About two months ago, I caught a 40th anniversary screening of Akira Kurosawa's Ran, a feudal Japanese reimagining of William Shakespeare's King Lear and one of the legendary director's most visually striking works. An epic, both historical and filmic, Ran's palpable atmosphere and grandiosity helped solidify what Sucker Punch Productions paid homage to with the art design of Ghost of Tsushima and now Ghost of Yotei, a duology inextricably linked to Kurosawa's influence. Like nearly every shot in Ran, Ghost of Yotei's visual excellence is almost overwhelming.
The landscapes of Ezo (Hokkaidō, in modern parlance) are a constant distraction as you embark on Atsu's quest for revenge against the fiends who killed her family, the Yotei Six. In an attempt to capture Ghost of Yotei's "natural" beauty, I took more than 120 screenshots in photo mode during my playthrough with only the camera position and the focal length altered; 15 of my favorites are compiled in the image galleries below. Becoming enthralled by Ghost of Yotei's atmosphere can be sublime. Still, you have to make an effort to fulfill its wandering samurai fantasy, even with its admirable attempt at avoiding common pitfalls of similar open-world action RPGs.
Ghost Of Yōtei Works Best When You're Genuinely Wandering
And Not Looking At Your Map
Yotei's most consequential iteration on Tsushima's open-world gameplay comes courtesy of Atsu's spyglass. Having a telescope sounds like a minor addition, but it becomes a necessary tool in how Ghost of Yotei provides a workaround to the issue that plagues open-world adventures of its ilk: constantly opening the map to select the next icon. Scanning your surroundings with the spyglass will let you discover points of interest, and you can even set the Guiding Wind (Tsushima's greatest triumph) while targeting a location.
With so many vantage points in Ezo, it's easy to go hours without opening the map, and engaging strictly with what you can see for as long as possible seems to be the intended experience. There's a deliberate cadence to the game that gets undermined when you select a destination on the map and go there in a straight line. You have to make an effort to play the part, but I found Yotei most enjoyable when, entering a new region, I made the local inn my first destination, sticking to well-worn paths until I was waylaid by a newfound objective.
It was very smart on Sucker Punch's part to give Ghost of Yotei's narrative little urgency. Atsu is returning to Ezo after many years away with one objective: exact revenge on the Yotei Six. She doesn't know where they are, so, by extension, you don't know where to go; there's only one thing you can do, and that's wander. Buoyed by the myriad rumors you pick up from Ezo's denizens, you'll quickly have plenty of leads to follow when you eventually do have to consult your map.
But the rumor system does, eventually, start showing its cracks. It's an issue I noticed in Atomfall, which similarly tries to make quest-gathering an organic part of exploration: there's a finite amount of content in Ghost of Yotei, but multiple leads pointing to each objective, so you start to feel like you're gathering redundant information – or like you've acquired some bits out of order – and everything in Ezo consequently feels like an open secret.
These larger structural issues barely register, though, when Ghost of Yotei's moment-to-moment gameplay is so delightful. The sharply honed excellence of Ghost of Tsushima's combat returns in a more robust form. Atsu has more than just a katana at her disposal, so the disparate stances used by Jin Sakai in Tsushima are replaced by wholly different melee weapons, each with their own move sets and special attacks, in Yotei.
The quick-swapping battlefield management of larger skirmishes and the exacting back-and-forth of the more intimate duels are equally satisfying. With numerous melee weapons, ranged options, and quickfire utilities, there's a great sense of mastery as the game progresses and you not only gain more abilities, but learn to use them in sync. In all of its facets, from exploration to progression, Ghost of Yotei strives to keep you engaged in the wandering samurai fantasy, and it succeeds without question, provided you play the game on its terms.
Atsu Is Ghost Of Yōtei's Heart
And A Big Improvement
I found Ghost of Tsushima's honor versus necessity themes to be compelling, but Jin Sakai is arguably one of the more milquetoast characters in his own game. Ghost of Yotei rectifies this shortcoming with Atsu, whose complicated, often brusque personality is much more interesting to peel back as her hunt for the Yotei Six unfolds. Atsu gets room to breathe as the protagonist, thanks to the aforementioned lack of urgency, but Yotei's story isn't entirely devoid of faults.
In some ways, Atsu's arc is the opposite of Jin's. Atsu is a ruthless killer, and the myth of the onryō spreads quickly, but even early on, she begins to recognize that something deep within her is wrong. Jin becomes the ghost, while Atsu wonders if there's anything left that's not the ghost.
Ghost of Yotei is as much a western as it is a samurai film. You're always the capable stranger who wanders into town like the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, and Atsu has a way with horses that evokes John Grady Cole from Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy. The game even does the bit where you walk into an establishment filled with seedy individuals, and everyone goes quiet as they turn to look at the newcomer.
While the near-endless errands and regular, bloody fights remain constantly entertaining, Ghost of Yotei's acute focus on wandering does, unfortunately, make its narrative feel disjointed and oddly paced. I had completely forgotten that the game opened with a "Chapter One" title card, when, 50 hours in, I was blind-sided by one that read, "Chapter Two." This first chapter, when Atsu is at her most bloodthirsty, is inversely the most meditative, setting you free to explore the large majority of Ezo according to your whims.
The second chapter then follows with a constrained scope, while the third is a veritable beeline to the end credits. Focus grows more acute and the stakes are suitably raised as you work through these latter acts, so the narrative does not necessarily feel poorly put together; it's just an awkward change in pace. The content of the narrative is, for the most part, well-constructed and emotionally delivered by the principal cast.
Atsu's tale is the perfect companion to Jin's, touching on many of the same themes, but exploring them in a different, often more nuanced way. Sucker Punch has utilized Yotei not only as a sequel to Tsushima, but also as a response to it. Jin grapples with the personal and moral quandaries of becoming a shinobi out of necessity, while Atsu is forced into that way of life, eventually coming to wonder if there's anything else to life after it has thus far been consumed by violence.
Ghost Of Yōtei Is Bold & Surprisingly Unpredictable
A New Bar For Sucker Punch Productions
The engine that moves Ghost of Yotei most effectively is perceived serendipity. Rumors and their adjoining quests are categorized by type (Myths, Tales, etc.), but none are formulaic in how they reach Atsu. You overhear a conversation, are approached by a stranger, are confronted at a Bamboo Strike, come across a blood-splattered camp in the woods, interrogate the lone survivor of a raider band that attacked you, or make camp and have a chat with a visitor.
Yotei is about the best you can hope for from this style of task-filled, open-world game (what is often pejoratively referred to as Ubisoft's style). It tries very hard to keep you engaged with what is directly in front of and around you at any given moment, and the variety with which it introduces new threads to pull helps the experience from growing stale. My only wish is for a way to access the rumor cards (essentially the quest log) without opening the map.
Sucker Punch's biggest game world yet is bursting at the seams with things to do, but the glue that holds it together is simply making sure the player constantly has something gorgeous to look at. Photo mode is effectively made a major mechanic by being bound to the D-pad alongside other essential functions – healing, calling your horse, and pulling out Atsu's spyglass. Ghost of Yotei has virtually no downtime, because you spend the quieter moments soaking up the atmosphere.
If you like Ghost of Tsushima and appreciate what Sucker Punch is trying to accomplish with the Guiding Wind, I suspect you'll find Ghost of Yotei even more compelling. It remixes the bloat commonly associated with this style of game into the primary method by which you explore Ezo and become embroiled in its socio-politics, in turn learning more about the Yotei Six and Atsu herself. Yotei's non-linearity cleverly frees you from the all-too-common conflict that side content imposes on the impetus of the main narrative.
As expected from a PlayStation Studios release, Ghost of Yotei is cinematic and polished. The only bugs I encountered in roughly 65 hours were extremely minor hiccups Sucker Punch forewarned me about, which will hopefully be patched out on day one, but were inconsequential to the experience regardless.
Through compounding vignettes, Yotei builds a tale of such scale that the fate of Ezo believably becomes intertwined with Atsu's quest for vengeance. Fierce winds, towering clouds, dramatic natural lighting, and the daunting scale of Japan's wilderness in Ghost of Yotei make it a worthy, captivating descendant of Kurosawa's Ran. Surgical combat and emergent exploration fill the gaps between enchanting vistas, and even some pacing issues can't stop Ghost of Yotei from feeling like a triumph.
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