‘Ghost of Yōtei’ and the Anatomy of Vengeance

Spoiler alert: We will be discussing key plot developments, character arcs, and narrative structure of Ghost of Yōtei (PS5, 2025) by Sucker Punch Productions. If you still want to play without knowing the full journey, you might want to stop now.

Revenge is arguably the easiest story to pitch in a video game. Bad guys kill someone you love, you pick up the sword, cut down enemies, experience catharsis. But at some point, that simplicity becomes stale. For a game like Ghost of Yōtei, the question isn’t if it can deliver the revenge story. It’s “what kind of revenge story does the game want to tell, and what does it actually say about revenge itself?”

From the outset, the game signals true ambivalence to its villains. You play as Atsu, returning to the northern province of Ezo after 16 years away, to hunt down six ruthless samurai. But as Atsu becomes legend, myth, ghost — something besides a mere avenger — the game quietly asks: Is vengeance itself the point, or is it what comes after?

Revenge as the engine.

The story begins with violence. Atsu survives the slaughter of her family and she spends years wandering in the south; returning with her father’s sword and a mission of vengeance. That is all familiar territory. But by setting the game 329 years after its predecessor (Ghost of Tsushima), and locating the story in a frontier region (Ezo/Hokkaidō) rather than the main islands, Ghost of Yōtei foregrounds the distance between myth and origin.

And here’s where the game complicates the revenge story. Atsu doesn’t just fight the Yōtei Six. She becomes a legend called “the Ghost,” perceived by villagers as an onryō-type vengeful spirit. In fact, she inherits a persona that transcends the mission. The game uses Japanese cultural memory of the onryō myth to push the question “what happens when revenge isn’t personal, but cultural, ritualized, even mythic?”

By inheriting the Ghost persona, Atsu’s revenge is no longer purely about her pain. It becomes about the story she creates along the way. The cut-scene bloodshed becomes folklore, realized through the ever-changing bounty posters of her likeness. The body count becomes currency, literally added to her price as an outlaw. The mask she wears becomes a symbol to Ezo. And that shift is crucial to making the revenge narrative feel less superficial than it otherwise might.

The cost of becoming myth.

Having a character inherit a legend risks flattening the revenge story. The focus moves from why kill to how many to kill. Obviously, Ghost of Yōtei plays with this. Atsu could theoretically pursue the Yōtei Six in any order, but the player is stuck to a rails system that is only aesthetically an open-world structure. Her vengeance is a checklist from the start, emphasized when writing the target names on Atsu’s sash. She even crosses the names off with her bloody sword after each villain “dies.”

At first, it’s curious how the game will sustain the emotional impact of each revenge. And to its credit, the writing does a great job at making each target’s “death” a bit different narratively. The Snake dies in prologue, purely functional setup. The Oni dies, but only after a team effort and reunion with the brother Atsu thought dead. The Kitsune is a redemption arc. The Dragon leads to a costly mistake that becomes a narrative turn. The Spider is yet another redemption arc, but spun differently. And finally Saito is the most impactful of them all; but for strikingly different reasons than Atsu hoped.

You are given the revenge story but you also inherit its pitfalls.

Open world and freedom vs. focus.

One of the game’s structural interplays is between player’s open-world freedom and narrative obligation. It is clear that the devs want the player to move through Ezo at their own pace, and the game emphasizes player desire throughout. You can even use a spy glass to mark your destinations and more organically carve a path through the world that is a true strength of the game’s immersion.

But this does create an interesting tension. Revenge stories tend to be linear and tightly paced. But here, the game says you can make it your own. There is a new question of whether or not that freedom undermines the urgency of revenge or if it actually deepens the theme by allowing space for reflection. I heavily prefer the latter interpretation; because the game puts so much focus on expanding the initial flashback from the beginning as it moves along.

Time-shifting and wound imagery.

Ghost of Yōtei has a ton of flashbacks, allowing players to explore Atsu’s earlier life and even overlays the past and present. And this is more than a narrative flourish. These moments invite the player to live the wound rather than skip right past it.

Revenge games often bypass grief and jump straight to the action. Here, the wound is front and center, though we do still get plenty of action at every turn. Still, by making the past so much more visible, the game argues that revenge is built on memory and perspective, not just retribution for the sake of it.

It’s also fitting that as the game moves to its second narrative half, you’ll notice that Atsu has fewer and fewer flashbacks. Especially once she makes peace with the Kitsune and meets her niece, Kiku. Suddenly, Atsu is far more bound to the present than ever, as realized by how her biggest weakness in early fights is that overlay of the past interfering with her most dangerous duels. For instance, she struggles in her early fight with Saito because she dissociates and perceives the fight as a child; barely strong enough to lift a sword.

Identity and player agency.

By equipping you with the Ghost title so early comparatively to predecessor Ghost of Tsushima, the game reinforces that you perform revenge. The player becomes a myth almost from the jump. But this raises an almost Bioshock level of questioning. Is the player controlling the person of Atsu or merely the onryō?

In this way, the game subtly critiques revenge by turning it into a farce. You indulge the myth and thereby lose the person. The mechanics — dual weapons, classic stances, heavy brawling — deliver spectacle, no question. But the narrative context consistently cuts you down when you try to rely on the myth to take down massive groups of enemies without any planning or consideration for your current skill level. The game makes you feel powerful, then it takes that power away from you when you give it too many inches.

Ritual or resolution?

In a traditional revenge arc you reach the moment of truth where you kill the villain and the story ends. Ghost of Yōtei complicates that endpoint, similar to the Red Dead Redemption games, in that once Atsu’s story ends, that’s it. She survives, yes, but her time as the onryō dies. We don’t see her roam the countryside in an endless epilogue. Instead, she recounts “tales” of her exploits to Kiku months later, taking you back in time to right before the final arc of the game takes place.

It’s jarring, though, because the game essentially takes you back to the moment when the world still treated you as a myth instead of a person. It’s not a hard game to finish with total resolution in the sense that you can discover “everything” within a reasonable time frame, especially because the game equips you with upgrades that let you radar every little collectible.

Still, it’s odd to return to the final part of the game in this way because the amount of enemies decreases to a paltry amount and you have no way of replaying hideouts and camps and missions. There’s also no “New Game+” at the time of this writing (which was the case in the last game as well until a later update). It’s almost like the game is pushing you to just…move on. Stop playing. Atsu’s story really does just end.

So in that way, the payoff is in this weird limbo where the revenge isn’t really the payoff. And what comes after isn’t, either. At least for now.

Does the game deliver on its critique?

Here’s the tricky part. Ghost of Yōtei both delivers a classic revenge story (you hunt, you fight, you kill) and tries to critique the genre by adding layers to its commentary. That dual aim is ambitious, and in some ways it doesn’t quite work.

I’m far from the only person to note that the game is pretty basic with its revenge setup, competent as the execution itself is. It falters in how predictable Atsu’s storyline really becomes, especially when compared to Ghost of Tsushima, which constantly kept surprising me with what the Ghost was willing to sacrifice in order to save his home.

Seriously, once the game introduces Kiku (whose mother never gets brought up as far as I could tell?), it might as well be screaming the final hours of the game and what will happen in the end, down to who dies, lives, and so on.

That said, the game makes up for this in a few ways, albeit earlier on with the Kitsune. The entire Teshio Ridge section is probably where the game peaks, specifically when it comes to how useless the player starts to feel when thrust into a world of shinobi who can cut Atsu down from the shadows, even when her guard is all the way up. Mastering this part of Ezo is easily the most satisfying for the reason and could be an entire game unto itself.

The final cut.

Revenge stories are comfortable, even irresistible. They have built-in momentum. But Ghost of Yōtei argues that maybe the comfortable story is inadequate. Maybe the real story is what comes after each death.

By situating its narrative on the edge of myth (onryō), in the wilderness, by giving you freedom, and by making you both actor and symbol, the game asks the player to reflect on why we tell revenge stories at all. And what do we do once the revenge is done?

In that way, the game doesn’t say much. It’s not fully satisfying, at least not in the conventional sense. You can easily mark this as a failure on the game’s part, but you can also read it as an actual narrative decision. In the same way revenge can be replayed like one of Atsu’s various songs, the game can be replayed, too. Whether or not the sound is still fresh and pleasing to the ear is up to the player, after all.

Ghost of Yōtei is available now on PlayStation 5.

Featured images ©2025 Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC