In a game like Ghostwire: Tokyo that lets players wield magical abilities with fun hand animations, a bow and arrow may always feel comparatively underwhelming. If Doctor Strange was to wield both his mystical sorcery and a random physical weapon, fans may be more interested in his magic abilities overall. Because Ghostwire: Tokyo’s open-world approach to gameplay is played from a first-person perspective, players also get to watch each Ethereal Weaving spell that KK and Akito cast with elaborate hand animations.
Even so, Ghostwire: Tokyo’s bow is offered as a unique physical weapon that Akito can use when he is not being possessed by KK, much like Talion and Celebrimbor in the Middle-earth franchise. The bow is mainly used when players are separated from KK by enemy attacks in the late-game, but Ghostwire: Tokyo perhaps should have made an effort to have the bow feel as fun to use as the magic abilities, though that would have been an unenviable task. A few considerations could be made for changes to the bow, such as substituting it for a gun, kunai, or emphasizing melee with a katana.
Ghostwire: Tokyo Could Have Packed a Bigger Punch with a Handgun
The bow and arrow has some spiritual and cultural Japanese significance in relation to Shinto shrine rituals, such as the Oyumi Shinji ritual. However, if that is what the bow is in reference to, it is never explicitly stated as so. Either way, the bow is only minorly useful up until players retrieve the fire and water weaving spells, and is made completely redundant once a couple skills are unlocked that let players absorb more ether. Ghostwire: Tokyo’s weapons were clearly considered with limited ammunition counts in mind, and therefore a bow makes sense in that regard.
But the same concept could have applied to a revolver, where players would only have six rounds to fire. Moreover, a revolver would have actually packed the punch that the bow seemingly can, where it is essentially a one-shot against visitors. Otherwise, Ghostwire: Tokyo could have simply stuck to kunai, which are swapped to when players wear the shinobi outfit, have limited ammunition, and could provide the same strategy in stealth.
Ghostwire: Tokyo Could Have Swapped the Bow for a Katana
KK’s palm-strike shove is technically a melee move, but it is hardly an attack. Rather, players use this shove to extract ether from nearby enemies, to lightly distance themselves from enemies, or to break floating ether and meika interactables without having to waste an arrow or SP. If the player’s physical weapon was a katana, that could have added a melee-oriented approach to the game while players absorb more ether. However, Ghostwire: Tokyo players could idly fall back on the sword and not even need to use Ethereal Weaving abilities if it was too strong. Therefore, sword attacks could be made much weaker than SP-based attacks in order to balance it, since a sword would not have ammunition resources to rely upon and could conceivably be used at all times.
Likewise, there are enough ether interactables in the environment that players would likely not have to worry about how they would hit the obscured nodes on corrupted trees to clear an area. But if Ghostwire: Tokyo insisted on having a ranged weapon as its backup weapon, then a revolver would perhaps still make more sense than a bow in this context. Either way, the bow is still serviceable nonetheless.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is available now for PC and PS5.
