Ghostwire Tokyo: Tips & Tricks to Getting Hero of Shibuya Faster

It’s one of those trophies or achievements. Getting Hero of Shibuya in Ghostwire: Tokyo looks, at first glance, like it would take forever. It requires you to collect and transmit all 220,300 disembodied spirits in Shibuya before the end of Chapter 4.

To get Hero of Shibuya, you must find every single spirit in the city and transmit them outside of the barrier around Shibuya via Ed’s payphone network (or by using the Transmission Beads).

The natural variance in individual spirit drops gives you a statistically meaningless amount of wiggle room; when I finished the trophy on PlayStation 5, I went exactly one spirit over the 220,300 cap.

Fortunately, getting the Hero of Shibuya trophy/achievement isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. It’s a monumental undertaking, but Ghostwire gives you a lot of tools to make the job easier, many of which aren’t explicitly explained. If you’re going to become a Hero of Shibuya at all, here are some things to keep in mind.

How to Get the Hero of Shibuya Trophy/Achievement in Ghostwire: Tokyo

Before You Start Hero of Shibuya

Ghostwire: Tokyo incentivizes you to grab and transmit as many spirits as possible; giving them to Ed is worth more experience points than just about anything else you can do. The Meika rewards are a relative pittance, but most of your leveling will come from spirit transmission rewards whether you’re after Hero of Shibuya or not. Even so, there are a lot more spirits than you need to hit Sync Level 50.

Naturally, you can’t collect every spirit until you have access to the entire city map, which means the overall process will have to wait until Chapter 4. You’ll have to cleanse all the shrines to clear out as much of the fog as possible.

The process is also a little less limited than you might think. The way that the Hero of Shibuya trophy/achievement description is written—”before the end of Chapter 4″—makes it sound like you have to do it before you complete the main story mission “The Black Tower,” which throws you into Ghostwire’s endgame.

As it turns out, Hero of Shibuya’s description is slightly misleading; Ghostwire handles its post-ending content a bit differently than a lot of other open-world games do. After you clear the campaign and the credits roll, you aren’t simply dropped into a post-story to explore. Instead, you can choose to save your game, load that save, and get thrown back into Chapter 4, just as you left it at the end of “The Black Tower.“

In other words, you don’t have to do a marathon run through the city before you beat the game to get the Hero of Shibuya trophy/achievement.

In fact, it’s helpful if you beat the main game before you try for Hero of Shibuya. Your reward for clearing Ghostwire’s story, at any difficulty and degree of completion, is a set of Transmission Beads that let you automatically receive the XP/Meika payout from every spirit you grab, instead of having to stop by a phone booth periodically.

This is an enormous time-saver overall, so if you’re looking to maximize your efficiency here, you’re better off clearing the game before you try for Hero of Shibuya. You do lose out on some slight amounts of lore by not using phone booths, as noted below, but you also save time by not having to stop periodically to unload your katashiro. Your mileage may vary.

Skills and Equipment That Make Hero of Shibuya Easier

Before you seriously consider going after the Hero of Shibuya trophy/achievement, it’s worthwhile to invest in the following skills and equipment:

• Omoigane III: Your Spectral Vision’s overall range is expanded to 50m. This is enough to see distant spirits through walls, ceilings, and on occasion, the street, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of hunting for well-hidden spirit clusters.

• Amenokagami III: This extends Glide’s duration to a full 5 seconds, which is more than it sounds like. You’ll spend a lot of time gallivanting around the rooftops on a Hero of Shibuya run, and a 5-second Glide can carry you most of the way across just about every street in Shibuya.

• Amenotori X: With this, you can hold L2/LT and summon a Tengu, which will serve as a grapple point. It has a surprisingly long range, but is finicky about what it will and won’t consider a valid target; a particular issue is that it won’t let you grab onto the edge of any roof or fence that isn’t perfectly flat or horizontal, like small houses’ rooftops. Still, it is arguably the single largest quality-of-life boost for a Hero of Shibuya run.

• Michikiri II: You can absorb spirits into a Katashiro at triple speed. This is a noticeable improvement, and again, is all about efficiency.

• Fukurokuju III: The ability to equip 3 sets of Prayer Beads can come in handy when going after Hero of Shibuya. Spirit Perception Beads are a must, naturally, but you can also equip Incognito Beads to duck out on unnecessary fights, Sleuth Beads if you’re also looking for the rest of KK’s reports, and/or Archery Beads to assassinate inconvenient Visitors from a distance. There are a lot of short alleys and alcoves in Shibuya where a Visitor is goal-tending a spirit cluster.

• Katashiro x50: If you don’t care to wait until you unlock the Transmission Beads, it’s worth spending the Meika to cap your supply of katashiro at any convenience store in Shibuya. Once you get the Prosperity Beads by cleansing the Chishima Shrine in Chapter 4, your money troubles are effectively over anyway. Getting 50 katashiro also unlocks the Boundless Spirit trophy/achievement.

• Spirit Perception Beads II: Cleanse the Hitani Shrine (Chapter 3) and the Saihama Building Rooftop Torii Gate (Chapter 4). With the Rank 2 Beads equipped, you spawn a small blue trail of light every time you activate Spectral Vision that will direct you to the closest spirits within 200 meters. This will even detect spirits inside quest areas and uncleansed corruption trees. It’s arguably the most important tool if you’re going for 100% completion in Ghostwire.

Sources of Spirits

As noted above, you have to transmit a total of 220,300 spirits to get Hero of Shibuya, but only the majority of those spirits will come from what’s randomly strewn all over the city.

Many of Ghostwire’s side missions, which are generally unlocked by purifying shrines near their starting points, offer spirits as a reward and are thus necessary for Hero of Shibuya. When you officially finish a mission, a few high-value spirit clusters will appear in your general vicinity. If you miss one, it will stay in the world until you absorb it; these do not expire. If you complete all the side missions in the game, you’ll earn an approximate total of 27,500 spirits towards Hero of Shibuya.

Another 15,000 spirits are locked behind successfully completing Hyakki Yako (night parade of 100 demons) combat encounters, which appear randomly on major streets, elevated tracks, and the highways around Shibuya. These are fog-enshrouded slow processions of Visitors that look ominous as hell, and if you get too close, they’ll pull you in for a fight to the death with several consecutive waves of enemies. Notably, you don’t get the tutorial message about what a Hyakki Yako actually is until you get caught in one, which is a nice, sadistic touch.

It can be a difficult battle if you accidentally end up in a Hyakki Yako without proper preparation, but there are enough consumables and ether objects scattered throughout each arena to survive. Run away, refuel during the first wave, and drain the small-fry Visitors’ cores so you can wire in for the later encounters.

You also generally want to save the bulk of your resources for the last wave, which can involve a fight with a Shiromuku, a couple of Rage Walkers with Marionette healers for backup, or a Lamentation with Marionettes and Passengers to provide it with covering fire.

When you complete a Hyakki Yako, you’ll reappear where you left Shibuya with three spirit clusters nearby, each of which is worth around 650 spirits. In general, you’ll need to complete 8 Hyakki Yako, the last of which will be worth exactly as many spirits as are necessary to hit that 15,000 threshold, and which will mark the official end of further Hyakki Yakos appearing in Shibuya.

Another 10,000 spirits are locked behind random Containment Cube encounters, where you must defend two or three of Hannya’s soul prisons from the Visitors trying to destroy them. Each prison you keep safe is worth approximately 250 spirits.

While you can screw up and let cubes get destroyed, that doesn’t appear to count negatively towards your overall total; once you’ve rescued a full 10,000 spirits from Containment Cubes, you won’t see this encounter pop up anymore.

Finally, there are 3,700 spirits located throughout the Shibuya Underground map, which you first access in Chapter 2. To save all the spirits here, you’ll have to return to the Underground in Chapter 3. You’ll discover several new corruption trees at the lowest level near the cistern.

You can track how many spirits are specifically left in Hyakki Yakos, the Shibuya Underground, and Containment Cubes by zooming your in-game map of Shibuya all the way out (above).

That’s a rough total of 56,200 spirits that you can get through other methods than simply roaming around Shibuya, which leaves “only“ 184,100 for you to go out and collect manually for Hero of Shibuya.

The Gathering of (More) Spirits

An average spirit cluster contains 95 to 105 Spirits. These are virtually everywhere in the city, in back yards, side alleys, laundromats, rooftops, canals, and balconies. If you see something in Shibuya that looks even a little weird, there’s almost always something there, and more often than not it’ll be at least one spirit cluster.

You’ll also have to play janitor to some extent while going for Hero of Shibuya. Whenever you find and destroy a corruption tree, at least two and sometimes more spirit clusters appear afterward, and there are more throughout the open world than you might think.

Periodically, you’ll also find tormented clusters, which require you to release a seal (or have KK do it) before they can be absorbed into a Katashiro. These are typically worth around 250 spirits apiece.

It’s also not uncommon for a single cluster to contain as many as 750 spirits, although there’s no obvious rhyme or reason as to why. It’s marginally more common to find them on taller rooftops or in hidden locations, but I’ve also seen super-clusters pop up in totally random back alleys. 

Notably, neither absorbing a cluster nor unsealing one will break stealth, and both can be done from a surprisingly long range. It’s entirely possible to be a ghost-stealing ninja and yank a few hundred ghost Tokyoites directly from underneath a Visitor’s (lack of a) nose.

Spirit absorption does require a direct line of sight on the target, but you can easily do so through obstacles like chain-link fences and safety railings. You also have the option to grab up to three clusters at once, although this will still take up the same number of Katashiro as if you’d grabbed them individually. It’s only a convenience.

Another useful feature when going for Hero of Shibuya is that, as you’ve probably noticed, every shrine in the city can be used to keep track of the spirit completion within its general neighborhood. If the data shown when you place your map cursor onto a shrine shows that you’ve got 100% of an area’s spirits transferred, then you’ve cleaned the place out and it’s safe to move on.

Hero of Shibuya Rewards (Bragging Rights)

For lore nerds, you do get an extra bit of storytelling for roughly every 10,000 souls you ship to Ed via a phone booth on the way to Hero of Shibuya. This may be a recorded message from Ed himself, a short conversation with Rinko, or a vision of Akito’s sister Mari.

More importantly, you receive several trophies/achievements based on your spirit completion. Helping Hand comes at 25%, you’ll get Savior at 50%, and Salvation of All unlocks as soon as you get 100% of the spirits in the city to Ed.

When you do get Hero of Shibuya, it’ll be after the game’s closing credits. At this point, you’ll receive the real rewards: Tireless Beads and Shadow Beads. The former is an infinite-ammo cheat that gives you an unlimited amount of arrows, ether, and talismans as long as it’s equipped; the former is a stealth boost that makes it much harder for Visitors to notice your presence.

If you’ve got any more trophies/achievements left to knock out in Ghostwire, these rewards from nabbing Hero of Shibuya will give you a leg up on them. For more tips in that direction, check out our Ghostwire hub for other guides.