For decades, there has been a misconception that Japanese game developers and gamers don’t like first-person games. As with any claim of this nature, it is filled with a long list of asterisks and exceptions. but Ghostwire: Tokyo Director Kenji Kimura and producer Masato Kimura believe there is some truth to it, theorizing it has to do with the stylish character design that is particularly important to Japanese gamers, as well as general concerns about motion sickness.
However, Masato says he thinks the mood is fading, noting he doesn’t hear about it as much as he used to — which has since turned out to be pretty handy Ghostwire: Tokyo is not just a rare first-person action game from a Japanese studio, but feels defined by perspective in many ways.
Kenji refers to Ghostwire: Tokyo as the first first-person game from Tango Gameworks that is technically incorrect (The evil within 2 a post-release first-person mode), but it’s the company’s first game built around perspective. And he says this led to a lot of experimentation during the game’s development.
“It was definitely a challenge for us,” says Kenji.
“Starting from zero was already difficult to get the feel of walking properly because you want your head to shake a little bit, but if you shake your head too much as you walk forward, you get dizzy,” he adds. “And when you don’t have a bob, it feels like you’re just gliding across the map, so that feels weird too. Doing everything from scratch was definitely a very big challenge.”
The benefit of this experimentation, says Kenji, is that it caused the team to rethink things that others would take for granted, such as how Ghostwire: TokyoThe gameplay of focuses on mid-range combat rather than particularly close or far away like a typical shooter.
Tango refers to ghost wire However, as an action-adventure game, it’s more of a shooter than a brawler. They use elemental powers instead of weapons, allowing you to use your hands to throw wind, fire, and water attacks at enemies. Enemies swallow a fair amount of hits and move at a modest pace, allowing time during combat to catch your breath or even run away entirely. ghost wire has stealth attacks, a melee button, a parry, and a bow and arrow, but in what I’ve played these felt more like backup options to use in a pinch rather than your standard attacks.
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Image: Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks
In the roughly five hours that I played the game for this story, I’ve dropped in and out of combat many times – weakening enemies from a modest distance and then closing in to finish them off with some kind of energy wire that pulls out their core. While I craved some form of evasive maneuvers to dodge incoming attacks, the action on the default difficulty setting generally didn’t become overwhelming enough to make this a major problem.
Tango has balanced the game to be easy to understand and have a comfortable pace and flow, says Kenji, rather than forcing players to study and memorize various aspects extensively.
“The game is about exploring the city and there are enemies that get in your way, but we didn’t want the combat to be so difficult that it prevented you from actually doing much of that exploration,” says he. “Because there is a lot of fun in exploring. So there are other difficulty levels you can try if you want to play more tactically, but it’s not as tactical on the normal setting.”
And this exploration is also closely linked to the perspective of the game. Kenji says the team wanted to make the game a sightseeing experience that could feature their recreation of Tokyo – which comes across well in-game with an impressive sense of variety and verticality.
Even the main character, Akito, was designed with the first person in mind. Kenji and Masato are going the opposite way of the popular logic in Japan they mentioned at the beginning of this story, saying that Tango’s team went with a kind of everyone’s main character who could blend into the crowd so that the player could better relate to their character.
To some extent, every game is defined by its perspective, probably in hundreds of subtle ways that we never notice. However, when playing the first two chapters of Ghostwire: TokyoI couldn’t stop noticing examples of how many of the big, obvious design decisions seemed built around perspective and how it all seemed to fall into place thanks to the game.
