Ghost of Yotei (2025)

I am enjoying this a bunch. It has a good mix of the standard open world stuff: platforming, combat, exploration, collectible finding, and a decent enough story. It is more of the same thematically as Ghost of Tsushima, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

Riding across the landscape is so beautiful and has a relaxing quality to it. It makes me want to walk more slowly to soak up the atmosphere take some screenshots of the vistas.

Two Months After Firing Over Charlie Kirk Comments, Ghost Of Yotei Dev Blames Harassment Campaign, Not ‘Bad Joke’

Drew Harrison wasn’t the only person who was punished by the seething online mass of the American alt-right and the government that supports it—a Reuters special report suggests more than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise actioned against. But Harrison’s story, which she is commenting on here for the first time, dovetails with a year-long harassment campaign her company had faced and remained publicly silent on until the day she was let go. An online mob had been railing against Ghost of Yotei and Sucker Punch since the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima was announced last September. They were further riled up by Kirk’s death and the firestorm of censorship and cancellation around it.

From my conversation with Harrison, it appears that Sucker Punch’s parent company, Sony Interactive Entertainment, acted swiftly and with little investigation into the situation around Harrison’s comments, as many companies did during those few weeks in September. In doing so, it emboldened gaming’s worst-behaved actors yet again and set a worrying precedent for an industry that too often kowtows to the reactionary sects within it.

But Harrison’s firing didn’t happen in a vacuum—as mentioned, both Kern and Hoyt, along with a slew of other content creators and right-leaning voices on Twitter and YouTube, had already had Ghost of Yotei and its creators in their sights for over a year prior to her Charlie Kirk post.

Some of the online subculture’s rowdiest voices complained that Erika Ishii, the queer actor who portrays the game’s avenging samurai, was not pretty enough. Others suggested that Sucker Punch had hired too many women to work on the game. Harrison pointed out that a picture circulated by rightwing reactionaries to support the latter argument (a side-by-side of all men sitting at a table versus all women, with Ghost of Tsushima emblazoned over the men and Ghost of Yotei over the women) was, shockingly, inaccurate. “It’s literally a picture of the Sucker Punch soccer team and our Women’s Day photo, from the same year,” she said.

Sucker Punch never made any public statements about the harassment of Ishii or the allegations against its dev team, and as far as Harrison and the anonymous Sucker Punch employee know, no statements were made internally, either. Sony did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

“The studio has a lot of vulnerable people. There are a lot of LGBTQ people. There are a lot of people on work visas,” the employee told me over a call. “There are a lot of people who would be targets if their name was put to their words.”

Leaders at games studios, who are often in much less vulnerable positions than their employees, also choose to remain quiet, for a much different reason. “Studios don’t want to address toxicity against their employees because they see it as confronting the dark sides of their community, which they believe is a core demographic,” said Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.

Article: Ghost of Yōtei - More Successor Than Sequel by Kyle Hilliard

Sucker Punch is also making efforts to let players stay where they want while they are exploring and pursuing their revenge goals. As was the case in Tsushima, alerts will let you know when you have enough materials to upgrade your various weapons and gear, but rather than fast-traveling to the one shop that sells you bow and arrow upgrades, you can now make a camp and ask that shop to come visit you. “It is another way where we’re trying to create a feature that tonally fits within the landscape,” Connell says. “Seeing if we can wrap up the mechanics around it and respecting the player’s time and where they are.”

Of course, fast-travel is still a totally valid way to move around the world, and it is still fast. Tsushima boasts some of the quickest fast-travel loading in any open-world game, and the team knew keeping that would be important for the successor. “Yep. Super fast,” Connell says. “It’s a convenience thing, right? That’s not going anywhere because people like it so much. But yeah, it’s pretty quick.”

The ending (spoilers, obviously)

I overall enjoyed the writing; it's not the most impressive, obviously but it serves it's purpose for a game like this. That said, the ending really vexes me the more I think about it. A lot of potential was wasted and the choices made were lazy shortcuts.

I hate. Hate. Hate when a story adds a child as motivation. It's a cheap, unremarkable way to aim a sloppy hit at pathos and make people feel something. The anvilivicious oh didn't you know revenge is bad message was already tiresome but to wrap it up with here's a child now you have something to live for is just a putrid bow on the shit sandwich. I might be getting a little unreasonable here but it feels like giving a woman's story a child as a resolution is a little gender essentialist. I understand the whole arc was about family so it's not completely out of pocket, but I find it too by the book to be acceptable.

The entire journey of atsu getting more skills and proficiency with different weapons because saito is a master of different weapons is completely shit on by an unremarkable duel in which atsu inexplicably gets bested and her brother has to step in and die to finish her motivation. Condescending. Insulting to our whole gameplay journey to step on our final battle just for cheap sadness points. Atsu could have and should have beaten Saito on her own merits.

Small point but the weapon masters are all woven into the story and in the end you storm the Saito castle alone but having them all join you would've been a great sequence.

The background story gets at the fact that Saito is trying to keep the region from being taken by the shogunate, which the matsumai are preparing it for. We get some nods to the fact that the matsumai are not looking out for the greater good of the people but that point gets thrown away completely in favor of going it's fine. They helped. Not my fight now.

I find this annoying because the game includes the ainu, has atsu become close to them for a bit. In real life the matsumai slaughtered the ainu. Nearly wiped them out entirely. This could have made for a good story direction to drive home that the matsumai are not allies, that Saito wasn't completely wrong to oppose them.

All of this to set up for jubei to be an enemy. When I saw his name I thought that's where we're going. The early game sets up a rivalry between them and I wanted that. If the kid was going to be included, she should have died and jubei should've blamed atsu. The matsumai should've determined after Saito was gone that atsu is too dangerous to live and sent jubei to kill her. They could have had an emotional duel where atsu throws the matsumais crimes in his face and they both get engaged. When he loses he begs her to kill him so he can die honorably and not have to kill her. And she does. There's your sad ending. There's your emotional impact

I played several hours last night after work before crawling into bed.

So far it is very similar formula/plot wise to its predecessor but I don't find it repetitive or boring. It's more like "Did you like Ghost of Tsushima? Here's even more!" It's hard to say how this game feels overall within its opening segments but so far it's been a positive experience but not everything is the same. There are more crafting material subtypes. The quests appear as cards that you can cycle through to highlight their locations without leaving the map screen.

There is a minor story thing that I enjoyed with picking your horse if you have the digital deluxe edition. Atsu's ability to navigate the past and present in certain locations is a satisfying way to explore and experience her past. The grassland vista with Mt. Yotei as its backdrop feels like the main hub area but maybe that'll change once I explore past its reach.

I'm not sure I'd recommend Ghost of Yotei yet if you weren't already interested in it but so far I'm enjoying Atsu's adventure and excited to experience more of it throughout the weekend.

Barely half an hour in, Ghost of Yotei reveals itself as a refinement, a tightening of focus, an immediate improvement over its predecessor. Atsu emerges as a protagonist both warmer and more compelling than the already admirable Jin Sakai, her appeal perhaps sharpened by the clarity of her motivations. It may not be an original story, not in the strict sense, but I can't help but feel that originality is often an overrated currency in games of this type. The familiar can still feel vital when inhabited by characters who breathe. Yotei, at least for now, makes that promise.

Where Tsushima delayed its hand by wrapping the player in cutscenes and mandatory tutorialization, Yotei wastes far less time, ushering the player into its world briskly, confident that immersion need not be delayed by exposition. I find this crucial! A game that insists I sit obediently through its opening overture before I can touch the strings for myself always tests my patience. That Tsushima doesn't permit the skipping of cutscenes until NG+ still rankles me, though perhaps that grievance belongs more to the past than to Yotei's present.

But Yotei doesn't entirely shed its lineage. The seams of what we might call "game-ness" remain visible, those small reminders that we're in a constructed space, rehearsing familiar motions. Weeds plucked, stones stacked, beams repaired, all with the press of a single button. These gestures are tidy and efficient, yes, but they evoke an approximation of labor rather than the experience of it. I can't help but imagine how much richer these acts might feel if rendered with the tactile involvement of a system like Kingdom Come II: Deliverance, which excels at folding the player into the fabric of its world. It's often precisely this evacuation of detail, the trimming away of the many in favor of a few central loops, that I think causes open world games to lose their claim to immersion.

But this, to be fair, isn't *Yotei'*s ambition. It doesn't ask us to inhabit its world so much as witness a story within it. The world is the backdrop, the stage, and the narrative is what matters most. That, too, is a perfectly legitimate choice.

For my part, I would gladly see less of the flourishes that test believability, like a wolf companion that arrives in moments too perfectly timed, or a horse that leaps thirty feet and lands as though physics were merely suggestion. These exaggerations feel ornamental, almost like indulgences of the medium. Still, I can't deny that I'm here less to measure plausibility than to enjoy the ride. And on that front, Yotei already makes clear it will deliver.

I was talking to my friends on Discord yesterday about how I was conflicted with whether I could afford Ghost of Yotei and if I should get the Collector's Edition or not because I loved the first game so much when I heard a knock at the door. My partner answered it and let my friend in who handed me a $75 PSN gift card then immediately left. For those well read on Roach lore, this is the same friend who busted down my door when I was disrespecting Astarion in BG3.

I feel very thankful and lots of gratitude towards them. They didn't have to do that but they did anyway. They also saved me from falling prey to purchasing the CE version of the game. I'll definitely be spoiling them the next time we hang out.