While I’ve seen some praise for Ghost of Tsushima’s accuracy, I don’t personally care much about it. Even Sucker Punch, the game’s developers, say that historical records from the true battles at Tsushima are extremely spotty. I want to avoid the discourse over historical accuracy. That is a futile arms race that would ultimately stifle artistic creativity for everyone. (Also, historically inaccurate hwacha rocket launchers improved the game.) What matters is how Tsushima fits in the larger media landscape of American blockbuster productions. If games are art, then they are an interpretation of the world that we live in. What is the game trying to communicate about a fictional Tsushima of 1274? That’s the part that I’m interested in.
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I disconnected from this game for the same reasons that I stopped paying attention a quarter of the way into Star Wars: A New Hope. East Asian aesthetics can't gloss over the fact that morality tales are very dull if they last for longer than five minutes. At least Star Wars has more jokes! And the drama had bite! In contrast, every conversation in Tsushima inevitably ends up being a dull, self-serious lecture on morality or duty or self control. Playing the game felt a lot like attending a summer Bible camp, down to the part where sexual innuendo is taboo, and the only kind of love that exists is life-or-death devotion. The landscape of Tsushima is exciting, beautiful, and whimsical. Leaves swirl around Jin’s feet in the daytime and orange embers dance around him at night. In contrast, the people feel wooden, and their lines of dialogue lack spontaneity. I started to dread turning in quests to my companions, as their closing remarks would inevitably lead to a navel-gazing Aesopian conversation about the dangers of straying from the path, losing control, or faltering in resolve. In the case of a character like Kenji, an unscrupulous sake merchant who isn't in a moral place to lecture Jin about his actions, Jin lectures him about morality instead.
Yes, a lot of videogame conflict is about the clash of ideals. In Tsushima, though, the conflict is pretty inelegant. Its characters don’t truly introspect or grow so much as they tell each other what they believe. This strikes at the core of the story’s problem: it is over-narrated. There is no breathing room for nuance, which stood out because role-playing games inspired by Europe are often full of grey morality. After a while, I began to grow irritated at Jin, who seems to be a mess of unintentional contradictions. He is wildly inconsistent in terms of whose cowardice he condemns, and whose he defends. He condemns the Mongols for leaving impaled corpses as a message, yet sees no hypocrisy in doing the same to three heads that he decapitates himself. (In fact, there’s a historical precedent for samurai head-collecting.) So why does he draw such a stark line between the Mongols’ morality and his own?
Because as long as he is true to the game’s loose definition of honor, then Jin does not need to be morally consistent. He does not need to be truly moral at all.
This is the crux of the problem in Tsushima, and it's one that doesn’t exist in many other open world RPGs set in European settings: its morality is binary. People are either honorable or dishonorable, with little to zero nuance in between. A samurai either has self control (good) or they do not (bad). Where is the line? There is none, as honor functions as a “get out of jail free” card for its traumatized nobility. Throughout her questline, Lady Adachi wants revenge, and she doesn’t care about making restitution to the people her clan has harmed. Some of the people conspiring against her were clearly in the wrong, but there were enough injured parties to fill a long list. Similarly, Ishikawa had originally planned to sacrifice his home village to capture his protege, whom he had abused. In most games about medieval Europe, there’s a lot of interesting back-and-forth about whether or not noble status entitles someone to be a complete dickhead. In Ghost of Tsushima, the answer seems to be a resounding “absolutely.” It was hard for me to blame Tomoe for leaving her mentor when Ishikawa insulted her and refused to listen to her own defense. As long as the game's upper-class characters have honor, they don’t need compassion for other human beings. The samurai are allowed to kill with impunity, and I had vainly hoped that the narrative would critique their bloodlust. The game never addresses the real consequences of their violence. Instead, violence is solely represented as a clash of ideals. Instead of using healing items, Jin even restores his health by killing his enemies (which restores resolve). When perpetrators of violence are not held to universal standards of decency, they are dehumanized in the process. Tsushima's ally sidequests are often re-affirmations of social status for deeply traumatized people, rather than an interesting exploration of actual morality. In place of a coherent belief system that helps the samurai make consistent decisions, honor is portrayed as an innate quality that actively hinders these samurai’s character growth.
Even more broadly, “honor” is fundamental to both the story and the game design. Jin obtains more charm slots by “honoring" fox shrines.” If he visits the “Pillars of Honor,” he can obtain new skins for his gear. By incorporating honor into the fox and shrine collectibles, honor becomes a superficial aesthetic to help non-Asian players relate to the setting. There’s just one problem: honor is only an Asian value system in the imagination of western writers. Like most human civilizations on earth, East Asian societies have highly localized and context-specific ideas of honor. In my own experience with Chinese, we have specific words for loyalty, religious devotion, and personal dignity. We certainly don’t have a word that encompasses all of these things under one value system. No civilization has a singular value system. When American writers apply “honor” to all moral situations in this game, it becomes a racialized metric by which the residents of Tsushima can pass or fail. It is the metric by which Jin, the eponymous Ghost of Tsushima judges the peasants of Yarikawa when they protest “but we’re just farmers, not warriors!” I had a real head-scratching moment when Jin tells a commoner resistance fighter that she doesn’t have to be a samurai to follow their code. Yes, she does! The samurai are not everyday Japanese people, they’re a specific class of militarized nobility! Yet Jin extends his ideals of honor to unarmed peasants, Buddhist monks, and a corrupt merchant. Not because they have signed up to become samurai, but because they are Japanese. Jin has no reason to expect honor from the game’s bandits any more than I should expect noblesse oblige from a random French highwayman. That would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Yet, that is exactly what is expected of the residents of Tsushima.
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I understand that large games need thematic pillars. However, unifying them under a single fictional ideology tends to flatten narrative complexity. The reliance on honor as a storytelling aid shows a bigger issue with how Tsushima actively tries to be legible to a non-Japanese audience. As long as the game tries to hand-hold players who know very little about Japan, relying on orientalist tropes becomes inevitable. One explicit example: the game's interface explains that Nobu means “trust” and Kage means “shadow” when offering horse names near its opening. Meanwhile, no piece of media has ever attempted to inform me that Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek. It’s a weird double standard that firmly casts the player as a tourist, rather than allowing us to be unsettled by our own ignorance. There were so many times when I longed for thoughtful silence, rather than how the game obsessively outlines its own themes. Like most big-budget games, Tsushima refuses to make its western audience feel uncomfortable, which is ultimately detrimental to its own narrative.
In later acts, the concept of honor takes on a slightly more distinct meaning. Jin is only able to turn the tide of the war by resorting to “dishonorable” methods. Does he sacrifice civilians for the greater good? No, he doesn’t. Does he force his allies into accepting unequal terms? No, he helps them out on their own quests. What makes him dishonorable is his guile. Tsushima represents basic tactical sense as antithetical to what Japanese warriors stand for. While Tsushima's fictional Mongols should definitely be condemned for butchering civilians, they are also condemned for making strategic alliances with the locals and weaponizing key local figures. I felt very uncomfortable when Lord Shimura and Lady Yukiko questioned the value of Jin’s sharp mind for military strategy. Premodern Japanese history is full of intrigue, and their military strategies were similar to those of other contemporary nations. The game’s decision to portray the samurai as poor tacticians was a consistent narrative choice. When Jin confronts minor characters who murder their wives or sell out Lady Adachi for profit, they confess their motives immediately. Every Japanese character is portrayed as an open book, no matter how heinous their crimes. Why? Why is nobody in this game a competent liar? Even the traitor Ryuzo chooses death over lying to Jin for his own survival. These story beats aren't written because Japanese people are incapable of lying. They're written because we live in an era in which the most prevalent western power fantasy is to fully “understand” East Asia through minimal engagement or effort. The goal is almost never about reaching common ground, but to achieve dominance and mastery over Asian culture. To European and North American audiences, there is nothing worse than being wrong about Japan or Japanese people, even when they are factually incorrect. Tsushima caters to this fantasy by removing all mystery from social interactions. Jin’s real crime is to become less legible in terms of how the west imagines samurai.
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The samurai’s lack of guile is especially uncomfortable during the introductory Battle of Komodo Beach, where Lord Shimura chooses to negotiate man-to-man with a famous warlord who had already been building encampments all over Tsushima before the battle even began. Military bases don’t just pop up overnight, and the feudal lords of the domain definitely didn’t have to negotiate with invaders with clearly hostile intentions. Yet Lord Shimura must, for it would be utterly dishonorable to refuse, whatever that means. I was reminded of something that a British historian had incorrectly written about the Opium Wars: that the Chinese had lost because they were too naive to anticipate European treachery. Portraying East Asian culture as inherently incapable of guile is not only ahistorical and offensive, it becomes justification for our subjugation by foreign powers.
The concept of honor becomes a way to justify how Asian people lose wars. Near the end of Tsushima's second act, Khoutun Khan explicitly tells Ryuzo that honor is what makes the samurai weaker than the Ghost. This is a curious choice of theme for a fictional Mongol warlord, especially when the game itself alludes to the Mongols’ attempts at cultural tolerance. Random non-playable characters discuss how the Mongols smash religious statues, but leave shrines intact. Why, then, does the Khan blame the samurai’s losses on their military culture? Because the west has a long history of pathologizing Asian culture onto military outcomes. The examples are numerous, but Europeans and Americans tend to assume that wars are won by superior ideology, rather than the quality of the invader’s gun. The Mongols have rocket launchers, but the samurai are only losing because they’re holding fast to their ideals. Sure. I’m not buying what Khotun Khan is selling. Like most of the west's imperial wars, the inferiority of samurai honor is used as the villain’s rationale for why Tsushima’s conquest was inevitable. Khotun Khan’s words ultimately reflect how the west portrays its own history more closely than it reflects historical reality.
Despite her status as a “dishonorable” thief, Yuna is able to sum up the theme of the game's war in a throwaway line: the leaders of Tsushima must change, or they will perish. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this theme. One could argue that “change or die” was the most important historical theme of 19th century East Asian history. But Tsushima is set in the 13th century, and its Japan is a fictional one created by an American studio. It’s bittersweet to read about how Asia must change in order to survive, especially from a country with a history of rationalizing imperialist violence in this manner. In fact, America’s formal relationship with Japan started when Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan with a fleet of warships that forced the Japanese to open up trade and grant most-favored-nation status to the US. American historians portray this event as the beginning of Japan’s modernization, and not as military coercion. The events of the 19th century don’t bear any relation to the history of the real Tsushima, but they absolutely shape how Americans tell stories about Japan.
Most egregiously, honor becomes a way to rationalize Asian deaths. At the end of the story, Lord Shimura decides to kill Jin for the shogun. In response, Jin calls Shimura "a slave to your [honor].” Even if the two samurai had irreconcilable differences, I don’t think this exchange sounds like what an Asian son would say to his surrogate father. It sounds more like what American thought leaders usually have to say about Chinese people: that we are impossible to negotiate with; that we will always sacrifice ourselves for an inscrutable morality system, an archaic code. The cultural impact of equating Asian morality to slavery is the same, even if it comes from a Japanese character’s mouth. The theme of this game was already written on the wall before its conclusion. It was foreshadowed by Lady Adachi’s willingness to facilitate her older sister’s suicide. It was foreshadowed by Ishikawa’s determination to murder his surrogate daughter for her willful independence, even after she proved her innocence. A samurai’s own family members become disposable when they appear to lack reason, never mind the thousands of Mongolians that the samurai consider to be “dogs.”
When you can paint an Asian person as unreasonable, it becomes considerably easier to murder them. When the game asks Jin if he will kill his surrogate father, the narrative makes it clear that blood ties and shared history don’t always matter when a samurai’s humanity is forfeit. The game’s aesthetic may be Asian, but its cruelty is uniquely American.
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Sisi is an award-nominated video game developer who explores themes of colonialism and queerness in their work. You can find them yelling on Twitter or posting games on Itch.io. Feel free to toss them a Ko-fi if you enjoyed their work.