As I'm riding my horse through the beautiful, sprawling landscape of feudal Japan, a golden bird flies in front of me. I had been on my way to liberate a small village taken from Mongol invaders, but I follow the bird off the trail. They'll always take you somewhere worth the detour in Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch's new open-world action game where you play as a samurai.
I get off my horse, run off the path, and the bird quickly leads me to the edge of a cliff. Not to lead me off the edge --- to look at the view. That view is breathtaking. Mountains surround an ocean that stretches all the way to the horizon, with a double waterfall flowing into it. The sun reflecting off the water. The bird leads me to sit on a rock between the two waterfalls.
It is so peaceful I'd be fine staying there for ten minutes, listening to the sounds of the water and the wind.
Beauty like this is everywhere in GoT, and it's nice to sit and soak it all in to take a break from the constant violence. I climb down the cliff to a sitting area, and sit to reflect and write a haiku. This will help me get stronger for the next big fight.
Even in a brutal, war-torn world, GoT emphasizes the importance of taking a moment for yourself. Players can ignore these little moments and bulldoze through the main quest, but the battles will be more difficult if you don't — for example — take the time to relax in a hot spring.
You play as Jin, part of a small group of samurai protecting their home — the Japanese island of Tsushima — from an invading Mongol army loosely based on real history. Jin's group is quickly overwhelmed by the Mongols; he's one of the few survivors.
Jin sets off on a mission to liberate Tsushima, make allies, and free his uncle Shimura, his only remaining family, from prison. Desperation makes him drift from the samurai rules and traditions that guided his life before the invasion, but one part of that code never changes: Protecting people is Jin's number one priority. Everything else is bendable. The threat of the Mongol invasion is too great to be constrained by noble ideals, and that tension between tradition and forging a new path is Jin's major conflict.
Throughout the game, Jin hears that fighting stealthily is dishonorable — but in practice, he finds that doing the "honorable" thing actually puts more people in danger. He can do the most good, save the most people, with stealth.
Players can fully get behind Jin's cause: Protecting the home that his family has lived in for generations. His connection to the island and its natural world is so intense, it becomes spiritual, magical — which makes for some interesting game mechanics. For example, Jin can make the wind blow in the direction of the next objective at will. It's a fun replacement to the typical navigation map. (Although the wind sounds are so soothing, you might be in danger of falling asleep.)
Ghost of Tsushima is every bit as atmospheric as Breath of The Wild or Red Dead Redemption 2, which makes it even more infuriating when you see the Mongol army burn towns to charred grey rubble, or when the beautiful forest you're riding through ends abruptly because the Mongols have chopped down all the trees. That fury kept me playing even when I wasn't particularly invested in the game's story.
And there were times when I wasn't that interested — Ghost of Tsushima suffers from flat characterizations, so flat sometimes they can deflate an entire storyline. At one point, I broke the news to a man that his brother was murdered by Mongols. He barely acknowledged it, a lapse so weird it threw me out of the game. Your brother was just murdered, and you're just going to talk about it for two seconds and move onto the next topic of conversation? That doesn't feel human. A war game that doesn't get too into its feelings makes sense for Jin himself, who's striving to control his emotions. But not everybody in the game is a highly trained samurai like him.
But the gorgeous surroundings and killer combat mechanisms help redeem GoT. You take on enemies with a katana, and you can shift through different stances that are effective against different types of fighters. As you level up, you get more weapons, abilities, and moves to make things infinitely easier. You start with just basic attacks — and eventually become strong enough to tear through armies with just your sword.
And you spend a long time getting to know the island of Tsushima itself. Between fights, you ride through picturesque forests of tall trees with orange leaves falling from the branches, and big fields filled with thousands of violets. You take a breather at lakes with cherry blossoms floating in the water.
It's impossible to not fall in love after moments like that, and playing through Jin's eyes makes you understand his love for Tsushima, even though his character is — well, meh. The sense that I'm making the world a better place drives me while I play, and I have the power to actually change the world. (That's a pretty common trope in this kind of game: The protagonist appears, and as if by magic they save the day and solve everyone's messy problems. But here, it works.)
So there's a huge sense of satisfaction as you travel around the world of Ghost of Tsushima, freeing cities from Mongol occupation and rescuing prisoners. If you train hard enough, the game says, you can save the world. Even nature itself will be on your side. And right now, that's a pretty appealing thought.
There was never a cop around when you needed one, especially in the subways, where these grim days they were needed more than they had ever been needed since, it seemed, the IRT opened for business in 1904. With the transit police force sliced from 3,600 to 2,200 in the wake of the mid-1970s fiscal crisis, the city's main mode of public transportation had become a festering Petri dish breeding violent young punks looking for quick cash and cheap kicks.
You could tuck the gold chain in your shirt, but you couldn't hide the swell $60 Pumas, which were like magnets for packs of teenagers carrying switchblades or worse. Fifty cents was the price of admission for a potential hell ride, an underground horror story waiting to be written in blood and graffiti.
Tasting the fear and seeing opportunity in this sorry state of affairs was a tough-talking Brooklyn kid with a sense of civic duty that was surpassed only by a talent for self-promotion. Cross Jimmy Cagney with Leo Gorcey, add a heap of P.T. Barnum and you had Curtis Sliwa.
Early in 1979, Sliwa, a 24-year-old high school dropout, formed the Magnificent 13, a volunteer patrol that rode the IRT at night particularly the No. 4 train, known to cops and riders alike as the Mugger's Express.
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Before year's end, the Magnificents' numbers had swelled far past 13, having drawn scores of mostly minority teenagers who were as fed up with the crime around them as anyone else. Sliwa Rock, he liked to call himself in those days rechristened his group the Guardian Angels and articulated what fast became a very popular philosophy as New York City's murder rate approached a frightening record 1,800.
"I have a very simple outlook toward problems," Rock mused. "Every problem can be attacked simply, without complex thinking. You are either right or wrong. If you're ripping someone off, you've got to be stopped."
And straphangers were only too happy to have the Guardian Angels riding with them karate-trained youths, fanning out through the night, anywhere from 12 to 40 eight-Angel patrols at a time. Mostly they were just deterrents to the bad guys and reassuring presences to frightened riders. But they fast jumped into action when they needed to chasing away predators, pulling to safety people who had been pushed onto the tracks, at one point even coming to the rescue of a policeman who was being beaten with his own nightstick.
The papers were full of their exploits.
"ANGEL ROUTS 3 MUGGERS. ANGEL AIDS COP IN BMT ARREST. NAB 2 AFTER SCUFFLE WITH ANGELS. RIDERS HAVE ANGELS LOOKING OVER THEM."
Every day was another chapter in the thrilling adventures of the multi-racial band of protectors in red berets and red-and-white T-shirts, making the subways safe for the people of the City of New York.
"I was born in this city many years ago," said 67-year-old John Caserno of Queens in a typical accolade. "Things have become almost impossible to deal with. But they help."
"God bless you," one elderly man told a band of Angels patrolling the No. 3 train early one winter's morning. "The mayor should give you a medal."
Mayor Edward Koch wasn't so sure about that.
As Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels began grabbing headlines faster than a speeding A train, there were those who had misgivings about what was, after all, a private army. "Paramilitaries," Koch denounced them, suggesting they should join the police force if they wanted to fight crime. But cops also were suspicious of them: the Angels had clashed several times with rank-and-file officers, and police brass and union officials did not welcome their help.
"We don't need 'em and we don't want 'em," said Capt. Gerald McClaughin, commander of the Central Park Precinct. "Historically, these groups have always turned bad. I think they'll probably assault somebody."
If City Hall was a little slow to grasp the social phenomenon that was the Guardian Angels, Lt. Gov. Mario Cuomo got it more readily. Still smarting from a 1977 mayoral primary loss to Koch and eyeing bigger and better things, Cuomo became the Angels' most eloquent champion. "They are a better expression of morality than our city deserves," he said.
Confronting the largely unspoken issue that these Angels were 80% black or Hispanic, he added: "If they were sons and daughters of doctors from Great Neck, would people be calling them vigilantes? Everyone would be giving them medals." New York City should be proud of the Angels, he said, kids who had been "born in troubled areas" and had "survived the test."
Sliwa himself missed no opportunity to make that same point: "We are taking kids who might have been committing the crimes and giving them an outlet to fight it. Before, while they were watching Superman and Batman on TV, they had no outlets for their good impulses to fight crime."
City Hall eventually started negotiations to work with the Angels but remained wary. "I don't know everything about the Guardian Angels," Koch said. "I do know they love publicity."
He was right, of course. Curtis Sliwa apparently had been born with built-in media radar. At 16, he had pulled several people out of a burning Brooklyn building one morning while on his Daily News delivery route; that earned him Newsboy of the Year honors and a photo op with President Richard Nixon, who presented him with a tie clip and a pen. In 1978, he won notice for starting an anti-litter campaign in the Bronx. That same year, he got some publicity returning a lost wallet packed with $300.
But with the Guardian Angels, Sliwa took a geometric leap into the big time and played it to the hilt. He did Tom Snyder. He did "Nightline." He was followed around by reporters from Japan and Norway and France.
There was talk about a movie of his life and he was adding to the script each day, with hair-raising tales of his narrow escapes from death. There were the three guys claiming to be transit cops who took him for a little ride and told him to disband the Angels or else. There was the gunman who opened fire at him and missed. There were the thugs who kidnapped him and tossed him in the river. You didn't have to be Ed Koch to be dubious about some of these stories
Meanwhile, as if New York weren't already a big enough stage, Sliwa, a one-time McDonald's manager, started franchising. Child killer in Atlanta? The Angels were there. Trouble in Detroit? Los Angeles? San Juan? You could count on the Angels.
By the end of 1980, some 700 Guardian Angels were roaming the New York subways, regularly racking up dozens of citizens arrests. The city, overwhelmed by a relentless publicity juggernaut, began moving toward an agreement under which the Angels would remain autonomous but would get police-issued ID cards and a modicum of police cooperation.
Koch sounded almost conciliatory: "It's like chicken soup," he said. "Have they hurt? No. Have they helped? Yes."
"The badges make the New York Times crowd feel good," Sliwa told the Daily News. "The people on the subways in Brooklyn never needed to see a badge. They were always happy enough just to see us get on the train."
Traditional martial arts teaches a lot of great values. That's why I believe it's such a great tool for any kids growth process. Not only physically (improving coordination & motor skills) but learning how to treat your surrounding with respect.
I was taught to always be my best self. No matter if it was in the dojo, in school, or simply walking down the street... We create the environment we want to live in, because our actions mirrors back at us. Both the good and the bad.
So if you see something you don't like, you have to be the change you want to see. Be the role-model! Give the seat up for an elder, hold the door for whoever comes next, and don't throw trash around like we have multiple earths. Call out whoever does that and they might think twice next time.
A true martial artists leads by example and uses his powers to make the world a better place, while bringing as many people he/she can along the way.
