I should start by saying that overall I had a good time with this game and any RPG fan would probably like this game. I very much enjoyed playing GoT...right up until I didn’t.

I’m sure you all know by now about the ups and downs of this game, so I won’t go too into detail about the things you’ve already heard. But I just wanted to share some of my experience of the game having played it for the past couple of months. I’ll start with a few good bits:

• One of the most enjoyable open world RPGs I’ve played recently, definitely a step in the right direction. Enough to make it different from the yearly Assassins Creed.
• I really liked the atmosphere and enjoyed the art style. I really wanted to try and play an honorable samurai.
• Using the wind for navigation is a nice touch. Worked very well for me, never got lost
• Combat feels very good, decent amount of complexity but not too difficult to be able to play casually.
• I liked the side mission layout. Major side missions that tie into the story, and then minor ones just for completing.

However, despite all these good points about the game I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it, I ended up stopping around ⅔ of the way into Act 2. Now part of this may be down to my play time, rather than being able to sit and play it for 5 days, because of work I end up playing an hour or 2 a couple of days a week. This meant my play time was more spread out with a chance for my focus to drift, but my points may still stand.

Firstly for me, I like to try and complete an area before I move onto the next Act in a game in case I end up missing things coming back to the area later, but I will try and leave myself a few menial things to do. I played RDR2 last summer and took this approach and I had a blast with the game, I really loved it. Now by taking this approach in Ghost of Tsushima, I found myself getting a lot of skill points, and unlocking the stances pretty early. This meant I was pretty well powered and clued up on the combat rather early, and meant there wasn’t much learning for the rest of the game. I enjoyed the combat in the game, but I enjoyed it more while I was learning it. Once I’d unlocked the stances and gotten used to switching them up on the fly I did start to get a bit bored of it. I ended up getting the Ghost Weapons pretty early on too, so a lot of (pretty decent) mechanics were available to me early on and again, I found myself wanting to learn more new ones. I think a lot of this is emphasized by the fact there’s no loot. You only really have one lot of weapons and then it's skins on top of that. There’s no chance for different damage stats, effects, multipliers. But then I don’t think GoT really wants those things, it doesn’t suit being a looty game. It would just make the game seem grindy. I’m not sure the solution, but for me, progression just stopped early on and I enjoy progression.

The other major issue for me was the background tasks just not being fun. Again I think coming off the back of RDR2 soured this for me. But with RDR2 some days I could just log on and spend a few hours hunting, go do some bounties, be a bandit for the day etc all without really having to think, or put my brain into the story. And I just couldn’t do that in GoT.

• Hunting was pretty boring and shallow I thought
• I hated the horse riding in the game so travelling just wasn’t fun as nice as the scenery was at times
• You can go around and clear camps or patrols, but that’s just the same thing over and over
• You can go find Pillars of Honor, fox dens, bamboo stalls, hot springs. But again I found these quickly became old, and didn’t really add all that much (except maybe bamboo stalls). I didn’t want to just do fox dens for a couple of hours.

The world just felt a bit shallow to me which was a shame because I wanted to love it and see it through. I think GoT just wasn’t the right game at the right time for me. I need something I can just pop into and do nothing for a couple of hours if my brain is fried after work. GoT is all about the atmosphere and the story and while I like it, I needed something different.

I’ve decided to go in the other direction completely and try Elite Dangerous, a game with no story and where everything is the menial tasks, see how we go with it. Maybe later on I’ll fancy jumping back into GoT when I’ve got a week off or something and be able to see it through.

TL;DR: Jin Sakai was the hero I deserved, but just not the one I needed right now

Thanks for reading!