This game easily has one of my favorite open worlds of all time. It is so easy to get distracted from the main story to do the side content. While the story isn't as good as Tsushima's it makes up for it with a better open world and better combat.

I loves Ghost of Tsushima. This game is kinda "more of the same" but: -atsu is not someone I sympathized with -the vengance theme is not memorable as the theme in GOT -lots of boring **** much for god's sake!!! and few battle in comparison -packed with little side quests that are all the sme and super boring For me is a 6 just because of the beautiful graphics, but I think GOT was way better even though with some defects

Ghost of Tsushima had the bones of a by-the-numbers, crowd pleasing open-world action adventure, interlaced with an ephemeral charm that made the game stick with me, even though I think a 7/10 was an honest rating for it. Whatever that special sauce was, Ghost of Yotei is missing it. The big problem with this game is the combat. The Soulslike combat style has always struggled when you're fighting multiple foes, and GoY prefers fields of 6 or 7 to single opponents. The target lock system is the worst I've ever seen. Even using the optional target lock mode, the camera swings wildly during fights. It became a constant annoyance that Atsu would be mid-combo on one enemy, but another would step just close enough that she'd change her target, mashing uselessly into an aware opponent while the staggered one I'd been trying to kill collected himself and counterattacked. Given the game's emphasis on setting up kill streaks without taking damage, this experience felt unnecessarily punishing, particularly for how common it is. Atsu has more weapons than Jin Sakai did, to her detriment. You'll have more than a dozen by the end of the game, 4 of which use multiple ammo types, each selected by holding a combination of buttons at once. Trying to switch anything but melee weapons mid-fight is needlessly difficult, since you don't have enough fingers to keep blocking and dodging during. This game uses the color-coded block/parry/dodge attacks, this time adding disarming attacks that knock away your equipped weapon. I have to find the game where this feels good, and GoY makes it feel worse than usual. The parry warning in particular is terrible, offset from the actual animation you need to interrupt just far enough to make parries more confusing than ever, while just as punishing as you'd expect. The shinobi, in particular, are a royal pain to fight. And you'll be doing a *lot* of fighting. The stealth mechanics are introduced much later than in GoT, including the ability to listen for enemies. The end result if that you're going to using your katana a lot and your tanto very little until about 2/3 of the way through the game. The story is good enough. There are moments that feel very predictable, but others that caught me by surprise. The key characters are likeable (and the intolerable side character is at least a much smaller presence than Kenji was). Atsu's story is one I've seen told before, but almost always worse than Ghost of Yotei tells it. The hard truth is that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Ghost of Yotei drags it down. I kept waiting for the moment that the combat would click. It never did. It's just cumbersome and frustrating the whole way through. It's hard to recommend a game like that.