“I am the Ghost of Yotei” – Dragon Age: The Veilguard actor adopts the vengeful mask as Sucker Punch explains why it moved on from Tsushima’s Jin Sakai
Ghost of Yotei’s developers have explained why they’re moving on from Ghost of Tsushima’s cast and instead choosing to have Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s star lead a whole new revenge tale.
Coming next year, Ghost of Yotei was announced at yesterday’s September State of Play show, as developer Sucker Punch takes its wildly successful open-world formula to a new part of historical Japan, set 300 years after the first game. Ghost of Tsushima’s Jin Sakai was certainly prepped for a sequel, but the studio was supposedly too fond of origin stories to let the concept go after just one game.
“We wanted to continue to innovate,” the studio’s communications manager, Andrew Goldfarb, writes in a recent PlayStation Blog. “To create something fresh but familiar, we looked beyond Jin Sakai’s story and the island of Tsushima, and shifted our focus to the idea of the Ghost instead. At Sucker Punch, we love origin stories and we wanted to explore what it could mean to have a new hero wearing a Ghost mask, and uncovering a new legend. This led us to Ghost of Yotei: a new protagonist, a new story to unfold, and a new region of Japan to explore.”
Moving on from Tsushima’s cast and flinging the samurai gameplay to hundreds of years in the future apparently let the team build off of what came before, while still keeping things fresh.
So Ghost of Yotei stars a new protagonist called Atsu, who seems to be going on a similarly violent romp across Feudal Japan and is played by none other than Erika Ishii, an actor who you’ve almost definitely heard in some massive blockbusters.
Ishii has also been in Apex Legends, Destiny 2, Halo Infinite, but her momentum’s been steadily building to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where she’s playing one version of protagonist Rook. “I’ve dreamed of this my entire life,” the actor tweeted. “But I still can’t believe I’m part of art like this. I am the Ghost of Yōtei.”