I honestly wasn’t expecting to be reviewing this so quickly, but yeah, I’m done with this game in a mere 14 hours… which is fine, I don’t mind short-ish games, but I was totally expecting it to be longer considering it’s an open-world thing.

I remember when this was announced. I think most people forgot about that because this is the game presented by Ikumi Nakamura at some E3, who made a big impression with her presentation, but said presentation is what got all the attention and people kinda forgot about the game itself. Also, this game is a Shinji Mikami game, in some capacity.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this… so let’s see if it’s fun!

*EDIT: I was so focused on writing about why the gameplay isn’t great that I completely forgot to mention that the localization team for this game is awful and fucked up the translation in every way possible by writing lines that literally aren’t even there in the original japanese version. Why is it SO HARD for localizers to just take the japanese text and write it in english? Plus, it’s not just the western localization that’s awful, as the chinese localization is also garbage pushing weird propaganda… This is why I leave japanese voice acting on in games, my minor understanding of the language is a decent bullshit detector*

Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Microsoft (through Bethesda)
Release date: March 25th, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS5 (PC version played)
Genre: Open-world FPS

Review

In this game, you play as Akito. He just got in a car accident that is never really addressed in the rest of the game. You also play as KK, a spirit of someone who just recently died and I guess is some spirit/yokai hunter of sorts and is looking for a body to possess, and Akito’s possibly-dead body from the accident ends up being a good candidate. As he takes over Akito’s body (but only partially as Akito wakes up and manages to retain control), Shibuya is overtaken by fog which makes anyone who touches it disappear. This serves the open-world gameplay trope of having empty worlds, as you won’t see other people walking around doing things. KK gives Akito spiritual powers so he can airbend, firebend and waterbend (sort of). Turns out this fog was brought down by Generic McBoring, a boring dude wearing a hannya mask who wants to do generic bad guy things (also by pure coincidence he ends up kidnapping Akito’s sister (who is in a coma at the hospital) for some reason, to use her for an evil ritual). Just another “I will destroy the world to rebuild it the way I want it” enemy, except this one has no believable motivation, personality, or anything interesting going on. You also learn basically nothing about KK and his band of coworkers who help him fight yokai and spiritual stuff, so he’s also boring. And Akito’s boring too. This plot is kinda meh and barely held my attention in the tiny amount of time this game lasted.

Combat looks pretty interesting at first. It’s an FPS where you basically use spirit magic. You have a wind attack which is a pretty simple windblast that’s basically a pistol-equivalent, a fire attack which is similar to the wind but hits harder (basically a higher-caliber rifle) and the water attack is a short-range but wide arc thing that’s meant to hit many enemies that are very close to you (this has almost no range). The wind is your go-to, fire is good for strong single enemies but has no ammo, and water is basically useless. Each attack can be charged for different effects. Wind shoots 2-4 homing bullets (you’ll absolutely never use this), fire basically shoots a contact grenade (mostly useless) and water becomes semi-useful because it hits in a much wider arc that hits a bit further too, definitely preferable for crowd control compared to the fire. Other actions you can do in battle is block (you will literally never use this once you figure out how to deal with enemies), and for enemies that took enough damage you can take their cores out to kill them (or just shoot them, whatever, doesn’t matter). There are talismans you can throw around for certain effects, the best one being the stun talisman. For moments when you’re separated from KK, Akito can shoot a bow. And when enemies didn’t notice your presence you can sneak behind them and get an assassination-style kill, not something you’ll do much of. Also, there’s a devil trigger kinda thing called Wire In… it’s useless, though I think it recovers ammo. You regain the meter for it by breaking cores. And you can eat food to heal during battle, yay.

The main problem with the combat is that it’s a fucking joke. You kinda have a bunch of cool elements with the core destroying thing and the 3 elemental weapons and blocking and some of the talismans are fine, but literally, every combat scenario is dealt with exactly the same. Use the wind attack, mash it at whatever you want dead until it dies, and if enemies actually start attacking you, move backwards and maybe even strafe a bit. You will literally never die. There’s hardly any enemy variety, they’re all super easy to deal with. Even the most aggressive ones can’t hit you if you’re just calmly moving backwards. It’s kinda pathetic, really. If enemies were a bit challenging you may have a reason to use talismans, but they’re not. So that’s an element that’s entirely unused. You’d expect the bosses to be at least a little challenging… nope. They’re probably easier than any regular combat scenario. This game was so clos4e to having decent combat, but the lackluster enemy design makes it feel like an afterthought.

The open-world is pretty awful. It’s a Ubisoft-style map with randomly-placed icons to go to and basically grab collectibles at. This is what I’d call “barely gameplay”. Like, there are many types of collectibles, but they’re not entertaining to grab. Spirits are just randomly floating around in random places, you just hold a button to get them. Tanuki are hiding in the world, you’ll notice them by pressing the detective vision button and finding outlines of things with tails on them and just press a button in front of them. Jizo statues are very useful as they give you extra ammo for your elemental weapons. After doing a side-mission involving a certain type of yokai (like kodamas, tanukis, kappas, rokurokubi, oni, the umbrella ones, and a few others), a few others of that yokai type will appear on the map for you to redo the side mission, which are mostly just “wait to be able to press the absorb button then press the absorb button”. There are collectibles to find you can give to Nekomata spirits to get some rewards that are useless like outfits (you can’t even see your body outside of cutscenes, what’s the fucking point of outfits?). There are side missions that are probably the most interesting part of the world, but there are not too many of them surprisingly. This open world… not great. I do like that it starts out small and you open it up as you go by purifying Torii gates at shrines, but there’s not really much to say about it beyond that, there’s nothing fun about moving around in it, and there’s nothing interesting in it.

You can power up in a few ways. Most of those I kinda already detailed how you do them when talking about the boring open world. Spirits you can trade-in for EXP (and you get very small amounts of EXP from killing enemies as well), and when you level up that gives you a bit of extra HP and skill points. Skill points are used to learn skills… Most of them are kinda useless, but at least your spiritual attacks can get boosted which is actually useful (stuff like more projectiles for water, faster charged attacks, faster attacks for wind… stuff like that). The other way to power up is that some Torii gates have rewards for you, specifically bead bracelets. You can equip up to 3 with the correct power-ups and the only ones worth using are the ones that power up your elements. If you have a bracelet already, getting a second and third one just powers it up. So the elemental ones end up boosting those attacks’ damage by 60%. And there are the Jizo statues that give you more ammo. That’s really it. Since the things you need to do power-ups

The only thing I REALLY liked about this game is the pretty badass visual representation of classic Japanese yokai. They look awesome. Unfortunate that the only ones you fight are mostly just the “people without eyes or noses” from the fairly common Japanese urban horror story you probably heard in a bunch of anime, or schoolgirls without heads. The rest of the yokai are fairly simple “follow them around a bit and then hold the “absorb soul” button, or very easy combat scenarios, so it’s kinda lame you don’t get to fight any of those.

There are 6 chapters, and the last 2 are literal walking simulators, with pretty bad boss breaks in-between the walking and cutscenes. As if the meh open world wasn’t enough, the game ends in what can’t really be called gameplay. If the bosses were challenging at all I might have a different impression, but I barely tried against any of them, especially the final boss which was a total joke.

PC performance

After Stranger of Paradise sucking balls when it comes to its awful PC port, it was nice to play a PC game with an actual framerate. I was running this at 1440p, with balanced DLSS, and I was getting a very solid framerate (same PC as usual of course, with a Ryzen 3700X and a 3060 Ti). In indoor levels, I was getting 140-175fps, and it tends to be fairly consistent at any given moment, while outdoor was a bit rougher but still respectable at 90-140fps (a bit more random, some areas run better than others). Not really much to mention here. I got one glitch where I fell through the world after fast traveling, but I could just fast travel again and it was fine, no other similar issues anywhere.

Yeah, this game is great on PC as far as performance, weird for a game published by fucking Bethesda… but I guess it shows that, when Bethesda isn’t actually participating in development at all, they can actually release games that function. After all, they also publish DOOM nowadays and both of those were fucking amazing on PC.

Overall

This really didn’t impress me. The open world feels very empty and has nothing interesting in it, the combat is fine until you realize that literally, every battle scenario is standing in place mashing the shoot button, and very occasional moving backward to avoid attacks, and the last 2 chapters are walking simulators with extremely easy boss battles. It might be a bit less meh if it had an interesting story/characters, but it doesn’t. It’s just severely lacking in all aspects.

If I were a completionist, this game would be torture considering there’s nothing to do after you’re done with sidequests and the main story, or at least nothing interesting. Oh boy, I get to find objects with tails on them, statues, and a couple of yokai that are just boring to get. Oh, and the spirits, of course, which are just randomly strewn around the map with no logic, meaning, or fun. This hardly qualifies as gameplay.

I wouldn’t recommend this game unless you got it for, like, 10$.