Author: Guo Hengyu Source: Quan Now
Whether it is the exquisite creation of the arrogance of emotional expression and the atmosphere of material mourning, or the pure portrayal of the samurai who put life and death aside, "The Ghost of Tsushima Island" is permeated with the reflection of Japanese culture.
On July 17, 2020, the last exclusive game of Sony's ps4 generation, ghost of tsushima, was officially released, and sony's four blockbuster 3a masterpieces on display at the 2018 e3 show, which was also Sony's last e3: marvel's spider-man, death stranding, and the last survivor 2 of us part ii) and Ghost of Tsushima, all of which have been met with players. Next, with the release of the PS5 release news, a new generation of consoles will be released at the end of 2020, after a series of starting game lineups have also been finalized, in various senses, the end of the PS4 generation is close at hand.
Ghost of Tsushima game cover
Looking back at the entire ps4 generation, it seems a bit inadequate to draw this over by Ghost of Tsushima, which has neither death stranding's desire to explore the depth of the story, nor the expansion of the game's defined boundaries represented by The Last of Us 2, or even the popularity of the Marvel Spider-Man series. After the ban on ghost of Tsushima was lifted on July 15, the game received an average rating of 83 on metacritic, and no matter how you look at it, it is not like the kind of game that can afford to "put the curtain on the generations".
However, after the game was released, the feedback from players was unexpectedly good. As of July 25, more than 9,600 players on metacritic have given the title an average score of 9.3, with "amazing" and "awesome" becoming the most frequent adjectives in a large number of near-perfect reviews, while in the Chinese Internet community, most players have also praised Ghost of Tsushima.
The high ratings were a surprise, especially for the game's development studio, sucker punch. As Sony's first-party game studio, their last well-known work was the infamous "Infamous: Second Son" after its release in 2014, and now, six years later, their game has become more sought-after than "The Last Survivor 2" - according to game media game rant, "Ghost of Tsushima" was sold out in Japan on July 22, and some stores in Europe and the United States have begun to ask suppliers to replenish.
Ratings and sales, as the two most intuitive figures, have shown that Ghost of Tsushima is Sony's biggest surprise for players in 2020, and there may be some coincidences, such as the release of the controversial "Last of Us 2", the contrast effect amplifies the player's good feelings for the game, for example, for an unknown studio, the player's requirements are lower and easier to be satisfied.
But this does not prevent us from continuing to ask questions, asking players why they are pleased by such a game, why does the game that is lackluster in some details get such a high rating, after all, "Ghost of Tsushima" must have done something right, so what did it do right?
To be fair, the good points and weaknesses of Ghost of Tsushima are conspicuous.
As far as the plot is concerned, the game's story itself is not much highlight, and the plot is slightly cheesy. The Ghost of Tsushima tells an alternate story set in Kublai Khan's conquest of Japan. In 1274, the general Hetung Khan led a large army to conquer Japan, and Tsushima became an outpost of the war. The protagonist of the game, Hitoshi Sekai, is the nephew of Shimura, one of the five local samurai in the Tsushima Island. After the outbreak of war, Shimura was captured by the enemy, and Ren, who survived from the battlefield, realized that it was impossible to fight a powerful enemy head-on with the traditional "Bushido", and in order to rescue his uncle and guard his hometown and people, Ren chose to wear the mask of a "war ghost" and embarked on a path of assassination that "betrayed glory". (Note: The characters in the game are all fictional characters)
Screenshot of the game
Basically, it's a story about rediscovering the foundations of one's own existence in the midst of chaos, and when a strong enemy shatters an old belief, the protagonist begins to find a new path of redemption for himself. But specifically, the game does not pay much attention to the narrative in terms of gameplay mechanics, does not have a good narrative technique, does not have a deep enough story connotation, and most of the plot promotion means is to trigger cutscenes with combat and exploration in a decent manner, even in this generation of games, such a method has become slightly outdated.
In the game, "Ghost of Tsushima" still has many lackluster places, localization is relatively rough, and bugs like "wearing molds" also occur from time to time. Lacking in innovation in the core system, the game's core system is an open-world game that captures the gameplay of Demon Hunter III, the stealth assassination features of the Assassin's Creed series, and elements of traditional action-adventure games like Tomb Raider.
Official screenshot
The difference between "eclecticism" and "plagiarism" is sometimes between the lines. During the production process, sucker punch did not simply pursue the take-it-or-go doctrine, they repackaged and designed these elements, reconciling the proportions of each part to achieve a delicate balance. So that even for players who are extremely familiar with the game and have played each of the above masterpieces, "Ghost of Tsushima" still has something to look forward to: the interspersed design of the main line mission and the side quest makes the task and the task not abruptly connect, alleviating the sense of fragmentation of the side story; with an excellent sense of blow and diverse battle content to make up for the embarrassment of formal repetition, so as not to make the player bored with the repeated slashing enemies in the game, and hook the player's addiction to battle; the difficulty design pays attention to skills and combat process. Instead of emphasizing the strength of the equipment alone, the difficulty curve is also designed to be smoother.
During the play, you can clearly feel the design idea of the production team "everything serves the player's game experience". In addition to the game system, sucker punch allows players to focus more on game content by simplifying ui and operation, paying great attention to the design of art and scenes, and even hired the well-known musician Mei Linmao to make a soundtrack for the game.
Compared with the understanding of narrative-based single-player games in this generation, the design of heavy experience and light plot seems to be a bit off the door, but from the perspective of actual game effects, players are very impressed. In a way, Ghost of Tsushima succeeds in making most of the elements of the game revolve around gameplay, and the gameplay experience becomes the core of the entire game.
Starting from the game itself, looking for the reason why Ghost of Tsushima became the dark horse of the end of the generation, most players will mention "sincerity". As something that cannot be quantified, the direction of sincerity is always vague, sometimes it means huge investments, sometimes it means perfectionism and obsessive-compulsive quality control, sometimes it means not greedy marketing strategies, and in the case of Ghost of Tsushima, it refers more to content that exceeds players' expectations.
As an American game studio, Sucker punch's understanding and portrayal of Japanese culture has come a long way compared to the simple "masked ninja" setting in the past. On the more obvious part, sucker punch put a lot of effort into the game's graphics, set-up design, and cutscenes. As a non-top 3a game, Ghost of Tsushima has an excellent performance of the game environment, and the game's creative team studies the changes in light and shadow in different environments, examining the Environment, Material Textures and Architecture of the 13th Century in Japan to achieve a closer and more "Japanese flavor" finished product.
Although sucker punch chose the design idea of emphasizing experience over plot, "Ghosts of Tsushima" did not completely abandon the story. The story of "The Ghost of Tsushima" is selected from Japanese historical facts, and its presentation method is related to the classic Japanese "sword and sword piece". The sword and sword film is a very important type of Japanese film in the 1960s, with "Humpback City" and "Heart Stick" as typical representative works, with duels as the selling point, focusing on portraying the Japanese samurai spirit with loyalty, courage and benevolence as the core. Such a movie corresponds to the fact that Ghost of Tsushima emphasizes gameplay with a sense of percussion and a refreshing gameplay experience, making the game an extension of the form of the sword and sword film.
The game's creative director Jason Connell said in an interview with the media that in the early days of game development, they borrowed a lot of Kurosawa's films, in order to restore the pure sword blade film style, the game deliberately built in the "Kurosawa Akira" mode, after opening the game screen will become the black and white style used in the last century's movies, the frame rate will be forcibly reduced, the picture will be added to the grain of the film, the sound effects also imitate the sound effects of the 50s TV sets and radios, all of which, It's all about immersing players in the Japanese movies of the last century.
Akira Kurosawa mode
The interspersed with in-game cutscenes and flashback plots is also full of cinematic feeling, jason Connell said that in some shots, even trying to achieve a "remake of Akira Kurosawa's film", the animation is properly integrated into the overall game promotion process, and the mobilization of player emotions comes naturally.
As for the more details in the game, whether it is the embedding of the "haiku chant" in the scene or the "duel" content outside the main line, it is permeated with the reflection of Japanese culture. The former completes the exquisite creation of the arrogance of emotional expression and the atmosphere of material mourning in Japanese literature, while the latter is reminiscent of the outstanding Japanese manga work "Lang Ke Xing", the two works have realized the interchange of meanings in the theme of "duel of life and death", and also completed the interpretation of "cruel beauty": the road to the peak is a journey that constantly rubs shoulders with death, the so-called "death duel is no pity", is the desire to become the world's unparalleled samurai to hone their combat skills to hone the purity of life and death.
At this point, it is not difficult to find that the advantages and disadvantages of "Ghost of Tsushima" seem to be very "conventional", considering that most games are not perfect, so after removing the aura of "the last exclusive", it seems to be just a "OK, but also average" game, so why did the player choose "Ghost of Tsushima"?
At the end of 2013, Sony's fourth-generation family game console ps4 was released, just a few months before the console was released, the stand-alone game masterpiece "The Last Survivor" developed by Naughty Dog was officially released, and this game known to players with excellent narrative techniques almost set the tone for the development of this generation of games. Since then, with the blessing of the performance improvement of the console after the replacement of the narrative-based single-player game, more and more excellent works have emerged. At the same time, with the increasingly close cooperation between large manufacturers and independent game manufacturers, the entire game industry has been brought to a "surreal experience road": the pursuit of better text expression, the pursuit of a deeper story core, the pursuit of beyond a single entertainment product, and ultimately in exchange for a spiritual artistic experience through the medium of games.
The last survivor
It can be said that from the beginning of "The Last Survivor", both game industry insiders and gamers have clearly experienced that the acceptance of games by the whole society has been increasing, and games have embarked on the road to demonization. In this atmosphere, people suddenly realized that games can do more: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certified the casual game "endeavorrx" as a prescription device for the treatment of ADHD in children; games such as Minecraft and "Stardew Cereal Language" became excellent examples of parent-child relationships; and "City: Skyline" was used by urban planners to simulate and prove how urban design is more reasonable. It seems that overnight, "games make people degenerate" has become a cliché that deserves to be eliminated by the times.
In such an atmosphere, "what games can do" becomes a more important issue, and one can clearly appreciate that a "proving that games are not just games" has spread. At the end of this generation, it seems that everyone is running to the name of "the ninth art", star game producer Hideo Kojima hopes to bridge the separation between the online world and the real world with the concept of "connection", and the experimental "Death Stranding" is born; naughty dogs strive to go further in the narrative possibility, and mistakenly make "The Last of Us 2" a failed experiment; and cd projekt red strives to make a blockbuster "Cyberpunk 2077" continuously jump tickets. At present, the forward-looking evaluation of the media is still mixed.
Death stranded
After a circle, the entire game evaluation system has been shaken by the multi-dimensional evaluation standards in recent years, and even disrupted to some extent. Until "Ghost of Tsushima" chose to go back and start to solve the problem of "what is the game originally".
Perhaps the charm of Ghost of Tsushima is that the game clearly knows its own existence from the very beginning. Whether it's imitating Akira Kurosawa's cinematic style or creating it in meticulous detail, it's really just the outer packaging of the game, and they all ultimately serve playability and serve the player. Compared to companies that seek to accomplish more with games, sucker punch only wants to do one thing: make the game fun enough.
if it's not fun, why bother？
At the 2017 e3 show, Reggie, president of Nintendo North America, said the classic line: "The game is fun, if it's not fun, why bother?" "The Ghost of Tsushima" proves the meaning of this sentence. And it proves that the purpose of the game to please the player is definitely not a shameful thing, and the game as an entertainment product is not a contempt for the game. When the player holds the handle and watches the protagonist on the screen, Seei Ren, awaken to the "War Ghost" mode, the screen tone changes to black and red for a while, the action of the bullet time is clean and clean, like a breathtaking undead wandering soul on the battlefield, and the player in front of the screen also soars with adrenaline, immersed in this chaotic island, and briefly becomes the sometimes wandering and sometimes determined samurai, "Ghost of Tsushima" has been successful.
This does not mean, of course, that all games should pursue a single entertainment experience, but just as popcorn and literary films each occupy a part of the film field, games as a product of "fun" as a starting point, if in the end everything goes towards artistry and ignores the more fundamental playability, it will be a major loss for the player. At the end of the day, the success of Ghost of Tsushima is nothing more than awakening the player's most rustic yearning for the game, just as when people first came into contact with Super Marie, the attraction to this bouncing pixel villain was not because of how deep his inner story was, but simply because the game was fun and fun.
At the end of "The Ghost of Tsushima", Seei Izumi sheaths his sword under the bloody red maple, which becomes the most appropriate blank space for the samurai's destination, and also becomes the complete end of the ps4 generation.