Review: Ghost of Tsushima’s Empty World Reflects Its Empty Representation

Ghost of Tsushima is a game of emptiness. The emptiness of war. The emptiness of a map far too large for its own good. The emptiness of repeated actions that were once interesting, but are now tedious. But most importantly, the emptiness of its representation of Mongolian and Japanese culture.

Yes, its verisimilitude in representing these cultures is indeed impressive. The amount of detail and care put into every pixel of Jin Sakai’s armour as well as the various Mongolian artefacts you find throughout the game is spectacular. But the reverence for these cultures only goes skin deep. This is because, although they say otherwise, the developers don’t care enough about the cultures shown in the game to truly represent them. I would first like to express that I am of Japanese heritage, but that I don’t know much about Mongolian culture; I can’t speak to how factually accurate the game depicts it. But what I can say is that the game really does not care for Mongolian people.

Literally the first words said in the game are for the express purpose of dehumanizing Mongolian people.They are called “brutal” and “relentless” within the first breaths of the script. This dehumanization isn’t left to just words, but actions: the first time we see a Mongolian, he is murdering a Japanese man. In one word this is… yikes. But to dig deeper beyond a single word of disgust, the game uses specific concrete and mechanical ways to further dehumanize a real race of people facing real world prejudice. 

For one, the subtitles never translate the Mongolian spoken by various NPCs, rather it transliterates it–meaning the Mongolian language is never translated to English, just phonetically written in our alphabet. By not offering them a way to communicate clearly with the player,the game literally steals the Mongolians’ voice. What’s worse is that the only humanized Mongolian character is Kohtun Khan, the villain of the game. Even the positive aspects of Mongolian culture shown are disrespected: the only way to experience traditional Mongolian culture is through collectables, buried deep within various menus that can easily be missed.

“Why does this matter though?” some may ask. “Why should I care about an invading force, they are the bad guys!”. Well, the thing is, dominant and oppressive cultures can use historical ‘slights’ against them as further justification for oppression and discrimination. Additionally, if this was a person’s only potential view of Mongolia and its people, they would now assume that they are barbaric, bordering non-human culture that only cares about subjugation. I really hope I’m not the first to point this out, but Mongolian people aren’t that.  

You would think that surely the heroes of this game, the Japanese, would get a decent amount of representation though right? Well not so much. I will give the game this: I am very glad they hired actual Asian actors for this. Most often productions will get whoever they want to play roles, race-be-damned (Such as with Sucker Punch’s previous game, Infamous: Second Son). With Tsushima though, they kinda put their money where their mouth is with its casting. But that’s as much I can say positively about the game’s portrayal of Japanese culture. Now I could list off all of the factual inaccuracies, but others have already done that. What I want to dig into is how the game mechanically and textually poorly represents Japanese culture.  

The most obvious way the game shows its lack of care towards Japanese culture is with the Japanese dub. Sucker Punch did go out of its way to hire famous Japanese voice actors for the game (a fact they highlighted near the release). However, for some reason the lip-sync in cutscenes only ever match up to the English dub. You would think that for all their “love” of Japanese pop-culture, they would make sure that something as simple as the animation matching the language spoken would be working correctly. But the game goes beyond just technical hiccups to show how little respect it has for actual Japanese culture; this lack of care is baked into the core of the game itself. 

Firstly, the overall plot and script of the game are extremely simplistic, unoriginal, and stereotypical. Its simple story of revenge for lost land and protecting the homestead from invaders have been seen in numerous chanbara (samurai) films, specifically in Akira Kurosawa’s own body of work. The script is filled with cliches of honourable samurai talking morosely about how unhonourable each other’s actions are. This all leads to a plot and script filled with western cliches of what Japanese people act like, and doesn’t offer any new ways of looking at the Samurai, resulting in a painfully average and uninspiring game. 

Additionally, the story maintains the Japanese nationalistic world view that the Japanese are the sole exceptional Asians and that samurai are great (no they are not– they are just the bourgeoise-cum-army of ancient Japan). But in more material terms this lack of care can be seen in the English dub’s script and direction. A good example of this is how all the actors are directed to speak with the cadence and verbiage of a white man’s idea of how Japanese people speak (i.e. saying honour a lot and speaking slowly). By doing this, Tsushima is only reinforcing a very narrow and cliched view of genuine Japanese lives

This lack of genuine care extends to the game’s mechanics and UI as well. For the latter, all the menus and interfaces affect this ‘minimalist’ style emulating Japanese calligraphy and ukiyo-e. This is deeply insulting since it is the most stereotypical route they could have gone with the UI. I have personally seen this particular aesthetic associated with Japanese culture so many times that it’s become exhausting. By using this design philosophy with their UI, Sucker Punch is playing into already pre-existing stereotypes and cliches of Japan, which frankly is quite harmful. It also affects the player in material ways since the minimalist interface caused me to miss vital information multiple times throughout my playthrough. At one point I needed to avoid some AOE attacks, but because of this minimalist aesthetic, I wasn’t able to see the warnings before it was too late. However, Sucker Punch’s clear misunderstanding of Japanese culture goes beyond re-deployment of cliche and stereotype; they also dumb-down centuries of Japanese culture and tradition to simple button presses.

What I mean by this is that at every opportunity, the game tries to ‘translate’ traditions and cultural actions into a ludic/gamic mechanic, thus trivialising them. You can bow and play the flute with a flick of the touchpad whenever you want. You “write”  haiku by looking around the environment and picking vaguely poetic sounding words. You ‘reflect’ on various things while going to all the onsens that are inexplicably dotted around the map. You bow incorrectly at the shinto shrines you find after a short platforming puzzle. And I lose my patience with this game every time I need to do those things. All these actions have deep cultural meanings. For instance, praying at shinto shrines is a tradition that pretty much every Japanese person does, we do it to pray for good luck and to respect the gods by giving an offering; so it’s a pretty important spiritual and traditional practice. By gamifying it behind a platforming puzzle and then using the incorrect bow is disrespecting such an culturally significant custom. It would be like pressing F to dab inside a christian church in some open-world game about being in New York. It is deeply insulting and hilarious that all these real actions that people in Japan have been doing for thousands of years are boiled down to a single button press for a motion done incorrectly and repeated ad nauseum, thus leading to a complete trivialisation of Japanese culture.   

Beyond its… shall we say cultural baggage, Ghost of Tsushima is also frankly not that good of a game to play. Whenever I entered combat there was a particular rhythm I could enter where flowing from enemy to enemy felt decent, but it always felt off due to the lack of proper lock-on or targeting. I had to vaguely aim my right joystick towards an enemy and pray to god that I was attacking in the right direction. The traversal never felt right because it was always just long stretches of nothingness occasionally broken by decent, but eventually boring, vistas. The objectives were so few and far between that the map always felt too vast and empty for its own good. A duel does occasionally break through the monotony, but the sheer number of times you have to do them just sucks the fun and interest out. In short, as a game it’s also kinda crap.  

Look. I can’t in any good conscience recommend this game. It’s an empty game with such a lack of care towards actual, real cultures, that it borders on parody of what the west thinks of Japan and East Asia.The gameplay is lacking in so many fundamental ways that you have to wonder where all the money and genuine talent went into this game. Ghost of Tsushima is a racist game that should have had more time in the oven along with a lot more Japanese creatives helping it so it didn’t end up in the state that it is.  

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