Just my counterpoints in green/red dependent on whether I agree or disagree. Obviously this is all subjective and simply based on my experience.
- The open world is interesting in just how beautiful it is, it makes traversing the island of Tsushima visually spectacular.
Agree
- Each collectible doesn't feel frustrating or annoying to collect, in fact they all make sense in the history and mythos of the story.
Disagree. They are so unbearably repetitive and dull, and they tie into either protracted or inconsequential rewards. 5 fox shrines for extra slot? The activity involves walking from A to B.
- Great mix of stealth, long range, short range combat gameplay make for interesting scenarios and multiplayer.
Disagree. Ranged gameplay doesn't have a lot of depth to it at all, and it's pretty unsatisfying most of the time. The bows don't feel fantastic to use and it's far too easy to walk around a camp and headshot every minor enemy. There's also a severe lack of enemies which really kills the variety of combat scenarios posed to the player.
- The combat system is exquisitely detailed for what would otherwise feel like an Assassin's Creed clone. Changing stances and using items mid-fight brings a lot of variety to the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Disagree. The combat system really lacks room for the players creative expression most of the time, the stances are prescribed solutions to particular problems that it expects you to employ consistently (e.g. if an enemy has a shield, you use x stance, if an enemy is a giant, you use y stance). It lacks the nuance that comes with more 'fuzzy' combat systems wherein the player can creatively use all of their moveset and must figure out how to be most effective with each based on characteristics like range, speed and effect.
- The graphics. What the fuck. Playing on PS5 on my LG G1 77" OLED and it's just unspeakably gorgeous. Thank you for the enhanced graphical options here.
- Photo mode is detailed and fun to use.
Agree. The game does look very good.
- Upgradeables feel fun to strive for and you're automatically notified when something's ready for upgrade.
Disagree. The upgrades aren't fun because they don't enable you to do anything you couldn't already do. From the beggining to end your playstyle feels very similar.
- Having said that, lots of QoL features that make this open world game not annoying or boring to navigate.
Agree. Fast travel is quick. That doesn't make or break a game for me though. It's a nice feature but games like W3 have horrenous load times and a fairly painful fast travel system and yet people rarely complain about it. The fast travel system here is just a band-aid on top of the tedious and repetitive open world activities.
- Great touchpad/DualSense integration.
Agree. This is a nice feature but it's not especially important to me either.
- Great story.
I think the story is okay, but very predictable and generally lacks interesting character development for characters outside of the war-torn context. You don't really know much about who these people are outside of their wars and losses.
- Great dual English/Japanese voice acting.
Agree.
- Smooth, seamless combat and traversal animations. They worked really hard to avoid Assassin's Creed jank city.
I agree with this, but at the same time I think the movement options aren't very interesting here a lot of the time. You have more freedom of movement in Assassins Creed or even games like Sekiro, than you do here. There are very, very few tall buildings and the few that do exist are seen recurrently and so they're not especially interesting to climb after a while. What value is a climbing system when almost every enemy camp is packed with ground-floor huts? Areas of the game such as the largest fortresses are also very restrictive with where you can climb, often using large vertical walls to block the player off and funnel the player through a very linear narrative path.
Overall, I think the game is just alright. It sets good groundwork for what could be a fantastic game set in this period, I think from a technical and artistic standpoint it's almost peerless as far as open world games go. It's incredibly polished and so rarely do you see games where the technical ability of a studio come together with such strong artistic vision. However, the design makes many missteps that make it less enjoyable than many games that have came before it which I explain my feelings on above.
7/10 from me.
