Ghost Of Yotei Is Breaking Away From Tsushima With Atsu

Ghost of Tsushima has always occupied an odd place in the modern gamer canon. Most journalists think it’s okay-to-good (I count myself in that bracket), while the general gamer public is a little warmer on it. That’s pretty normal – many games have a divide between the critical consensus and the thoughts of the community, and this goes both ways. Alien: Isolation, Dishonored, and Disco Elysium reverse this polarity. But with Ghost of Tsushima, it goes deeper. And Ghost of Yotei seems to go against that grain.

The foundation is important for Ghost of Tsushima – a lot of people found it fun. It was mildly criticised by critics for being a fairly generic open world with bloated collectibles, hidden by a veneer of aesthetics. But a lot of people liked these aesthetics, and (given most members of the general audience play far fewer games than critics) was given a bit of a pass for its open world drudgery in much the same way as Horizon because it looks good while doing it and makes it more enjoyable than many other bloated open world games.

Ghost Of Tsushima Somehow Became The Anti-TLOU

With most games, that’s the end of it. A crowd pleaser that doesn’t get the critical garlands The Last of Us is adorned with, but still beloved by gamers at large. But not so with Ghost of Tsushima. It was also, less mildly, criticised for its cultural appropriation of Japanese culture by a Western studio. My overriding belief is that it’s largely fine to tell stories about other cultures because art should not all be insular and introspective, but the clunky Kurosawa Mode and anachronistic use of Japanese touchstones like haiku made this earnest attempt to capture the samurai era into something messier and inauthentic.

We’re getting in the weeds now, but the black and white filter also ignored the fact many feel Kurosawa’s best shot work is the bold and colourful Ran.

Then The Last of Us comes back into the fray. Tsushima and TLOU2 released just one month apart, and despite being made by sister studios with the same Sony focus on motion capture photorealism, third person action gameplay, and narrative weight, ended up positioned as ideological foes. The Last of Us Part 2 was praised by critics despite being so woke that it killed one of its main characters in a dystopian apocalypse, as well as featuring two playable women (one a lesbian) and a trans character. It’s also – and this is the only criticism with a modicum of weight to it – not that fun to play with its dreary nihilistic view of humanity and drawn out ending.

Ghost of Tsushima on the other hand had you play as a man, and not just any man, but a stoic, violent samurai rebel. A paragon of masculinity is he. Critics put out the hit on it – read: scored it a respectable 85 on OpenCritic – because of woke politics around it development, and (again, the only worthwhile point here) it’s more fun to swing from ropes and slash enemies to ribbons with a historically inaccurate katana than it is to stealthy conserve bullets and grapple with the human condition when pushed to brutal extremes.

Ghost Of Tsushima’s Loudest Fans Turned It Into Something It Wasn’t

This all came to a head at The Game Awards. 2020 was a vintage year, but The Last of Us Part 2 was widely expected to take Game of the Year, which it eventually did. Hades was considered its closest challenger, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons was given the slimmest of chances. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Doom Eternal, and Ghost of Tsushima, the others rounding out the pack, were considered no-hopers.

Everyone plugged in enough to care about The Game Awards knew this, just as everyone knew last year that it was Baldur’s Gate 3’s to lose, with Tears of the Kingdom the challenger and Alan Wake 2 the outsider ahead of a trio of also-rans. And because of this, there was toxicity in the air. The Last of Us became Gamer Enemy Number One for the crime of Abby, and so in Player’s Voice, there was a choreographed attempt to stick one in the eye of critics on the jury by crowning Ghost of Tsushima the winner.

This attempt was successful in that Tsushima won, but unsuccessful in that critics didn’t particularly care as many of us are quite fond of Tsushima despite thinking it has a higher ceiling to reach. This victory, as well as its proximity to The Last of Us, has seen Tsushima reach a deified status amongst gamers who care less about games than they do being angry on the internet. I wrote a while ago that all this furore meant Tsushima 2 didn’t deserve the pressure it was under, and now Ghost of Yotei has welcomed that pressure by putting a woman front and centre.

I don’t like to help this ilk of gamer out, but since I know they badly lack creativity, that makes this one Ghost of Two-She-Ma. Use it wisely in the worst YouTube thumbnails known to mankind.

I don’t think having a female protagonist inherently makes a game better, though I’m aware there are a lot of loudmouths who feel it makes the game worse. But what it does offer is two-fold. Firstly, it displays a confident hand from Sucker Punch at the helm, guiding the series into fresh territory instead of stagnating in the safety of familiarity. Secondly, it shows the studio is keen to be its own beast, wanting to tell the story it feels makes for the best experience, not catering to the vocal minority that another, less confident and creative studio might have mined into cheap adulation for subpar experiences.

Ghost of Yotei is not going to be great just because it has a woman, and it might not be great at all. But it represents Sucker Punch shaking the round peg of Ghost of Tsushima out of the square hole of gaming history it found itself in, and that is to be applauded. The confidence shown with moving the series forward, as well as the ability to start fresh without the flaws of Tsushima holding it back, make it a far more hotly anticipated game than it otherwise might have been.