Growing up as a kid immersed in American pop culture, it’s hard to escape the impression that samurai are really, truly cool. The Japanese figures– military nobility from a certain duration in Japanese history, beginning in the 12 th century– have been totally absorbed by American pop nerdiness and became unlimited apotheosis of amazing. Apparently honorable, apparently undefeatable, and using gorgeous armor, samurai are precisely the sort of heroes individuals enjoy to root for: anachronistic and purportedly worthy. Naturally, in reality samurai are more complex than that, an objected to symbol of Japanese nationalism inhabiting a messy location because country’s history and a filled intersection of cross-cultural pollination, as the image goes into the lexicon of our culture without any of the much deeper political or symbolic baggage intact.
The first thing to get out of the way about Ghost of Tsushima, developer Sucker Punch’s most recent open-world game about samurai, is that it’s not much interested in those cultural questions. Ghost of Tsushima is securely a video game for that American kid and the person they grew up to be. This video game doesn’t think deeply about samurai, only about how cool it is when a samurai plunges his sword deeply into an enemy’s chest. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, depending on what you’re searching for and what your relationship to these cultural tropes is. Understand going in: Ghost of Tsushima isn’t high samurai movie theater. It’s a popcorn flick.
The story follows Jin Sakai, a nobleman and samurai during the first Mongolian intrusion of Japan, during the 1270 s. After a devastating early fight on the island of Tsushima, Jin is left alone, his army dead, his uncle, Lord Sakai, captured. From here, he needs to reconstruct himself, the way videogame protagonists always do– by leveling up skill trees, catching area, getting allies, and eventually combating employers in order to unlock more territory and … you get the i