Ghost of Tsushima

• 1. Introduction

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  Ghost of Tsushima is a 2020 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Its hero is Jin Sakai, a samurai defending Tsushima Island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, which began in 1274. Jin soon learns that the warrior code he was raised on cannot stop an enemy with superior weapons. He can fight honorably, or he can use practical methods that the samurai despise but that cost fewer lives. The island can be crossed on foot or on horseback. Every fight can be a direct duel with a katana or a quiet assassination from the shadows. Why would a studio that had built one franchise choose to walk away from it? How did the team make a distant century feel real enough to walk through? Why did they throw out the usual map and compass? And what did critics and players make of a samurai who becomes a legend by breaking the rules?

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• 2. Chasing Authenticity

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  Development began in 2014, as soon as Sucker Punch finished Infamous Second Son and its expansion, First Light. After nine years with the Infamous series, the studio wanted something new. It settled on an open world game with a heavy emphasis on melee combat. The setting was not obvious at first. Pirates, the Scottish outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor and The Three Musketeers were all considered. Then the team found a historical account of the Mongol invasion of Tsushima, and, in their words, "the entire vision clicked into place."

  The conflict suited a game because it was "easy for people to immediately conceptualize." The Mongols had the most advanced military in the world at the time, so the stakes demanded that Jin, and therefore the player, step in. About 160 people worked at the studio during development. Nate Fox served as game director, while Jason Connell was both creative director and art director. The project took six years, the longest for any game the studio had made. A prototype from a cancelled steampunk project called Prophecy later leaked in 2020, and it showed gameplay ideas that were carried over.

  Japan Studio, a fellow Sony team, was excited by the idea and helped fly about 10 members of Sucker Punch to Tsushima Island. They took a guided tour with a historian that lasted 10 or 11 days. The team traveled to Japan twice, once in summer and again in November, on the anniversary of the invasion. Historians advised on the invasion and on local customs and traditions. Other experts covered Japanese dialects, religion in the 13th century and the recreation of 13th-century kanji.

  Sword fighting got its own specialists. Ide Ryusetsu and Kuwami Masakumo Shike, from a samurai martial arts school, performed motion capture and advised on swordplay. David Ishimaru, a historical sword fighting expert based in Seattle, helped shape the combat style.

  Authenticity still had limits. Experts warned the team that placing real historical figures in the story would be insensitive, so the developers held back. Jin's armor and katana are not historically accurate, and his armor draws on the Sengoku period of the 16th and 17th centuries. Chris Zimmerman, a Sucker Punch cofounder, said real samurai armor from the 13th century was "jarring looking" and clashed with what players expect. The katana stayed because it was seen as the "quintessential icon of samurai." A Japanese localizer proposed swapping the haiku side quest for a waka quest, which would be less anachronistic. The idea was rejected because haiku is far better recognized outside Japan.

  The research had a surprising result years later. In March 2021, Fox and Connell were named tourism ambassadors to Tsushima Island for spreading "the name and history of Tsushima through their works."

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• 3. Honor Versus the Ghost

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  On Komoda Beach, the samurai of Tsushima meet the Mongol landing and are cut down. The island's five great families, Shimura, Sakai, Adachi, Nagao and Kikuchi, had joined forces under the jitō, Lord Shimura. The Mongols, led by General Khotun Khan, have far better weapons. The Khan is a cousin of Kublai Khan and a grandson of Genghis Khan. Shimura is captured, and his nephew Jin is badly wounded and left for dead. A scavenger named Yuna revives him and tells him the whole island has fallen. Jin storms Castle Kaneda to rescue his uncle, but the Khan defeats him and throws him off the castle bridge.

  Jin concludes that he cannot win alone or with traditional samurai tactics. Yuna teaches him guerrilla warfare, and he gathers allies. They include her blacksmith brother Taka, the swindler Kenji, the archer Sadanobu Ishikawa and the warrior Masako Adachi. His mercenary friend Ryuzo joins too, bringing the Straw Hat rōnin. As Jin frees villages, islanders begin to speak of "The Ghost," a samurai spirit risen against the invaders. Taka forges a grappling hook so Jin can scale the walls of Castle Kaneda. Starving and desperate, Ryuzo and the Straw Hats then betray Jin to claim the bounty the Khan placed on him. Jin fights them off, frees Shimura and retakes the castle. By then the Khan has already left to conquer Castle Shimura, with Ryuzo at his side.

  Winning that second castle is costly. Jin gathers the warrior monk Norio, his fellow monks and the disgraced Yarikawa family. The pirate Goro carries Shimura's petition to the shogun, asking for reinforcements and for approval to adopt Jin as heir. Jin and Taka are then ambushed and captured by the Khan. The Khan offers Taka his freedom if he kills Jin. Taka attacks the Khan instead and is killed. Jin escapes and destroys the Straw Hats with Yuna's help. When the shogun's reinforcements arrive, the Mongols retreat and blow up the bridge to the inner courtyard, killing many advancing samurai.

  Another frontal attack would only bring more losses, so Jin slips into the keep. There he poisons the Mongols' airag and kills Ryuzo. The castle falls with no further samurai deaths, yet Shimura is furious because Jin has broken the code of honor. Jin answers that the code is useless against enemies with no honor. Shimura knows the shogun will have Jin executed for treason, and he urges Jin to blame Yuna. Jin refuses and embraces the name The Ghost. Shimura regretfully arrests him and burns the decree that would have made Jin his son.

  Jin's allies free him, and his horse is shot dead by archers during the escape. Heading north, he learns that the Mongols have copied his poison for an assault on the Japanese mainland. He leaves a note asking Shimura to join the fight, and Shimura answers it. At Port Izumi, Jin kills the Khan on his flagship, and the invasion loses momentum. The shogun, however, now sees Jin as a threat to the obedience of ordinary people. He disbands Clan Sakai and orders Shimura to kill his own nephew. The two men duel, and Jin wins. The player then chooses between giving Shimura a warrior's death and sparing his life by abandoning the samurai code for good. Either way, Jin becomes the shogun's enemy and keeps protecting Tsushima.

  The designers built this tension into the systems. Unlike the Infamous games, Ghost of Tsushima has no karma meter. Its absence let the team tell one cohesive story about a samurai who must sacrifice everything he knows about honor and tradition to save the island. Instead of binary choices, characters and the world react to what Jin does, approving or disapproving. The weather also grows stormier the more often the player uses ghost techniques. Players can still switch between ghost and samurai styles, because Jin's roots do not vanish when he transforms.

  The team gave the villain the same care. Khotun Khan never changes, and he has a "bureaucratic aspect" because he tries to take the island with minimal bloodshed. Patrick Gallagher joined the cast in 2017. To prepare, he watched The Godfather and drew on his experience playing Attila the Hun in Night at the Museum.

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• 4. Swords and Standoffs

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  Early playtesters complained that enemies were "sword sponge," meaning they soaked up so much damage that immersion broke. The team first tried giving enemies hit points and armor points. It then decided every enemy would fall within a set number of hits. Health stays the same on every difficulty setting. Higher difficulties instead make enemies parry and block more. One early prototype of that idea was called overkill because enemies deflected every attack. The answer was a stagger system, which lets players break a defense while staying on the offensive. The team called combat the hardest feature to build, and it rebuilt the design many times.

  Fox described the three pillars of combat as "mud, blood, and steel." The goal was a game that felt grounded, visceral and challenging, with sword fights as deadly as those in samurai movies. Jin is often outnumbered, and basic enemies can kill him fairly quickly. Fox compared the Mongols to packs of wolves attacking from every side. He compared the fighting to a dance in which the player must "weave between Mongol swords." On the highest difficulty, non-boss fights end after one or two successful attacks. One-on-one duels run longer, because players expect them to feel like boss fights.

  The ending of the Kurosawa film Sanjuro inspired the standoff. In the film, a warrior waits for the opponent to move first and then kills with a single strike. In the game, a standoff can turn into a series of fatal blows against several enemies. Four stances answer four kinds of foe. Stone stance handles swordsmen, water stance handles shielded enemies, wind stance handles spearmen and moon stance handles brutes. Each unlocks after Jin observes or kills Mongol leaders. Eventually the player unlocks ghost stance, which makes Jin invincible and lets him kill with one hit for a limited time. Players trigger it by killing several enemies without taking damage or by slaughtering a Mongol leader.

  The ghost weapons are the other half of the design. The team made them exceedingly lethal and generally more effective than samurai tools, which sharpened Jin's dilemma between honor and saving the island. Jin strikes silently with a tanto and later unlocks chained assassination to hit several enemies in a row. Firecrackers and wind chime bells create distractions. Smoke bombs disorient alerted foes, kunai strike multiple targets and explosives kill groups. A blowgun shoots poison darts that make victims hallucinate and attack their own allies. The narrative keeps reminding players that these techniques are loathed.

  Finesse feeds a resource called resolve, which the player earns by parrying or assassinating. Jin spends it on healing and on special combat techniques.

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• 5. Wind as a Guide

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  The art team spent one and a half years making sure foliage and other objects reacted properly to wind. The team had decided early that "wind blowing around literally everything in the world" would be the game's visual calling card. The idea came from early Chanbara samurai films, which show movement in the background through dust, smoke and wind. Many particle effects and systems were carried over from earlier Infamous games.

  Navigation followed from the same idea. The team first added icons and a compass, then noticed that players spent too much time staring at them and ignoring the world. Wind became the guide instead. Building the feature took about a week, and refining it took roughly another year. Shadow of the Colossus helped inspire it, since that game shows the direction of the objective when the player holds up a sword. Connell said "nature is a symbol for Jin's home." Another team member, Fleming, said the guiding winds gave a feeling that "nature herself is on the player's side." Real history echoed this, because a typhoon wrecked the Mongol forces and the Japanese saw it as a "divine wind" sent to protect their home.

  A promise made on stage raised the pressure. At the game's reveal at Paris Game Week, Connell went off script and announced there would be no waypoint mechanics. The team had to add features to keep his word. Yellow birds now lead Jin to places of interest. These include hot springs that raise his maximum health, "Bamboo Strikes" that raise his maximum resolve and "Pillars of Honor" that unlock cosmetic designs for his weapons. At some spots Jin meditates and composes haiku.

  The in-game landmass has the same shape as Tsushima Island, but the team did not aim for a one-to-one copy. It gave each region its own biome and exaggerated the dominant foliage there. In the Golden Forest, for example, the trees glow orange and yellow instead of showing every species that would really grow there. Connell called such places "the perfect photographer's dream." Fox noted that the island is more varied than its real counterpart because the team also borrowed looks from mainland Japan. The three islands of Tsushima open gradually, starting with Izuhara, then Toyotama and Kamiagata.

  Fleming observed that "everything in Japan tends to celebrate negative space." That pushed the team toward simple architecture, spare interiors and a minimalistic head-up display. Shadow of the Colossus and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild shaped the quiet landscape, though Sucker Punch aimed for more photorealistic visuals. Serenity was deliberate, so that the violence in combat and story would hit harder by contrast.

  Kurosawa mode is the clearest tribute. It is a black-and-white filter with film grain and adjusted audio. The team contacted the Kurosawa Estate to use the director's name, and it designed the mode using tools from accessibility settings for colorblind players. Other films that guided the team were 13 Assassins by Takashi Miike and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Red Beard and Ran. The team tried to capture the samurai code shown in Seven Samurai. The comic series Usagi Yojimbo, about a soft-mannered rabbit samurai, also mattered. Fox read it while working on the Sly Cooper games, and the surname Sakai honors its creator, Stan Sakai.

  Costumes tell the story too. Jin's samurai armors are bulky and colorful, radiating "a sense of regality." The ghost outfit is darker and more agile, and the team avoided the all-black cloth look of a traditional assassin to keep it realistic. Capes and tassels sway in the wind. Peasant recruits wear leftover armor and look ragtag, and people in northern Tsushima wear snowflake patterns. Khotun Khan has two armors, and one is angular and completely drained of color to signal his oppression and brutality.

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• 6. Sound of Tsushima

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  Brad Meyer, the audio lead, borrowed sword blanks left over from recording sessions for God of War, a game from Santa Monica Studio, another Sony developer. The team scraped them together, clanged them, swung them and hung them from the ceiling to spin. They also cut through fruit, vegetables and cloth to build the sound of a blade passing through a human body. Jin's wind chimes were recorded with a Japanese fūrin. The black-naped oriole became the guide bird because Meyer had recorded one while on vacation in Sri Lanka in 2018.

  The music system began as a copy of the one in Infamous Second Son, where combat music rises through three states. Ghost stance and standoffs demanded extra states. Combat sounds also fade down during exploration, so that quiet stretches stay quiet.

  British composer Ilan Eshkeri wrote the score. The team approached him after hearing his work on Coriolanus, and they were impressed by how he recreated Japanese music with western instruments. He hesitated at first because he had never scored fighting games, but a briefing on the story changed his mind. He studied Japanese musical styles of the 13th century, including Gagaku, Shōmyō Buddhist chanting and the biwa hōshi. He also learned Japanese scales, played Japanese instruments and listened to music from Tsushima Island. Consultants helped translate his English lyrics into Japanese.

  Eshkeri met Junko Ueda, one of the few surviving musicians who can play the biwa, an instrument samurai once used. Her playing appears on "The Way of the Ghost," Jin's personal theme. Eshkeri also quoted and rearranged ancient melodies, including The Tale of the Heike. He deliberately avoided Kurosawa's film scores to keep his music original. The final battle was the hardest track, since it had to be action-packed and emotional at once. In total, he wrote double the music the game needed.

  Shigeru Umebayashi supplied five musical suites for exploration. The full soundtrack arrived on the 17th of July 2020. A four-track remix EP, "Sound of the Storm , Ghost of Tsushima Soundtrack: Reimagined," followed on the 10th of July 2022 through Milan Records. It features TOKiMONSTA, Tycho, The Glitch Mob and Alessandro Cortini.

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• 7. Legends and Iki Island

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  A cooperative mode was always planned. Development of Ghost of Tsushima: Legends started in 2016, and the studio experimented for six months to a year on its design. The team chose supernatural elements drawn from Japanese mythology, which gave it more freedom with characters and abilities. A storyteller character, Gyozen, ties the mode back to Jin's journey. Darren Bridge, the senior game designer who led the work, said the visual style stayed unrefined until the final nine months. The last boss fight came so late that the team once considered delaying it or cutting it.

  Legends has four classes. The samurai is the tank, taking and dealing heavy damage. The hunter is the sniper, using bows and other ranged weapons. The rōnin summons dogs and revives teammates. The assassin hits hard with one attack and can teleport short distances with "Shadow Strike." Higher "Ki" levels on gear make players deadlier on harder missions. Story mode lets two players tackle narrated quests. In October 2020 it gained "The Tale of Iyo," a three-chapter raid for four players built around puzzles that need cooperation. Survival mode sends four players against 15 waves of enemies. In Rivals mode, two teams of two race through survival, earning "Magatama" currency to buy perks and curses that slow the other side.

  Legends launched on the 16th of October 2020, the same day a new game plus feature reached the base game. In December 2020 it added four outfits based on Bloodborne, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Colossus. It became a standalone release on the 3rd of September 2021, and PlayStation Plus subscribers received it free in March 2022.

  The Director's Cut arrived on the 20th of August 2021 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Its centerpiece is the Iki Island story. Jin finds villagers driven insane by a poison called "sacred medicine." It was given to them by the Mongolian Eagle Tribe, led by Ankhsar "The Eagle" Khatun, who is conquering the island. Years before, Jin's father Kazumasa led a failed campaign there against raiders and was killed in an ambush. Jin saw it as a boy and still blames himself.

  A thunderstorm wrecks Jin's boat, and he lands at Fort Sakai, his father's old stronghold, now the Eagle's base. Her second-in-command, Khunbish, captures him, and they force the "sacred medicine" on him to turn him into a shaman. Visions of the Eagle, his dead father and his failures plague him. The raider Tenzo rescues him and brings him to the raiders' leader, Fune. Jin helps retake the fort and kills Khunbish. Then he hears Tenzo tell a dying Mongol, "May your death benefit all beings." A masked raider spoke the same words to Kazumasa before killing him.

  Jin nearly kills Tenzo but masters his anger. He proposes re-enacting the ambush to lure out the Eagle. Though hallucinating almost constantly, he overcomes the poison by acknowledging his father's faults and accepting his death. He kills the Eagle in a duel, and he and Tenzo forgive each other before parting.

  The island itself was built to feel different. It is about the size of Act One of the main game and opens once the player reaches Act Two. Bandits, raiders and criminals populate it. The team kept bold colors but chose a new palette so players could tell it apart from Tsushima. New features include a horse charge and animal sanctuaries where Jin can pet animals. Chad Cannon and Bill Hemstapat, who had worked with Umebayashi on the arrangement and orchestration of "Tsushima's suite," wrote its music. The PlayStation 5 version added full Japanese lip sync, haptic feedback, adaptive trigger support, 3D audio, dynamic 4K resolution and faster loading.

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• 8. Release and Reception

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  Sony first showed the game at its Paris Games Week press conference in October 2017. It held back an earlier announcement because many systems were still tentative. A gameplay demo followed at E3 2018, paired with a live shakuhachi performance by Cornelius Boots. The game launched on PlayStation 4 on the 17th of July 2020, after a delay from the 26th of June because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Development had been declared gold on the 22nd of June 2020. Sony also partnered with the Tourism Board of Tsushima Island and Nagasaki Prefecture on a website about the island's real history and culture. Nixxes Software developed the Windows version, which launched on the 16th of May 2024.

  That PC launch ran into trouble. On the 11th of May 2024, the Steam listing was reported delisted in 177 territories because PlayStation Network was unavailable there. The news followed criticism over similar account-linking rules for Helldivers 2. Sucker Punch had said linking was mandatory only for Legends, not the single-player game. The lockout ended on the 28th of October 2025, after a patch split Legends into free downloadable material that remains region-locked.

  Critics gave the game "generally favorable" reviews, according to Metacritic. OpenCritic reported that 88% of critics recommended it. Four editors at the Japanese magazine Famitsu gave it a combined 40/40, making it the third Western-developed game to earn that score. Toshihiro Nagoshi, director of the Yakuza series, praised Jin as a protagonist. He added that Japanese studios were unlikely to approve a game starring a middle-aged man because of marketing concerns.

  Game Informer's Matt Miller called the story "a tale about the contradictory ideals of honor and revenge." IGN's Mitchell Saltzman praised the performances of Tsuji and Gallagher and called Khan a memorable antagonist whose "soft intensity" is "oddly calming despite his terrifying intentions." Keza MacDonald of The Guardian gave a mixed review, saying the game stuck so closely to classic samurai tropes that it sometimes forgot to have a personality of its own. Many critics found the side quests repetitive. Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell called them an "afterthought." Several reviewers also found the stealth too rudimentary.

  The world won more admiration. Rachel Weber of GamesRadar called it a "work of art," and Miller described a "painter's vision of feudal Japan." Mike Williams of USgamer called the guiding wind a "major innovation." Others, including Tapsell, found the open world structure unimaginative and outdated.

  Scholar Anthon Cederwall noted how the game weaves in Shinto belief. Torii gates mark the boundary between the sacred and the profane, and in the game they signal entry into a "spiritually significant space" with an upgrade shrine. Foxes that lead to Inari shrines are messengers of the Kami Inari, a deity tied to prosperity, agriculture and protection. After a typhoon damaged Watazumi Shrine on Tsushima Island in 2020, the game's community raised over 27 million yen to help repair it.

  Sales were strong. The game sold over 2.4 million units in its first three days, the fastest start for an original first-party PlayStation 4 franchise. It reached 5 million by November 2020, 9.73 million by July 2022 and over 13 million by September 2024. In Japan, it sold 212,915 units in its debut week and passed 1 million by May 2023. Sony court documents from 2023 put its budget at a reported $60 million against $397 million in revenue. It earned nominations for Game of the Year at The Game Awards and the D.I.C.E. Awards.

  The story is not finished. Ghost of Yōtei, a sequel set around Mount Yōtei on Hokkaido in 1603 and following the warrior Atsu, arrived on the 2nd of October 2025. A film directed by Chad Stahelski is in development. An anime based on Legends, directed by Takanobu Mizuno with series composition by Gen Urobuchi, is scheduled for Crunchyroll in 2027.

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