Jin will run around a camp hitting R2 and picking up currency or supplies around him with little effort. Now repeat that 200x with how many flowers you’ll collect over the course of the game. In Red Dead, that would require you to dismount your horse and go through a literal cutscene showing Arthur cutting the plant and putting it in his satchel. He can see it flashing on the screen, drive over it while on his horse at 20 miles an hour, and if you hit R2 anywhere near it, you’ll pick it up. Say Jin needs a specific flower to make a poison you find in the wild.

The same goes for smaller aspects of the game. It’s passable, but no one really leaves Red Dead thinking that its gunplay is industry best. As “advanced” as we see combat get in Red Dead is through horseback chases or Eagle Eye slo-mo mode, but that’s about it. Traditional Rockstar-style auto aim where a headshot or a center mass shot or two puts down enemies. Red Dead, meanwhile, has less engaging combat. All has been tuned to perfection so you feel the right balance of challenge, but also feeling like a total samurai badass. Tsushima combat is an expert blend of parrying, dodging, blocking, different combat stances, different Ghost weapons and then outright combat or stealth assassination. Here, I think Ghost of Tsushima takes it. We see a split here both in combat, and how you interact with the world.

Ghost of tsushima xbox