Ghost of Yotei Review: Sucker Punch's Samurai Story Soars Despite Playing It Safe

How do you follow up a good video game? You make a great one. The idea seems obvious, simple even. But what really makes a sequel great? That's perhaps harder to answer. There are some salient grounds a game must cover to best its predecessor. It must expand on the ideas and themes introduced in the first game. It must deepen gameplay systems in ways that feel connected to the previous game and independent from it at the same time. And it helps if the follow-up, somehow, is more fun. But to truly transcend the highs (and lows) of the previous game, a sequel must tread new ground.

That's how stellar sophomore games stand out in a sea of more-of-the-same-but-better sequels. They surprise you. They challenge your expectations and provoke sentiments you perhaps didn't feel while playing the first game. Portal 2 did this. So did Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed 2. Sony's own The Last of Us Part II upended the coming-of-age, dad-daughter zombie road trip vibes of its very successful predecessor to tell a flawed but ambitious story about revenge and forgiveness. And more recently, A Plague Tale: Requiem took the innocence out of A Plague Tale: Innocence to deliver something devastatingly bleak and brave.

Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch Productions' follow-up to the wildly successful and widely liked Ghost of Tsushima, falls short of similar glory. Set 300 years after the events of Tsushima (and completely disconnected from them), Sony's next tentpole PS5 exclusive, which comes out October 2, is undeniably better than its predecessor in every single aspect: Ghost of Yotei tells a more personal and affecting story centred around a more compelling protagonist; it iterates upon gameplay systems of combat and exploration, delivering a familiar but improved experience on both fronts; and its recreation of a cross-section of untamed Japan feels much more intentional and lived-in. All these improvements transpose the Ghost of Tsushima experience to a new story and setting, but struggle to transcend it.

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Everything I did in Ghost of Yotei through my 65-hour run, is a better version of what I did during my Platinum playthrough of Ghost of Tsushima. But very few of those refinements are substantial enough to redefine or even reframe the new game in a new light. Ghost of Yotei's story ditches Tsushima's broad and at times bland moralising about samurai honour and duty in favour of a mercenary's messy and obsessive revenge. But it also ultimately plays it safe, choosing to walk a path beaten nearly to death. There's not a single narrative beat in Ghost of Yotei that truly surprised me. It's a richer, more emotionally charged story than Tsushima's fictional retelling of the historical Mongol invasion of Japan, but it shies away from any real subversion or provocation.

Ghost of Yotei's Atsu is a far more interesting and complex protagonist than Ghost of Tsushima's Jin Sakai, but she's also constrained by straitjacket morality and blockbuster conventions. And the systems underpinning Yotei's gameplay are smoother than ever, all the dents hammered out. But there's no transformative mechanic to establish the game's identity independent of its predecessor. And so, even though Ghost of Yotei relentlessly refines the Ghost of Tsushima experience, it ends up reflecting it, too. None of this, however, means that Ghost of Yotei isn't good. Heck, it's great. It's fun to play, stunning to behold, and hard to put down. It comfortably clears the high bar set by Sony's triple-A first-party games. It also aims for and delivers technical perfection on the PS5. In other words, Ghost of Yotei does exactly what you expect it to do. Nothing more, nothing less. And perhaps that is the problem.

Atsu is a far more compelling protagonist than Ghost of Tsushima's Jin Sakai
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

To Sucker Punch's credit, however, its newest game defies some expectations right from the outset. Beyond its mechanical and visual DNA, Ghost of Yotei has nothing to do with its predecessor. A direct sequel to Tsushima, a game that has sold more than 13 million copies and remains a fan-favourite, would have been a much safer bet. But Yotei is a standalone story, set centuries after the events of the first game, in a completely different time and place. Atsu is a young girl living an idyllic life with her family in the lap of Mount Yotei in Ezo, Japan's northernmost wilderness, in the 1600s. She is precocious, witty, and rebellious. She plays the shamisen with her doting mother, learns to forge a sword from her blacksmith father, and spars to win with her twin brother. Her world is set on fire when an infamous band of Ezo outlaws, known as the Yotei Six, murders her family, destroys her homestead, and leaves her for dead, pinned to a burning ginkgo tree with her father's katana.

But Atsu survives. And what doesn't kill her, only makes her stronger. She vanishes from Ezo, her father's sword in hand, and flees southward. She grows up in a ruthless mainland Japan among the samurai, learning, waiting, and seething. From the embers of her past life, an onryō is born — a vengeful spirit hellbent on taking blood for blood. Sixteen years later, Atsu returns to Ezo as a wandering mercenary, a phantom, with six names on her sash and vengeance on her mind. Ghost of Yotei thrusts you into Atsu's obsessive quest to bring peace to the child she once was and justice to the people who took that childhood away from her.

Atsu returns to Ezo to hunt down the Yotei Six
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch (Screenshot - Manas Mitul)

The setup is a familiar one, explored in the excellent Netflix animation series, Blue Eye Samurai, and more recently (and closely) in Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft's own take on the violence and romance of feudal Japan. But Ghost of Yotei forges its own path, largely inspired by Japan's samurai cinema, through a story that's been told several times before. Atsu is the centrepiece of this revenge tale, a singularly focussed, indefatigable lone wolf, constantly pushing against her next target. Despite its open world design, the game brings an urgency to her quest that was missing in Assassin's Creed Shadows, incidentally also a game about a woman hell-bent on exacting her revenge against a masked group of violent outlaws. This is where Ghost of Yotei excels — in constructing its ancillary content as a scaffolding for its story.

Where Assassin's Creed Shadows sent you on irrelevant errands repeatedly, Yotei presents its side quests, bounty hunts, and open-world activities as pieces of the whole picture. Not all of them are essential to progress in the main story, but they reveal more about Atsu and the world she walks through as a ghost. Each region of the Ezo map in the game reflects a distinct visual, cultural, and political landscape. When all of it is taken as a whole, a connective thread emerges. That's perhaps the standout design element in Ghost of Yotei — nearly everything there is to be done in the game is intentional and rarely does any of it feel like it's just meeting a quota.

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Atsu travels through Ezo's diverse regions to hunt and haunt the Yotei Six
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

As Atsu travels through Ezo looking to cross out the names on her sash in their blood, her path intersects with these constituent regions and people. Over time, the people she meets first become allies and then friends. And these experiences eventually begin to push and pull against her desire for revenge. Atsu is a ghost who has had little connection to the world of the living after her family was killed. She has no friends, no lovers, nothing to call her own except her purpose. So, what is she then when she's had her vengeance? Atsu is confronted with that question when she lets new people into her life and finds a second family. She doesn't really have an answer, but you slowly see her unshakable resolve to kill the Yotei Six wobble as she realises there's more to live for than revenge.

Atsu is also not alone in her bloody quest against the Yotei Six. She learns that the Matsumae, a samurai clan in Ezo, is fighting off the group's hold on the region, too. The samurai, as patriarchal as any feudal order, are cold and thankless toward Atsu, but she soon finds she may have friends in the clan who have her best interests at heart. The Yotei Six, led by the fearsome Lord Saito, has run a brutal campaign of control in Ezo, and the common folk have had enough. They, too, help Atsu in their small ways, pointing her in the right direction and leaving gifts for the onryō. Taro, an orphan scavenger ostracised for picking valuables off corpses, brings useful trinkets and charms for Atsu; Huci, an elder of the Ainu tribe who possesses quiet wisdom and stubborn self-reliance, becomes a guiding spirit to her; and Oyuki, a figure from Atsu's past, becomes her closest ally. These cast of characters slowly become part of her wolf pack, a family of friends who help her in their distinct ways.

Atsu finds a sympathetic cast of characters willing to help her in her quest
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

As you cut through the Yotei Six, you notice Atsu change. Hard-edged and carelessly cold at the beginning, she begins to soften up, even finding space for forgiveness and humour in her. Ghost of Yotei delivers her slow transformation near perfectly, giving the onryō reasons to be human. Atsu's arc comes to life through an incredible Erika Ishii, who lends her voice, likeness, and performance capture to the character. Atsu is a compelling protagonist, full of consuming rage and conflicting emotions, but the game doesn't fully explore her place as a woman in a man's world. Her distaste of the samurai is often mentioned, and her anger at those dismissive of her because of her gender is always palpable, but Ghost of Yotei never considers her womanhood as a crucial part of the story.

The game also constraints the story from embracing bolder ideas. Atsu's journey is affecting, and her story finds a few emotional highs, but I found myself largely unmoved and unsurprised over the course of the game and I could see many of its revelations coming from a mile away. Ghost of Yotei cushions the weight of its emotions at crucial junctures by almost always playing it safe. The final act and the climax are a stirring march that mixes revenge, redemption, and regret — it's assured storytelling that hits the right notes at the right times, but the pitch-perfect approach leaves little room for surprises.

Atsu's journey changes her over the course of the game
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

Where Ghost of Yotei bucks convention, however, is the way it structures its story. The game's narrative unfolds organically, balancing the player's urge to push forward into Atsu's revenge quest and take a breather and explore the rugged wilderness of Ezo. Yotei does this by ditching the traditional journal, a staple of all open world games, that lists all main missions, side quests, and activities. The game instead devises a neat way to layer everything on offer through a deck of categorised mission cards that you can shuffle through when you open the map. Each card reveals limited information about its related objective and adds more context as you explore the world, ask questions, and gather clues.

The map, too, avoids the clutter of open world design by not littering it with icons and markers. It's a problem that every game that comes with a map has attempted to address in recent times. Ubisoft, whose early open world games wrote the blueprint for checklist-style open world maps peppered with things to do, tried to navigate the issue with a scout system in Assassin's Creed shadows. The mechanic, while sound in theory, functionally merely created a laborious method to put a marker on the map that you can then travel to. Ghost of Yotei brings a diegetic approach to sticking visual identifiers on its game world. Atsu carries around a spyglass at all times, that you can bring up with a quick press of the up button on the D-pad.

When you spot something interesting on the horizon with the spyglass — a plume of smoke, a tree that stands out from its surroundings, a mountaintop — the game adds a marker on the map that you can then navigate to. This mechanic encourages you to not just soak in Yotei's stunning game world, but observe it closely, too. I often found myself clambering up cliffsides to reach the perfect vantage point and pull out the spyglass to spot interesting places on the map. Sometimes an innkeeper, a merchant, or a traveller passes along information about a Yotei Six encampment or a rumour about a tucked away shrine, which adds a marker on the map, too.

Ghost of Yotei encourages you to observe the game world for interesting places
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

Slowly, newer ways emerge to guide you to bounty hunts, enemy camps, shrines, alters, and hot springs. Just like Ghost of Tsushima, the wind guides you to your next marked objective on the map, allowing for a HUD-free screen while exploring Ezo. Most side quests and activities tie into the main story, too. One of the major mission sub-categories requires you to track down sensei spread across the breadth of Ezo — each a master of a particular weapon. Atsu must seek them out to acquire new weapons and learn new weapon arts. Bounty hunts, on the other hand, take a leaf out of Red Dead Redemption 2. You pluck a poster out of the bounty board that details the last known location of the outlaw and the reward on offer. Turning in the bounty earns you coin and sometimes new armour, too.

That's not all Ghost of Yotei takes from Red Dead Redemption 2. Just like Rockstar's open world Western, the game lets you put down a camp at any point on the map. Here, you can rest and recover your spirit, craft ammunition and resources, play your shamisen, cook and eat food for a temporary buff, and call a member of your wolf pack to sell you items and gear for your next mission. These are neat touches that make Ezo feel lived-in and intentional — a living, breathing world that's not just a setting, but a character. But for a game intent on urging players to explore this world without menus and markers, Ghost of Yotei is too generous with fast travel options. Every location or activity you visit or complete unlocks a fast-travel point. Once you've begun exploring Ezo, there are few places on the map left that don't have a fast travel option in their vicinity.

Atsu can put down a camp at any point on the map to rest and recover
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

There are no shortcuts, however, in Ghost of Yotei's action. Tsushima introduced a fast, fluid, and visceral combat system when it launched in 2020. The follow-up takes the same DNA and splices out new variants by introducing four new weapons that replace weapon stances from the first game. Each sensei Atsu tracks down unlocks a new way to cut down enemies: the dual katanas are for rapid combos and particularly effective against spearmen; the yari grants greater range and prevents sickle-wielding foes from getting in close; the kusarigama is meant to face off against multiple enemies and shatter shields; and the odachi is Atsu's heavyweight option for bigger, stronger brutes. The underlying language of each weapon is practically the same, but each of them speak their own tongue.

The savange crunch of the odachi is distinct from the piercing precision of the yari — the way the latter handles reminded me a bit of the spear from God of War Ragnarok. Beyond the slickness of your slices and the satisfying clink of your parries, the visceral sound effects and haptic feedback on the controller go a long way in making combat feel both surgically efficient and sloppily violent at the same time. This is easily one of the best melee combat systems in an open world action-adventure title and it completely shows up the combat in Assassin's Creed games, that remains riddled with jank over multiple iterations. On harder difficulties, Yotei's combat presents a gratifying challenge, too. Enemy attacks are deadly and windows for perfect parries and dodges are tight. Taking on multiple types of enemies as you shuffle through the right weapons for each is a choreographed dance.

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Ghost of Yotei's combat is fluid and visceral
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

The Yotei Six Boss fights, in particular, are brutal. I played on the hard mode, and some of those encounters nearly ground me down. These act-ending showdowns also require tailored tactics and approaches. Each member of the Yotei Six is a distinct segment of the game that can be taken on in any order you please: the Oni is a brute who commands a pillaging army and a towering castle in Ishikari plains; the Kitsune, a shinobi who has made the snow-draped mountains of Teshio Ridge his home; and the Spider and the Dragon, the sons of Saito, are gun nuts holed up in the southern Oshima coast. While you can go about crossing the names on Atsu's sash in the order you please, the final act is reserved for Lord Saito.

Over time, Atsu grows stronger as you master each weapon, unlock spirit attacks and new skills, and accumulate ranged options like the versatile light and heavy bows and the explosive matchlock. Quickfire tools like the smoke bomb and the throwing knives come in handy to get out of jail in tense and crowded combat situations, too. All of it marks a considerable upgrade on Ghost of Tsushima, even if it fails to add mechanical depth, but Yotei misses a trick by retaining the first game's combat UI. Weapons and tools are still tied to right and left triggers that present a clunky and laborious process for switching gear in the heat of battle. The game's smooth combat deserved an intuitive iteration of the interface — perhaps a unified weapon wheel or a hotkey for switching armaments on the fly.

The Yotei Six are formidable villains that test Atsu's resolve
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

Where you can't fault Ghost of Yotei for holding on to something from its predecessor is its cinematic art style and presentation. Ghost of Tsushima, with its flowing reeds of grass and dancing sea of autumnal leaves and sprawling fields of vivid flowers, defined a distinct visual language for video games, inspired by the films of Akira Kurosawa. Ghost of Yotei doubles down on the colour and composition of its predecessor to present an Ezo so breathtaking, so utterly transfixing, that exiting the game and returning to real life becomes a sorry disappointment (another thing that the game shares with Red Dead Redemption 2). From its rolling, interminable grasslands and its blood red forests to its quiet cliffsides and quieter rivers, Ghost of Yotei is essentially a painting; brush and ink on canvas that you can enter and explore at your leisure.

And at the heart of it all is the mountain that lends the game its name. Mount Yotei watches over Atsu and her journey. It stands guard, a relic, an all-seeing kami that towers over the game world. Everything you do in the game, you do it in the mountain's shadow. Its mere presence becomes an evocative and crucial part of the story, even though the mountain is little more than a skybox. It's also the finer details that add a lifelike sheen on the game's surface: the way your horse gets a boost as your ride through a river of flowers guiding you through a region; the way wild horses join you in rhythm and stride as you gallop through grasslands; and the way your presence marks a shift in the atmosphere when you enter a crowded inn — so much of Yotei is a syncretic union of samurai cinema and Westerns.

Mount Yotei overlooks Ezo like a watchful guardian
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch

The game leans into its cinematic inspirations, too. In addition to the black-and-white Kurosawa mode seen in Tsushima, Ghost of Yotei adds two new modes honouring directors, Takashi Miike and Shinichirō Watanabe; the former injects more blood and mud and brings a tighter cinematic camera inspired by Miike's violent films, and the latter scores idle exploration with original lo-fi music composed by Watanabe. These are fun and creative ways to alter gameplay experience — something more games should take note of, as well.

And as always, Sucker Punch delivers an irrefutable standard when it comes to technical performance on the PS5. I played half the game on the ‘quality' graphics setting for sharper image quality and the other half on the ‘performance' setting to recover more frames. Both experiences, locked to 30 and 60fps, respectively, were flawless, with zero stuttering, or frame drops, or bugs. There's a ray-tracing mode, too, that targets 30fps, but with higher-quality lighting and reflections.

Ghost of Yotei's cinematic visuals and art style stand out
Photo Credit: Sony/ Sucker Punch (Screenshot - Manas Mitul)

Ghost of Yotei's technical accomplishments, its meaningful mechanical upgrades, and its compelling visual presentation make it a near-complete package that's near-impossible to not recommend. It is more Ghost of Tsushima, for sure — and that's good enough for many — but it's also more than that. Tying the game's identity to its popular twin is unfair but also inevitable. Ghost of Yotei is far more accomplished at telling its story than its predecessor ever was. And Atsu is far more fascinating than Jin Sakai could ever be. But Sucker Punch was also clearly cautious and conservative with Atsu and her journey.

The studio took inspiration from Kurosawa's work when it came to game's visuals, but if only it had looked to the master's films for notes on the game's narrative, Ghost of Yotei could have truly transcended the samurai fantasy that has quickly become a common motif of the medium. Despite its excellence and innovation, the game fails to do that. I was expecting Sucker Punch to break the mould with the sequel, to be uncommon and transgressive. But Ghost of Yotei avoids bolder choices, specifically with its story and protagonist, that would have helped it delivery fully on its cinematic ambitions. Instead, it settles for being a ghost of what it could have been.