Set in present-day Tokyo, Akito is possessed by the spirit of a mysterious entity and must fight off the hoards of ghosts, or “visitors,” that came with the fog, turning the people into lost spirits. Purge away these visitors in this extensively detailed open world with the help of your newfound powers.

An Uninspired Combat

Overall the combat feels in-depth when you first start to pick it up. Such as a rotating list of elemental attacks, as well as a bow weapon Akito can pick up, along with consumable talismans. However, more or less they all just become a way to fire different colored energy blasts at ghosts. The upgrades for the attacks are also lackluster. Only increasing their size and radius, rather than changing the attack or allowing for different options. Not to mention how easy it is to run out of energy considering how often you are meant to be fighting. The bow is also disappointing, as it’s rather quick to run out of arrows and is much more difficult to refill ammunition than the elemental attacks.

The Wire In ultimate mechanic ties in well with the other combat techniques but doesn’t do much more than speed up combat; faster purge, refilled energy, more damage, faster attacks. No unique move or alternate firing modes. Since the player obtains almost all of the tools they will use early on in the story, it feels sort of . . . boring . . . to keep doing the same rotating attacks against the same enemies over and over, or even just a reskinned version of a previously fought enemy with a bigger health pool.

A List of Scary Chores

The side quests are fun at first but quickly become filler that feels lazier and lazier as they go on. Aside from the occasional cinematic set pieces that occur every few side quests, they mostly involve following a yokai to capture or fighting off ghosts. Even the set pieces end up being fighting wave after wave of ghosts. Sometimes they are as simple as delivering toilet paper from one stall over. Which becomes time-wasters with rather unsubstantial rewards. The main quests don’t differ much either, where they almost all involve firing variously shaped and colored energy blasts at ghosts in different buildings. Quickly the quests became repetitive and the fun was wearing off around day 3 of playing.

This isn’t to say the game is completely lacking in content and all the player is doing is fighting ghosts. There are rune mechanics and exploration, though both usually just result in obtaining meika (the in-game currency) and souls. The corrupted tree branches, feedable dogs, soul cubes and hidden objects throughout also serve as distractions from the missions, but also just serve to grant the player more meika and souls. There are the rare rewards like prayer beads and cosmetics, but it’s mostly a reward that appears in the player’s inventory after a quest, rather than as a reward for something the player seeks out. As for what meika is used for, it always boiled down to more arrows for the bow, as buying dog food and healing items was never really necessary. The more I received one of the same two rewards for exploring the world the less I wanted to do it, and eventually, the less I wanted to keep playing at all.

A Story by Definition

The narrative hints at being a unique tale of death and loss but contains cliché characters and convenient plot devices that pop up constantly which makes it hard to care. It also makes it especially difficult to latch onto the protagonist because it’s clear he is meant to be a generically handsome blank slate so the player can vicariously live their power fantasy. He has a few mentioned backstory flashbacks which sort of add depth to his character but don’t relate to his decisions in the story and his feelings for saving his sister.

It’s also hard not to notice the Japanese media culture shine in some problematic ways as well. Such as Akito and KK constantly commenting on how old KK is as he is always reminiscing of the old days and complaining about today’s youth despite him only appearing to be in his early 30s at the latest. As well as the headless schoolchildren enemy type, which comes in a few variants, like girl and boy. The girl variant has a smaller health pool and deals less damage than the boy variant despite there being no real difference between the two. This is a small way the game plays into the “girls are weaker” stereotype that shows up again with Mari and Rinko, the women characters who need to be protected and saved on multiple occasions.

A Carefully Designed Open World

The environment of Ghostwire is very beautiful and insanely detailed. Every corner of every street is filled with dozens of HD props and readable papers (if you read Japanese). Because of this, the city feels real and interesting. Exploring every back alley and rooftop is the most appealing part of Ghostwire: Tokyo. It’s clear the developers put most of their time and effort into creating the world on such a huge map. Knowing this, however, it’s clear that the effort might have been misplaced. The detailed environment is what’s setting the game back when you take a look at the actual mechanics. It feels like the game is meant to be much more than just a horror-action RPG, but ultimately sets up the player’s expectations to fail.

While the city looks amazing, even while focusing on the details, the rest of the game seemed to have been put on the backburner. Maybe Tango Gameworks ran out of time to make the game they wanted to and had to rely on filling the city with the handful of enemy types they had ready, and the quest lines which originally had more unique concepts were also dissolved into throwing ghosts at the player. KK, a paranormal investigator with help from a mysterious crew, is more or less a power source for a random teenager that just wants to fight ghosts and save his sister, who is conveniently the driving force of the narrative and antagonist’s MacGuffin.

It’s hard not to feel let down by the scope of the game, especially after opening the map and realizing the size of the world. It takes a more patient gamer than me to be able to complete the laundry list of tasks required to truly explore all of it, and to those that do, I applaud you.

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Final review: 3 out of 5 stars