The skin changer monster derived from the theme of "social animals" alone accounts for nearly one-third of the monster species in this game. ”
A puff of smoke enveloped the Shibuya district of Tokyo, Japan, and hundreds of thousands of people sucked into the fog suddenly disappeared, leaving only their clothes in place. Demons and ghosts have replaced humans and wandered aimlessly through the streets of Shibuya.
The protagonist halo takes care of the tragic 22-year-old young Yi Yue Xiaoren. Both of his parents died, his sister Mari was seriously injured in a fire and hospitalized, while he himself was killed in a car accident on his way to the hospital.
Coincidentally, Xiaoren is forcibly possessed by another mysterious soul, "KK", and not only does not disappear into the fog, but also gains the power to drive the ethereal spirit and the Miza demon to exorcise demons. In order to rescue their loved ones and expose the conspiracy behind the smoke, Xiaoren and KK work together on a journey.
Ghost Line: Tokyo (hereinafter referred to as "Ghost Line") chooses a Japanese supernatural theme based on a modern background, and the conception and visual style are very novel and flattering. However, the actual results delivered by the production team Tango are quite traditional: a first-person shooter that takes into account the elements of the open world.
Compared with the previous "Evil Spirit Possession" series, "Ghost Line" is a major innovation, but as a "canned" game in the mouth of players, it does show a banal and even stale side, "5 minutes can experience the next 5 hours of game content".
The monotony of fighting and exploration has also worn me out many times. However, whenever there is such a time, there are always some places where the production team has moved their minds, which brings me unexpected surprises. In a trance, I actually attacked most of the Shibuya district, and it took more than 20 hours to remember the main line of clearance.
1
"Ghost Line" is not an authentic "Lin Zhengying simulator", KK has more demon removal spells than zombie Taoists. Players can unlock all three different attributes of the "Ethereal Combat Technique" in the early stage of the process, each of which has two branches of general attack and charge attack, adding up to only six attack methods.
The seemingly fancy spell is actually a skinning of weapons commonly seen in traditional FPS games. It is not MP magic that limits the player's play, each spell has its own "spirit power", which translates to the adult language is the ammo capacity.
The Wind Attribute Attack is a fast Wind Bullet that shoots from the fingertip, a normal attack is like a pistol; a Fire Attribute Attack is a flame spear summoned by holding your hands together, which acts as a high-powered sniper rifle, and the charge attack becomes a fireball attack with ranged explosion damage, comparable to a grenade launcher. For balance, fire-based ammunition has the least reserve and is more difficult to obtain.
The Water Attribute Attack is a horizontal blast wave that is hand-rubbed, with a short range, but a wide range, damage explosion, and status equivalent to the shotgun in the FPS. As for charge attacks... It is a shotgun with higher damage and a penetrating effect attached.
Players carry a small amount of ammunition capacity, need to consider resource management, actively use charge attacks to save ammunition in battle, but also pay attention to the floating drink vending machines, road signs, cars and other "ethereal crystals" in advance, destroy them to obtain ammunition. Some oil drums on the street will also turn into crystals, which will explode widely when destroyed, while generating rare fire-related ammunition.
The spell's abundant firepower can strike the monsters straight, eventually shattering their shells, revealing the "spirit core" of the key parts. At this point, the player can use the "Spirit Grabber" to use spells to create ropes depending on the distance, or directly start and pull out the spirit core, so as to kill them immediately. In the case of sneaking in, backstabbing ghosts can use the "Disease Method", which has the same effect as "Grabbing Spirits".
Compared to the way Doom executes demons, "Grabbing Spirits" and "Disease Removal" are less bloody and more cool.
There are also bows and arrows with their own silenced effect but severely falling, as well as four types of imperial swords with different effects. Miza is similar to a throwing weapon such as a grenade, but has a richer function: paralyzing the enemy to restrict its movements, reducing the enemy's defense so that it exposes the spirit core faster; creating a bush or a loud noise out of thin air, assisting the player in sneaking, etc.
As the bond between Xiaoren and KK deepens, the two can achieve "absolute resonance" for a short time. Similar to the explosion or awakening, the player must accumulate the resonance rate by killing and executing the enemy, and the resonance rate can be launched when it is full, generating a shock wave that can blow or stun the enemy, while returning the ammunition and enhancing the attack power to achieve the effect of quick clearance.
These demon-removing mechanics derived from FPS games may sound ok, but Ghost Line isn't as combat-like as most shooters.
The reinforced concrete forest constructed by countless buildings in Shibuya District creates an inexplicable sense of isolation, and battles with monsters often occur in narrow battle scenes, such as an alley or a four-walled construction site. This deliberate design closes the distance between the monster and the player, bringing psychological stress and horror to the player, like the "Resident Evil" that Shinji Mikami once worked on.
The narrow paths of the interior scene meet
The production team may have followed a similar design, which greatly limited the player's movement speed in the horizontal plane, even if they were possessed by powerful people such as KK, the villain could not master the flexible body methods such as rolling, dodging, and sliding shovel. It is always ideal to beat a monster to the point where the spirit core is exposed, and the execution in actual combat is often interrupted by the attacks of other enemies.
Players must use the block function to defend against monster attacks, but also through the perfect block to trigger bounce, so as not to take any damage - which also means that the player is always in a passive position, which is a bit strange for a pseudo-FPS game.
2
Ghost Line introduces an open-world element, which means that monsters are refreshed and battles take place everywhere on the map. Sooner or later, the player will get bored and need something to keep fresh, such as new enemies or the growth of the player's character.
First of all, the types of enemies are unfortunately few. Some monsters are only skinned by another part, making it difficult to bring continuous stimulation to the player for 20 hours. Some of the monsters are based on Japanese legends, and the other part is obviously derived from the resentments that people have in their daily lives, and the resentments of Tokyo residents are probably endless.
Only the skin-swapping monster derived from the theme of "social animals" occupies nearly one-third of the monster species in this work, and there are three kinds of meat shield-type elite monsters designed based on middle-aged men with large belly, which can be seen everywhere in the middle and late stages of the process, and it is annoying to see.
Dead Fat Man (literally)
More dead fat people
Bosses with strong combat power are even rarer, and there are only five boss battles in the main line of the game's entire six chapters, and the last three boss battles are piled up in the closing two chapters.
In one of the boss battles, Xiaoren, who has lost links with KK and is unable to cast spells, faces a cat-shaped monster alone, with three glowing tails on the cat's back, suggesting that the player needs to pull out the three tails one by one by stealth and backstab. This forced backstabbing design has appeared in many games, and changing the skin in "Ghost Line" is really not a good idea.
Because there are too few attack methods, the growth of the player's character cannot be intuitively reflected. In order to build the growth of quantitative change into qualitative change, Ghost Line requires players to devote their limited energy to endless exploration of the map.
Ghost Line has a skill tree system, skills involve every action the player can take in the game, mostly the number bonus on the panel, refined to the point of no return, but there are very few skills that can really be used. For example, a skill allows me to restore a certain amount of health after executing an enemy, but unfortunately, under the difficulty I chose, that amount of health is not enough to match the damage that the enemy has done to me.
Unlocking skills requires two kinds of resources: experience points and goku jade, and to obtain them requires players to actively explore the Shibuya map.
The most efficient way to gain experience points is to use the Paper Man "Reidai" to collect scattered souls, and then use a street phone booth that has been modified into a teleportation device in advance to send the souls to safety outside Shibuya.
A paper man can collect no more than 1,000 souls, and completing side quests, or occasionally triggering "Hundred Ghosts Night Walk" encounters, will reward some souls, the number of which is around 2000. There are 2,403 million souls waiting to be collected in shibuya, and collecting spirit bodies is a boring process, which makes me feel the sense of mission and responsibility of saving Tokyo.
Monsters such as Kappa, Ghost, and Tang Umbrella Monk appear as relatively friendly NPC characters in Ghost Line, and after completing certain challenges, KK can absorb them to obtain goku jade. The challenge is monotonous, with some monsters needing to follow the footsteps by running or sneaking, starting over if they are lost or discovered, and cleaning up a large number of monsters.
Ghost in the game
Leveling up increases the player's health cap by 2% per level. Shibuya is also dotted with dozens of statues of Jizo Bodhisattvas representing the three attributes of wind, fire, and water. Visiting a Jizo Bodhisattva increases the maximum mana limit of 1 block. Collecting hundreds of thousands of spirits and finding all the bodhisattva statues will at best double the health and ammunition reserves.
Bodhisattva statues also cannot be visited immediately when the open world is unlocked. The third chapter of Ghost Line will open half of the map, and the fourth chapter will unlock the remaining half. The newly unlocked area is shrouded in dangerous fog, and players need to purify the shrines in Shibuya areas and dispel the fog in order to explore the collectibles, side lines, and even main lines in this area, which is quite not "open world".
The experience of cleaning up the shrine is also not as good as "Far Cry" with the outpost as a selling point. The attack method is limited, the sneak income is not high, the bow and arrow and the imperial seal that are conducive to infiltration cost money, and the use of backstabbing and bow and arrow headshots for some elite monsters can not do a second kill, it is really better to go directly to it.
The shrine's reward is the most useful and simplest: the various rosary beads worn on the hands. After cleaning up all the shrines in the fourth chapter and getting enough rosary beads, the player's spell and bow damage can be increased by 60%, turning the gua sha battle that takes a minute or two into a peerless mowing that can solve the problem in a few seconds.
3
The production team tried to grasp both open worlds and FPS games, but neither of these aspects of Ghost Line was satisfactory. FPS and the open world itself are not wrong, and "Ghost Line" just chose the most likely way to cause PTSD, resulting in a weak gameplay beyond the player's expectations, replaced by human words is "not fun".
But the "not fun" Ghost Line is by no means useless, it does have a charm that keeps me going for 20 hours, and it has a lot of details that suit my taste and refresh me — even though those details rarely play a direct role in gameplay.
Similar to the hook claw, KK can use the spell silk thread to hook the tengu flying in the sky to achieve the effect of quickly climbing to the top of the building, which is called "ethereal leap". The tengu's position is fixed, but it can freely summon the tengu after pointing out a core skill. Combined with the "Ethereal Flight" that can glide through the air for a period of time, at least in the process of exploring Tokyo, the player's mobility is no less than that of "Fading Light".
Ethereal Leap
Ghost Line's Tokyo is not a 1-to-1 map based on reality, and the actual relationship is more like That Santo vs. Los Angeles. Commercial areas, residential areas, industrial areas, parks, cemeteries, and areas unlocked in each chapter of the main line process are highly similar to reality, and each has a completely different visual style.
Downtown
The typical landmark buildings in Shibuya District have also been included in the game one by one, and the degree of restoration is quite high. Examples include Shibuya's famous intersections, underground streets, subway stations, and the nearby Hikari and 109 Buildings. The two towers in the game were renamed "Kagerie" and "429", the latter of which may be a tribute to the well-known visual novel game 428: Blockaded Shibuya.
Metro station
Buildings and roadside objects are certainly stickers, but they are also very finely made. Like subway signs and newspapers, I can still see every katakana written on it in the lowest quality.
Because the fog came too suddenly, humans disappeared, but the buildings left by humans were still brightly lit. The ghosts on the street are obstructive, but the ghosts will not leave corpses to affect the appearance of the city, I can send them to the past life first, and then take care of myself walking on the street to take pictures, do not have to care about any epidemic prevention regulations and the strange eyes of passers-by.
Outside of the big map, the production team is accustomed to making independent scenes for the main line and even side quests, sometimes indoors, sometimes ghosts and monsters create strange hallucinations, not necessarily terrifying, the atmosphere is very in place, reminiscent of "Evil Spirit Possession".
"Ghost Station"
"The Other World"
The production team was even willing to make a not-so-small field scene for a kappa to sneak up on the kappa while waiting for the kappa to eat a cucumber, and I couldn't help but wonder how cheap the human resources in charge of the art were this year.
After the disappearance of humans, convenience stores in the streets and alleys, as well as stalls selling snacks and toys at shrines, were all taken over by cats. Some cats are also very interested in human culture, and beg the protagonist to help collect various models, toys, and trinkets, and it will exchange a lot of money and props for it. This involves the collection system of this game, which has hundreds of collections and has no practical use, but the copywriting is written in great detail, as if it were a propaganda advertisement that only existed during the Japanese Olympic Games.
The collected objects will be displayed in real time at cat and stalls. One of the collections was the helmet of Naoe Kane, a famous Minister of japan during the Sengoku period, and when I sent the helmet, the cat put the helmet directly on his head and made a particularly satisfied cry. In my opinion, this kind of positive feedback is much more energetic than the insignificant growth of the character.
There are also some settings and details that are difficult for me to leave, and digging into these contents is much more interesting than doing main quests, but unfortunately, due to space limitations, I can't share them all:
Tanuki cats that can speak Kansai dialect (translated into Sichuanese dialect that are not like gods in Jianzhong), pet cats and dogs that casually give players a hand, ghosts who die of resentment without toilet paper on the toilet, UP masters who specialize in live broadcasting for strange phenomena, blooming cherry blossoms that return from red to white after purification, and CP with a strong sense of mixing mouth when Xiaoren and KK are bonded...
All in all, when I made exploring every corner of Shibuya, rather than the speedy main story, my biggest fun and game goal, Ghost Line didn't seem so bad.
4
There are different value orientations in the player group, and depending on the acceptance of the various attributes of the game by different players, there will be mixed evaluations and controversies.
The 80% of the players who give praise on the Steam platform will probably not be as harsh as I am on the gameplay of "Ghost Line", excellent background settings, art style and detail portrayal, more or less have been worth the ticket price; players who give bad reviews must admit that there are some places where "Ghost Line" is really good.
Rather than being "propaganda fraud" in Ghost Line, I would rather believe that the production team was inexperienced in the transition and had an immature understanding of open-world gameplay. The fatal flaw of "not fun" cannot be hidden, but as a "Tokyo travel simulator", the content of this Shibuya flavor can is still quite in place - of course, if the number of "social animal monsters" is reduced, players will have more relaxation and pleasure in the process of traveling.