Ghostwire: Tokyo’s first-person perspective is paramount

For decades, there’s been a stereotype that Japanese game developers and players dislike first-person games. As with any claim of that sort, it’s filled with a long list of asterisks and exceptions. But Ghostwire: Tokyo director Kenji Kimura and producer Masato Kimura think there’s some truth to it, theorizing that it has to do with stylish character design being especially important to Japanese players, as well as general concerns about motion sickness.

Yet Masato says he thinks the sentiment is fading away, noting that he doesn’t hear about it as much as he used to — which turns out to be fairly convenient, since Ghostwire: TokyoThis is not only an unusual first-person action video game by a Japanese studio; it also feels very defined by its perspective.

Kenji refers to Ghostwire: Tokyo as Tango Gameworks’ first first-person game, which isn’t technically true (The Evil Within 2 got a post-release first-person mode), but it’s the company’s first game built around the perspective. And he says that during the game’s development, that led to a lot of experimentation.

“It was definitely a challenge for us,” Kenji says.

“Starting from scratch, just getting the sense of walking correctly was hard, because you want the head to bob a little, but if you make the head bob too much while you’re walking forward, it makes you feel dizzy,” he adds. “And not having any bob makes it feel like you’re just sliding across the map, so that also feels weird. Doing everything from scratch was definitely a very big challenge.”

Kenji says that this experimentation has the advantage of allowing Kenji to question things others may take as a given, such as how they are made. Ghostwire: Tokyo’s gameplay is centered around mid-range combat rather than anything especially close or far away, as in a typical shooter.

Tango can be translated as Ghostwire as an action-adventure game, though, it’s closer to a shooter than a brawler. You have the ability to use elements rather than guns and can throw fire, water, or wind at your enemies using your hands. Enemies soak up a fair number of hits and they move at a modest pace, so there’s time to breathe during fights, or even run away entirely. GhostwireIt has stealth, melee, parry, and a button to move, but I found those more useful as backup options than defaults.

Image: Tango Gameworks/Bethesda

In the five or so hours that I played of the game for this story, I often found myself stepping in and out of combat — weakening enemies from a modest distance, then moving in close to finish them off with a sort of energy wire that pulls out their core. While I craved some sort of evasive move to dodge incoming attacks, the action on the default difficulty setting generally didn’t get overwhelming enough to make that a major issue.

Kenji claims that Tango balanced the game so it was easy to comprehend and has a pleasant tempo and flow. It is not about forcing players to memorize and study different parts.

“The game is about exploration of the city, and there are enemies that get in the way, but we didn’t want the combat to be so difficult that it prohibited you from actually doing a lot of that exploration,” he says. “Because a lot of the fun is in the exploration. So there are other difficulty levels that you can try out if you want to play in a more tactical way, but on the normal setting, it’s not that tactical.”

And that exploration, as well, ties closely into the game’s perspective. Kenji says the team wanted to make the game something of a sightseeing experience that could show off its recreation of Tokyo — which comes across well in the game, with an impressive sense of variety and verticality.

Akito is the protagonist of the story. Kenji, Masato and Masato said that the Tango team chose a type of all-man character so that the players can relate better to it. This is in contrast with Japan’s popular logic.

To a degree, every game is defined by its perspective, likely in hundreds of subtle ways we don’t ever notice. But, you can still enjoy the first chapter of Ghostwire: Tokyo, I couldn’t stop noticing examples of how many of the big, obvious design choices seemed to be built around the perspective, and how everything seemed to fall in place thanks to the game as a result.