"Ghost of Tsushima masterfully blends 13th-century samurai honor with Mongol brutality, praised for its combat and scenery but criticized for stiff animations, while The Last of Us Part 2 becomes a lightning rod for backlash—its transgender themes, explicit sex scene, and Joel’s torture dismissed as forced "woke" messaging over storytelling, exposing a cultural divide where audiences reject ideological games in favor of traditional values. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, I'm going to tell you why Ghost of Tsushima is a great game and it's a take you're not going to hear anywhere else, I guarantee you.
Also, there'll be a couple of mild spoilers up ahead.
Big new video game, Ghost of Tsushima.
Really, really powerful game.
I would say excellent.
I think it's not too much to say an excellent game.
Maybe not a classic, but really, really good stuff.
All right, so to give you the story, it takes place in 13th century Japan, the island of Tsushima.
The Mongols are invading.
The Mongols were a really powerful force that really changed all of culture, even in the West.
So this is their first invasion of Japan, and they come on this island and they destroy.
They so outnumber the samurai that they destroy the samurais.
You play this guy's name is Jin Sakai, and this guy is basically like, remember the Lone Ranger, all the other Rangers were killed.
This guy's the last samurai, and he has to go around finding the survivors and putting them back together to fight back to save his island from this horde of Mongols, the Mongol horde that is taking over the island.
I found the gameplay really good.
When it gets reviews, like on Metacritic, some of the professional critics kind of counted it down, gave it in the reviews in the 80s instead of the 90s for the gameplay.
But I noticed the customers all really loved it, and it's up there at a 9.2.
And I found the gameplay really good.
My model for all fighting gameplay is Gears of War.
Gears of War is simple.
It's straightforward.
It's intuitive.
You do the thing.
You kind of very quickly fall into it and you start to forget it.
Ghost of Tsushima has more fighting mode in it.
There's more like moves, kind of samurai moves.
The moves are, I found, very cool.
They're pretty simple to remember.
They work pretty well.
They're pretty intuitive once you get used to them.
Really good.
And my big thing with all video games, I think video games are a visual art.
I don't actually think they're a storytelling art that much.
I think the stories tend to be simplistic, one battle after another.
Even when they make them more than simplistic, they're still really powered by the fighting.
But what I do think video games do is they move you into the art.
They move you into the scenery.
And while the figures, the actual human beings in Ghost of Tsushima are only moderately good, I would say they're good, but they're not great.
They're a little stiff, a little bit creepy valley.
But the scenery is unbelievably gorgeous.
The scenery is unbelievably gorgeous.
And as you ride through it, you get a horse.
And as you ride through the scenery, you actually are sucked into the scenery.
Some of the camps that you visit, the dojos and the various places where you have battles, are just really, really beautiful and it really takes you in.
Here's the thing though that really got me about this game.
Obviously, it takes place in the 13th century.
And so all bets are off.
You know, suddenly the social justice of it all kind of just disappears.
I just don't think they were thinking about it.
I think they were thinking about telling the story, which is what you should be thinking about.
You should not be thinking about these little ugly small-minded, picky social justice trolls who, if I ruled the world, would be hung up by their ankles and flogged and then sent home to their mothers and fathers where they could live in the basement where they belong instead of picking on all these industries that are successful, that are entertaining, that are doing all this wonderful stuff.
And Ghost of Tsushima doesn't deal with any of that.
Because they're samurais, there is this great male set of values.
The value of honor, the value of service, the value of the strong fighting man serving the weak person who can't fight for himself.
And we all know what that ultimately translates into is that men should defend women, that men should defend the women and children of the island and they should go out and fight.
Plus, on top of this, and I'll get back to women warriors in a minute because I know you all love to hear me talk about women warriors.
But the other thing about this is there is a natural love of your culture and your community.
So the invading Mongols are looked upon as you would look upon, say, invading Mongols.
There's none of this like, oh, what did we do to offend them?
Like the left when they talk about like Islamists.
Why are they so mad at us?
Maybe we didn't give them jobs.
Maybe we weren't nice.
None of that.
It's like, these bloody Mongols, I'll chase them off our shores, which is the way you should feel.
You should love your country.
You should hate your enemies.
You should hate the enemies of your country.
And you should hate the conquerors of your country.
You should fight back against people who attack your country.
When somebody bombs your country, you should fight back wholeheartedly, viciously, and without quarter.
And that's what they do.
And the whole thing about the game is the honorable samurai values against the evil Mongol values and how sometimes you have to compromise.
I don't want to give anything away.
I don't want to have any spoilers, but sometimes you have to compromise your values and what that means and how that affects people.
But just the very opening of the story, the very opening of the story, one of the samurais goes down to the Mongol leader.
And this I will give away.
This is just the opening scene.
This is the only thing I'll give away.
He goes down to the Mongol leader and he says, come out and fight me man to man.
Come out and fight me man to man.
And let's settle this by champions, essentially, this honorable thing, because they're so outnumbered.
There's like 85 samurais, there's thousands of Mongols.
And so the guy goes out and says, just fight me man to man.
And the Mongol leader throws a glass of wine on him and then throws a torch on him, sets him on fire and cuts off his head.
Doesn't give him a chance, doesn't fight him honorably.
And that sets the scene that you're dealing with this ancient code of honor versus the Mongols.
Now, of course, because we have to be politically correct, there's all these women warriors in it.
And the first few things where you go after allies are all about the women warriors.
And I have to say, you know, when I was reviewing The Witcher, I was talking about the nonsense of women swordsmen fighting at the level of male swordsmen in a melee battle.
There was, it's half legendary and half historical.
There was a group of female samurai whose job was to protect their homes while the real samurai were out fighting the battles.
And so these women warriors used a weapon called the Naganata.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
Basically a pole with a blade on the end.
It was supposed to, because they were smaller and weaker, supposed to give them more leverage with that spear.
That's what I've read anyway.
Now, there's not a lot about this in real history.
There's a lot of legend about this, and they have found archaeological finds where battlegrounds, they did find women's bodies, which is very, very rare in the West to do that, to find warriors.
They found one Viking and they said, oh, see, women Vikings were warriors.
Not so much.
But it's hard to know the truth about this.
It is true, by the way, in Western chivalric literature, there are also legendary female knights, but they are legendary.
They do things that male knights, female knights could not have done, including wearing armor and carrying that around.
However, however, we'll give them a break.
We'll give them a break and allow there to be some female samurais.
That having been said, the values are good male values.
They're things that we used to learn by playing cowboys and Indians when we treated the Indians like they treat the Mongols in this.
They are things that we used to learn by playing GIs in the war.
They're things that we teach our soldiers still.
Values like honor, values like service, values like fighting and killing to defend the weak.
And it's nice to see them.
It's nice to see them.
Good Male Values Explored00:04:21
It's nice to get these social justice warriors out of people's heads and get these values back on the screen.
I have to tell you, it was just playing this game, which really is enjoyable.
I really enjoyed it.
It really does remind you that social justice warriors are termites in the house of God.
They are like termites eating away at the structure of everything that is right and everything that is good.
They call themselves social justice warriors, but they're termites.
And really, when you see a game that still sticks to its guns and shows us, tells us a story the way a story should be told, it's an incredible relief.
Ghost of Sushuma.
I recommend it if you like these third-person fighting games.
Really, really exciting and fun.
Spoiler alert, I'm going to be reviewing The Last of Us 2, and I may give away some of the things that happen in this irritating social justice warrior piece of garbage.
So, let me talk about this video game, The Last of Us, Part 2.
You know, this is making a, there's a big fuss over this because of the sexuality in it and the social justice garbage that has piped into this very, very popular franchise.
The first game, which I played, The Last of Us, was just, people love this.
Whenever I talk about the fact that I'm a gamer, people write in and say, you've got to play The Last of Us.
Well, I did.
I played it almost to the end, and I got tired of it after a while because people say what a great story it is.
And it's a good story about a guy who's lost his daughter.
It's a zombie pandemic, right?
It's post-apocalyptic world, and he has to help this young girl get to a place where they're going to use her blood as a serum.
And in traveling through the zombie world with this girl, he sort of rediscovers himself as a dad and as a man.
And it's got, it's very pro-masculinity.
It's very pro-fatherhood.
It's very deep kind of relationship for a video game.
So people loved it.
I got bored of the gameplay.
For me, it was all just shooting zombies.
And I get very tired of shooting zombies and they're scary.
And, you know, it's like, I just, I just, this was the same thing.
So I got very close to the end.
I now realize I was very close to finishing it.
And then I just got tired of the shooting.
So the Last of Us 2 comes out, right?
This is a really popular game.
And suddenly, so we're back in the world and the young girl, Ellie, has grown up and now she's a lesbian because I don't know why, but suddenly she's a lesbian.
And her friend, Joel from the original, this guy who's now older, he's an older guy, and he's clearly got very tender feelings, tender, fatherly feelings towards this girl.
And I should say, by the way, that the art and the voice acting in the game are terrific.
They really are.
It's a little slow.
They take a little bit too much time with it, but still, it's really good voice acting, really good art.
Joel is being hunted by Abby, who is a, at least she looks like, a transgender woman.
Okay.
So she looks like a guy who either has had an operation or something or is a woman who thinks she's mad.
You couldn't tell.
You couldn't tell.
And we have to play her at times.
And she's just a vicious, vengeance-bent person in a game where every male, every male gets destroyed or humiliated.
And Joel, this guy we've really learned to be with and to love and to kind of follow his role, follow his journey into fatherhood, into rediscovering what it means to be a man.
Now we've got to play her as she hunts or him or whoever, whatever she is, as she hunts him down.
And we even get the joy of a graphic sex scene, which you just can't tell if it's a guy sodomizing a guy who thinks he's a girl or what it is.
you can't tell why are these all stuck together
So an employee at IGN, one of the big game websites, said, anybody who doesn't like this scene is a virgin.
Pushing Values On00:04:56
Now, let me tell you something.
I'm 65 years old.
I had more sex last week than all the employees at IGN put together in the last year.
Okay.
My one response to this is this.
My eyes!
Get out of my eyes!
Out of my eyes!
My eyes!
I don't care.
I don't care what people are.
I don't want to watch it.
I don't want it forced down into my consciousness.
I don't want them preaching to me while I'm trying to play a video game.
And it's absurd.
And by the way, a lot of people feel like this.
You know, the critics give this game a 94%, which is no way.
The people give it a 4.8 out of 100.
So that's what the people think about this.
This is awkward.
We're supposed to be all so shocked and awesome.
We don't care.
We don't care.
Most of us are straight people who just want to have kids and go on and have our family lives.
We don't care what you're doing, but we don't need to know.
We don't need to have this forced on us as telling us basically that we're immoral if we don't want to play this game.
It's offensive.
It is offensive to do that, right?
It is offensive to push it on.
Plus, it makes no sense.
All the tolerance that we have for every little minor twist in human consciousness, all the tolerance we have, is because we are a powerful, rich nation surrounded by an army that will protect us.
We can afford to screw around with all the social justice we want.
We think.
We think that we can experiment with all the tolerance, all the social justice.
Let everybody come in.
Let everybody come into the country.
There should be no borders.
No boy.
I'm such a good person.
That is all because we are rich and powerful and protected by a massive, massive military force.
Once there's a zombie pandemic, once you're living in a post-apocalyptic world, all those bets are off.
Strong men rule.
Men with guns rule over men without guns.
Women will have to produce children.
That's what they will be there for.
There'll be a lot less tolerance of this sort of thing.
Our tolerance is a luxury, and I'm all for it.
I'm all for being tolerant.
But don't tell me in a post-apocalyptic world surrounded by zombies, we're going to be the same decadent, non-caring, virtue-signaling clowns we are in a situation where we are wealthy and protected and at peace.
And just one more thing I got to say about this, because it's so offensive to me to be preached to about something I don't care about at all.
I mean, I truly, I do not care what people are doing in their private lives, but it's offensive for them to tell me that a game that I really enjoyed or a game that most people really enjoyed because of its values now has to be twisted and sell their values to me instead of the values that I actually went to the game for in the first place.
Why does everything have to be transformed into this garbage?
That's what I want to know, especially illogically.
And one of the most offensive scenes in this, it is genuinely offensive that we have to play this vengeance-hungry Abby who's out to get the guy that we thought of as the hero.
He was our character in the first game, this guy Joel.
And then I don't want to play a lot of this.
I just want to play a little bit of this death scene because they don't just kill him.
They torture him to death.
And the person who's doing it is a character that we are forced to play.
Stupid, old man.
You don't get to rush this. You're done.
You want what I want, right?
End it.
No!
Jewel...
Get up.
Joel, f ⁇ ing get up.
Please stop.
Please don't shoot.
Joel, please get up.
No!
They try to convince us that this transgender person is somebody we should somehow like and forgive.
They make you kill a dog, which a lot of people are really upset about.
You know, it's garbage.
It is garbage.
I do not understand the disconnect that has taken place between entertainers, including sports people, movie people, television people, entertainers, and the people they are supposed to entertain is an amazing phenomenon that we will call in the later years, we will call, remember when they got woke and went broke, because I don't think this game is going to do very well, and they can sit and rant and rage about it all they want.
It doesn't matter.
It's our values that we have, not their values.
We don't need them to preach to us.
They're game makers.
Just make a good game and let us see our values in play.
And then maybe, maybe we'll give you some of our money if you're very polite.