Sucker Punch veterans on Ghost of Yotei Complete Edition, showing a different side to Atsu, and the history of the studio

Joanna Wang and Parker Hamilton are part of the furniture at Sucker Punch.

“I joined when everything was painted,” Wang tells me. She joined Sucker Punch during the development of the second Sly Cooper game. “There was no such thing as a normal map, I remember painting the character,” she mimes painting the beloved, now long-dormant raccoon.

Both developers are chatting to me following the release of Ghost of Yotei: Complete Edition. A rerelease of PS5’s 2025 exclusive that includes the game’s recently released Echoes of Sekigahara expansion and roguelike mode Most Wanted, feels like a full stop on Sucker Punch’s latest Japanese epic.

Joanna Wang, the game’s production art director, tells me that the Complete Edition was the perfect excuse to include influences and references that couldn’t make it into the original game.

“Hokkaido is a really rich, beautiful place. We were so excited to bring so many pictures back from our research trip, but we had such a hard time picking through them and choosing which locations were going to make it into the game.

“Complete Edition gave us opportunities to relook at all that reference to see what other corner of Hokkaido we wanted to make for this expansion. It was a really exciting moment for us.”

With ballooning development costs, few games in 2026 get this chance at this style of rerelease. Parker Hamilton, a veteran systems design lead on the game, tells me it was a chance to evaluate what worked about the base game, and what could be expanded.

“With Yotei, we were working through so many idea, but we were excited to tell a complete story, and it really was a revenge story we were able to tell in that game, but with Complete Edition, we were able to delve more into Atsu’s past. That’s something (from the base game) we wish we would have had a bit more time to do. We wanted to show another side of her that we weren’t really able to, since she was so focussed on her revenge quest”

Atsu isn’t the only character from the base game that gets more to shine. One of the Yotei Six, The Snake, is killed in the base game’s opening 10 minutes. The DLC expands on a character that Sucker Punch always wanted to give more context to.

“We loved The Snake, but it was a character that… we wanted to introduce the Yotei 6 early, so unfortunately he was the first to go. So now we’re excited to get the opportunity to bring Atsu to an area where The Snake had more of an impact.”

Much of Echoes of Sekigahara focusses on Atsu taking down outlaws that are all vying for the title of The Snake in the wake of the original’s death. This is an effective retconning of The Snake’s prominence, which is largely skipped over in the base game in favour of more exciting characters.

The expansion offers players a look at Atsu before she became the Ghost. Wang tells me that this was a chance to go deeper with the character, and reveal a side to Atsu that’s only briefly touched on in the main game.

“The original game is a complete story, but we go one layer down then we see what changed her. It gives the player another side of Atsu’s personality and who she is.

“The battle of Sekigahara is one of the most famous in Japan’s, but we’re not a historical document. We’re not trying to recreate it one-to-one, we’re telling the story through Atsu’s lense.”

The war itself, which is shown during flashback scenes in the expansion, features some of the most impressively dense sequences in the whole franchise.

“We had pretty much every single team in the production come togther to support that war, because we want to make sure it has the epicness. It’s a high contrast with how you begin the expansion in this open, vast area. It’s quiet, then you suddenly go into this chaos.”

Since this expansion is being released over a year after the original game, the expansion has to accomodate for players who’ve beaten the original game, as well as those who will do the DLC missions as part of their standard playthrough.

Parker Hamilton tells me that  this was top of mind for the team when building this section of the game.

“The expansion has to do a number of things. We want to introduce mechanics to players that haven’t seen them elsewhere, and we want them to, if they’re playing the game naturally, to take those mechanics outside of the expansion and use them throughout the game.

“So with the massive weapons, we needed to think about the players who’ve already acquired a lot of things through completing the game. We were inspired by this power fantasy. We wanted to introduce an armored brute that’s really difficult unless you use everything at your disposal. They also make it easier to do brawl cleanup.”

Hamilton tells me that he sees the different combat mechanics forming a “mosiac of the game,” allowing players to approach encounters in any way they please, but to also introduce story characters tied to those specific fighting styles, as was the case in the main game.

Speaking of mosiacs, Joanna Wang’s team is partly responsible for the incredibly vibrant color palette across the base game. She jokes with me that when approaching the DLC, her team and her literally started with the question “what color of flower have we not made yet?”

“We look through our asset library and we were like “is a black flower something we’ve made yet?”

The new area is the highest in any of the Ghost games, which Wang tells me informed changes in how the world was formed.

“The wind feels stronger. There’s no mountain block here. The landscape should just feel endless. There’s no Yotei as the central compass of the world.” While Yotei isn’t imposing over every frame, Wang tells me that in the DLC’s opening, as players ride across the ridge, if they turn around and look back, they’ll Yotei in the distance, an indication of how far from home Atsu has chosen to roam.”

There’s a massive amount of thought that goes into every inch of Yotei’s hand-crafted world. Wang tells me that if players pay attention,  as Atsu’s story progresses in the main game, they can revist previously desolated lands, and find that nature has begun to recover. This is something 99% of players will never see, but it’s vital to the team.

As our interview draws to a close, I ask a question that divides Yotei fans more than any other: What is the best armor set for Atsu?

“You know what? I actually just like Atsu’s base armor. There’s an artistic reason why we’ve been working so long on that. You know, she (is presumed) killed under the Ginko tree at the start of the game, there’s the burning tree and yellow leaves falling, that  theme of yellow is all around her.

“That costume would carry  that yellow, and also the shamisen on her back would carry it, it’s a big silhouette, it carries that memory of her mother and her childhood. So every time I see her, I’m also seeing that. I feel very emotional.”

Wang tells me that one element of Atsu’s costume remained a constant throughout the entire development process, even before Atsu herself.

“Before we drew the character, the concept team drew the sash. We were like “maybe this is a cool idea” and then we kept that for the whole game development, and it became this central object. We just put so much effort and emotion there.”

“I wish every design was that easy.”