I finally found something I genuinely love in Ghost of Tsushima and I wish the whole game was just that but then the game would just be For Honor so never mind.
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Do you not think they do the same thing with AC (and Watchdogs)?
Because you are angling for a job at Ubisoft's PR team. And I'm still plenty young, auntie.
I suppose if it wasn't 4th game in a row glorifying the 'troubled dad' trope that seemed to dominate media of the 2010s, I'd think it was less shit...but still probably not good.
I think Ghost is 3 (maybe a 3.5) out of 5 as well though.
You called God Of War a 3/5 so does that mean 'bad' or does it mean 'servicable'?
And RDR2 only sticks out because it was a game where I laid out all of the issues with the game as clearly as I could only for you to toss them aside as if it was the irrelevant ramblings of a homeless guy trying to sell you pencils from a cup. You can't blame me for feeling a little eye-rolly when most of the issues you pointed out were the exact ones I was trying to articulate.
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Shit, dude. did you get an internship at ubisoft this summer? I'm talking about ghost in relation to AC because that was literally how I started the discussion. On it's own merits it's just fine. Compared to AC games in general it's refreshing. Oddessy just wasn't that good, very few AC or Ubisoft games are. But I see this is series you're invested in so I won't do this dance. Hopefully you'll pull a RDR2 or God Of War (2018) and just end up changing your mind about the game completely, rendering this whole discussion kind of moot.
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The window on perfect parries is a 10x tighter in ghost than the couter kills in something like black flag, which gives you the ability to counter kill anything instantly, and being in the right stance doesn't guarantee anything when you're surrounded by multiple enemy types, or even when you're against the same type. If I fuck up my positioning or time my attack string badly, the stagger combo isn't auto killing anything. Now the new-ish combat style of origins and oddessy has the arcade double speed dark souls which ditches the counter kill crap but also makes enemies like wonky damage sponge terminators. It's not fluid.
Even if I pick the wind stance against 4 spear enemies, I can still be turned into swiss cheese if I pick my attack approach wrong, despite all of my combat abilites, something can always go wrong. It also incorporates the principles of Sen, Go No Sen, and sen no sen (albiet lightly) by giving you options to deal with attacks outside of parries, like disrupting their own 'wind up' with a well placed attack of your own.
The combat in ghost isn't perfectly rewarding but combat in anything but a pirate ship in AC has never been rewarding (and even then it wears bloody thin, real quick).
The skill tree has the advantage of having skills I actually end up using and want to use instead of just bells and whistles which technically make me more of a badass but feel hollow or impractical.
I'm with you on the charms, but I ditched the traveller's attire as soon as possible. I'm unlocking the map fast enough by just chasing foxes and birds in my armor and I'm in no rush to do any of that faster. The customization works on an aesthetic level, It looks nice enough for me to want ride over to a flower out of my way so I can get my scabbard to match my headband. It's just the right amount of incentive for a cosmetic upgrade.
I'm not going to sit here and defend the story, it's a pretty stand stoic revenge/liberation tale. What I like about it is that it doesn't break my immersion of being a wandering ronin. Jin's character is just flat enough for me to be able to project my own goals of becoming more powerful without me getting bored or pissed off when he opens his mouth, when compared to a lot of other open world games including AC, this is a godsend.
I really like how everyone in the game is pretty no-nonsense but still manage to feel distinct from each other, the game wont win any TLOU2 type awards for the acting. But I never feel the urge to skip a cutscene, when Lady Masako told me about the slaughter of her family after seeing the bloodstained tatami and broken naginatas in her estate, I gave a shit. Which is something an AC game has probably made me do twice over the span of a dozen games.
And I never feel like there should be less mongols after clearing outsposts because this isn't far cry. It's literally the mongol empire they are the in-universe example of the endless horde. If anything I'm surprised there aren't more of them crawling about, they probably have a metric fuck ton of ships posted in every sea surrounding the island.
Oddessey's story might make you feel more in tune with greater conflict but when you get to know the people in your island are ubisoft-usubtle wink-and-nod swingers who want to have pansexual orgies with you, it's hard for me to take my role in the fight for these people very seriously. Seeing Jin's bare ass when he gets into the hot springs is about all the fanservice I need for a game like this.
So yeah the game is on the better end, of open word stuff. It's somewhere between Breath of the Wild and Mad Max in terms of quality.