‘Japan should have made Ghost of Tsushima’, says Yakuza creator

Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi has heaped praise on Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Tsushima, labelling the game “amazing” and expressing some regret it wasn’t made in Japan.

In the latest SegaNama live stream, Sega’s chief creative officer lauded the Sony-owned, US-based studio’s work on the PS4 exclusive, and specifically praised its attention to detail when it comes to Japanese culture.

“We definitely lost to them,” Nagoshi said (translated by DualShockers). “I think it’s a game that definitely should have been made by Japanese people, but I heard they did a monstrous job collecting data and everything. There’s also the Kurosawa Mode, showing how they tried to pursue an artistic movie feel with the game overall.

“It’s the kind of work made by non-Japanese people that makes you feel they’re even more Japanese than us. I think it’s amazing. We often believe Western people would never get certain Japanese things, but the game shows this way of thinking is wrong in the first place.

“The game also has a lot of innovative elements, like how it uses shadows really well,” he added. “I’m sure they worked tremendously hard on all these things too, and it fits the story. It’s amazing.”

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Ghost of Tsushima recorded the best launch week sales of any first-party PS4 game in Japan to date and sold through more than 2.4 million copies globally in three days to become Sony’s fastest-selling original IP for PS4.

“I knew it would sell a lot,” Nagoshi said. “But I was wondering whether it’d sell that much or not. Because similar looking games recently released like Sekiro, and some could think they don’t need Ghost of Tsushima anymore.”

Publisher Activision said on Wednesday that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sales have cleared five million units since the game’s March 2019 release.

Developer From Software will add a boss rush mode and a Dark Souls-like online messaging system as part of a free Sekiro update on October 29 – the same day the game releases for Stadia.

In VGC’s Ghost of Tsushima review, our critic said the “Kurosawa homage forges its own identity, but is weighed down by the genre’s more perfunctory tropes”.

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