells" that all just fit the basic archetypes of an FPS weapon system, which is fine but I can see some people potentially feeling tricked by the advertising. Just like every game now, it also has the illusion of character choice in your progression with assigning skill points. I say illusion because you don't really have many choices to begin with, and you can easily level them all, or at least all enough to beat the game with none of the upgrades changing the style of play.

The world is fantastic. The aesthetic and pure atmosphere of the world are definitely the strong point of the game. If you're at all interested in Japanese folklore and mythical demons you will love the world and side quests. However, at the same time the open world part of it wore me down. The constant cycle of discovering new "gates" (towers in every Ubisoft game) that unlock new areas and side missions and collectibles gets very old very fast. Some people love this stuff, but for me it's just artificially inflating the length of the game. You can easily beat the main story in 10 hours or less, but they try to stretch the world into 40 hours of gameplay. This is only a real issue for me because the side quests did have some super memorable moments. Seeing new monsters that have been the cause of hauntings is exciting and cool at first, but quickly becomes disappointing once you realize the same monster models are used for side quest after side quest. Making this supposed brand new demon with a new name really the exact same one you just purged from a house down the street. Stuff like this kept happening and ultimately made me just ignore the open world altogether and streamline the story about halfway through.

The story itself is a fairly generic save your sister story. The villains are cool aesthetically but have little to no real substance behind them in my opinion. You never even learn what the main villain even looks like and his motivations are still questionable at best. You and your ghost friend that is possessing you develop a nice enjoyable relationship and both ultimately redeem yourselves, but in my opinion it failed to really pack as much of a punch as it could've because you don't even really know the full scope of the story until the last chapter and you're then supposed to immediately be invested in the grand finale five minutes later. Also just now while writing this I realized there's a fairly large plot hole/lack of information with your buddy, but maybe it's explained in a side quest I skipped or you're just supposed to accept it for the story.

To sum everything up, the gameplay is fun but you have to realize it's an FPS game to not be left feeling underwhelmed by the lack of options. The world design itself is the strongest part, but it being open world for the sake of more "content" detracted from the game for me and I think it could've been much better as a linear game that told more of the story and sparingly used side quests to maintain the excitement I felt the first few times. It's a game worth playing for sure, but I would wait for a sale unless you're comfortable either spending $60 for 10 hours of gameplay, or you're a completionist who will put in the ~30 to 100% it.