When Sucker Punch creative director Jason Connell went to Hokkaido on a research trip, he saw Mount Yotei reflected in a massive body of water. The beautiful landscape swallowed him up, capturing him in all its surreality, forcing him to contemplate his place as a small spec amidst the grandeur of nature. It’s a feeling that can be overwhelming on its own, but probably more so when you have to attempt to replicate that on a 2D screen.
Ghost of Yotei takes us to Ezo, the historical Japanese island where Mount Yotei is located. Compared to the island of Tsushima, it’s huge. As game developers, the team at Sucker Punch had to capture that scale while squishing it down into a playable space, all while trying not to lose the magic of what it feels like to be swallowed whole by the world.
“Nothing will ever replace being somewhere,” Connell says. “The next best thing we can do as creators, as artists, is transport people to a place. Much of the decisions that we make are trying to elicit that transportative feeling. I feel so lucky to be working with the artists that we have. You’ve gotta hit them with the music, gotta make them feel something. I wasn’t listening to music when I was there, but it does help on the screen to elicit feelings. Films do it with motion and movement, sound, and colors, and not just the actual image. It’s 10% of all these little things adding up to what’s in that frame.”
Sony
One major movie inspiration for this sequel was Yojimbo, the Kurosawa film about a wandering ronin. In the opening scenes, he comes to a fork in the road and tosses a stick in the air to choose which way to travel, much like how you follow the wind, woodland creatures, and your own curiosity in Ghost of Yotei. Lady Snowblood, a classic revenge story, is another. But not all of Sucker Punch’s inspirations came from live action — sometimes you have to look at animation to capture the essence of motion.
“Princess Mononoke was another inspiration,” Connell says. “It’s an amazing film. Hokkaido and the Ainu are very loosely referenced. There’s a wolf in there. There’s a lot about nature.”
The indigenous people of the land, the Ainu, were conspicuously absent in Tsushima, but Yotei fixes that oversight, digging into their culture and customs. You meet them on the road, visit their homes, and learn about them throughout Atsu’s story. All the lessons Sucker Punch learned on Tsushima gave Sucker Punch the space to explore new areas.
“Whether it’s combat or mannerisms or writing style or etiquette, props, you name it — whatever it was, it was a wholesale immersion [on Tsushima],” Connell explains. “This one, we had a lot of that, a lot of those advisors worked with us again, and we felt more comfortable in those areas. But the Ainu, especially in Hokkaido, they’re really well known for being up there. So we ran across it very quickly. We’re like, ‘Hey, this is an area we were completely ignorant to.’ I had no idea. And so we invested, and tried to reach out to some folks.”
This outreach led to some Sucker Punch developers travelling to spend time among the Ainu in Hokkaido, where they took them foraging, taught them what was edible and what wasn’t, then they went back home with them and made food together. For their beautiful patterned clothing, the Ainu drew a variety of their designs on translucent paper so Sucker Punch could digitize them and bring them to the game.
Sony
Making a video game is hard, but building a new IP from scratch is even worse. Decisions you make early on are often locked in, and you’re constantly figuring out the rules and limits of what you’re creating while trying to, you know, actually make it at the same time. In Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch didn’t even nail the art direction until two and a half years into development. Ghost of Yotei stands on the shoulders of all that foundational work, allowing the developers to explore things more deeply.
This also extends to what you do in the world as a player. One of my biggest issues with Tsushima was how repetitive some of the side activities were. Yotei works tirelessly to keep you feeling surprised, even for repeatable things like bamboo cutting.
“We planned for that better this time,” Connell says. “If we are going to use similar types of mini games – bamboo chops, wolf chases – each one has to try to present a new challenge, or try to present something exciting that happens, some creative curve ball to the experience. We also tried to create a more diegetic world experience, and that’s the feedback we got. Direct messages to me sometimes. I know our team felt it. It was cool to be able to spend a couple years just taking what’s there and making it more immersive and less I’m going to hold your hand.”
It’s a key change that pulls you into the world of Yotei, which is much more expansive than Tsushima, with wide open sightlines and massive fields large enough to support entire herds of animals. Instead of feeling like sections of golden forest and blocks of bamboo grove, the biomes fit together more naturally and each crest of a hill tempts you to pull out your spyglass to see what you can find on the horizon.
“From an art direction perspective and from a mechanical perspective, it was important to us to increase the feeling of the openness, and that really makes it feel vast,” Connell says. “Because Hokkaido, in real life, is massive compared to the tiny island of Tsushima. We obviously can’t and shouldn’t make a game that’s 40 times bigger. That seems ridiculous, but can we make you feel like it’s vast? We do that in this game by increasing sight lines and designing the world to really maximize space.”
It’s a world you’ll be able to explore for yourself when Ghost of Yotei launches for PS5 on October 2.
AloJapan.com