\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>tsu is no samurai. The lead character in Ghost of Y\u014dtei is a wandering sellsword from a lowly family. Her sex and lack of status mean that, following the murders of her family, she has no fixed place in 17th-century Japanese society, and there is no permitted path for her to tread if she is to get revenge on the Y\u014dtei Six, the men who killed her loved ones. As the game\u2019s co-director Nate Fox puts it, \u201cAtsu is not somebody who walks in to a room and people pay respect to.\u201d<\/p>\n Y\u014dtei\u2019s predecessor, Sucker Punch Productions\u2019 2020 sprawling open-world game Ghost of Tsushima, is the story of a samurai, Jin Sakai, who shreds his honour to defend his homeland. Jin can\u2019t repel the Mongols attacking Tsushima as a noble warrior, but as \u201cthe Ghost\u201d, a fear-inspiring legend willing to use any dirty tactic to gain the upper hand, he can. If Ghost of Tsushima is about a man grappling with the trade of one kind of power for another, Y\u014dtei sees Atsu seize the only power she can with both hands.<\/p>\n <\/span>Peak of achievement \u2026 Ghost of Y\u014dtei.<\/span> Photograph: Sony Interactive Entertainment<\/p>\n Atsu adopts the mantle of an onry\u014d<\/em>, a revenge spirit from Japanese folklore. By embracing this legend, she becomes a figure of fear to her enemies. While the resulting game is similar to Tsushima \u2013 in Ghost of Y\u014dtei you also travel across a romanticised open-world recreation of feudal Japan on horseback, carving up your enemies with precise strokes of your katana \u2013 the shift from high-class samurai to vagrant sellsword shows itself in unexpected ways.<\/p>\n \u201cShe has a different life than Jin, and we want to bring that out through interactivity,\u201d Fox says. That means removing Ghost of Tsushima\u2019s contemplative moments, such as those during which Jin would meditate on his surroundings and transform his struggle into haiku. \u201cJin was a scholarly samurai; he would pause to reflect and take in the beauty of nature. Atsu is not that person.\u201d Those moments softened the rough edges of Tsushima, a mellowing that Sucker Punch doesn\u2019t want to apply to the feral world of Y\u014dtei. Atsu doesn\u2019t write poems; she collects bounties as she hunts down the warriors that stalk Hokkaido.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Sucker Punch also expresses the difference in protagonists with a subtle innovation for open-world games: a movable campsite. \u201cWe like creating features that are tonally supportive,\u201d Y\u014dtei\u2019s other game director, Jason Connell, says. \u201cCamping is something you would expect in a world like this.\u201d And Fox adds, \u201cAtsu\u2019s a sellsword used to sleeping rough\u201d.<\/p>\n As game worlds have expanded and the numbers of questlines and upgrade trees have multiplied, it has created a barrier of administration between players and the worlds they\u2019re exploring. Instead of moving on foot, they use fast travel to warp between markers on the map. \u201cIt\u2019s discordant,\u201d Connell says. One moment you might be in a tropical forest fighting mercenaries, the next you\u2019re on a mountaintop upgrading a weapon before hopping to a beach to deliver a quest item. Atsu\u2019s camp is Sucker Punch\u2019s attempt to redress this disruption and wrap the world around the player. Quest givers, shopkeepers and key characters will now visit you, providing a way to continue your journey without interrupting the flow of the story. \u201cIt\u2019s a convenience,\u201d Connell says, \u201cand a more diegetic experience.\u201d<\/p>\n In this way, Y\u014dtei is set to be both an evolution of Ghost of Tsushima and an inversion. Set 300 years after the first game and on the other side of Japan, with the player wearing the sandals of a character from the opposite end of society, it promises to be a familiar world filled with unexpected change.<\/p>\n Ghost of Y\u014dtei is released on PlayStation 5, on 2 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Atsu is no samurai. The lead character in Ghost of Y\u014dtei is a wandering sellsword from a lowly family. Her sex and lack of status mean that, following the murders of her family, she has no fixed place in 17th-century Japanese society, and there is no permitted path for her to tread if she is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[11602,11604,378,4905,3241,11603,6556,2184,11601],"class_list":{"0":"post-18968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-determined","9":"tag-feudal","10":"tag-games","11":"tag-ghost","12":"tag-japan","13":"tag-outsider","14":"tag-revenge","15":"tag-seeks","16":"tag-yotei"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}