After roughly 60 hours I just finished the story of Ghost of Yotei and wow, what a game!
Initially I went into the game a bit sceptical as I really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima and wanted to see what was next for Jin, so this game going in a completely different direction made me a bit skeptical. By the time the game ended, I actually feel Yotei had the better story and was the slightly better game overall.
I found the difficulty is slightly different from GoT as I played the whole game on Lethal and only really found it challenging during the 1V1 duels whereas out in the open world it was never much of a challenge. In Yotei, I find the enemies to be a lot more aggressive even on Hard so Lethal was a bit too much and I opted for a custom setting that’s lethal for everything except enemy damage (set to hard) and timings (set to medium).
Missions I’d say are nice and long, it can get a bit repetitive as many follow the same formula but there’s a decent amount of fighting and that’s what you play the game for so balances out. I was surprised though how long the missions are for each of the Yotei 6, they are essentially split into multiple missions and have great twists to keep you guessing.
I generally like to look at a mission list before I play a game and it looked quite short on paper but each mission was more like a chapter with multiple sub missions which I found enjoyable. The open world itself looked stunning although I do feel it was a bit more empty and smaller compared to GoT which had random Mongol patrols all over the map but Saito’s men patrolling felt a lot more scarce.
In general the game was absolutely amazing from a visual standpoint, it seemed to be a big graphical update over it’s predecssor and playing on the PS5 Pro it looked amazing.
Here comes the spoilers but with Ghost of Tsushima the ending felt like the story had just begun. Jin Sakai the Samurai was gone and the ghost was born so this made the game felt like part 1 of many. For Yotei, the Onryo’s mission really was over, she was entering a new chapter of her life and the ending was (very sad but) complete.
This will probably be my game of the year and if they do release DLC, I’ll be playing it without a doubt.