‘Ghostwire: Tokyo’ Feels as Empty and Abandoned as Its City
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a grade-A example of an impulse purchase, not a game that will shake the industry for months or years to come. I felt no hype leading up to Ghostwire’s release – in fact, I was quite skeptical – but somehow that Friday rolled around and I was rushing home after work to install the game. Coming off the back of a 60 hour stint of Elden Ring, I was craving something new and compelling to mix up my playtime, something that felt less impossibly large and overwhelming. I watched Suzi Hunter’s review of the game, who praised elements of the game that steered me from thinking I’d wait for a sale or maybe sit out Ghostwire: Tokyo altogether to feeling an excitement in my stomach about what the game had in store.
It’s impossible to discuss Ghostwire: Tokyo without acknowledging how the title became wedged into the AAA sphere of gaming influence. Ikumi Nakamura’s incredibly endearing E3 presentation in which she introduced viewers to Ghostwire won the hearts of people like me who aren’t hardcore Bethesda fans, haven’t played previous titles from Tango Gameworks, and almost always keep a distance from horror games. Sometimes, all it takes is a charismatic and passionate artist or creator to sell me on a work, and Nakamura delivered such a wholesome and memorable introduction to Ghostwire that, against my better judgment, I sought out the game despite other, more mixed reviews.
Of course, only a handful of months after this indelible E3 presentation, Ikumi Nakamura left the company in an abrupt and seemingly rocky manner, citing her personal health as a primary reason for the sudden departure. It would be nearly three years before Ghostwire: Tokyo released, and in that time, I have to wonder how much the project changed without the creative direction of Nakamura to guide its development. Perhaps the title saw no derailment and rescoping, but having recently completed a playthrough of Ghostwire, I feel as though I can easily identify the seams that were tarped over as the game lurched ever closer to its spring 2022 release window. Sadly, Nakamura’s name is practically buried nine minutes deep into the credits.
The Captivating Environments of Ghostwire: Tokyo
The strongest element in Ghostwire: Tokyo is by far its compelling environments. As a massive fan of the Yakuza franchise, Alan Wen’s suggestion that Ghostwire’s Tokyo “would make Yakuza’s RGG Studio sweat” in terms of its realism and attention-to-detail was a stronger sales pitch than any marketing around the game itself. One of my favorite idle activities in the Yakuza games is to toggle on the first person pedestrian mode, jogging around the city in a vaguely fictionalized virtual tourism sense. Ghostwire: Tokyo might not have the charm and bombast of the Yakuza series, but it would give me yet another excuse to immerse myself in the cramped urban spaces of Japan’s most famous city streets.
A captivating feature of Ghostwire: Tokyo that certainly is not the case for the storied Yakuza series is the complete absence of human beings from these Japanese urban environments. Due to a narrative conceit established almost immediately in Ghostwire, every single human being in Tokyo – and perhaps more broadly – disappears in a ghostly wisp, leaving only their clothing and belongings behind in a suddenly vacated puddle. Spirits who may find themselves chained to the real world through past trauma and unresolved bonds linger ethereally in the shops, shrines, and street corners. But there is no actively alive, corporeal person to seek out and interact with. Instead, you are left alone on the sidewalks and rooftops, parkouring your way around the city and bringing peace to these lost souls awaiting their spiritual departure.
It’s eerie – or as Nakamura so charmingly put it in 2019, “spooky” – to inhabit this massive metropolitan space so internationally revered for its ubiquitous shops, restaurants, and walking districts, but without any people to speak of. Half the fun of visiting such urban metropolises is the feeling of being around culture, around diverse people who are all sharing the same collective space. You are constantly reminded of Tokyo’s former activity when you creep through the shopping stalls or encounter an empty taxi idly sitting with its lights on, abandoned to dereliction. Ghostwire’s Tokyo provokes a feeling of the uncanny, of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity, the confusion of which adds an unsettling feeling in one’s stomach.
Make no mistake: this abandoned downtown stretch of Tokyo is gorgeously rendered, almost always raining, covering each area with a unique blend of ray traced reflections that I often stopped to bask in. The ray tracing is surprisingly limited in scope, with few glass surfaces truly reflecting the environmental light sources, but I still found myself taking screenshots with regularity. The lighting from shop signs and street intersections is also visually arresting. I was having enough fun by simply roaming the streets and alleyways that I sought out all the game’s optional Jizo statues around the halfway point in Ghostwire’s story.
A One-Trick Pony
As much as I enjoyed my virtual tourism in Ghostwire: Tokyo, the allure quickly ran out for me. I realized somewhere before the ten hour mark that this game suffered from what I tend to describe as open world bloat, leading me to fatigue while playing. Again, coming off the back of Elden Ring, one of the best open worlds of my entire gaming lifetime, Ghostwire: Tokyo had massive shoes to fill. Absenting the unavoidable comparisons I was making between both games when alternating play sessions with each, Ghostwire: Tokyo fills its world with bland and repetitive busywork that almost never felt engaging or rewarding enough to continue sifting through.
There is no shortage of time consuming tasks throughout Ghostwire: Tokyo’s meager runtime. The open world environment of downtown Tokyo starts small, limited by a harmful fog that will start deteriorating your health if you stray too far from the currently unlocked inner city. As the story takes off, you can expand the edges of this world by cleansing Torii gates, traditional structures marking the entrance of the city’s myriad shrines. Cleansing Torii gates expands the available locations you can explore, opening up additional options like side missions, collectibles, ghost cat shops – cats function as poetic merchants floating about with two tails in the remaining corner stores and antique stalls – not to mention the game’s 52 Jizo statues that reward you with additional attacks for simply discovering them.
One of my first goals while playing Ghostwire: Tokyo was to unlock as much of the map as I could, expanding my options to fast travel and therefore more quickly obtain these collectibles. The world felt small enough to justify my full exploration of it. What I quickly realized, however, was that much of the world is overstuffed with lost spirits, ghostly humans that are floating untethered throughout the world. Your main character, Akito, can purchase and obtain Katashiro, which are used to absorb these lost spirits and return them to phone booths around the city. Collecting these spirits awards you with currency and experience points which, in standard open world fare, enable you to expand your otherwise rather narrow repertoire of abilities.
Expanding Akito’s powers is one of the most underwhelming tasks I’ve encountered in an RPG-styled skill tree. Some of your basic upgrades can be useful, such as extending the speed with which you move while crouched, enabling you to more efficiently sneak about taking down enemies. In reality, however, most of the available upgrades simply broaden the range of an ability or quicken your charge attacks, effects which I found to not substantially be worth upgrading aside from the gaming formality of exploring the inner workings of a game’s systems. With virtually zero exceptions, I found myself only accidentally remembering that I had available skill points to upgrade after the fact – which is a huge problem when you consider that a well-designed skill tree will incentivize players to seek out upgrades at every possible opportunity.
Ghostwire: Tokyo‘s Lopsided Storytelling
The story of Ghostwire: Tokyo also feels incredibly lopsided – almost an afterthought, at times – and I never once felt invested in the story until deep within the final chapter. The premise of Ghostwire builds upon a supernatural event hinted at above, causing the living people of the city to disappear, which leaves Akito alone in this world due to being inhabited by a spirit known as KK. The presence of KK is what enables Akito to use powers during combat, but also implies much about the framed villain of the story, Hannya, who you may recognize as the masked figure from the cover art of Ghostwire: Tokyo.
As a protagonist, Akito is dull, static, and flat; but so is Hannya, to whom the game gives the barest of motivations. Both Akito and Hannya are operating from positions of loss, struggling to accept the inevitable passage of people whose spirits are migrating to the next world, i.e. the afterlife. Akito starts the game in a near dead state, graciously protected by KK’s spirit, but regains a tether to this world by realizing that his sister is also on the verge of death. Akito therefore resolves to protect her and keep her alive no matter the cost. On the other hand, Hannya feels cartoonish even when afforded the motivation to bring back the souls of his deceased daughter and wife. Hannya’s inability to accept what has already transpired kicks off this supernatural occurrence causing so much citywide harm in the first place.
One of the reasons I struggled to ever care about the game’s characters is the jarring shift between the game’s presentation of first and third person perspectives. The entirety of Ghostwire’s gameplay takes place in the first person, whereas the entirety of its cutscenes and accompanying major story beats happens in the third person. The game provides some halfhearted costume options that ultimately feel inconsequential when you only see these custom outfits during scripted events. Even so, each cutscene felt unnatural to the story being told or the gameplay being offered. Neither one felt like they truly connected with each other. In my experience, this disconnect developed between player and character reflected the way that Akito and KK himself are separate but forced unnaturally together within one body.
The game repeatedly tries to separate Akito from KK, lending further credence to how I feel the game unintentionally distances its player from the story and exploration central to the experience. There are enemies in Ghostwire that will violently grab Akito, thrust a weapon into his body, and yank KK’s spirit out, taking away Akito’s powers in the process. Suddenly, Akito is left with just a composite bow with which to fire a slim quiver at enemies. If this only happened once or twice, there might be a case to be made that it was predictable but appropriate; after all, it’s a design trope of video games to strip away the player’s power and “test” them without the tools they have become comfortable relying upon. However, Ghostwire: Tokyo not only strips away KK’s powers from Akito during a few key story sequences, but introduces an enemy type that recurs in such a way that becomes more annoying than compelling. I felt like each repetition of having KK yanked away reduced the intensity of his absence rather than amplifying it.
The game also front loads its story beats until suddenly Akito discovers a motorcycle that, if supercharged with spiritual resources from the “other side,” will enable him to pierce through the impenetrable fog, thereby confronting Hannya once and for all – saving his sister and perhaps even Japan itself from this solipsistic and destructive path. Strikingly, this motorbike is discovered and repaired within Chapter 4, leaving two tiny chapters mostly consisting of cutscenes, boss fights, and forced walking sequences, left to experience. Instead of this motorcycle adding a stylish new dimension to the now rote parkour exploration that kept me interested for the first ten hours, the motorcycle gets destroyed in the same cutscene that you first use it. Sure, it serves its narrative MacGuffin purpose, but its presence strikes me as an incredibly misjudged opportunity gone awry.
In the same inexplicably rushed manner that this motorcycle is immediately destroyed, the remaining two chapters of Ghostwire melt away completely – almost as if the developers themselves just punted the game towards the tail end of development. The game shifts from non-linear environmental exploration to hallway-like sequences that enable the writers to dump the rest of their story onto the player. The pacing of Ghostwire’s story is so poor that it inescapably feels like the game forgot that it needed to bring closure to the threads it opened in the first few hours. The credits thus started rolling and I honestly couldn’t tell if the story was finished until names of the developers started appearing on screen.
The Mixed Bag of Ghostwire: Tokyo
Needless to say, Ghostwire: Tokyo was a wildly inconsistent roller coaster in my playthrough. I think the aesthetic dimensions of this game are fantastic. I disagree with the criticism that combat feels stale and repetitive – although it could certainly be boosted in quality by more enemy variety and a skill tree that adds true value to my upgrade path. I love little touches throughout the world like the spirit shopkeeper cats, the dogs you can feed and pet, and even a few side quests along the way. (I’m thinking specifically of a side quest that involves a painting imbued with the consciousness of a corrupt demon, leading to one of the biggest gaming jumpscares I’ve encountered in some time.) There’s a lot going for Ghostwire: Tokyo, it just importantly missed key ways to make its beautifully rendered Japan feel worth revisiting.
If I could break my monotonously dreary tone throughout this post-mortem on my several hours playing Ghostwire: Tokyo, there is one singular design decision that I think this game masterfully lands – apart from rainy, ray traced Tokyo, that is. The game handles consumable items in a way that, to me, completely solves a problem that I’ve never been able to overcome in other games: the tendency to mindlessly hoard every item you find without ever using them. I finish nearly every game with an inventory full to the point of bursting with revives, healing items, and so on, without ever using them. There’s an implied use case for these items, but the “what if” nature of many games causes me to hoard these items indefinitely as though I might need them for a difficulty spike – one which seldom comes.
In Ghostwire, your maximum health increases every time you consume a healing item, which means that you are rewarded for using up your copious stock of Japanese snacks. Instead of stubbornly evading damage, I started to play more aggressively because I knew I could use these consumables in a way that would permanently and positively impact my play experience. I’ve never seen another game reward you for using consumables in this manner, and if there’s one design lesson to learn here – or at least one that I hope to see in more games – it is to take this formula and apply it in the more traditional RPG-styled design of most major modern games.
I encountered a silly take on Twitter a day before I finished Ghostwire: Tokyo, which read, “I am not a completionist. I am more of an abandonist.” And while that made-up word might not have much cultural cache, I think it indicates something useful about my experience working through the final few hours of Ghostwire: Tokyo. It took me several hours to collect even 25% of the game’s lost spirits, earning me the “Helping Hand” achievement. When I explicitly realized that I had an additional 75% left to collect, I abandoned the project entirely – deciding that I’d rather experience the story than exhaust myself trying to seek out the tens of thousands of spirits crammed across labyrinthine Tokyo. Additionally, it took me another few hours to locate and collect all the items for a single shopkeeper cat. And while it might have still cracked a smile when the cat instructed me to let my wallet “unfurl,” I put in so much effort for one of these little creatures only to feel that my reward was merely more currency.
My enthusiasm for Ghostwire: Tokyo diminished the more I played it, and if the final few chapters hadn’t been so brief and linear, I might have taken a break or perhaps even abandoned the game altogether. I can’t say that I was satisfied by the ending and the work it took to reach the credits, but I also don’t regret the many optional rooftops I climbed, alleyways I investigated, and buildings I meticulously explored along the way. Ghostwire: Tokyo is far from an essential gaming experience, and if you’ve played any – literally any – open world game prior to this, I don’t think you’ll have much value to find here. But if you need an excuse to dabble in downtown Tokyo, you might also appreciate getting lost in this abandoned virtual world.
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