Board 8 > So I finished Ghost of Tsushima yesterday [huge spoilers/minor rant]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like three years late. Finally got round to it. But the ending has been playing on my mind for the last 24 hours so I'm making a topic about it

I chose to kill Shimura. It felt like a richer story that way, and having seen both endings I massively prefer the kill one - the spare one feels very anticlimactic. I think Shimura was probably a dead man if he'd failed anyway? And killing him was more for him than it was for Jin.

But that's not the point I wanted to make. The discourse around it seems to be that spare is the "correct" choice because by sparing Shimura, Jin fully embraces his "Ghost" identity and abandons his honor completely and his adherence to the Samurai code - but that's completely at odds with how I played the game, and what the game encourages you to do.

You're given Ghost weapons and tools, absolutely. But you're also constantly encouraged to challenge your opponents to Samurai stand-offs. The 3rd act shows the negative consequences of using ghost tactics what with the poison being everywhere. The final duel with Shimura featured no Ghost tactics at all. You initially duel Khan without using them. Jin hadn't "completely abandoned" anything, he was just no longer solely adhering to it. He always maintained some aspect of his Samurai self - even if you did everything in the game using stealthy tactics, the game forces you, time and again, into honorable one-on-one duels and purposely restricts your use of Ghost tactics right up until the end of the game.

If that's the message they wanted to send with the endings, they could have taken the choice away from the player, and run some sort of analysis on how the player used Ghost tactics; compare use of standoffs, Ghost kills, etc. Or even have a longer, more varied battle with Shimura where you get the chance to use Ghost weapons if you so choose, and if you do that, you spare him.

Because, and this is what's bothering me the most: Jin can't fucking say "I have no honor" as he does in the Spare ending having just had a very honorable duel. If that statement were true it would have come after hurling Kunai and Sticky Bombs at your uncle to end it in seconds. Having a full-on, totally honorable, one-on-one fight with Shimura, then to be told that you're abandoning the Samurai code completely by choosing Spare, then being able to continue challenging Mongols to stand-offs in the postgame, feels a bit incongruous.

And all of that is avoided if you choose to kill him.

I get why people choose Spare. I admit I hesitated for a while making the decision - but looking up the comparatively anticlimactic other ending and seeing the justification for it afterwards has only made me happier with my decision.