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Ghost of Tsushima makes one thing clear very quickly: You’re not going to have an easy time carving a bloody path across feudal Japan.

Don’t be ashamed if your first hours as Jin Sakai are marked by game over screens. Ghost of Tsushima isn’t exactly at the Dark Souls level of making you feel like you’re terrible at video games, but combat is paced in a way that emphasizes patience and striking with a precision. You are a samurai, after all.

Once you get a handle on how to manage any given tussle, that fundamental power fantasy really lights up the screen. There’s a learning curve for sure. But it’s a learning curve you can flatten out a bit by arming yourself with some knowledge and a few key, early upgrades.

Let’s dive in.

How combat works in Tsushima

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True-blue button mashers might luck out in the early game, but it’s not going to help much beyond that. Very quickly, Ghost of Tsushima starts throwing enemy combinations your way that specifically undermine a button mash-y approach to combat.

Succeeding early on is a matter of getting a handle on the parry and dodge commands. You can block most attacks by holding down the L1 button, but if you time it right you’ll actually interrupt and stagger your attacker, leaving them momentarily vulnerable. That’s when you press the attack.

Dodging is the other piece. If you see a small red dot pop up on your attacker’s weapon, that means they’re about to strike with an unblockable move. That’s when you dodge, and follow up with a counterattack if you’re lucky. You can also often interrupt an unblockable attack if you lash out with a heavy sword attack (triangle button) as soon as the red dot appears.

That heavy attack of yours is also an important piece of the Tsushima combat puzzle. Every enemy in the game can be staggered, as indicated by the white meter that builds up over a foe’s head with each of your heavy attacks. Fill that meter and you get a window to attack freely; early on, one stagger is typically all you’ll need to dispatch anyone you’re facing.

Juggling the three basic elements of parrying, dodging, and staggering is half the battle in Ghost of Tsushima. Get the hang of those and everything else starts to click into place. You’ll want to do that early, because your toolbox gets a bit more complicated once stances enter the mix.

Different forms for different threats

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There are four basic enemy types in Ghost of Tsushima: Swordsmen, Shieldmen, Spearmen, and Brutes. They all behave and attack differently, so you need to approach each one a little differently in combat.

That’s where stances come into play. You start the game with the Stone stance, which is more effective against swordsmen. What that means in practical terms is your heavy attacks in Stone stance build up the stagger meter much more quickly against swordsmen than any of the other enemy types.

You can easily switch between stances on the fly by holding down the right trigger and pressing the face button for that stance. (You can see which stances correspond to which button in the menu that appears in bottom right corner of the screen while you press R2.) It feels a little clunky at first, but it shouldn’t take long before you’re slipping in and out of stances on the fly.

You’re not penalized for using the “wrong” stance against an enemy. Their stagger meter will still fill up. But it happens slowly – and even more so as you get further into the game – so it’s a good idea to work on mastering your stances as you unlock new ones.

Those stance unlocks are tied to Ghost of Tsushima‘s Mongol leaders. Every leader you take down brings you closer to unlocking the next stance. You’ll most often find those leaders in Mongol camps, which are mostly optional objectives that involve clearing out the enemy presence so Tsushima locals can move back in.

It’s tricky, though. Even the easiest camps pit you against multiple enemy types. If you just go charging in before you’ve really mastered how combat works, you’re going to get cut down an awful lot. But you can give yourself an edge…with the right upgrades.

Becoming a better samurai

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Ah, upgrades. The bread and butter of any open world game with progressively harder environments to explore. Ghost of Tsushima is lousy with upgrades, and while I’d argue that stances are much more important for your long-term survival, picking the right upgrades in the early going will set you up much better getting those stances unlocked fast.

There’s no one recipe that works here, to be clear. While talking over early game strategies with Mashable’s Alexis Nedd, who’s handling our Ghost of Tsushima review, I realized we had some very different approaches to building Jin Sakai as a fearsome samurai warrior in the opening hours. 

So don’t be afraid to try the approach that works for you and your style of play. You can’t doom yourself by making the “wrong” choices. In truth, there are no wrong choices here.

My own strategy focused on a less stealthy approach, at least initially. I put points into the Standoff skill first; this is the ability that allows you to open many fights with a timing minigame where, if you hold down and then release triangle at the right time, Jin lands an immediate one-cut kill. Leveling it up once lets you take out two foes in quick succession, and doing it again ups that number to three. A great odds-evener for the early game, when enemy squads tend to be smaller.

I also put an early point into the archery skill, which unlocks Concentration. Once you have it, you can click the R3 button while you’re aiming your bow to briefly slow down time. It’s great for landing easy headshots on the archers and solo patrols that scout around Mongol camps, which in turn makes it easier to sneak inside and choose where you want to face off against the rest.

Moving over to the “Samurai” skills, it’s definitely worth grabbing Perfect Healing Parry from the Deflection skill tree and Dodging Slash from the Evasion skill tree. Anything that gets your health back quickly is incredibly helpful in the early going, and the dodging slash gives you a counter to spearmen and brutes – who dish out unblockable attacks more frequently – before you have the stances unlocked.

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You can also upgrade your weapons and armor, the latter of which confers various special abilities like increased health, improved stealth, and faster Concentration cooldown. I spent most of my resources in the early game on upgrading my katana, Jin’s main weapon, and the Traveler’s Attire armor. The former makes your attacks more potent and the latter has one upgrade in particular that reveals a bit more of the map as you explore.

On a repeat playthrough, I’d probably do that a little differently. The sword upgrades are great, but I didn’t really see much impact from the armor upgrade. I’d probably focus instead on upgrading the Samurai Clan Armor (which you get early on). Alexis recommends it, too, even though she took more of a stealthy approach than I did in her early game.

“Masako’s gift to Jin is the early game’s primary melee outfit and its upgrades dramatically reduce incoming damage and jack up your health a Massive amount,” she said. That armor also grants you extra Resolve – which you can spend on healing mid-fight – whenever you take damage.

Alexis also favored katana upgrades early, but she invested in her tanto as well – that’s the blade you use for stealth kills. “Being able to deal damage faster makes crowd control easier, and quieter assassinations are crucial in early stealth sections to avoid pulling aggro.”

We both agree that Jin’s kunai are a lifesaver early on, because of their ability to insta-stagger multiple enemies at once when they’re clustered together. If you find yourself struggling with group fights in the early going, try busting out your kunai to even the odds. The first upgrade lets you toss an additional one, so you can stagger as many as three enemies in one go. (The second upgrade, which increases kunai damage, isn’t nearly as essential.)

Some final thoughts

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Finally, keep an eye out for shrines in the early going. These environmental puzzles usually involve some mix of running and jumping, and finding the right path to get past the bridge to the shrine that is inevitably broken. Your reward for completing a shrine is always a major charm that slots into your katana.

Charms confer an assortment of passive bonuses, and major charms tend to be fairly game-changing. I honestly don’t remember which charms unlock from which shrines, but there are some good ones to hunt for in the early part of the game. There’s one that increases the supplies and resources you pick up each time you collect them. Another, which I used for pretty much the entire game, makes parries, perfect parries, and dodges easier to nail.

Once you get a good mix of upgrades, skills, armors, and charms unlocked, turn your attention to those Mongol camps. You’ll also get to take on leaders during some story missions, but the camps are your quickest bet early on for unlocking more stances. 

Remember, too: If a Mongol camp offers an optional objective to “observe” the leader, don’t go kill him straight away. Instead, sneak in closer until you can see an R2 prompt above his head. Hold the button down until the prompt disappears and you’ll get one extra notch of progress toward your next stance, and then another notch after you kill the leader. Doing this can greatly speed along your stance progress.

As a final note, don’t forget to upgrade your individual stances too. You should be working to get at least the second unlock on each one, as that upgrade increases the stagger damage you deal against enemies who are weak to that stance.

That covers everything. Go forth and be the best samurai legend you can be. Ghost of Tsushima is most rewarding when you work to master the combat, but if the going gets too tough you can also switch the difficulty down to easy at any time. Good luck!

Ghost of Tsushima is available on PS4.