‘Ghost of Yōtei’ Reviewed: Bloody Revenge and Strange Comfort in a Sprawling Open World
If there’s a calibration that suits your own personal dream of a samurai epic with you at its center, Ghost of Yōtei probably offers it. The game begins as heroine Atsu confronts and kills a masked man known as The Snake. Atsu, we quickly learn, is serving revenge. More than a decade earlier, when she was a child, a group of lethal enforcers called the Yōtei Six descended upon her homestead and murdered her parents. Now, after years of diligent training, Atsu has returned to slice up the Yōtei Six one by one. The order is up to you, but you know you’ll have all their heads eventually.
This is a satisfyingly straightforward plan of attack, and while Ghost of Yōtei soon busies the player with an array of side tasks—painting landscapes, cutting bamboo stalks, soaking in hot springs, etc.—the core narrative keeps the game humming along. Northern Japan has been trampled, dishonored, and degraded by its cruel, self-appointed rulers; you, a much-whispered-about legend called the onryō, are justice incarnate, cutting a bloody streak across the countryside. At the time of this writing, I am some 20 hours into the game’s sprawling narrative. I have basically never not had fun playing it, and there’s much game left ahead of me.
What do we want from an open world? It’s a question that’s haunted me lately. As I’ve looked at the real world around me—processing what feels, more often than not, like a never-ending string of new horrors—an unwelcome thought keeps coming into my head: Of all the worlds human beings could have created, this is the one we’ve chosen?
Ghost of Yōtei is, theoretically, a welcome break from all that. But the real world also has a way of intruding on the fictional one. In a pattern that has grown grimly routine for the video game industry, Ghost of Yōtei had already drawn heated criticism—from depressingly predictable quarters—first by building the game around Atsu, a female protagonist, and then by casting genderfluid actor Erika Ishii as that heroine.
That “controversy,” at least, was largely consigned to YouTube and X, where there are clear social and economic incentives for stoking such fires. But more tangible real-world consequences came earlier this month when Drew Harrison, an artist on Ghost of Yōtei, made a social media joke about the murder of Charlie Kirk—sparking the same kind of coordinated campaign, encouraged by Vice President J.D. Vance, to cancel anyone, in any industry, deemed insufficiently reverent about Kirk’s killing. Fewer than 24 hours later, Harrison had been fired by the studio. But the game still arrives under a cloud—from some who remain outraged that one of the studio’s former employees would ever have made such a joke, and from others who are outraged that Sony wouldn’t stand behind her.
All this cultural baggage is, frankly, too much to put on Ghost of Yōtei, which above all aims to please. In this game, nature is revered and protected; enemies are easily identified and vanquished; and joyful, satisfying experiences are plentiful. It is a comforting place to spend some of your precious time.
