My full "review" of the game itself follows heretofore:

My overwhelming impression of Ghost of Tsushima is that, framed neither as a compliment nor an insult, it's a deeply superficial game, whose strengths and deficiencies alike never really manifest beyond the marketing copy, and never really see any need or desire to do so either. Its story and characters are inoffensively trite; its core gameplay loops, for all the talk of innovation in design, are at best minor variations on industry-standard practices, dressed up as surface-level innovations; and it wears its influences, cinematic and otherwise, too thinly and with too little discernible attempt at further examination to be able to appreciate them beyond the bare minimum of acknowledging their presence.

It's a work that never quite manages to overcome the sum of its parts; but whose parts at the same time are all assembled just well enough to never offend and to provide consistent entertainment. In the end I feel neither positively nor negatively about it: I quite enjoyed my ~40 hours and had a good time with it but feel no further desire beyond the publication of this article to engage with it again in the future.