Ghost of Yotei Review - Atsu's Relentless Quest for Vengeance in 1600s Ezo

There’s something messy about Ghost of Yotei, and I don’t mean in the way its blood sprays across snowy ground after a perfect parry. The mess comes from how the game feels at once familiar and entirely reworked, as if Sucker Punch took the skeleton of Ghost of Tsushima and asked what would happen if you stripped away the samurai nobility and gave us someone raw, human, and almost ugly in her obsession. Atsu isn’t Jin Sakai, and the game doesn’t want her to be. She is a ronin, forged not by a code but by the absence of everything—her family killed by the Yotei Six when she was young, her childhood stolen, her adulthood sharpened into one weapon aimed squarely at vengeance. Erika Ishii’s likeness and performance make Atsu brash and stubborn, sometimes insufferably so, but always believable. Different from Jin, she doesn’t grapple with honor, doesn’t hesitate, and isn’t debating her methods. She’s burning through Ezo with blood in her eyes, and that’s the story you play.

And that story, despite being straightforward in its revenge structure, is repetitive yet oddly compelling. Thirty hours in the main quest might sound tight compared to Tsushima’s length, but Yotei keeps you in its loop of targets, escapes, and confrontations. The Yotei Six are easy to hate—Lord Saito proclaims himself “Shogun of the north,” the Oni crushes villages across the Ishikari Plain, the Kitsune runs a clan of shinobi in Teshio Ridge and abducts craftsmen from the night. They’re not layered villains, but you don’t need nuance when the blade’s edge is meant to cut. Yet how many times can you watch a target slip away in a cutscene before frustration sets in? Far too many. Then again, the game offers smaller, more intimate moments that dig into Atsu’s past: sparring with her brother, her father guiding her in the forge, her mother’s shamisen connecting music to memory. These scenes, more than any villain monologue, ground the story in something human.

The setting does more heavy lifting than the narrative. Ezo—modern-day Hokkaido—is the game’s triumph, layered in contrasts. Fields of wildflowers scatter petals as you ride, crimson forests twist like brush strokes, wetlands glow under the moon, snowburied ridges hide shinobi ambushes, and the sea throws itself against jagged cliffs. Mount Yotei is always there, inescapable on the horizon. The island feels like a lawless frontier because historically it was—set after the Battle of Sekigahara, when Tokugawa Ieyasu folded Japan under his shogunate, tens of thousands of ronin fled north, and Sucker Punch uses that context to infuse every village, every burned farmstead, with unease. Technically, it’s dazzling: 60fps in performance mode during gameplay; 30fps in cinematic cutscenes. But it’s more than performance; it’s composition. Duels are staged like frames from Lady Snowblood, petals swirling in the wind, or waterfalls roaring behind clashing steel. The world itself demands screenshots, and the photo mode mapped to the D-pad makes sure you oblige.

Exploration doesn’t follow the rigid checklists you’d expect. The Guiding Wind returns, a gust of leaves and bent grass steering you instead of a mini-map. A villager at a camp might tell you of a nearby fox den, a merchant points toward an onsen, and travelers mention shrines. Atsu herself ties into this design: she paints sumi-e with the DualSense touchpad, sketching animals and landscapes, and plays her mother’s shamisen to guide you to hot springs or collectibles. It feels more personal than Jin’s haikus, though it sometimes tips into over-curation. Golden birds that lead directly to skill points, repeated lines from NPCs, hints that feel too deliberate—all of it makes discovery feel like an illusion, a theme park where the rides are well-built but visible.

Combat, though, is what makes you forget any rails underneath. Atsu doesn’t rely on Jin’s stances. She wields five weapons—katana, dual katanas, kusarigama, odachi, yari—and the game expects you to rotate through them in every fight. The kusarigama stands out most, a chain-and-sickle that smashes shields, sweeps groups, and yanks enemies across the field for instant assassinations. The yari breaks defenses, dual katanas overwhelm, the odachi crushes armored foes, and the katana anchors it all. Firearms bring a new brutality: the musket is slow but devastating, dropping armored soldiers in a single deafening shot, while the flintlock pistol staggers or finishes enemies up close with vicious immediacy. Add in smoke bombs, blinding metsubushi dust, and blades ignited with fire, and fights feel layered, never repeating.

But it’s the timing that defines it. Parrying at the flash of blue never loses its thrill, standoffs return to let you strike down multiple foes in cinematic iai style, and duels against the Yotei Six become exacting dances where one mistake ends you. The lack of a lock-on is a real flaw. Enemies can slip out of frame, and you wrestle the camera when you should be focused on parries, but the sheer fluidity of attacks, the weight of the kusarigama’s swing, or the odachi’s crash keep combat endlessly rewarding. Stealth exists, with tall grass and chain assassinations, but it’s more appetizer than main course. You clear a few guards silently, then the fight begins, and that rhythm feels intentional. The kusarigama’s ranged assassination, pulling a soldier silently into the shadows, is the one stealth mechanic that consistently shines.

Progression avoids the grind. No experience points or levels; improvement comes through shrines, charms, armor sets, and side quests. Some of the strongest abilities are buried in optional content, which risks frustrating anyone who avoids side missions, but it also makes every bounty, shrine, or quest feel like it matters. And those bounties can be memorable: a murderous musician, a killer who drowns victims like a kappa, a serial murderer who stalks your night camps, and even a superboss duel that cost me more than an hour and too many retries. Not every bounty is inspired; some boil down to clearing a camp, but enough of them twist the formula to make them worth chasing.

The DualSense, meanwhile, doesn’t sit idle. You trace calligraphy on the touchpad, squeeze triggers to stoke fires, tilt the controller to lower fish over flames. It’s gimmicky at times, but it adds to the sense of physicality. Then there are the stylistic modes: Kurosawa Mode for black-and-white with Japanese audio, Takashi Miike Mode, where gore explodes to absurd degrees, and Watanabe Mode overlaying lo-fi beats like Samurai Champloo. They’re optional, playful, but they underline the game’s identity as a cinematic spectacle.

Of course, not everything lands. The story relies too often on villains escaping in cutscenes, slowing the pace. Climbing sequences marked by white rocks are tedious relics. Escort moments where you match NPC pace or give someone a boost yank you out of immersion. Stealth remains formulaic, and exploration sometimes feels more guided than discovered. Yet every time I wanted to nitpick, combat pulled me back in. Every time the story sagged, the landscape carried me forward. Atsu’s shamisen tethered me to family memory, sumi-e painted her connection to the land, and the blood-soaked duels reminded me that revenge stories, when executed with this much style, don’t need reinvention.