Ghost of Yotei review: New Japanese adventure matches its predecessor
Within minutes of starting the sequel to the celebrated game Ghost of Tsushima, you’re already blown away.
Ghost of Yotei: PS5, releasing on October 2
Within minutes of starting Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch’s follow-up to its explosive 2020 hit Ghost of Tsushima, you’re whacked across the face by one of the video game developer’s now signature, almost unbelievably gorgeous vistas.
You are Atsu, and you’re looking down at the smouldering ruin of what used to be your family’s home. In the background looms Mount Yotei, an active volcano that dominates the landscape of modern-day Hokkaido, the large island north of Japan’s mainland.
Yotei shares much of Tsushima’s DNA: it’s visually arresting, aggressively stylish, and draws from many of the same inspirations. But, given it takes place about 300 years after the events of the first game, you can absolutely enjoy it as a standalone story. The events of Tsushima play no role whatsoever in Atsu’s tale.
That towering mountain is an appropriate metaphor, for both character and developer. Trying to follow up an experience as critically acclaimed as Tsushima is its own type of Everest. And for Atsu, a lone wanderer in pursuit of what seems to be an impossible vengeance, the peak is barely within sight.
Here’s the set-up: when Atsu was a young girl, her family was murdered by a group of marauders known as the Yotei Six, whose leader, Lord Saito, is now the dominant force in Ezo (the old name for Hokkaido).
Far later, battle-hardened after years spent fighting in the south, Atsu has returned to Ezo with a list of six targets: the Snake, the Oni, the Kitsune, the Spider, the Dragon, and Saito himself. Her self-assigned mission is to kill all of them and avenge her family.
It’s quite basic, as the premise for a story, and for mine, that is Yotei’s distinctive weakness when you compare it to its predecessor.
The protagonist in Tsushima, Jin Sakai, was a lone samurai struggling, against overwhelming odds, to liberate his home from the invading Mongols. That task required him to compromise the principles by which he had always lived – he could either adhere to the strict samurai code, and inevitably lose, or cast it aside and have some hope of winning.
That fundamental moral dilemma, embedded at the heart of the story, brought Jin into conflict with the allies he respected most, and forced him to reckon with his own humanity.
Just how far would you be willing to go to protect your home? Could you debase yourself, even in the eyes of those you’re selflessly defending? Could you cloak yourself in shame? Are there any lines you wouldn’t cross?
Those are compelling questions, and they were handled in a way that felt unique to the Japanese setting. Tsushima stood apart from the other open world games of its generation due partly to its aesthetic, yes, but also because its story felt palpably different. It was the outlier in an ever more generic field.
Yotei doesn’t quite have that magic. You could lift Atsu’s plot out of Japan and plonk it almost anywhere else in the world without losing much, if any, of its meaning. It is a “you killed my family, prepare to die” tale which, unsurprisingly, ends up examining the cost of revenge. That’s something we have seen many times, across every medium.
If you played Sifu, a few years back, the premise is essentially the same.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t work. This is a good, competently constructed, pretty airtight story, with genuine emotional stakes. It just feels more textbook, and less original, than what came before.
The paradox is that it grabbed me in a way Tsushima didn’t. Why? I put it down to the characters themselves being more interesting, on a human level.
Jin was a very serious man, doing very serious things, with a very serious weight on his shoulders. Atsu still has the serious mission and serious baggage, but she’s also sassy. There’s an extra level of confidence, and wryness, and charm to her. She’s a bit more fun.
The characters who join her throughout the story, about whom we can say little in a spoiler-free review, are similarly compelling. And so are some (not all) of the villains.
So we’re left with interesting points of comparison. The overarching story is better in Tsushima. The ground-level, character-driven stories are better in Yotei. Both games are worthy of your time, should you have enough of it. But you do need quite a lot.
By my PS5’s reckoning, completing Yotei took about 70 hours, though that includes no small amount of time I spent with the game paused. Life calls. You’re looking at 40-50 hours or so to get through the story, if you do only a modest amount of the side content.
That said, the side missions are consistently rewarding. Tsushima was criticised for being too repetitive, and I can see the same issue arising here, but there is a greater variety of activities to focus on in Yotei, and they’re less rote.
A less than exhaustive list of side content: hot springs, bamboo stands, bounties, occupied villages, hidden enemy dens, shrines, duels, painting, shamisen spots, wolf dens. I’m sure I’ve left some out. Sucker Punch has tried to make each instance feel more unique than before. It doesn’t always succeed.
There are some activities that test your patience, and the game seems to know it, because there’s typically an option to skip them. One asks you to build a fire, in quite tedious fashion, as though you’re a contestant on Survivor. Another involves cooking mushrooms or fish. That sort of thing. They pop up frequently, and the skipping option is very, very welcome.
You can often sense the gap the game’s creators are trying to bridge, between players who really just want the story, and those who want to fill out every corner of the map. It’s not easy to cater to both at once. That’s a natural hazard of the open world format. In this case, they just about manage it.
The difficulty options help. Playing most of this thing on the level just above easy – don’t judge, I have other life commitments here – I only ever died by missing a jump during a set piece. Never in combat. But if you want a greater challenge, it’s there for you.
And it’s satisfying. Where Tsushima largely focused on stances, which saw Jin wield his katana in different ways, Yotei focuses on giving you different weapons. You end up wielding dual katanas, a spear, the kusarigama, and other options. There’s a scissors-paper-rock style system, where certain weapons are more effective against certain others.
What else can we say, in a technical sense? The game runs smoothly. I experienced no crashes, and no bugs that impeded my progress.
And the presentation is undoubtedly a step up from Tsushima, both in terms of facial capture and voice acting. The performances here are almost universally excellent.
So is the score. The main theme in particular is an earworm. Rarely do I sit and watch the credits of a game, but in this case, the music held me.
What should you actually expect, then, playing this game? There are multiple areas – the fashionable term these days is “biomes”, but that feels very Alien to me – each with its own aesthetic, gameplay theme, and boss.
One area might throw you into a series of war-torn villages, with a focus on combat. Another might chuck you into the snow, with a focus on puzzles and stealth. The idea is that each will give you a distinct challenge, at a varying pace. In between, there are spectacular set pieces.
I found the ending slightly underwhelming, because this story’s chief antagonist never quite reveals his true depth. Too much is left unsaid. The ending is slightly rushed. You get hints at relatable motives, but at the end, he feels more like an obstacle in a video game than a real, human character.
The emotional heft all comes from your own side. It is to the credit of this story that I can’t discuss its greatest elements, its greatest characters, without straying into spoiler territory.
Never mind. Short summary: you get to be a badass lady with a sword. The combat never stops being stylish and cool. The art style, and the world you get to live in for so many hours, are gorgeous. The acting is near flawless, and the moment-to-moment writing is elevated, compared to its predecessor.
I fear for the photo mode addicts, who have presumably only just recovered from their Tsushima-inspired bender, but this game is a delight to look at, and to play.
It’s not flawless. But it scales the mountain.
Ghost of Yotei: 4/5
The game releases as a PS5 exclusive on October 2
Originally published as Ghost of Yotei review: New Japanese adventure matches its predecessor
