Ghostwire: Tokyo
Review
Atmospheric
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
Another Open World Game
Boy, you know what we need right now? Another open-world game with collectibles, numerous side quests, RPG elements, and light stealth all propping up some shooter action at the core. We've only had six mainline Far Cry games a couple of Rage titles, the modern Fallout games, and Cyberpunk 2077, after all. I guess I should be thankful that Ghostwire: Tokyo doesn't shoe-horn crafting and survival elements as well! Had it done so it would be challenging Dying Light 2 for the most generic game of 2022 award.
That's not to say that the open world of Ghostwire: Tokyo is awful, quite the opposite. There is a great degree of care placed in the meticulous detail of the Shibuya district. Everywhere you go there's some interesting little detail to discover, making the city feel lived-in. Moreover, the empty city streets perpetually shrouded in fog, bathed in moonlight, or sprinkled with a light spring rain have an unusually lonely atmosphere to them. Sure, most open worlds are largely empty but Ghostwire's feels unusually sombre as well. Part of is the setting, a major metropolis that has been suddenly depopulated by a supernatural event. The streets are empty save for the now-abandoned pets and whatever detritus the humans left as they vanished. The act of wandering these empty streets is at once immediately familiar and impossibly alien. It simultaneously evokes, the loneliness of being in a dense crowd of strangers and the solitude of being the last man on earth.
This sense of loneliness is somewhat undermined by filling the map with a million different side-quests and collectibles. It doesn't help that the quality of these side quests is so wildly inconsistent too. Some are excellent, like when you ride an empty subway train to a mysterious station to free the souls trapped there, but most are generic 'Go to the place and kill the enemies there'. Worse still, the game has nothing to reward you with for doing all these extra missions, the best it can offer is some in-game currency and some cosmetics. The currency is mostly worthless, as you will find mountains of the stuff just walking around and the cosmetics are pointless in a single-player first-person game.
That said, there is a simple joy to going around the map and cleaning up all the little markers, and filling out all the missing entries in the game's codex. It's a satisfaction not unlike tidying up your house or mowing your lawn. Ghostwire: Tokyo is hardly unique in this appeal, but it does execute it with a degree of skill.
Characters
In Ghostwire Tokyo, the player takes on an unusual dual protagonist role. You play as both Akito, a young man who was in a traffic accident just as everyone in Tokyo's Shibuya district was raptured up by a supernatural ritual, and KK, a disembodied spirit of a tough-talking Tokyo detective turned paranormal investigator. KK possesses Akito's body in a last-ditch effort to foil the plans of the mysterious man in a Hannya mask who is responsible for everyone disappearing. As a result, Akito can use all of KK's psychic powers. He'll need them because as a result of the ritual Tokyo is now crawling with ghosts and demons.
Making the player control two characters at once is a clever move on the part of the writers, as it allows the player character to be simultaneously a fish-out-of-water who needs to have basic concepts explained to him and also a bonified badass capable of fending off scores of demons. It also offers interesting narrative potential for the personalities of the two protagonists to clash against each other. KK is dedicated to his mission but Akito is just a scared kid way out of his depth, who probably wants to just go home. It could have been like the original Ratchet and Clank where the two player characters had different goals and personalities, and even actively worked against each other at times, before eventually become a well-oiled machine by the end of the story.
Unfortunately, this constitutes what is probably Ghostwire: Tokyo's biggest missed opportunity, as the game gets KK and Akito on the same page almost immediately when the man in Hannya mask kidnaps Akito's comatose sister. In addition to removing a potentially interesting narrative direction, this also piles coincidence onto the story, so now Akito isn't just some guy who got into a car crash right before Tokyo went to hell, now he's also intimately involved with the main villain. At this point, the coincidences are getting a bit hard to swallow.
The characters are also inconsistently written at times. KK is supposed to be a tough, cynical detective yet in one sidequest he remarks "All property is theft" like a college-paged stoner trying to sound profound. As the late, great Norm Macdonald would say: "No offense but it sounds like some f@#&ing commie gobbledygook" and I doubt there are very many Marxists on staff at the Tokyo police department. Surely, it would be better to have Akito say this, and KK reply by mocking his youth and naivety.
Of course, this line could just be the result of a translator more interesting in pushing their own cringe-worthy political opinions rather than faithfully recreating the dialogue's meaning in a new language. Certainly, we've seen this sort of thing happen before with Japanese imports to the West. My smattering of Japanese picked up from anime and video games is insufficient to make any judgment on whether it was the original writers or the translators who dropped the ball. In any event, it doesn't matter who is to blame, the line is a flub that serves only to pull the player out of the game's world.
Hello Gorgeous
Whatever shortcomings the game has, it certainly looks gorgeous. As mentioned above the streets of demon-haunted Tokyo have been carefully rendered in all manner of loving detail. Each little corner offers some thoughtful detail or other. However, things really get visually interesting when you enter a cursed location and watch reality warp and shift around you.
Of special note are the monsters which are drawn from a mish-mash of Japanese folklore, urban legends, and popular horror movies. It was a pleasant surprise to see the headless schoolgirls from Crazy Lips and the titular monster from Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman turn up. These monsters are all genuinely terrifying from the slender man clones with business suits and featureless faces to the grotesque Hanako-san (a ghost that haunts school toilets... no really).
It's a shame that the game never really gives them a chance to be frightening. You have plenty of ammunition for your magic attacks and killing any enemy will give you more. Likewise, there are so many healing items (seemingly every Japanese snack food under the sun has been added to the game as a health potion) that you never have to worry about running out. With effectively unlimited resources even the most intimidating monster becomes trivial to grind down.
Judgement
Ghostwire: Tokyo is not a bad game by any standard. It's pretty, it's fun, and it follows a formula that has proven to be successful even if it's overdone by this point. As I played through it for this review I found myself alternating between enjoying myself and being frustrated with its shortcomings. There is a potentially brilliant horror/detective game buried under all the superfluous side quests and pointless collectibles, and each time I caught a glimpse of it, I find myself wondering about what could have been.
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7.2
fun score
Pros
Excellent monster design, unique and moody atmosphere, Some excellent side quests.
Cons
Most side-quests and collectibles are tedious, There are lots of games out there that do more or less the same thing, Seldom actually scary
