Ghost of Yotei Needs to Be Far More Inventive Than Ghost of Tsushima

I am in a minority of players who thought Ghost of Tsushima was pretty mediocre. Don’t get me wrong: Sucker Punch’s latest action-adventure game was gorgeous, featured some fantastic presentation, and had a world that was fun to get lost in. For the most part, though, I found Ghost of Tsushima to be a pretty cookie-cutter open-world game that didn’t do anything all that novel when compared to other games in its genre like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring. With its sequel, Ghost of Yotei, having now been announced, though, I’m hopeful that Sucker Punch will choose to do so much more this time around that will differentiate Yotei from its contemporaries. 

Outside of its reveal trailer, there still aren’t many public details available for Ghost of Yotei. It’s known that the sequel will take place over 300 years after Ghost of Tsushima, will be set in the area around Mount Yotei, and will focus on a new protagonist known only as Astu. Other than this, Sucker Punch is remaining dodgy about its story and has said even less about its gameplay differences when compared to Tsushima, although it has promised that there will be “new mechanics, gameplay improvements, and even new weapons.

To me, where Ghost of Yotei really needs to differ itself from Ghost of Tsushima is with the activities that litter its world. Petting foxes and writing haikus was initially enjoyable in Ghost of Tsushima, but upon doing each over a dozen times, it became mind-numbingly boring. Part of my own frustration on this front might stem from the fact that I’m an open-world completionist. I like to do everything an open-world game throws at me just to get the satisfaction of seeing 100% completion. 

What hindered Ghost of Tsushima further for me on this front is that the side activities in the world often felt counterintuitive to progressing in the main story. This is something that a lot of open-world games struggle with as it’s hard to marry the push of a throughline narrative with this ability to go off the beaten path and do meaningless tasks.

One way that I think Ghost of Yotei could look to resolve this is to make its story more open-ended. The game’s debut trailer suggests that its main character, Astu, will be hunting down other ronin that are spread across Mount Yotei. Rather than taking down each of these adversaries in a specific order and making its storyline linear, Sucker Punch should just dump players into its world and give them a broad task that they have to complete however they choose. This is something that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did particularly well, as Nintendo’s foray into open-world design tried to funnel players down a certain route while still giving them the freedom to go anywhere at any time.

In 2024, I feel like we’ve evolved past the point where open-world games are nothing more than vast areas filled with key AOEs that players are meant to interact with. This is something that Ubisoft popularized over a decade ago with its own games, but it’s time to move on. If Ghost of Yotei’s open-world structure was simply an expansion on what was already seen in Tsushima, it would lead to the game feeling extremely dated, no matter how gorgeous it might look. 

Outside of its open-world design, I think Ghost of Yotei also needs to push for more freedom in the realm of combat. Ghost of Tsushima offered a handful of different stances for players to use, but each stance had to be used to take down specific enemies. It was a rock-paper-scissors-style fighting system where you were essentially forced to use certain sword styles to beat foes that were weak against those styles. And if you tried not to abide by these rules, the game itself would freeze and alert you with a message telling you that you need to change your stance. 

I’m not saying that sword styles need to be eliminated entirely from Ghost of Yotei, but they just need to be incorporated in a manner that isn’t so forceful. The second katana that Atsu can be seen wielding in the Ghost of Yotei trailer is clearly going to mix up combat and will likely be one of the main aspects of the new mechanics that Sucker Punch will introduce. My desire is to just see the forced nature of some of Tsushima’s mechanics either done away with entirely or at least greatly diminished. 

Even though Ghost of Tsushima didn’t land with me in the way I hoped it would, I’m still very much on board with Ghost of Yotei. Sucker Punch has been one of my favorite studios since I was a kid and I think it’s easily one of the most talented companies in PlayStation’s first-party stable. In a year of 2025 that is already looking filled to the brim with high-profile releases, Ghost of Yotei is already standing out amongst the crowd and is a game I’ll be playing the moment that it launches. Hopefully, Sucker Punch can experiment a bit more with this sequel and push the open-world genre forward as a result.