Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022)

Ghostwire: Tokyo has the most wasted potential I've seen in a video game in a long time. The foundation was here to be one of the best games of the year and instead it wound up being okay at best. First, let's talk about the good:

One of the most unique settings for an open-world game I've ever seen. It's already rare to get anything open-world set in modern day Japan. Yakuza series and Judgement is about all I can think of. But a barren, fog-shrouded, post-ghost-apocalypse Japan? That's badass.

It has an incredibly weird and uniquely Japanese take on first-person shooter gameplay that feels, at first, not great, but after some adjustment of expectations of how a shooter is supposed to feel, winds up being viscerally satisfying and visually captivating. There's a BUNCH of cool hand shit in this game, enough to make Naruto jealous.

It has some of the coolest looking trippy dream sequences/alternate reality sequences I've seen in a game in a long time. Reminded me of the DmC remake's alternate reality sequences but far more artistically inspired.

Now, for the bad: Preeeetty much everything else. The side missions are the barest bones of content. I've completed some of then in literally less than a minute. There's hardly any actual writing to them. Here's an example of what a side mission in Ghostwire: Tokyo may look like.

You walk up to a little ghost girl, who says she had a special umbrella that was her grandma's, but it turned into a yokai and ran off. You walk ten feet behind her, find the umbrella yokai, hit a button to capture it, and then walk ten feet to go talk to the girl again.

There are obviously ones more involved than this, but barely. Usually by "more involved" I mean the structure and depth of the gameplay and the quality of the writing is the same, you just have to fight a few enemies in between, or climb through several stories of a building before finding whatever thing you're supposed to grab or activate.

The main story quests are better than this in the sense that there's "unique content," in the form of those impressive trippy ghost world sequences, but the quality of the writing is the same and the gameplay is largely just as simplistic, with the incredibly refreshing exception of forced stealth sequences where the main character has the ghost who is possessing him stolen out of his body and has to largely sneak around the ghosts instead of fighting them, although you do have a powerful bow with a very limited number of arrows to fall back on. I liked these sequences and thought they were the most inspired design choice in the entire game, but I know how MOST people feel about any sort of forced stealth in a game so I don't think these will do the game any favors with a general audience. But it's pretty smart to make you actually feel the same helplessness the main character feels when he loses his ghost powers, like it actually got my heart pumping.

However, the issue with the main story, is that it's INCREDIBLY short. It's six missions long and I would estimate they take only about eight hours to complete. I only played the game for fifteen hours and I spent a decent chunk of that running around doing side quests and collecting shit before I was ready to just be done with the game and I did missions 4, 5, and 6 in one sitting that took maybe three hours.

The game's story and dialogue feels like it was written by an AI. It's the blandest thing possible. Nothing charming or unique about it, it exists because the game needs a story and that story is completely self-serious. I feel like there wasn't even a single joke made by any character.

The game has the typical open world collecting bullshit. You've got spirits floating around that give you EXP and money, jizo statues that increase your ammo capacity, and several things that seem to intrinsically do nothing for you but are there if you want to collect them. The game has the equivalent of towers which open up more of the open world by clearing away the deadly fog. I don't mind any of this too much.

So...yeah. Basically the art team was completely let down by the writers and game designers. Game needed more and better content and far better writing. I would've loved to see some basic puzzles in there. Just SOMETHING to make the game feel more substantial.