Not really... It's also audio. Some shots during duels also I'd say.
Anyways, GoT doesn't even pretend it's historically accurate. I don't agree at all that it "should investigate and reflect on his [Kurosawa] work". It's not even the real Tsushima we're exploring.
It's pretty amazing how many people (including several journalists) I've seen misinterpret Kurosawa Mode as just being a black/white filter and nothing else. Same with the claim that this game should be fully historically accurate when they've never aimed for it to be that way.
All it takes is a simple Google search to get more info about it and Sucker Punch put a lot of time into making it feel authentic in terms of matching up the visuals and audio to match 50's samurai films. Sucker Punch even explicitly said that is is not just a black/white filter.
Kurosawa Mode info: https://ew.com/gaming/ghost-of-tsushima-akira-kurosawa-estate-cinematic-mode/
It's not just a black-and-white filter, Connell clarifies. "We actually did some research on the curves that may have existed on that kind of film that [Kurosawa] might've used."
It proved difficult to translate that directly into a game like Ghost of Tsushima with current film-mapping technology, so Connell took various black-and-white samurai films and analyzed scenes from various times of day and weather conditions to track "how deep were the blacks? How bright were the whites?"
For final touches, the team added a film grain to make the mode appear as though it had just emerged from the age of Kurosawa, as well as an increased wind function. In Ghost of Tsushima, the wind serves as the player's navigational tool; Jin actually follows the wind to find his next destination. In the Kurosawa Mode, the wind is "cranked up," says Connell. "And lastly," he adds, "we actually toyed with the audio a little bit. Our audio team have an internal tool that mimicked sounds of old TV and, specifically, megaphones, radios, TVs back to the '50s." It all makes for a game with the feel of theatrical entertainment.
Not trying to be fully historically accurate and how Sucker Punch looked at it (2018 article): https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-ghost-of-tsuhima-balances-fact-versus-fiction/1100-6460128/
The way I think about it is: we're going to deviate from historical truth, we just want to do it intentionally. A lot of the support we get from our friends from Sony in Japan, and our Japanese friends in Sony US, and all the cultural consultants we've assembled to help us do this stuff, is to make sure we don't deviate accidentally. There are things we are going to do that are different and we want to choose those wisely.
There are places where we're really pretty true, right? Like if we're putting birds in the game, they're Japanese birds. Brad Meyer, our sound lead, took a trip to Japan to capture the actual sounds of things in nature… It's an awesome game to work on because it lets us do this cool stuff. So, stuff like that is going to be perfect, like the statues that you see in the temple, in the demo, those are actual 13th-century statues.
And then there are things where, well, there's some stuff where the consultants help us not make mistakes. If anyone asked that question, I probably gave the example of us rewriting that scene, with Jin and Masako, when they meet. Originally we wrote it as, "Hello, Jin." Ryuhei, our producer, said, "Yeah, Japanese people don't say that. She would just say, 'Jin.'" Little stuff like that, just to make sure that if you're a Japanese speaker or if you're Japanese, you don't snag on stuff.
If you have an idea about what samurai look like or how they act or how they think we're going to give that to you. Most people's idea is really based on an idea of samurai which is really more of a 16th-, 17th-, 18th-century idea of samurai; 13th century, historically, is pretty different. In terms of how they fought, what they wore, it doesn't match your expectations. So we're not sticking exactly to the historical truth of Kamakura-era samurai. It's gonna be a little different. The armor that you see him wear, it's not 13th century armor. It's more warring states period armor. Because, honestly, the 13th century armor is pretty jarring looking, it's not what you'd expect. It's really boxy. It doesn't look aspirational. And we wanna make sure that what we give you is your fantasy of what being a wandering samurai is.
At the end of the day, this is a game that puts you in the power fantasy of being a samurai. It was never trying to be 100% historically accurate.