Well, that was a bit of a gear shift wasn’t it? After about fifteen minutes of standard new-weapons-and-mechanics chatter in Ghost of Yōtei’s big gameplay deep dive reveal video last night, we moved on to that section I think we probably all saw coming. The one where Sucker Punch starts talking about Japanese film directors and the mud from 13 Assassins and how it’s licensed wind from Akira Kurosawa’s estate. But then– : can I interest you in some lo-fi chillhop beats to study/decapitate to?
I’m being a bit sassy with poor Sucker Punch here, who only want to tell you how excited they are about their new game like everyone else. But, listen, I think I can get away with that because in all honesty, like Sucker Punch, I too am a sucker for this stuff. I’m a white guy who’s been to Japan a couple times and – surprise – now has a Google Doc with an excessively detailed Tokyo-and-Kyoto restaurant itinerary on it. I bought a kitchen knife in Asakusa and for a very brief time got really into making little cocktails with flavoured sake. And I have hovered, for the best part of a year, over the Buy button for a nearly two-metre-tall French Grande Kurosawa exhibition poster on Ebay that absolutely would not fit in my living room. In other words: I get it! Samurais are cool; I am a cliché. Guilty as charged.
This is really where the strange conflict of this mini series – Ghost of Tsushima and now Yōtei – comes in. On the one hand, what have we got here? Well, largely a group of earnest nerds making something they really care about, with as much attention and sincerity as they can possibly bring to it, which usually results in something pretty great. That thing, in this case, is also not something to be thought too hard about, at least on the surface. Ghost of Tsushima was ultimately a well-excuted take on a very familiar, middle-of-the-road third-person action game intentionally made for a broad audience. You sneak a bit and stab a bit and fill out a simple skill tree and have an ultimate-slash-rage-mode activated by pressing L3 and R3 together like at least six other contemporary Sony first-party action games. And that’s fine! It’s an action blockbuster movie!
If you believe in meeting things where they are and evaluating games according to what they’re trying to do, then it achieves its own goals very well. Ghost of Tsushima and, we can be fairly certain, Ghost of Yōtei are not High Art, in the same way many of the movies they take such overt inspiration from are for the most part ; bracingly fun, not-too-serious popcorn joints that are ultimately about making the viewer quietly mutter “hell yeah” to themselves when someone blocks an arrow with a sword. They are exceptional, low-barrier-to-entry entertainment, and needn’t strive to be anything more to be considered great in their own right.