Ghostwire: Tokyo Review: Lackluster Combat Living in a Resonant World

The fondly conceived open world of Ghostwire: Tokyo isn’t bustling with life but defined by its unnerving absence.

Ghostwire: Tokyo
Photo: Bethesda

You could describe Ghostwire: Tokyo as a Japanese ghost story, though that would undercut just how dedicated it is to embodying the totality of that premise. It isn’t the first game to offer a dense, incredibly detailed rendering of Tokyo, but maybe it’s the first to make you feel like all of that work isn’t window dressing. That’s because there’s such a strong sense of presence, of life, culture, and more behind the activities that you can do here. Its vision of Tokyo may have been realized on a fraction of the budget that Rockstar spent on bringing L.A. to life in Grand Theft Auto V, yet both games are every bit as fondly conceived.

The difference, of course, is that the open world of Ghostwire: Tokyo isn’t bustling with life but defined by its unnerving absence. When the game starts, a sentient white mist rolls into Tokyo and evaporates the entire human population, leaving still warm piles of clothes in its wake. The city’s neon lights are visible everywhere, and cars are still running and radios still blaring. The only things walking the streets are stray cats and dogs, as well as otherworldly spirits of varying temperament. Among them is Akito, our hero, who’s possessed by a recently deceased paranormal investigator named KK who has just enough supernatural power to combat the various hordes from the beyond, and restore the vanished to the physical realm.

First-person shooter combat is, functionally, the brunt of Ghostwire: Tokyo but also ultimately its biggest disappointment—namely for feeling so weirdly vestigial. You have three elemental attacks, a way to quick-kill unaware enemies that you’ve managed to stun, and later a set of magical grenades, but nothing in the game is particularly challenging. Health items are plentiful, ammo is everywhere, going off the beaten path just once is usually enough to gain enough XP to level up, and enemies are predictable. The only time where tension raises from actual physical danger are in the sporadic moments where KK is stripped away from Akito and you have to get out of danger with only a bow and arrow at your disposal.

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Like Silent Hill before it, killing a baddie here isn’t nearly as interesting as reckoning with the mere fact of its existence. These are salarymen who’ve overworked themselves to death, traditional fabled creatures and cryptids now wearing modern clothes, Noh theater figures now forced to contend with a world that’s no longer theirs, or demihumans using their symbology for sinister purposes. The game eschews blood and guts for a more classic sense of eerie wrongness that culminates in the more blatantly freaky stretches where the architecture of a room changes, paintings bleed their ink across walls, or the walls vanish altogether.

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There’s a mindfulness to the particulars in Ghostwire: Tokyo, where nothing seems haphazardly placed, its subversions of reality feel targeted, and every little corner of the city means something to someone. This likely explains the nature of the combat. Game combat, by its very nature, has to scale for progress, rendering some enemies as less of a threat, or less meaningful than others. But Ghostwire: Tokyo treats its spirits with too much reverence for it to have made sense had they been turned into your run-of-the-mill FPS trash mob.

With that in mind, the game’s best elements are its sidequests, where stranded ghosts and spirits stuck on our plane of existence ask you to sort out their unfinished business. Yes, they award XP and items, but they also wind you toward Ghostwire: Tokyo’s grace notes: alternately lighthearted, funny, and tragic snapshots of the lives that were stolen from Tokyo.

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One sidequest has Akito informing cute little raccoon canids known as Tatnuki to abandon their hilarious recon missions and report back to their leader. Another concerns a hoarder whose obsession creates a black hole after his death. Akito’s and KK’s own personal journeys are poignant, with Akito’s search for his sister in particular leading to some unexpected thematic terrain about dying with dignity, but it’s those other glimpses of the lives that could have been that are more consistently resonant by a power of exponents.

Though Ghostwire: Tokyo’s gameplay has a little Doom in its DNA, its soul has far more in common with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Death Stranding, games that not only confront their protagonists with forces beyond their understanding, but leave them to scramble—sometimes clumsily—to find meaning in it all. Ghostwire: Tokyo’s gameplay lacks the singular, unique focus of those two titles, but it’s very much the Japanese response to the questions that the extremely British former and uniquely American latter are asking.

This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.

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Score: 
 Developer: Tango Gameworks  Publisher: Bethesda  Platform: PC  Release Date: March 25, 2022  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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