A lot of the best video games are sequels — Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, and Metal Gear Solid 2, to name a few. It makes sense when you think about it. The foundations are there, and have been received well, but what if you could do it all again? You can leverage technological advancements to refine the fundamentals, then incorporate some of those cutting-edge ideas that may have been a bit too ambitious the first time around.
With Ghost of Yotei, it feels like Sucker Punch is doing just that. Ghost of Tsushima was a clever game that bravely defied the then-conventional standards of open-world game design. Players were led around the map by nature itself, and there were no damage numbers or XP bars to break your immersion. Hell, there was barely a user interface to speak of, as the studio pursued a cinematic sense of serenity. The writing was a bit dull, and the opening was painfully slow, but once you broke through into its vast midgame, the moreish exploration and kinetic combat made it challenging to put down.
Ghost of Yotei addresses many of the first game’s pain points within the first 30 minutes. You play as Atsu, who, as a child, was pinned to a burning tree and left for dead by a group of mercenaries called The Yotei Six. This horrible bunch invaded Atsu’s idyllic feudal Japan home and slaughtered her family, for reasons you will unravel carefully across the course of the game. Of course, Atsu managed to survive the incident and, after years of training sword skills in the Warring States period, has returned to Ezo (now known as Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island) for some old-fashioned vengeance.
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As a vertical slice, Ghost of Yotei’s opening is one of the most compelling and well-paced chunks of linear video game I’ve played in years — you quickly get a sense for Atsu’s bracing personality, and her position as a perennial underdog in an environment that no longer understands her (and often rather foolishly underestimates her, due to her appearance). The brutal but fair Sekiro-like swordplay comes into focus as you soak Atsu’s katana with the blood of the first mercenary on her list, before the game kicks you into the eye-popping, wind-battered landscape you’ll have to spend the next few weeks pilfering through.
Here is a game that isn’t afraid to fail you from the jump — or start you with a limited toolset that you need to explore to expand. Some of the creature comforts Jin Sakai had in the first game aren’t available to Atsu at the beginning of Ghost of Yotei. You can follow the golden path to get powerful quickly, of course, but I couldn’t help but explore in an open world as masterfully designed as this. Before I had reached the central trading hub of the first map, I had already scaled Mount Yotei, kicked off a sprawling myth, met a dyesmith and struggled to topple a deadly Ronin lurking in a graveyard. I would soon learn that last one was a mission I could pick up from the Bounty Board at the hub — but I had stumbled into it on my own, and was now reaping the toolkit-bolstering rewards ahead of time. What a feeling!
Few games dare to be as dynamic as Ghost of Yotei. It quickly reminded me of the brain-tickling brilliance of ignoring the story and charting Red Dead Redemption 2’s Old West, with a little bit of Shadow of Mordor mixed in for good measure. You start at your old family home, with a couple of stray leads to follow — but ultimately, you don’t know where The Yotei Six are, so you’ll need to interrogate the wandering ronin who try to jump you, and careen into optional activities and chatty townsfolk to figure it all out.
Rumours and leads abound in Ezo, and nothing is stopping you from following a thread and riding into an entirely new region with its own gorgeous pocket climate and unique enemy types. It will be difficult for players to compare notes on their playthroughs, as the game is constantly reacting to your choices in interesting ways — changing who appears when you set up camp, and adapting cutscene dialogue based on what you’ve done so far. Even the way you engage with companions and the amount of upgrades you pick up on your travels can alter the flow.
It is flabbergasting stuff, and I can’t even imagine how much tinkering was necessary to allow this sort of emergent freedom. Ultimately, though, it makes for a game that is stupendously immersive and singular, one that confronts — with deadly precision — the tired corpus of the contemporary open-world game. Sucker Punch is standard-setting here, and the bar has been pushed extremely high. Of course, there are some wooden lines and janky bits of animation to contend with as a result, but none of them are egregious enough to get in the way of your fun.
I can only hope that developers take inspiration from this model going forward, or at least, some of the finer touches that help pull Ghost of Yotei together—the leading dialogue, the little birds and fireflies that draw your eye towards points of interest. Even the way you open up the world is genius, by placing purchasable (or earnable) map fragments on top of regional maps like a jigsaw puzzle.
I was convinced that something had to give in the midgame, that Ghost of Yotei couldn’t keep this up for the entire adventure. But to my astonishment, it continued to surprise me with interesting twists and startling vistas. You don’t quite know when the game is going to kick you into a mandatory scene, and the transition between areas always brought new factions and dialectics to explore, enriching the narrative tapestry (and teasing me to embark on more optional adventures.) It’s hard work to wrap this game up quickly, because I rarely became bored with following my nose, and all it usually took was a glance at the Wolf Pack menu to see who wanted to bend my ear at camp and set me off on my next journey.
Beyond all of this design genius, though, is an audiovisual suite that refuses to quit. On my launch day PS5, Ghost of Yotei runs immaculately and stuns with its haptic feedback and material details — the fabrics rippling in the wind, and hooves stomping through streams of flowers in a basin overseen by a jaw-dropping peak. One of my favourite choices I made during the campaign was completing a bounty hunting quest early on, which provided me with an armour set flecked with coins that disabled parries but increased the window for perfect parries and dodges. This spoke to my risk-vs-reward approach and scratched an incredible itch in my brain, pushing me to master combat and put an end to duels with sharp, timely flair. Few feelings are as rewarding as completing a duel at the peak of Atsu’s onryo powers.
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I’m yet to even mention the small moments of interaction that Sucker Punch care so deeply about — the way you knap flint to start a fire with the touch pad, or slide your thumb across to match notes on the Shamisen, or flick with your finger to win a game of Zeni Hajiki. Ghost of Yotei’s serene moments of tradition and self-care stand tall next to its most adrenaline-pumping routs. I particularly appreciated how the game offered a window into the culture of the Ainu people through collectables, quests and trading merchants. I’d often leave Atsu to idle in the middle of a flourishing field, creating a soothing screensaver as I dived down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Sucker Punch clearly has a substantial research team, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn about this critical period of Japanese history as I progressed through the game towards its scintillating climax.
Erika Iishi’s performance as Atsu deserves so much praise, too — it’s replete with difficult emotions and powerful line deliveries that helped me invest in the thrust of the story, and buoyed by a supremely talented cast of supporting characters who flesh out the ‘Wolf Pack’ throughout, like the entrepreneurial scavenger Taro or the nerdy cartographer Isaburo. Touching debriefs and cheeky quips helped sustain the momentum and embellish profound moments when I’d warp back to camp for upgrades in the middle of a Yotei Six hunt.
Ghost of Yotei is a tremendous game, a nexus of thumbprints and bold, challenging ideas that coalesce into something magnificent. I believed in the story it was telling and its rich characters, and guffawed at the glinting depths of its brilliant combat. But most of all, I’m just so compelled by the clarity of Sucker Punch’s vision, and how the game so carefully unpicks all of those annoying, fatigue-inducing habits that we’ve come to expect from open-world games. By asking tough design questions and taking a firm stance against the norm, there is potential to create new paradigms, and Ghost of Yotei seizes this opportunity and emerges victorious.
