Earlier this month I did something I had never done before. I preordered a game, pre-downloaded it, and started playing it pretty much the second it was available to play at midnight. That game was Ghost of Yotei.
But even before I did so, I also noticed concerning signs that maybe wokeness had crept into the game. Probably the first worrying sign came in the first trailer, which you can see here:
I don’t know about you, but I have gotten to the point that the moment that I see a trailer for a movie or game and see a woman as the lead character, I have an almost Pavlovian reaction: My back gets up immediately. I’m not inherently opposed to a female lead in a game or action movie. Some of my favorite action movies and video games have had female leads. In movies, the most obvious example is Aliens, where James Cameron skillfully turned Ellen Ripley from a smarter-than-usual ‘final girl’ in the original Alien, into a hero in the sequel. In games, there is … well, Amanda Ripley from the excellent Alien: Isolation—the daughter of Ellen from the original movie, who ends up being stalked by an alien while trying to figure out what happened to her mother. And there are also the obvious cases of the Samus Aran from the Metroid series, Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider games, and many others. But in recent years, the media seems to have forgotten how to handle female leads, to make them part of a good story. Thus, I was concerned about that maybe this series was having the same problem.
Further, as I played the game, I started to hear rumors of a very woke ending to the end of Yotei. I won’t explain what exactly they were saying about the ending before I venture into spoilers, but I will simply say that the rumors I saw weren’t true. And if you go past the point when I start to talk about spoilers, I’ll explain what I heard so you will know exactly what I am denying and you will know exactly what the truth is, too.
Still, as a consumer of media, I also know that when a game or movie starts to become politically controversial or potentially controversial, reviews become much less trustworthy. Remember how many people tried to convince us that the 2016 version of Ghostbusters was not complete crap? And when the game Hogwarts Legacy came out, you could sense that the hatred of JK Rowling was infecting the reviews for what was ultimately a pretty great game.
So, I am hoping to give you a review that you can trust for Ghost of Yotei, where you can trust that I would call it out if they let their politics undermine the game. And, by the way, I will occasionally sprinkle in some tips, including after I start to talk about spoilers.
And for the record, I am not going to talk about anything outside of what is literally in the game. Some people involved in the game allegedly said some controversial things and maybe you will decide to look into that. Maybe you will even decide that what they said will dissuade you from buying the game for that reason. But you can figure that out without buying and playing the game, so you don’t need a game review to tell you that. So I am just going to focus on whether the game itself is woke—and overall, whether or not it is good.
And I will start off being entirely spoiler-free, and then I will give you a very huge warning before I spoil anything. And just so you know what I mean in terms of spoilers, if something happens in the first hour of a game that lasts more than fifteen hours (How Long to Beat says that Yotei's main story alone takes about twenty-six hours), my strong presumption is that it is not a spoiler: It is part of the set-up, the premise.
So, what is Ghost of Yotei? Well, the short version is that it is an open-ish world action/adventure game with the kind of strong, often cinematic storytelling that Sony games specialize in these days. The game takes place in early 17th century Japan, where you play a woman called Atsu. If they ever said her family name, I missed it. When she was younger, a group known as the Yotei Six murdered her whole family. After that, she became a warrior ‘in the South’ (probably meaning the main island of Japan), and came back to the region to hunt down and kill the Yotei Six.
In terms of gameplay, like the previous game, your character can fight in three ways: 1) Using straight hack-and-slash in open combat, 2) stealth, or 3) ranged weapons—and very often I find myself using a combination of the three. For instance, I often found myself using a bow and arrow while in stealth to take out many enemies, assassinating a few more by stabbing them close, and then shifting to regular melee combat to finish of the rest. The game rarely forces you into one mode of fighting—except in boss battles which are mainly done through melee weapons.
This game is also a sequel to a previous game, Ghost of Tsushima, and I will give my perspective on that game, so you know where I am coming from on this one. And, to jump ahead, just about everything I can say about Tsushima can also be said about Yotei.
It was frankly my favorite game of the last five years. That story centered on Jin Sakai, who was a samurai living his best life on Tsushima, a real island between the Korean peninsula and the rest of of Japan. It takes place in 1274, when the Mongols invaded, in a larger attempt to island-hop their way to the main island of Japan. Jin and the other samurai on the island try to fight the Mongols, most of the samurai die, and Jin barely survives. After he recuperates, he decides his only hope of resisting the Mongols who have taken over his island is to adopt increasingly dishonorable methods of fighting such as sneaking and assassination. Over time, he becomes sort of a folk hero much like Robin Hood, the titular ‘Ghost of Tsushima.’ And all of this puts him in conflict with others on his side, who think he is wrong to adopt such tactics.
More than a few people compared it to the Assassin’s Creed series, especially their more recent action-RPG games at the time, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Fans of Assassin’s Creed series had been begging for a game that took place in Japan where you would become a ninja, and we were still a few years before Ubisoft would finally give us that with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. But many felt that Ghost of Tsushima scratched that itch, and while that is true, I think people saying that often sold that game short.
For one thing, Tsushima did melee combat better than any Assassin’s Creed game I have played (and I have played all of them except Shadows). It is frankly the best, most satisfying melee combat since the Batman: Arkham games. I have seen some people say that it copied the Arkham games, but it really didn’t. That being said, it probably wouldn’t shock me to learn that Sucker Punch Productions (the company that made the game) probably studied what worked in the Arkham games and learned from it, while doing their own thing.
And the other thing Tsushima did better was to give us a story that avoided all the convolution of the Assassin’s Creed games. I like the Assassin’s Creed games, but they have an overall plot that is so complicated that it takes forever to explain what the heck is going on. For instance, if you want to understand all the lore and you have over an hour to kill, this video will help:
By comparison, Tsushima tells a relatively simple, straightforward story. That’s not to say there are no twists and turns but it was so much simpler and more comprehensible than your average Assassin’s Creed game and it was refreshing.
Another thing that was interesting was how whimsical the game could be, as a strange contrast to how violent it could be—it was rated M mainly for violence, after all. One minute you could be chopping off the head of a low-level Mongolian leader, and slaughtering his terrified soldiers as many flee for their lives, with limbs flying and blood spraying. The next could be chasing a fox to a shrine in order to get essentially a magic charm that would give you some kind of a boost. And then when you are done, you can pet the fox. Your character soaks in hot springs in order to boost his health bar, composes haikus a few centuries before this kind of poetry was invented and chops bamboo in order to strengthen his resolve meter. The game also gives you the ability to make Jin bow anytime you want him to, and sometimes weird and wonderful things happen when you do that. For instance, if you bow near a particular shine for frogs… well, you can see in the video what happens next:
And throughout the game you can feel the love that went into it. Reporting indicated that this started as a few people working on the side without sanction from the top executives and it really showed. It felt very strongly like they were just trying to make a game that would seem really cool to them—and they just hoped everyone else would like it, too. And to their credit, they got Toshihiro Nagoshi, director of the Yakuza games to give them this glowing praise:
We definitely lost to them. I think it’s a game that definitely should have been made by Japanese people[.] … It’s the kind of work made by non-Japanese people that makes you feel they’re even more Japanese than us. I think it’s amazing. We often believe Western people would never get certain Japanese things, but the game shows this way of thinking is wrong in the first place.
And I think that, for the people behind Tsushima, there probably couldn’t have been higher praise than even more Japanese than the Japanese.
So, the natural question is … how does Yotei stand up compared to Tsushima?
I would say it like this. If Tsushima is a 10 out of 10 game, Yotei is a 9.5 out of 10 game.
Now, right off the bat, there are two features that was eventually in Tsushima that isn’t currently in Yotei. The first is their multiplayer mode, called ‘Legends.’ But that wasn’t in the original release of Tsushima, either, and Sucker Punch has already promised to include it in Yotei:
Ghost of Yotei Legends includes⚔️
— Sucker Punch Productions (@SuckerPunchProd) August 19, 2025
-Two Player Story Missions
-Four Player Survival Matches
-Play as one of four character classes
-Giant versions of the Yotei Six
Pre-order #GhostofYotei now: https://t.co/vztS3ECJdb pic.twitter.com/Ctwdv9srqj
That game mode in Tsushima is so good that I have run into people online who had no idea there was a main single-player story mode, even though that came first.
The other missing feature is New Game+, which is where you get to start over but with most of your equipment and maybe new challenges, which is an increasingly common feature in all games. Tsushima didn’t launch with New Game+, either, but I haven’t seen any explicit promise to put the feature in Yotei. If I was a betting man, I would put my money on this feature being added eventually as a free update, but there’s no guarantee.
For the same reason I think the game will eventually come to PC. Again, I am just judging from past behavior, but Sony has recently put many of its first party titles onto PC, including system sellers like God of War (2018) and the Spider-Man games. They have even put Helldivers 2 on Xbox, but analysts think that it was just because the game was multiplayer-centered. And previously they put Tsushima on PC. This is part of an overall trend of console makers being less stringent about exclusivity.
Now, before I go much further in comparisons, let me answer another obvious question: Do you need to play Tsushima before you play Yotei?
No… mostly. Story-wise, you don’t need to play Tsushima first. The stories are not very strongly connected. After all, one takes place in the 13th century, and the other takes place in the 17th century. You wouldn’t expect any characters from the original to even be alive in this sequel. The heroine in the new game, Atsu, is seemingly of no relation to anyone in the original game. I don’t count it as a spoiler to mention that there are a couple callbacks to Tsushima, because that is so obviously something you’d expect, and you will probably get more out of those callbacks if you had played the first one. But you don’t have to have played the original to enjoy this.
So, this can be your first game in the series… with one huge caveat: The game does not explain its melee combat very well.
Bluntly, I have played through the beginning stages twice, and I am not sure you will understand the basics of melee combat if you haven’t played the first game. So, let’s rectify this.
Tip: How melee combat works. I don’t consider this a gameplay spoiler so much as how to basically play the game and, yes, this is an implicit criticism of the game that it doesn’t explain this well enough. What you want to do in melee combat first is to break your enemy’s defense and stagger them with heavy attacks. Then, when they are staggered, use light, quick attacks to do major damage to them while they are staggered. Heavy attacks are done by default by pressing the triangle button on a PlayStation controller. Light attacks are done by pressing the square button. So, bash them with the triangle button until they are staggered, and then hit the square button over and over again. They might regain their defense and start blocking your light attacks, and if they do, repeat the process: Stagger with heavy attacks, then use light attacks to do major damage. Rinse and repeat until each enemy is down.
So, other than that oversight—which I believe I just corrected—you don’t have to play Tsushima first. Mind you, there is more to melee combat than what I just said, but the game explains the rest of it just fine. But that process of staggering and then doing major damage is not well explained.
Since I am answering questions about Yotei, let me answer three more:
First, is it a Soulsborne game? The short answer is ‘no.’ The term refers to a genre created by the company called ‘From Software.’ It is marked with ‘tough but fair’ combat, action RPG elements and very often a story that is esoteric at best (and typically it is a dark story). The term ‘Soulsborne’ refers to both the ‘Souls’ games (Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls I-III) and Bloodborne. The most recent of that type by From Software is the open world game Elden Ring and its spin offs. I like those games, but this just isn’t in that genre.
And if you want Soulsborne games that have a similar setting, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is mostly in that formula that takes place in old Japan and it is also made by From Software. I am also told the Nioh series, while made by another company, is good. And if you want an open-world Soulsborne game, you might look to Rise of the Ronin, which is made by the same company as the Nioh games, although its reputation is more questionable. I plan to play it when it becomes cheaper, but you probably want to check some reviews before you decide if you want it.
I will note also that while Yotei (and Tsushima) are not Soulsborne games, they both have a ‘lethal’ difficulty mode where the game says that a single strike with a sword will kill you—which, if true, is worse than any Soulsborne game I have ever played. That sounds a bit too masochistic for my tastes, but maybe you will enjoy that mode.
Second, is it an RPG? I have seen at least one review call it an action RPG and I would disagree. Now, there is a thin line between an ‘action game with RPG elements in it’ which is extremely common these days versus an action RPG, but I think this game doesn’t count as an RPG. And frankly, it is further from the line than Tsushima. Tsushima actually had experience points that you used to gain skills on a skill tree. Yotei has no experience points. It has a skill tree, but you gain every ability on it either by carrying out missions or visiting altars. That is very un-RPG.
Third: How does the game perform? The nice thing about modern games is that if a game has a bug in it, the game can be updated via the Internet and the bugs can be fixed. If an NES cartridge has a game breaking bug, tough, there was no hope that game manufacturer could fix it. But a game sold today might be fixed if it is broken. The downside of that reality, however, is that increasingly games are sold in a broken state and only fixed later. But Sucker Punch continues to make sure that when they release a game it works damn near perfectly at launch. I think I ran into a few more bugs and quirks with Yotei than I did with Tsushima, but they were at worst temporary problems and not game breaking.
And, for the record, they updated the game at least once during my first playthrough. So, if I had started today, the game presumably would work even better.
Moving away from specific questions back to the subject of comparison, one thing that has been massively improved from Tsushima to Yotei is horseback riding. You could ride a horse in Tsushima, but it didn’t feel very good to me, and I felt like I missed too much when I was on a horse. So, I ended up going on foot unless the game forced me to use a horse, which undermined an emotional moment late in the game involving that horse. In Yotei, they improved the horseback riding and made it feel really good. I think what they were going for was to almost feel like you are flying on your horse, which makes riding around on it pretty fun in and of itself. It’s not quite ‘Spider-Man swinging through New York City in the 2018 game’ fun, but it’s up there.
Which is good, because I think the world is physically bigger in Yotei. I mean, the real island of Tsushima is much smaller than the island Yotei takes place on (called Hokkaido today, but called Ezo back then), but I doubt that the scale is 100% accurate. But one thing that earned Tsushima a lot of praise is that while its open world was big, it wasn’t bloated. It was a pretty meticulously crafted world. Now, this isn’t exactly scientific, but the world in Yotei is definitely bigger … but it also isn’t bloated. It feels like you have just as much to do, but its all spread out more. So, thank goodness the horseback riding feels good because you are going to want to get on your horse to get around this map. Walking everywhere would not work.
But you will also notice that I said Yotei had an open-ish world while calling Tsushima an open world game. Yotei divides its world into four open zones, while Tushima was two big zones. So I don’t quite call Yotei an open world game (although rational people might disagree with me). Still, both games constantly give you a lot of freedom in terms of where to go and what to do.
And they both have a design philosophy of constantly distracting you from your course. Maybe you are trying to play the main story and on the way to doing something in that, you run into an enemy outpost. Or you run into a fox den where you can chase a fox around to get bonuses. Or you see a yellow bird that you know will lead you to something interesting and possibly useful—a new mission, a health upgrade or just some cosmetic gear. So, you have to decide whether to let the game distract you, or to continue onto your goal. Personally, I prefer to be distracted, but you might feel differently.
Another difference is that in Yotei, you can camp almost constantly. Camping didn’t exist in Tsushima. Camping instantly recharges your two main gauges—your health and your spirit. ‘Spirit’ is basically the same thing as ‘resolve’ in the last game. You gain it by fighting, and you can use it to either heal yourself or pull off special moves. So being able to restore both after almost every battle can be a lifesaver. I remember in Tsushima, I would barely win a fight and being down to very little health and resolve. At times like that, it was a bit of a nail-biter until I could fix myself. That isn’t nearly as much of a problem in Yotei. But some people might prefer that kind of difficulty—and, if you do, no one forces you to use that crutch.
Camping also gives you a chance to refill your ammo in a crafting system, if you have enough stuff to do it with. So far, I have never come up short. Also, when you camp, a random person might join you by the fire. Sometimes it might be a random person who points you toward a landmark nearby. Sometimes it might be a wandering merchant.
On a related subject, they inserted a bunch of ‘realistic’ elements into the game. For instance, when you camp, you can cook food to get a temporary bonus, such as stronger melee attacks, or better stealth. But when you cook, it offers a mini game where you are asked to hold the food in the fire, and watch it cook, and occasionally flip it over to make sure it is evenly heated. Starting a fire involved using the touchpad to spark the flames, and blowing on the microphone built into the controller. And even improving your melee weapons has you using motion controls to strike the hammer and buttons had you do things like putting the steel in the fire.
Except then they give you options to pretty much skip most of that. It was easy to just skip lighting a fire and cooking and to make the process automatic—it gives you a button prompt to skip it. You can also go into the ‘settings’ menu under ‘gameplay’ and make setting up camp automatic. In the same ‘settings’ menu you can go into ‘accessibility’ and get rid of motion controls for improving (‘forging’) your weapons, so you only have to press a button to strike the hammer. I did that and never looked back.
They also give you the option to just about eliminate another new feature: The wolf. In the ad, you saw a wolf was somehow involved, but you shouldn’t think of him as a companion. Rather he is a character that sometimes shows up to help, sort of like the Mysterious Stranger in the Fallout games. It can be a nice help when he shows up, but you can’t really count on him. As you play the game, you can do more and more to befriend the wolf and make him more useful to Atsu. But the game also gives you the option to make it so the wolf never helps, and if you never do the wolf missions, you can basically eliminate him from the game almost entirely.
On one hand, all of these opt-outs suggests they weren’t sure if people would like these features—and indeed, I haven’t listed all the ways you can opt out of certain features or make them easier to handle. That suggests a lack of confidence in these new features. But on balance, I like it when games give you more options to tailor your experience to your preferences. So there’s another tip:
Tip: If you don’t like a feature in the game, check the menus and they might give you the option to minimize or eliminate it entirely. To give another example, both Yotei and Tsushima have a minigame where you strike bamboo to increase your resolve or spirit. In order to do so, you have to press seven buttons in a specific order in a short period of time, the buttons and their order changing for each bamboo stand. And honestly, it can be hard. It usually takes me several attempts. So if you find yourself hating it, both games give you the option to remove time as a factor under their accessibility options. So now you have to hit a list of buttons, but you can take your time to do it. It’s designed for disabled people, but non-disabled people might like it, too.
Seriously, as a general life tip, always check out the options for accessibility in all contexts—not just gaming. You might discover they are useful even if you don’t have a relevant disability. For instance, most laptops have a high contrast mode for people who have trouble seeing. But most of my laptop computers have been very hard to see when I am using them outdoors, so I use the mode if I am out and about.
And other the big gameplay difference—besides horse riding being fixed—is that stealth is seriously discouraged at first, in Yotei. Eventually you get the tools you need to successfully use stealth, but it takes much longer, relative to Tsushima to get those tools, if you just follow the game where it leads. In Tsushima, your very first mission after the samurai are just about wiped out is an on-rails stealth mission. Soon after that, you are unleashed into the open world and you have a number of obvious choices left open to you. One of the most obvious choices is to go help Yuna, the thief who saved your life and nursed you back to health. If you pick her mission first, she will give you the ability to assassinate people and to use your hearing to detect where your opponents are (much like in The Last of Us games).
By comparison, in Yotei, the game gives you lots of options but it very much incentivizes doing things other than getting the basic skills and tools needed to do stealth well. I will explain more of what I mean by that and give you tips on how to get stealth skills relatively early after I get to spoilers, so for now you will just have to take my word for it. If you like stealth you might not like how much it disincentivizes stealth at first, and you might want to wander over to spoilers for tips on how to get around that.
As for the melee element of the game, the funny thing is that the games feel different, but they also feel almost the same on that front. Atsu’s animation is not simply a copy-and-paste of Jin Sakai’s moves. She moves differently than Jin and feels different, but it still feels just as good and for pretty much the same reasons. I’ll talk a little more about melee in a minute. But let me share another tip related to that.
Tip: Consider performance mode. I played this on a base PlayStation 5, and these days just about every game has a performance mode or a quality graphics mode. You can find this in Yotei under ‘settings’ then toggle the options for ‘display mode.’ You can choose between ‘performance,’ ‘quality’ and ‘ray tracing.’ I personally tried the ray tracing mode and I found that the animations came off as choppy and thus deeply unattractive to me—like it just looked wrong in my mind. Putting it in performance mode instantly solved that problem and the game actually looked better, paradoxically. But that might be very idiosyncratic to me and your results might vary.
Moving on, the archery is improved but only a little. I only ever used archery to supplement my stealth or if the game forced me to (and usually the game doesn’t force you to use any particular play style). But within that context, the archery was improved, especially with the inclusion of certain charms. However, if you are curious about trying a run where you act as an archer, it looks like they improved that as an option.
Moving on, the story is the main reason why I gave this game a 9.5 out of 10, and Tsushima a 10 out of 10. But part of the problem is the first game’s story is so amazing it leaves you wondering how they could ever top it. Obviously, this is subjective, but I thought the end of Tsushima was very moving, and there are certainly moments toward the end of Yotei that you might find equally moving—or perhaps more moving than I did. In fact, maybe my view of the end was influenced by some of the controversy (which I will discuss after the spoiler warning), because just hearing about the controversy spoiled much of the ending for me. Maybe I would have liked it better if I was completely surprised at what happened? *Shrugs.*
And as a related matter, let’s talk about immersion and the related issues of historical accuracy—including whether Atsu’s an anachronistic character. I don’t know about you, but when I play a game that takes place in history, I want to feel like the game actually takes place in that time period.
Previously I chewed out Ubisoft over this exact issue with Assassin’s Creed at a time when Shadows was being delayed for a few months to polish that game:
Dear @Ubisoft
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) October 7, 2024
The moment I realized that something had gone horribly wrong with Valhalla was when I was fighting a guy and I accidentally killed a civilian, and the game told me if I kept doing that I would be desynchronized
Like what the hell? You have me playing as a Viking…
The cut off text:
You have me playing as a Viking raider. Killing civilians is what they were all about. in fact, the civilians they killed quickly probably got the good end of it. Because they often did worse to the ones who survived
Now I get that maybe you guys don’t want to create a realistic Viking raider simulator. But the way you deal with that isn’t by essentially lying about history. Maybe you explain that your character is different and more honorable and is disgusted by what other Vikings do,
Or maybe don’t make the main character of Viking at all but maybe an Englishman resisting their encroachment?
But you really need to stop altering history for your story. I mean it’s one thing to talk about the assassins and Templars and the aliens and all that. But don’t tell me the Viking Raiders were not what they were. It’s gross. They were evil f—king barbarians and that’s how they should be portrayed. Go look at The Northman for an unflinching portrayal of what the Vikings really were
And stop with the insertion of women into men’s roles.
And stop doing things like making Sparta into a sea power 🙄
Just every time you find yourself saying ‘hey, let’s ignore history,’ maybe reconsider
And yes, as you take a few months with AC Shadows, maybe re-dedicate yourself to following history.
The reality is most of history doesn’t line up with what you would call progressive values. You shouldn’t ignore that or pretend it didn’t happen. if you really feel it’s important to promote your values then condemn them for not following them but don’t pretend they did follow them.
But honestly, the fans are just sick and tired of you guys promoting your agenda over storytelling. The reason why I fell in love with the series was because it was a chance to go back in time and see what it was like to live in those times, and when you whitewash those times it takes away from that experience.
So, let’s talk about the Ghost series and historical accuracy. First off, Tsushima was not an entirely historically accurate game. Of course, there was no ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ but even putting that aside, it was not completely historically accurate. I previously mentioned that Jin composed Haikus a few centuries before they were invented. Also, in the game, the Mongols would typically get off any horses they were riding on before they would fight you, which is pretty much the exact opposite from how real Mongols fought. And Jin constantly used his trusty katana, despite the fact that katanas were not invented until later in the very same war he was fighting in. Those are only a few examples of how the first game was not historically accurate.
And, yes, it really does annoy me when game makers (or people who make media in general) pretend that feminism came to the world long before Susan B. Anthony was born. And that bothered me at first with this game. It wasn’t just that Atsu was the main character. If her whole family is wiped out by the bad guys, who else is going to avenge them? In her mind no one was left to get justice. But it was also the fact that she was able to serve openly as a woman warrior for years before she came back home for revenge, and there were more women warriors than I would expect on Ezo island.
But I also admit I am not a complete expert on Japanese history. I knew off hand that women could be samurai at various times (Atsu is not a samurai, although Lady Masako in Tsushima was). So, I did a little quick digging, and discovered a few facts. Before the Edo period, women were warriors in Japan, although it was not common. Then during the Edo period, women were encouraged to take domestic roles until women warriors were just about unheard of. (I am not sure how coercive that process was.) And the Edo period lasted from 1603-1867.
And the game takes place in 1603.
So, it seems reasonable to believe that the process of pushing women away from being warriors had barely begun. And even then, there are plot reasons I won’t spoil that explain why female warriors would be attracted to this region. Thus, in my non-expert mind it made just enough historical sense not to take me out of the game and break immersion after I learned all that. Maybe someone who is an expert on Japanese history will tell me I am wrong, but it stopped bothering me.
And more basically she doesn’t come off as a Mary Sue or just an obnoxious modern ‘Strong Woman’ or ‘Girl Boss’ architype. Atsu really is pretty much just as good as Jin—and not better. For instance, someone might complain that while Jin only uses a single katana, Atsu can use four different melee weapons (I am not counting dual katanas as a separate weapon). That is true, but Jin is able to use that one weapon so well, it does the job of those four weapons.
Allow me to explain. In Tsushima, different stances worked best with different enemies. So, for instance, if you were facing an enemy who only had swords, you used Stone Stance. If they had a shield, you used Water Stance. This goes on this way for four different stances, changing how Jin moved and was animated. If you used the wrong stance for the wrong enemy, you struggled to fight them. By comparison, in Yotei, Atsu can’t change stances, but instead uses entirely different weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies. The game even maps the command to switch weapons almost exactly the same way it mapped changing stances in Tsushima. So, which is better? Being able to use four weapons but not be a master of any of them? Or to be so good with one weapon that it’s all you need? You could say that Atsu is a ‘jack of all weapons, master of none’ and that kind of phrasing is rarely a compliment.
But at the same time, I think the game was a little defensive about being accused of making a Mary Sue character. So, they make sure it takes time for her to even be just okay with each new weapon. For instance, they create mini games for training that you are supposed to fail. At first when I saw what they were asking me to do I thought ‘they have got to be kidding’ because it was so difficult. Then I tried, failed, and realized that I was supposed to fail because of the cutscene that followed, which I found to be irritatingly defensive. If they really want to emphasize that it took time for Atsu to learn this new weapon, just do a montage or fade to black and say ‘six months later’ or something like that.
But the gameplay really is extremely well done. Starting with the excellent Infamous series, which was about superheroes, more or less, Sucker Punch showed that they knew how to make you feel empowered while still making you feel challenged. And both games are very good at making you feel that way.
Is there any politics in this? I would have a hard time believing they didn’t make the protagonist a woman ‘because feminism.’ But then again, that’s why James Cameron turned Ellen Ripley into a warrior in Aliens. The difference was Cameron knew how to make it make sense within the story’s context. The genius move Cameron did was to make Newt into Ripley’s surrogate daughter (in a deleted scene, you learn that Ellen’s daughter Amanda had died while Ellen was in cryo-sleep—the same daughter in the game Alien: Isolation). Thus, it was easy to accept that Ripley would go after Newt when an alien grabs her and get fierce in the process, because everyone understands that hell hath no fury like a woman protecting her child. I call it ‘Momma Bear Syndrome.’ Likewise, the people making this game make Atsu make sense as a warrior.
Although to be fair to the developers, I can think of one ‘story’ reason why they might have made Atsu a woman: They didn’t want her to be a samurai. While women were occasionally samurai that was also rare for women back then, and maybe they didn’t want to repeat the storyline from Tsushima where a samurai struggles with whether or not to engage in dishonorable tactics in order to win. I’m just making a guess, but it fits the facts.
And without giving anything away before the spoiler warning, the end is not the woke nonsense you might have heard it was.
So, without spoilers, I can say that if you liked Tsushima, you’ll probably like Yotei, too, but maybe not as much. Honestly, it is overall mostly more of the same. There are small innovations in the gameplay, but nothing so radical as to make this game unrecognizable. As they say, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. And if you have never played any of the games, hopefully I will have given you enough to make an educated guess whether or not you like it.
And that brings me to the ….
SPOILER ALERT
… Still with me? I mean, I am not just going to spoil this game, but I am going to spoil other games, although all of the other games I’ll spoil are at least five years old.
So, let’s get a little bit deeper into the ‘is it woke?’ controversy. And frankly, even hearing about the controversy unfortunately spoiled the game a bit for me, because it telegraphed certain things about the ending. It might be the reason why I don’t like the story as much as I did with Tsushima.
It all comes from posts like this:
— Grummz (@Grummz) October 7, 2025
That is not a literal line in the game and I don’t think Grummz thinks anyone would be confused and think it is. It is a mocking reference to a scene in The Last of Us’ second season (meaning the HBO series) where a bisexual woman tells her lesbian lover (main character Ellie) that she is pregnant from a previous straight relationship and the lesbian (Ellie) says this. Some one even made an AI version of that fake scene:
— ParasiteX (@ParasiteX_369) October 7, 2025
I don’t care who you are, that is pretty funny. ‘Fake but funny’ is a term I often use and it applies here.
The gist of the allegation is that it ends with Atsu and a woman named Oyuki being lesbian lovers and having a kid together somehow. I even saw a post on Twitter/X that I can’t find right now where the author claimed that Yotei was doing this to mimic the end of The Last of Us Part II.
And it is complete bull. Not only does that not describe the end of Yotei, but that post I couldn’t find wasn’t even accurate about the ending of The Last of Us Part II, and if the show follows the game, it doesn’t describe the end of that arc on the show, either (I haven't watched season 2 yet and I'm not sure if I ever will). But to sort out the bull from the truth, I have to spoil a huge part of the end in Yotei.
First off, remember how I said that Atsu’s whole family was wiped out? Well, I kind of lied, in the sense that I was repeating the false information the game gave you toward the beginning so that if you only read the spoiler-free part of this review, you would be surprised as Atsu was when she finds out she was wrong. While her parents were murdered by the Yotei Six, her twin brother, Jubei, actually survived and Atsu doesn’t realize it until she is hunting down one of the Six, who is called the Oni. (‘Oni’ means demon, more or less.) Jubei is now a samurai and he tries to help his sister in her quest for revenge. Apparently, both of them assumed the other was dead and no one in that world knows that the rule in fiction is that if you don’t see the dead body, then they aren’t dead. (And sometimes even if you see a dead body, they might still come back.) As the story goes on, you learn that Jubei has a daughter named Kiku.
Another of the Yotei Six is called the Kitsune, who always wears a mask based on the mythological nine-tailed fox spirit that person is named after. As you pursue the Kitsune, you meet Oyuki, the alleged eventual lesbian lover to Atsu. She is a musician in an inn who offers to help you with your quest to kill the Kitsune. Eventually you face off against him and he says that he had nothing to do with the murder of Atsu’s parents: It was a different person wearing the Kitsune mask. And soon after that, you learn that Oyuki was the Kitsune on the night her parents were murdered. But she reveals that she tried to help Atsu get away only for Atsu to be captured and nearly killed by the main bad guy, Lord Saito. One particularly memorable detail is that Oyuki was punished by Saito by being branded. Oyuki explains that only Saito knew she was a woman under the mask and if the others knew she was a woman, things would go very badly for her. So she had to keep herself from crying out and giving away she was a woman as she was branded. After that, Oyuki tried to plot against Saito and ended up being outmaneuvered, with her apprentice taking over as the new Kitsune.
Eventually, Atsu does find it in her heart to forgive Oyuki. But they don’t become lesbian lovers as some are suggesting. In fact, just like in the first game, there is no romance in the game at all. Now, shifting back to Tsushima, it wouldn’t shock me if after the story is over, Jin might have eventually ended up with Yuna, the thief who saved his life. They had good chemistry. But there is nothing that confirms that this happened. Yuna and Jin might have just remained good friends until the day they died. And I can imagine that some people will claim that Atsu and Oyuki are ‘coded’ as lesbians. I mean, the idiot who ran the Acolyte show thought that Anna and Elsa were coded as a lesbian relationship in Frozen, as mentioned in this article:
Elon Musk Reacts To Leslye Headland Describing ‘The Acolyte’ As Lesbian Fan Fiction With A Star Wars Veneer: “Reality Is Actually Crazier Than The South Park Parody” https://t.co/YJxP4jCaX7
— That Park Place (@TPPNewsNetwork) March 21, 2024
So, who knows what weird things people might read into this game. But even though I was on the lookout for any suggestion that they might eventually become lovers, I saw no sign of it. And frankly it is not very believable overall, because Oyuki was associated with such a traumatic event and my sense of Atsu as a character is that it is an unsurmountable barrier to romance between them—assuming she was a lesbian in the first place. Really, the game doesn’t say anything about her sexuality because she doesn’t have any time for romance.
Still, as you might have guessed, by the end of the story her brother Jubei dies. Then we get an epilogue six months later and you see Atsu is taking care of her niece, Kiku, which is pretty much the obvious thing. I mean, the young girl had no other family on this earth that the game mentions. And as for Oyuki? She’s depicted as visiting the farm Atsu and Kiku live on—as in, this is not an everyday occurrence. So, they aren’t even living together—they are just friends.
Now, maybe some people would call it woke that a man dies to be replaced by a woman raising his daughter, but I don’t see it, especially because his unnamed wife died when his daughter was young, so he initially replaced her. And honestly, it seemed to be more about one of the theme of the story than any kind of man-hating, talking about the cost of revenge and Atsu needing to find something to live for, beyond revenge.
Because the overall theme of the story is how destructive revenge can be. The funny thing is that this makes it is the second time that a Sony game’s plot seems to have been written in part as a reaction the games in The Last of Us series. And let me warn you now, as I warned you before, I am going to SPOIL at least three more games as I make this point.
The first time I got that feeling was when I played the 2018 Spider-Man game (you can call it by its official name Marvel’s Spider-Man if you want, but I’m not going to). I felt like the end of the game was a direct reaction to original The Last of Us. That game was pretty well adapted into the first season of the HBO show of the same name, so I am spoiling that, too.
The first The Last of Us game is about a zombie-like outbreak and the main character, Joel, loses his teenage daughter right at the beginning. Then he has to protect another teenage girl named Ellie who happens to be immune to the disease (I’m using that term ‘disease’ kind of loosely). He takes her across the country to a lab in an abandoned hospital where they hope they can create a vaccine and gradually he gets close to her. Remember how we had a bunch of stories about an old man taking care of a young person gradually becoming like a surrogate father to the girl? Movies like Logan, TV shows like The Mandalorian, and even the 2018 God of War game (although Kratos is literally the father in that one)? I am pretty sure this game inspired most of them.
Anyway, Joel gets her to the lab and they give him the devastating news: The only way to create the vaccine is to kill Ellie. Joel loses it and kills everyone he has to, to get to Ellie and get her out, while she was unconscious and being prepped for the procedure. And Joel even lies to her when she wakes up and says that the vaccine wouldn’t work, so that is why he got her out of there. It’s dark but its human. Some people said he did nothing wrong. Some people go the other way and say that actually this means Joel is a villain. I would say it’s just human.
And I think the 2018 Spider-Man game’s ending was written as an answer to that. In that game, Doctor Octopus releases a plague on New York City and he also has the cure—a single dose, but they can use it to make more. Additionally, Aunt May is sick with the disease. As Peter goes in for his final showdown with Doc. Ock., Mary Jane tells him Aunt May only has about an hour to live. Peter gets the cure and brings it to a doctor who helped make the disease (long story), who is also taking care of his aunt and then this happens:
If you don’t want to watch the video, Peter is left with an impossible choice. He could cure his Aunt, but let millions of other New Yorkers die of this plague. Or he could let his Aunt die, and save those millions. And it isn’t easy but with Aunt May’s guidance, he lets her die and makes that sacrifice. And I couldn’t help but think that this whole sequence was an answer to the ending of The Last of Us, basically saying ‘this is what a hero does. And Joel is not a hero.’
I don’t even think they were mad about the ending of The Last of Us. I just think they wanted to make a contrast between the characters. Joel’s decision was selfish but understandable and very human. Peter, on the other hand, was being a hero.
And I get the feeling that Yotei is equally a response to The Last of Us Part II, and to be very blunt, Yotei compares really favorably with that game. For those non-gamers who have read this far, The Last of Us Part II is extremely divisive in terms of its story. And the second season of the show, which is reportedly based on half of that story, has cratered in the ratings. Many people hate the story. And I feel like Yotei was a response to that, basically telling the people who made The Last of Us Part II, ‘this is how you make a story about the destructiveness of revenge.’ In other words, I think there is a lot more of a critique in how they are responding to The Last of Us Part II.
Thus, both games deal with how destructive revenge can be, but I think the storytelling is just 1,000% better in Yotei. But to explain why, I have to talk a little more about The Last of Us Part II. In that game, one of the most controversial decisions was to kill off Joel. As in, a character named Abby—who you often play as—tracks down and kills Joel and the rest of the game is about Ellie’s quest for revenge. Call me weird, but I was open to them killing off Joel when I played the game. But I just don’t think they told their story of revenge and how harmful it could be nearly as well as they did with Yotei. For me, it was the excessive switching between the new main character, Ellie, and Abby, that killed The Last of Us Part II's narrative. It just destroyed the pacing. They create a cliffhanger where Ellie is about to kill Abby, and then they suddenly switch to a long stretch where you control Abby and the average player just wouldn’t want to get away from that cliff hanger and get involving in upgrading a character you know you probably won’t stick with, anyway. Then there is literally a moment where Ellie becomes a ‘boss’ type enemy to Abby. Then you go to kill Ellie as Abby and the game has you switch and have to save Ellie from Abby whom you were controlling just a split second before. It was a baffling decision, artistically, and it was just plain bad in my eyes.
And all of this was based on the apparent belief that you have to play as Abby to understand why she killed Joel—which is an insult to our intelligence. It isn’t exactly rocket science to understand why Abby wanted to kill Joel. Joel killed her father, during his rampage when he was rescuing Ellie from the lab, so Abby wanted to kill Joel. A single line of dialogue would have explained that. We aren’t dumb, Neil Druckmann.
Yotei handles a similar story of the costs of revenge with much more skill. Much like Tsushima was refreshingly straightforward compared to Assassin’s Creed, Yotei is refreshingly straightforward compared to The Last of Us Part II. I won’t spoil everything in this spoiler discussion, but by the end you understand main villain Lord Saito’s motive, even if you can’t forgive his behavior. Really, you have a pretty good idea where every member of the Yotei Six is coming from by the end, with the exception of the Snake, whom you killed in the prologue.
But the focus remains on Atsu and the ending is vital to her journey—which is why I don’t think it is political. The game is about a woman going into a dark place in her single-minded quest for revenge and eventually finding her way out of the darkness. Atsu literally starts off telling people that she planned to kill the Yotei Six and then to die afterward. She doesn’t see herself having a life after she finishes her mission and that is partially because she doesn’t think she has anything else to live for. But by the end, she realizes her desire for revenge shouldn’t consume her anymore. Her finding a purpose for living beyond revenge (in part as becoming an adoptive mother to her niece) was the end of that journey. That’s why she was raising her niece at the end, not some weird anti-man impulse.
Another point to clean up is how the game discourages you from stealth early on. I promised to explain my point more in the spoiler discussion and even to give you a tip on how to mitigate that. So as promised:
Tip: The fastest way to get many of the tools you need to do stealth is to pursue the Kitsune first. The game really encourages you to go after the Oni first, but if you go after the Kitsune first, you will get a decent outfit for stealth automatically (the Nine Tail Armor), you will learn how to detect hidden people by hearing (a la The Last of Us), and you will get smoke bombs. In addition to that, you will have the opportunity to track down the best stealth armor (in my humble opinion): The Crimson Kimono.
Furthermore, that takes you into a northern region where you can get a kusarigama. The best I can do to describe that weapon to you is as a chain where one end is a sharp hook, and the other is a metal ball somewhat like a morning star flail. Not only is it useful for countering enemies with shields, but it is also useful in stealth. You will very much like what you can do with a kusarigama when you are trying to be stealthy.
But the game really, really discourages you from going after the Kitsune first. You have to actively make sure that when the game gives you an option to learn about the members of the Yotei Six, to ask about the Kitsune first. And the game creates clear incentives to go after the Oni, first, and then the Kitsune, such as making it difficult to upgrade your weapons if you take them out of order. You’re very much going against the grain if you go after the Kitsune, first, but if you doggedly go after the Kitsune as I suggest, you should be able to do it.
Finally, let me say a little more about why the story didn’t quite hit as well with me as Tsushima did. The comparison I made to a friend is with the game Spider-Man (2018) and its sequels. As I said to that friend, the first game was incredible, in terms of gameplay and story, but where do you go from there with the story? How do you top that or even equal it?—especially in terms of story? It’s not like you can kill Aunt May twice and killing another beloved character would seem repetitive. It’s the challenge of doing something different but equally good and powerful and that seems like a pretty hard thing to pull off. I would be impressed if they could do it, but I am not surprised if they couldn’t.
Or consider what happened with the Star Trek movies after Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Wrath was an all-time great—one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen regardless of genre. But it was almost impossible to replicate it. The Search for Spock was underrated in my mind precisely because it came right after Wrath and paled by comparison, but I think the fandom is starting to recognize that it was a gem, even if it wasn’t as good as Wrath. (Seriously, watch the moment when Kirk learns that his son has died and tell me Shatner is not a good actor.) And trying to recreate Wrath by imitating it, either by killing off Data in Nemesis or flipping the characters in Into Darkness was somehow even worse. After Wrath, the series was at its best when it just tried to carry on, without trying to top Wrath or even to seem very much like it, particularly in The Undiscovered Country. But in a weird way, Wrath was so great I think it kind of cursed the rest of the series to many people. Lightning struck, but it wouldn’t strike again and I think it made the rest of the movies look worse by comparison in a lot of people’s eyes.
And that’s how I feel about Tsushima v. Yotei. No, Yotei isn’t as good as Tsushima. Few games are. But I’m not going to let how much I love Tsushima prevent me from seeing how good Yotei still is, just as I still loved The Search for Spock even if it wasn’t as good as the Wrath of Khan. And if you come in with appropriately calibrated expectations, maybe you will enjoy it as much as I did.
But that’s just my opinion, and it is very subjective. Hopefully, I have informed your purchasing decision. Still, I plan to read the comments to find out if anyone else in our community played through these games and to hear what they thought of them.
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