Ghost of Tsushima: Legends is Unusually Challenging

 When Ghost of Tsushima dropped back in July it was a smash hit, selling 2.4 million copies in the first 3 days of its release. The game touts beautifully flowing combat and landscapes in an homage to classic Japanese films. It also tells a gripping story, with the player taking on the role of Jin Sakai, who must defend his homeland from a Mongol invasion. Once one finished the story, however, there wasn’t much more to do in Tsushima. This was the main thing detractors would point to when criticizing the game. Many people (including myself) beat the game in the first week of its release and then had no reason to pick it up again. So, Sucker Punch got back to work and brought us Legends, a new online multiplayer game mode that gives players a reason to return to the instant classic.

Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, was released on October 16th, and allows players to play in groups of two or four. The two-person game mode contains new story missions that players can complete to get new outfits, gear, and resources for upgrading that gear. The other game mode is survival, wherein four players attempt to defend three points on the map for up to twenty-five waves at the highest difficulties. Both game modes have four levels of difficulty—bronze, silver, gold, and nightmare—and the player unlocks harder difficulties as their gear score (called Ki) rises. At higher difficulties, there are more of the new enemy type that came with the Legends update, the Oni—who are powerful, spirit-imbued enemies with massive health bars and dangerous one-shot attacks. It is definitely easier to beat these if you can communicate with your teammates, but these modes offer matchmaking if you can’t assemble enough of your friends. Personally, I’ve already added several new players to my friends list that I met through survival matchmaking.

The biggest grind in Legends is the classic gear grind. Players complete missions to get new gear, then use that gear to complete harder missions and get even better gear. It’s a tale as old as time. There are five gear levels; common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. Legendary items can appear as a reward even in bronze missions, but they seem to have a higher chance of dropping on higher difficulties. Additionally, epic gear (the most useful as players can only equip one or two legendaries) only drops at gold difficulty or higher. There are four classes for the player to choose from—samurai, hunter, assassin, and ronin—each with unique abilities and gear pieces, meaning players will need gear for four different play styles. Players can also reforge a piece of gear to increase its Ki or change the perks on it. There are many perks and substats which allow the player to tinker with their build to output a ton of damage or stay alive as long as they can. One must have a strong build in order to complete nightmare missions, which means you’ll be grinding for resources as well as gear.

If all the grind of survival and story missions still isn’t enough for you, that’s okay too. This Friday, October 30th, the game is getting another update which brings the Tales of Iyo—a three part four-player raid on nightmare difficulty. This will be the only game mode that doesn’t support matchmaking. The game already encourages sociability, with the extreme difficulty of nightmare objectives forcing players to communicate in order to prevail. Now, with the raids, Sucker Punch has taken this a step further, so players will have to have their four man squads set before taking on this trial.

The main attraction of Legends is the nightmare difficulty game modes. They offer the greatest challenge and the best chance to get legendary gear. The nightmare story missions are challenging, but doable if you and your teammate are patient and work together. The nightmare survival, however, is another beast entirely that can make even Tsushima veterans feel like hapless noobs. It requires perfect chemistry between four high level players to hold off three points at once. It’s also a marathon, with even gold survival missions taking up to an hour to complete—and nightmare presumably taking longer, although I’ve yet to get past wave thirteen out of twenty-five (I’ve linked a video below of some of my pitiful attempts). This is a truly rare game mode that even experienced gamers probably won’t complete on the first try, or even the first sitting. It gives players a reason to keep coming back to the game and trying to get better. There are also weekly modifiers for nightmare modes. For example, this week’s survival challenge gives enemies immunity to all status effects, so that perfect fire damage hunter build you made last week would be essentially useless for this week’s nightmare survival. This encourages players to experiment with all the classes and many different gear combinations, offering hours of reforging and tinkering with substats—if you’re into that sort of thing (I am).

Warning NSFW: Language


Ghost of Tsushima is a stunningly beautiful game, and the main story alone made it worth the $60 price tag on release. With this free multiplayer update, the game has more replay value than ever, which it sorely needed when it initially came out. There is already so much to do in Legends, and with the new raids coming this Friday, there will be even more. Start assembling your squad and optimizing your builds—the Tales of Iyo should provide the most arduous challenge yet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker DLC Review: Neji Hyuga

  Neji Hyuga is undoubtedly one of the most beloved characters in the Naruto franchise, which made Soleil’s decision not to include him in the Shinobi Striker roster for over two years a puzzling one to say the least. Each new season, fans of the game would ponder about who the new DLC characters would be, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a discussion that didn’t include Neji. On September 25 th , the Shinobi faithful finally got their wish, and Neji Hyuga was added to the game as part of season three. Given how long fans of the game were practically begging for Neji, the reaction to this most recent DLC has been surprisingly critical. Recently, the new characters have been trending towards more overpowered abilities, and people were probably expecting the same here. Considering Neji’s role and power level in the manga/anime, however, Soleil made a well-balanced character with interesting possibilities. Neji’s DLC also comes with some fresh outfits and hairstyles that players ca...
Read more

'Among Us' Will Give you Trust Issues

Among Us is the latest mobile gaming phenomenon, and it’s liable to have you and your friends stabbing one another in the back and levying paranoid, McCarthy-esque accusations. It’s a game about trust and, more importantly, a lack thereof. The game is set on a spaceship, and the design is simple—you start with ten players, most of whom are crewmates, and are given various tasks to complete. One or two of the players, however, will be imposters tasked with sabotaging the ship and killing the crew. The objective of the game as a crewmate is to complete all the tasks or find out who the imposters are and vote them off the ship. As an imposter, the player will attempt to kill all the crew members or sabotage the ship’s vital systems, all while trying to fool the crew into thinking you’re one of them. As a crewmate, you can complete various tasks to win the game for your team. These tasks, however, take a bit to complete and block the player’s screen while working on them. This means t...
Read more

Action Bronson is a Modern Folk Hero

  “Author, singer, dancer, exotic olive oil taster, it’s me baby” croons Ariyan Arslani—better known as Action Bronson—on the second song of his latest album, Only for Dolphins. The song is called C12H16N2, the molecular formula for dimethyltryptamine (DMT): a chemical substance which can be consumed as a psychedelic drug. References to Bronson’s hallucinogenic exploits are nothing new for the chef-turned-rapper, which is unsurprising since you’d have to be tripping balls to even consider leading a life like the one he has. As he states in the song, Bronson is man who wears many hats—a jack-of-all-trades in a time when everyone else is trying to fill a specific niche. He consistently makes outlandish statements in his music that the listener knows can’t be true, but somehow believes anyway because of his penchant for doing things that seem unlikely or impossible. “All around the world I’m known by different names, never the real one” -Action Bronson on Golden Eye Action Brons...
Read more