If last month we offered you the impressions of the first demo of Ghostwire: Tokyo, now, a few weeks before its launch, we had the opportunity to play the first two complete chapters of the final game. Two chapters, in fact, more extensive than what may seem a priori. Although the first is a lucky introduction of plot and characters that we can not expand too much not to surprise the surprise, the second leaves us in a relatively free way for the Tokyo of the game, giving a good vision of its opponent , mission structure , exploration and other elements. With all this, it took us about ten hours – and discovering a significant part of the map – to reach the end of the content agreed for this advance.
Just as the public knows exactly what to do, at the launch of Ghostwire: Tokyo we find the game configured with voices in Japanese and subtitles in the language in which we have configured the console. Despite the fact that English and even Castilian dubs exist, and I’m not, personally, particularly supportive of the original version, I think that in this case the Japanese dub is quite immersive. After the introductions, we tend to follow a simple list of missions that will always take us deeper into the context of what happened in Tokyo and who KK is, the spirit who now shares the body with Akito, our protagonist.
The plot of personal goals and the apocalypse does not differ much from the plot of any other title, the truth, but the details have a fundamentally Japanese texture. The recreation of the Tokyo property is meticulous and knows how to take advantage of the iconic elements of its urban planning to remind us that we are there, and not at all in a fictional world. The interiors of the buildings – for the moment few – that we have visited are decorated in a rather traditional way, as well as the interactive objects such as collectibles, food and certain elements of gameplay is named after his name in Japanese. There are occasions where you feel like you could have searched for an equivalent – “yakitori” for “brochetas”, or “konpeito” for “star caramelos” or something – but the location makes an active effort to keep everything as it is. , so as not to dilute the matics offered by the original words. And enemy names, which are being translated, continue to display the name in hiragana or kanji alongside the Spanish text.
While understanding this comment, the immersion in Japanese culture will be a strong and attractive point of the title for many players, I can also understand that many others will be a little overwhelmed by the amount of information. It is true that each time we unlock an enemy, an object or a location, we obtain an entry in the database that we can consult in the menu, and which explains to us in detail what each thing is; but it’s also true that, if my instincts aren’t failing me, most players don’t have a lot of data to skip reading menus. For that, I would recommend approaching Ghostwire Tokyo with an awareness of the game we’re going to find: one that’s very, very Japanese, from premise to execution.
Even if we are not very saddened by the culture of the Japanese country, without an embargo, everything will not lead to such a dream: the combat system explains very well by itself what we want to realize that we find in doing combos and blocks. Quiz the element that the fact that the camera is in first person is closest to, but let’s take into account that it is one of the keys. Virtually all special moves that our person can perform, such as ether missiles – of different types: water, fire and wind, for example – are performed from a distance, and weapons – such as bow with lightning bolts – work in a similar way. To finish with the enemies we have two options: either completely harden your life or hit it enough to be able to carry out a final attack, the animated flame in which we extract your core through some magic spells. Enemies, yokai, do not have a life bar in themselves, but if they are in a state of greater danger, their core will expand more and more. But you never quite know how many moves we have left to beat a yokai, which gives it a rather curious element to fight. On the other hand, most of them are designed so that we can move around the map a lot, whether it is looking for ammo, whether it is a question of lowering the rank of their attacks. There is a block option – with the possibility of a perfect block – which made me one of the most enjoyable parts of the combat system. Just as the enemies themselves are quite fast, covering them is very fundamental to keeping them under guard and being able to attack them quite easily. Indeed, towards the end of Chapter 2, we begin to notice several yokais designed specifically to allow us to play with the block when we face them.
On the other hand, and bordering on Japanese flavor clarity, I think the highlight of Ghostwire Tokyo is that it’s a very difficult game. True, there are a few wide cinemas all over the intro, but as we explore the open world we constantly find ourselves discovering new locations, absorbing spirits to gain experience, side missions with which to level up and break down collectibles. and new information about the content of the game… It’s one of those titles that will bring you so much in its open world style that you will end up, in the end, forgetting to continue the main mission. Basically, most of the map is covered in a cloud that keeps us from moving forward, and which we tend to avoid by liberating sacred sites. Not that the mechanics are very original, but the game looks pretty good, as we avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of things we can do in each small area. When we discover a new area, we can explore it quietly before moving on to the next one, which we want to take into account that several hours of secondary content have passed. Personally, I’m sure a little more research could have yielded a little more than what the second chapter had to offer.
Technically, the truth is that there isn’t much that makes sense: we have a performance mode that sacrifices the laser trace to give us equally outstanding visual effects, and a quality graphics-centric mode, at the cost of something frame rate. In general I have no problem with the portions of photographs including the quality mode, with the exception of the most populated areas of the city when it rains, in which the ratio is a little wobbly. I imagine my biggest pega comes with the same usage as the PlayStation 5’s DualSense. While most of the stuff that covers the functionality of the Sony command is admirable and well-deserved, like the little vibrating sound when we approach from a place in the there are monsters, or using the command line to transmit KK’s voice and it sounds a bit more spectacular, there are two more flamboyant aspects: the sound of the bells, a sound excessive, when we point the camera at an object of interest for our current objective, and the use of the touch screen, which at least in the current version does not end up working. At times in the tram you tend to clear your mind by drawing a sigil on the command text panel, but later in the tutorial I haven’t found this to work properly in any other scene, including understood by trying with different DualSense. On the other hand, we can use the panel to switch between items in our Ether Discs, which generate distinct effects, but I also found the command’s detection to be very limited on these occasions.
However, what we have in front of us seems, in a good light, a more notable game. Quiz a bit nicho in some of its concepts, and sometimes not quite revolutionary for the genre, but it’s one that has all the elements to work perfectly: an interesting story, a balance between skill to and loca ideas, incredible character designs, and combat and a world that doesn’t seem to hit us at any time.
