15 Hours With Ghost Of Yotei: An Impressive But Familiar Sequel

What does it mean for a game to take your breath away? For me, it’s when what I’m being shown on screen makes me forget, no matter how briefly, to suck oxygen into my lungs or let the spent CO2 slowly exhale. The normal, mundane rhythms of my biology become interrupted in some way. For a moment or two I’m jarred out of the ordinary. This happens a lot in Ghost of Yotei. To what end I’m still not sure. Sucker Punch Productions has outdone itself, but is all that beauty and artistry in service of yet another impressive Sony blockbuster of the type we’ve come to expect, or something more?

I’ve ridden horseback through a number of fields, killed hundreds of foes, and spent an inordinate amount of time picking through the game’s open-world distractions, compelled by both pleasure and the irksome strain of obsessive completionism unique to games. Many of the things I’ve encountered in Ghost of Yotei I’ve done or witnessed before, but the sheer craftsmanship with which they’re recreated leaves me struggling to turn away. 

Set hundreds of years after the events of Ghost of Tsushima, the sequel follows wandering outlaw Atsu as she returns to her homeland on the outskirts of Shogun rule looking for the Yotei Six, a group of ruthless killers who tortured her and murdered her family when she was still a child. Played by Erika Ishii, she makes for a much more grounded and compelling lead than Tsushima’s honor-bound aristocrat Jin Sakai. 

Where the original game was a war story, Ghost of Yotei is situated more like an American Western with Atsu and her wolf companion navigating a lawless frontier where samurai, raiders, and bounty hunters dish out competing forms of justice in a changing world. Nearing what I understand to be around the halfway point of the game (look for my full review closer to launch), Yotei is already a much more strongly written and engrossing cinematic adventure than its predecessor. 

A tale of revenge might sound clichéd–will she outgrow her past trauma or be forever chained by it?–but a rich cast of multidimensional characters with their own motivations, struggles, and backstories keeps Yotei from being just a violent campaign against those who wronged you. Atsu thinks killing the Yotei Six will revolve her past, when really it’s just another way of running from it. 

Combat feels much the same as that in the first game, but with new weapon types substituted in for particular schools of fighting. The highlight here are dual katanas that let Atsu cut enemies to pieces in the blink of an eye, but each tool is still governed by its effectiveness against particular enemy types. It’s fun and beautiful when everything comes together, but Yotei still makes a number of trade-offs in service of the spectacle.

It’s not as fluid as the rhythmic juggling of Spider-Man or the Batman: Arkham games and not as responsive and tightly tuned as more arcadey action games. The camera can still be a pain to manage as enemies nip at you from off-screen with arrows or unblockable attacks. This friction is meant to be overcome with new upgrades and skills, but boss fights especially still feel like cinematic events first, with the gameplay elements grafted onto them second. 

This is where the breadth and visual splendor of Ghost of Yotei’s world comes in. Built from the ground-up for PS5 unlike the first game, there’s a whole new level of depth, detail, and polish in how Sucker Punch has rendered the wilderness of its Japanese setting. I’m constantly mesmerized by smoke lilting over trees and small villages in the distance, or how the wind lavishly frolics across a field of tall grass or yellow flowers. No screenshot or video clip and truly do it justice, even on the base PS5. 

It’s also clear that a lot of effort has gone into masking the fact that this game leans heavily on the same kinds of repetitive tasks that other sandbox games openly taunt you with, cluttering their maps full of icons that threaten to induce burnout with their sheer volume and sameness. While gold birds still lure you to points of interest and you frequently encounter camps, fortresses, and other areas waiting to be “liberated” from surrounding factions, Ghost of Yotei tries very hard to make all of this stuff feel like it’s just unfolding naturally, rather than being just a scavenger hunt of perfunctory tasks to complete during lulls in the main story. 

One big question for Yotei, and the trajectory of Sucker Punch’s games over the last two decades, is whether it wants to compete directly with the best open world adventures around like Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Witcher 3. From where I currently sit, I’m not sure. At times its main story feels like it wants to be an action-packed interactive movie, a la Uncharted. At other times it’s lavishly trying to gamify mundane chores like cooking and bathing to make the world seem more realistic, natural, and immersive. 

The result is a lot of variety that keeps things fun but doesn’t always coalesce into something more. I’ve yet to encounter a side story that left me especially surprised or moved, or a particular stealth sequence, battle, or mini-game that made me desperate to find the next. Ghost of Yotei does so many things at such a high bar of craft and quality but doesn’t always justify its particular mix of mechanics and gameplay concepts. It can feel like Westworld: an immersive theme park of attractions still searching for the connective tissue that can turn it into something more. So far it feels like Ghost of Tsushima but more and better.

Is that enough in 2025? Maybe. It’s still a massive achievement from a production standpoint. Many have tried and failed to turn out superb big-budget games with such predictability. But I’m still searching for the part that shows the core experience at the heart of Yotei has leveled up just as much as each of its constituent parts. And with a game this pretty, I’m happy to keep looking.