It’s the ubi-soft model of go to point of interest and do thing but one a gameplay, design, aesthetic, and story level it’s much, much better than ubisoft’s games.

The gameplay is rock solid. Swordfighting is incredibly satisfying. There’s no “press a to win” stuff like ass creed. You have to actively parry, use your tools, counter specific enemy styles, and fight smart. There are no i-frames at all - any attack animation that touches your characters hurtbox will damage you. The difficutly goes from forgiving all the way up to “lethal” where you and the enemies die in a few cuts.

Design wise there’s plenty to do. The pois - traversal puzzles, enemy camps, playing flute for cats, composing haiku, have good variety.

Aesthetically it’s gorgeous. The game goes for a hyper-realism where the game world reflects the narrative - betrayals happen in dim, misty swamps, huge fields of vibrantly colored flowers denote areas of special interest. The game has has important diegetic, like actually part of the game world, ui. Instead of a quest marker the wind blows you towards your destination. Literally winds of fate. When you approach a poi a mystical golden bird will appear and chirp to gain your attention then lead you to the poi. When you’re not fighting there’s generally no ui on your screen so you don’t get the ubi thing where your screen is covered in different icons.

Story wise the game builds a character arc for your dude as he starts off as a stereotypical honor bound warrior dude and grows to become an insurgent leader. There’s a good assorted cast of characters who represent people from across the social strata. I did have an issue with the story presenting an overly rosy view of samurai, but then the dlc expansion specifically addresses that and examines it.

Two things I really like

• when you complete a poi the game will reveal a few nearby undiscovered pois. This lets you just bumble across the map from adventure to adventure organically instead of climbing a tower and knowing where everything is

• the game gives you most of your core toys and abilities by the end of act I so you can make use of them for most of the game. You continue to amass tools and abilities throughout the game, but progression is front-loaded so you don’t end up in a situation where you only get to play with the cool stuff at the very end.

It’s also got drip for days and no mtx, just the one expansion pack that adds, idk, 10-20 hours of stuff to do (and really powers up your bow skills if you want to be archer guy)