 Hey everyone, today I want to do a shorter video talking about Sony's latest first-party hit Ghost of Tsushima. It's one of the rare open-world collectathons that I ended up having mostly a really good time with. It's also one of those types of games that's almost surgically designed to bore and piss me off in equal measure. Parts of this game are a 10, and then other parts of the game are a negative 6 million, and today we're going to talk it all out and see if we can arrive at a final, totally subjective score on the plenimeter. Incidentally in the background here you've seen some gameplay from West of Dead, which someone in the comments recommended to me, and also from the games Carrion and Hellpoint, which I've been playing and might make videos about. Other than that, I think I'll be returning to the best of the generations list, and I'm probably going to make a video about Shadow Warrior 3, and whether we should hope it to be more like 2 or more like 1, Ghost of Tsushima. After the logo. It's to have a hook. My most viewed video is my review of the game Rage 2, which is weird I think, and is kind of annoying because it's not even one of my good ones. In that video I talk about how I'm pretty ambivalent about open world games. I do not like the new Assassin's Creed games at all. In fact it blows me away that they review so well when they are so mediocre. I did not like Far Cry 5 that much because I think it's worse than every other Far Cry game. I didn't like Red Dead 2 because I found it boring and empty and I thought the combat was just flat out bad, but I did like Rage 2. I liked it a ton, and I loved Horizon Zero Dawn. Now Rage 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn are structurally basically identical to Far Cry and Acy Odyssey. Bandit camps, clearing map icons, collectibles, a huge fucking map, and then the same 4 or 5 activities over and over again. So why is that? Why was I unable to finish Acy Odyssey, was bored most of my time with Far Cry 5 and had to push myself through Red Dead Redemption 2 to get to the end of its admittedly excellent story. While at the same time loving Rage 2 and super looking forward to playing Horizon again at 60fps and 1440p. So what's the difference? Well actually I don't think it's all that hard to explain. A few of these games have a rock solid hook that they do as well as any other game and others like Acy Odyssey are big piles of mediocre. Acy Odyssey was a tremendously huge game that didn't do anything badly, it's just that everything it did was basically okay. Well, okay isn't good enough to carry me through 70 hours. Rage 2 is a great, a great shooter. Horizon has a fantastic story, world class audio and text logs, and some of the best and most unique combat the genre has ever seen. If a game is going to demand dozens of hours, it needs to do at least one thing exceptionally well and Acy Odyssey does nothing exceptionally well except use up the 4 hours after work and before bed that I could spend better doing all the things I feel guilty about not doing. A game needs to have a hook good enough to overpower the nagging feeling that I could be spending my time more productively doing the dishes. So where did I come down on Sucker Punch's new Samurai Creed? It's complicated. Every single thing I hate about many of these open world games is in Shushima in spades. And yet, there's enough great stuff here that it was worth a video. Let's start with the good stuff. When I first saw Ghost of Sushima a couple years ago, I think I had a common reaction. It looked impressive, but I was left not really understanding what the game actually was. It had a decidedly souls like feel in that first gameplay reveal and I was hoping that's what the game would be. When we eventually learned what Sushima actually was, however, I admit I was pretty disappointed. The last thing in the world I needed was Samurai Creed. So I went into the game, not expecting too much frankly. One thing I've come to think is that these huge open world games take so much talent and effort just to craft these tremendous maps with mind blowing graphics that they almost always end up with everything else feeling like an afterthought. Well, Sushima makes a ton of compromises and cuts a shitload of corners, but at the end of the day, what's here is far more Arkham City and Horizon Zero Dawn than Acy Odyssey. And the main reason that's so is because while Sucker Punch didn't manage to create a wide variety of linear story missions or quest objectives, they did manage to create a combat and progression system that is fun to play with. Now it's not as good as Horizon because Horizon had a totally unique combat system and really great story missions, but it's the next best thing. Sushima and Arkham are very similar games. Both have beautiful and grossing maps that feel totally fresh and interesting to move around. Both feature combat that has some issues, but that's just somehow addictive enough to make killing generic mobs as fun the 2000s time as it is in the early game. Both had well told stories, it never raised the excellence that Gorilla or Rockstar managed, but it's far better than any story Ubisoft has ever told. And while most of the collectibles are more Ubisoft than Arkham City, the actual skill progression is impactful enough and fun enough to make scrounging the map for upgrades not feel like a pointless waste of time. Combat. You will spend the vast majority of your time in any of these open world games in combat, which is why it frustrates me so much when developers spend five years on a game and ship a title that has combat as its weakest link. How can Ubisoft know that I'll spend 70 hours of my time fighting things and still not manage to create a combat system that's anything more than slightly below average? This is the thing that most annoy me about Red Dead 2 as well. You're going to have me shooting things for 50 hours. Why is shooting so weak? So I'm so thankful that of all the things Tsushima does well, its best system without a doubt is its melee combat system. And that's because while it's familiar and clearly borrows from other games, ultimately it is a very unique mix. Now it's not perfect and we will get to the problems, which are pretty significant, but it's definitely not boring and that is half the battle. Tsushima is a clever mix of combat systems. It's got a tiny dash of Sekiro in there because parrying, blocking, and guard breaking is what the entire system revolves around. It also does a great job of bringing Neo's stance system into the mix, though it's implemented differently here. Tsushima uses stances as a kind of complex system of stamina and dodge management. You can play the entire game in low stance or high stance in Neo, it's not optimal but it can be done. Tsushima uses its stance system as a layer of rock-paper-scissors draped on top of its action melee combat. And the game borrows heavily from the Arkham series as well. While the Neo and Sekiro systems are there, the lack of stamina and lock on and the tremendous amount of enemies the game throws at you are much closer to Arkham City than to Bloodborne. Now that might sound kind of complicated and it is. It's a totally unique system that perfectly blends aspects of all of those games into something totally new. On top of that, it features a bunch of other skills and abilities like after killing seven enemies without getting hit, you can press the win button for three awesomely animated super kills. You can escape danger with smoke bombs. You can throw kunai, you can throw sticky bombs, regular bombs, you use bows and arrows. The gamepad is utterly stuffed with contextual commands and inputs to the point that it's kind of impossible to really consistently use everything. You'll end up settling on a few different things that you'll use in a few different scenarios. The game features maybe 10 or 15 boss fights that are basically Sekiro fights complete with the rock-paper-scissors unblockable attacks and a huge focus on parry and guard breaking the boss. These fights are quite difficult on hard, which is what you should play the game on by the way. They are basically when the game's combat system really shines and most of them require several attempts to beat. They're so good, it's kind of a shame that many of them are optional side missions. The upgrade system and resolve meter that's used to heal and fire off certain unblockable high damage attacks ends up being really satisfying by the end. But it also means that early on it feels like you don't have the tools to really deal with the game's enemies. And it also means that by the end you are just a ridiculously overpowered killing machine. The combat loop here is really cool once you've got the full kit unlocked, but the game's challenge can't really keep up with a tremendous variety of almost instakill abilities the player has. In fact, even on hard, there are only a few situations that offer any difficulty by the end. The game probably needs a new game plus with a harder setting. Now I want to be clear. Much of the time this combat system is fucking great. Like top of the line, totally fresh, arm severing goodness. It's animated so well, it sounds great and it's just viscerally excellent. When it's at its best, it is one of the finest melee combat systems you will get outside of an actual Soulsborne game like Neo or the Surge 2 or Souls itself. And it's at its best pretty damn often. The vast majority of the time you'll be playing Tsushima will be taken up with the two things the game does best, riding around a really beautiful map looking cool and killing enemies while also looking cool. This fact sets the floor on Ghost of Tsushima pretty high. Just on the strength of those two things alone, the game is worth purchasing. But it's also true that the game falls short of greatness because of the other things the game does not so well and even some issues with the combat itself. The other side. Now just because this is one of the best melee combat systems ever in one of these kind of games doesn't mean it's perfect. In fact it has some serious issues. Let's start with something that's kind of baked into the experience that players like me might find difficult to get used to. There is such a heavy Souls influence here that as a player you can't help but try and get into that flow. Now I don't know about you, but when I play Souls I get extremely angry any time I take damage. I feel like I should be able to never get hit when I'm playing well and when things are going well here in Tsushima you can get into that same flow. But unlike a Souls game, Tsushima will present you with a ton of places where damage is simply impossible to avoid because of the game's other main influence. It really does have the Shadow of Mordor Arkham influence which means tons of enemies with overlapping attacks. This is easier to manage in Arkham and Mordor because you always have a guaranteed counter move that you can use whenever an attack is coming from behind you. You don't have that here, so you will constantly be getting hit from behind. This is something you can get used to and it doesn't ruin the combat but when it combines with the game's other design choices it can get pretty fucking annoying. So the game totally lacks a lock-on mechanic. I find this like totally inconceivable man. Now yes there are tons of multi-enemy fights, but you get that in Souls as well. On top of the no lock-on the camera speed is like almost impossibly slow. I don't think I've ever seen a game with a camera this slow and I simply don't understand why this is the case. Then it's got a really serious problem with auto-targeting on attacks. Souls 2 also has this problem and it contributes to that game feeling so shitty to play sometimes. Tsushima has the same issue where you'll simply miss attacks or you'll attack in the opposite direction or you'll be right in front of someone in the middle of a combo and the game will suddenly decide to swing you around 180 degrees and have you attack the air behind yourself. Finally, the game lacks polish in many ways. Now I know that's weird to say with how great the game looks but it's true. You will constantly get stuck on geometry or you'll take damage you shouldn't have. Or the totally crazy way the game maps its dodge and dodge roll on the same button means that dodge rolling will often take you like 20 feet from your target so you can't counter-attack. Dodges won't register, blocking doesn't work sometimes. And most frustrating of all is this. Like Neo, this game relies heavily on the stance switching mechanic. In fact, it relies more heavily on it than Neo does, in that certain stances just make some enemies incapable of hurting you. After a few unlocked, spear dudes straight up cannot damage you anymore. You just automatically parry all of their attacks. Shield guys and sword guys are a massive pain in the ass in anything but the correct stance as they will literally block every one of your attacks. So you would hope that this stance switching was as smooth as it is in Neo, but it isn't. The game has a really annoying habit of not switching stances unless you very carefully and deliberately make certain it worked. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to switch stances like three or four times before it clicked. The combat here isn't slow and deliberate man it's fast paced and requires you to switch constantly and quickly so it's kinda crazy that this ever happens. I honestly cannot remember even one time through both Neo games where I ever failed to switch stances when I wanted to. Literally not once do I ever recall that happening. It happens in almost every fight in Ghost of Tsushima. Now, it rarely leads to death, although it did a couple of times. But either way, it's just a consistent annoyance and over time things like that add up. I get frustrated easily when a game feels like it's fighting me with its controls. Tsushima feels like that pretty often. For instance, Sakai has like tank controls when it comes to turning in a circle or getting off a ledge or sinking up to a ladder. Those little frustrations are just constantly running in the background. Now I suspect that for most people this won't be a big enough deal to even register, but this kind of stuff really sticks out to me. The very best games manage to never have these issues. In Bloodborne, my Hunter does what I want him to do instantly at all times. In Doom Eternal, I feel I have full control of my character at all times. That's what a polished game feels like to me. It strips out all the little things that piss me off for a second. A polished game means I don't have to sigh and say what the fuck dude just drop off the fucking ledge. Games that have these problems can still be good and this is an example of that, that kind of shit still matters. Tsushima also has a mechanic that I wish would just straight up fucking disappear from games forever. Listen, developers, I want you to ask yourselves a serious question. Does your game absolutely need a knockdown mechanic? I get that all games need to have a stagger or interrupt, otherwise you'd just be able to mash buttons. But does your game need to have me thrown five feet away and have to watch an animation as my dude picks himself up? Why? Even in Souls, this shit drives me nuts. But at least there, it's a huge monster that's throwing me. And almost every enemy that does it is being fought one-on-one. And a game that relies entirely on groups of enemies and constant target switching. Why is it possible for a guy behind me and off camera to send my dude flying across the map? Is anything honestly, honestly added to the combat experience by that? Would the game be worse if it wasn't in there? If the answer to that question is no, then don't put a knockdown mechanic in your game. Like, at what point in development did someone say, hey, this is awesome, but we need a mechanic where you totally lose control of your character because a dude off-screen hit you with a big stick. We need something that stops combat and makes you watch a little animation for a couple of seconds. It's just another one of those small things that makes me set the controller in my lap and sigh. Tsushima happens to have a pretty good pile of things that make me do that. And not just in the combat system. Now, these aren't constant issues, but they are common enough to keep the combat from being perfect. Neo, The Surge 2, Bloodborne, Souls, these games all have nearly flawless combat. All of them aren't necessarily perfect games, but they have rock solid, super tight combat mechanics. Tsushima, at its best, feels as good as any game, but it's got just enough problems and lacks that tiny extra sheen of polish to make it a true classic. Still, while all those problems and a few more keep the combat from perfection, the things the game does well are more than good enough to make the combat one of the best parts of the title. You spend a lot of time decapitating Mongols here, and it only works because the game is deep and subtle and varied enough that it doesn't get old. The game requires some skill to master, and the game is at its best when it's pushing you to the edge of your ability. It's just a shame that the difficulty couldn't really be set any higher because it's just kind of a little bit sloppy. Sekiro can be as brutally stupid as it is because at the end of the day, no matter how fucking frustrating it is, you know that it's simply a matter of you not being good enough. It's not the mechanics or a slow camera or a broken lock-on that kills you. It's the fact that the game is just really hard. On hard, Tsushima is challenging and satisfying, but it manages to fall short of the best of the skill-based action combat games because it's just missing the polish those games need to have. And that leaves out the stealth part of the combat, which is total garbage, but we'll get to that in the next section. Ninja Creed. So, Tsushima is a melee combat narrative action game, and it's a pretty damn good one. Unfortunately, it's also an open-world game TM and a pretty bog-standard one of those. All the stuff you'd expect, like collectibles, bandit camps, et cetera. It also has a bunch of the things that have kind of stopped being in these games because they are total shit. Things like escort quests, eavesdropping missions, mandatory insta-fail stealth missions, and single-button stealth kills, et cetera. And I don't mean that like once in a blue moon it has these things. I mean, it's built around these things for a reason I can't possibly understand. Let's start with eavesdropping missions. These missions are universally hated because they are total garbage. Occasionally, a game can get away with them if it's used smartly. Black Flag has several that are tolerable because you're literally getting story exposition. They're almost hidden interactive story cutscenes, but Tsushima uses this mechanic to just have you slowly trail a dot for five minutes because I don't know, actually. I honestly don't. They're fucking terrible and inexcusable. The game has easily 15 missions that require you to stealth kill enemies because there are hostages that will be killed if you go in fighting. It has a bunch of literal get-seen mission fails missions. Why? These are literally the very worst parts of the AC games. It's the lack of this crap that makes Horizon one of the very best of the open world action games. And Tsushima, unlike Assassin's Creed, actually has a really good melee combat system. So why? Listen, I don't hate stealth games. In fact, I like them, but if you're going to make a stealth game, it has to have actual mechanics. Levels need to be designed to make navigating them feel like you're being clever. You absolutely need to be able to hide bodies, which even AC has always let you do. Assassin's Creed kept this reasonably fresh because the parkour was tight and pretty fun and you could get lost in crowds and all that. Tsushima has you sneaking around yurts. You need a ton of different tools and abilities to keep stealth fresh. And Tsushima just doesn't have that stuff. It's got the classic garbage variety stealth. You've got a rock and one button insta-kill knife and then some tall grass. It doesn't even really have alarms to disable. I think it has one, one time that happens. In fact, the game clearly knows its stealth as garbage because it eventually gives you an armor set that negates it. You get armor and charms that allow you to just like walk past dudes. Then you get another one near the end of the game that literally lets you dress as a Mongol and walk around. It's like the game slowly apologizes to you. Yes, we know this is total garbage but we already made the missions. Tell you what, here's a suit so you can just walk through. All right? Please don't make games where I have to babysit idiot NPCs or just make them not able to die. Having to res them is stupid and annoying. When the game is doing this stuff and it does it quite a bit, it is as fucking awful as the worst moments of Assassin's Creed. It just doesn't work. It's sloppy, it's derivative and it's not even executed well. I have no problems with the ghost angle of the story but just keep it to poison and ninja stuff or have only one or two missions like that. All I can say is this. If you like this kind of simple barely gameplay at all stealth stuff, that is fine. But this game doesn't even do it as well as Assassin's Creed and it's certainly not Deus Ex or Dishonored. It's just kind of bare bones, bottom the barrel shit you've done over and over in this generation. If this is the last game that asks me to hide in tall grass and follow an NPC, I will be extremely pleased. Samurai Simulator. The other open world stuff fares a bit better. Now it's not groundbreaking but it's at least reasonably well done. Horizon succeeded at this stuff because it managed to actually nail all of it. Its text and audio logs and collectibles were really fucking good so writing to a map marker was fun. The apocalypse hologram logs were amazingly well written and some of the audio logs were actually moving and powerful. Then you've got AC Origins which literally had collectibles that when you open them up in the menu said collectible. That's not a joke, it really had those. Tsushima has a few that are actually pretty damn good. The dialogue with the Khan text logs do a decent job giving you Kotankan's motivations but it's also got a bunch of ones that are just totally pointless, man. Then there are like the mountain of things that don't matter. There are a bunch of towers that give you sword skins. Pointless. There are the fox dens that give you and then level up your gems. Now these are worthwhile in gameplay but annoying to actually get. Is following a fox actually fun? No, it is not. In fact, sometimes it's infuriating because he'll get lost in the tall grass or he'll glitch and disappear. I'd say about half of the things on the map are worthwhile and the other half are pointless shit. Problem is, I'm the kind of guy who's gonna go to every waypoint because that's just how I play games. Developers must know this so why even bother with all the crap? Like, why waste my time having me ride to a fucking sword skin that takes up like four pixels on my screen? You literally can't even see them, man. As far as the map itself, things are a bit mixed. First off, it is really beautiful and laid out pretty damn well. Nothing pisses me off more in an open world game than following a waypoint and coming to a big fucking mountain or cliff. That shit drives me nuts. Sushima does this but there's always a way down very close so while I got pissed off, it only lasted a few seconds. Annoying but only minorly annoying. Then there are the waypoints themselves and here the game is fucking brilliant. There's no other way around it. The UI is one of the very best you will ever see in an open world game. We live in a world where this is considered a reasonable UI that was developed by professionals in the last couple of years. So this is a massive improvement and something to praise loudly. The follow the wins mechanic is one of the very, very finest examples of game navigation ever designed. It is right up there with Dead Space. Whoever came up with this should be considered a star. You will rarely need to open your map once you've decided where you're going. In many games you find yourself constantly opening and closing the map to figure out where to go or you'll be constantly looking up at the minimap in the corner of the screen. Sushima has you open the map once, set your waypoints and then literally follow the blowing wind and grass. It is genius and every other open world game ever should totally steal it and implement it. I should never need to look at a minimap again. This should be something we look back at in 10 years and say, remember when you followed a yellow line on a minimap? Why was everyone so stupid? Now it's not all good. A shocking number of missions require you to investigate the area. Listen, this can work in some games. In Arkham, this shit works because you know, Batman. In The Witcher, it is awesome because you know, Monster Detective and the actual investigation is cool as shit. It's cool because Garrett will be all like, huh, monster semen. Oh, look, gouging wounds in this dude's face. Ah, he's had eggs laid in his chest cavity. Also, and this is key, both of those games use the video game-y system where what you're looking for glows. Is this realistic? Nope. Is it easy? Yep. Is that a problem? No. In its search for realism, the game thinks it's okay for one dude to murder thousands of the greatest warriors the world has ever known, but not okay to have clues glow. If the game was actually concerned with you figuring out a mystery, this would be cool, but it is not. There are no actual clues. This devolves to running in circles until you get a prompt. Sometimes, they literally don't load until you run away. Other times, they'll be inseamingly random spots and unlike in The Witcher, you need to find all of them to move on. And worst of all, everyone, every single one, eventually leads to tracks appearing on the ground to follow. And let me make clear, those tracks often don't appear until you find the other clues. Eventually, I was like, okay, where are the tracks? We've done this a hundred times. I know I'll be following tracks, but nope, tracks simply do not appear until the game decides you've wasted enough time running in fucking circles. There's another problem with this system. Now, this is a beautiful game, like as good as any game can look on the PS4, but it's also a dark game. I swear to God, the game's day-night cycle is fucked. It's as if Japan has 19 hours of night and five hours of daylight, so you will follow totally unhighlighted footprints that are barely visible in the pitch black dark. It is absurdly dark, dude. I get the idea is that there's only natural lighting and they're again going for realism, but like, again, why realism here in lighting, but not in, you know, like Mongols? An entire quest revolves around someone teaching the Mongols archery. This is hilarious. The Mongols are the greatest archers in world history. They literally conquered the known world on the basis of their impossible archery skills. Mongol boys and girls learn to shoot from horseback at age three. So the game isn't overly concerned with realism, except in places designed to annoy the shit out of me. Things like fall damage, lighting, and pointless investigations. Do these issues make it a bad game? No, this is a good game, but they make me ask why? Why can't you just have the investigation things marked? Why don't the footprints just use the wind mechanic? Why is looking at the ground for three minutes fun? This kind of shit doesn't help the game at all, and when a suite of mechanics don't help, they should probably be examined to determine if they need to be in the game at all. None of these investigations lead to really cool stories. Arkham and Witcher's investigations lead to interesting tales that are fun to learn about. Tsushima has one investigation. Oh, these people were killed by Mongols. Follow footprints to said Mongols and decapitate them. Obviously, there are only two possible solutions to these issues. Either spend a ton more effort making these quests interesting and unique, or just pull them out and replace them with more Mongol gutting. As it stands, they are unfortunate black marks. Things that have to be balanced against the things this game does either well or excellently. They don't ruin it, but they do hurt it, often quite a bit. Story. Wanna know why I was excited for this game? Because I love history. I am a history nerd. And on top of that, I love the Mongols. I read a bunch of books about Genghis and his descendants. And the story of the failed Mongol invasions of Japan are so insane and unlikely that it's a great setting. For those of you who don't know, the Mongols by this time had basically conquered everything. They conquered all of the Middle East, like all of it. All of China, they conquered all of Russia and Poland and Hungary by mistake. 15,000 men went scouting to see what was up there and accidentally completely wiped out the whole noble class of the area and then conquered it all. They were on their way to conquering all of Europe, but then the Khan died and they had to turn around and go vote for a new Khan. 30 years later, things were changing for the Mongols. They'd settled down and become kind of wealthy Chinese. Kublai decided to conquer Korea and he did. Then he went to conquer Japan. The Japanese were overwhelmed. Their whole solo combat and honor thing didn't work at all because the Mongols, they weren't about solo combat. They were military geniuses about siege warfare and winning at all costs. The Japanese both times gamely fought and were losing. But again, both times, the Mongol invasion fleet was sunk by tsunamis. This is where the word kamikaze comes from, the divine win of the gods that protected Japan. So the setting for the game is great and it ends up being a really cool alternate history. The game implies that in actuality, it was you who destroyed the Mongol fleet, but the Lords created the divine win story because you did it dishonorably and had become an outcast. When it comes to story however, this is not a historically accurate game at all. Its Mongols aren't accurate at all. And the game seems to believe that the average samurai was a noble gentleman who the people loved and who selflessly gave his life for his peasants. When in reality, the samurai were horrible, basically the same as European Lords. Peasants could be beheaded on the spot for failing to bow or for making eye contact or for anything, really. The samurai were like Lords anywhere and Lords suck ass. So that's odd and disappointing. I expect it from Japanese developers because this is like their national mythology, like how we think the founding fathers were gods or something. But I find it weird that this worshipful depiction of feudal Japan came from a Western developer. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Believe it at understanding that this is not a game that has any kind of real historical accuracy or anything to say about Japan or the samurai beyond cliches. Totally wrong cliches, basically. The actual story is pretty much what you'd expect, but it is told very well. This isn't a game about all the things I kinda wanted it to be about. It's a game about a few really interesting characters and their fight. It works really well because it's acted well and because it doesn't try to be more than it is. It's just a well done action adventure story filled with fun or interesting people. It's got some twists and turns and it's set in a wonderful and interesting and beautiful setting. Japanese culture is amazing, dude. I find it totally fascinating how it's so very similar to medieval Europe while also being totally different. The story, like the combat, is good enough to justify the purchase. All I'm saying is don't expect anything too deep. Horizon's story was so great because it's a really well thought out sci-fi tale that works deep down below the surface and gives you a bunch of stuff to ponder just like all good sci-fi does. Tsushima isn't that. It's just a great action movie. It works well, but what you see is what you get. You won't think about this story afterward, but you'll be enjoying it all the way through and that's all one really can expect from a game, to be honest with you. Wrapping up. So then, what do we have here? A game with a great and totally unique combat system that has just enough annoying shit to not be perfect. A game with a gorgeous map and a waypoint system that is amazing with missions that are pretty meth and sometimes just fucking terrible. And a story that is entertaining and really well done but never tries for anything more than that. I generally don't score games because most of my videos aren't strictly reviews. Most of the time my videos are more like, hey, look at this game or, hey, look at this one thing about this game. But I'll score this because I think the most interesting thing about this game is how to score it. I don't have some special system. I score games like a teacher scores a paper. I score the totality of my reaction. On my usual one to 100 high school English paper scoring system, this game is an 84. It has everything it needs to be a 90 or 95 but at the end of the day, it never pulls it all together to become an all-time classic. There are too many times you're following footsteps or an NPC or crisscrossing the map for a fucking sword skin. And the story is good, but not great. And the combat is great but has too many issues to be perfect. It's almost the definition of a solid B. It's good enough that I finished almost everything on the map aside from pointless trash but the existence of so much pointless trash means hours of my time was spent pointlessly. Like the hour or two of my life I spent riding around that ended up with a hat is totally fucking pointless. But the missions that led me to bad-ass armor sets that actually looked great and significantly changed my gameplay, that stuff was awesome. In the end, I enjoyed this game. I recommend it but I'm also left a little bit disappointed because it had everything it needed to be one of the three or four bests of these type of games. It could have been, like Horizon, one of the very bests of the open world action genre. Too bad it spends so much time doing the worst parts of those games. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.