2025 has been absolutely stacked with video games, and Ghost of Yōtei is one of the year's most anticipated titles. The new game from Sucker Punch arrived today for the PlayStation 5 and has immediately shaken up the conversation as a major contender in the Game of the Year department.
Ghost of Yōtei follows a new protagonist named Atsu, a haunted and tormented mercenary seeking revenge for the murder of her family. The game is set 300 years after 2020's Ghost of Tsushima and serves as a standalone sequel to the hit samurai adventure. The Ghost series has become renowned for its intense gameplay, which complements the game's music perfectly — and Ghost of Yōtei is no different.
"We knew when we got to Ghost of Tsushima that kind of melody is gonna make or break everything. That is so much of the emotional backbone of a game," Sucker Punch told Complex. "And so that was the main thing that we carried forward from Ghost of Tsushima to Ghost of Yōtei: what is critical to our storytelling is the emotional weight that the music can provide."
Complex caught up with Toma Otawa, Ghost of Yōtei's composer, and Brad Myer, the team's Audio Director, to discuss how music was used to elevate the game's story.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Ghost of Tsushima was a massive hit and one of the best games in the past few years. What did you learn from this original game that you're applying to the follow-up in terms of importance in music and creating a narrative?
I mean, music has always been a very important thing for Sucker Punch and it's been in our DNA. And we've done a lot of interesting things throughout the studio's history. I mean, the Peter McConnell scores for Sly Cooper stick into my head because they were just so iconic for that time and that character. On Infamous, we worked with Amon Tobin and did a really interesting score with that. And started to incorporate vocals and lyrics in Infamous Second Son. And we knew when we got to Ghost of Tsushima that kind of melody is gonna make or break everything. That is so much of the emotional backbone of a game.
And so that was the main thing that we carried forward from Ghost of Tsushima to Ghost of Yōtei is what is critical to our storytelling is the emotional weight that the music can provide.
And that is almost, it's largely through a really strong melody and strong melodic content. And obviously it was a very different score compared to Ghost of Tsushima. And that was a very intentional decision on our part for a lot of reasons that we can get into. But what we were looking for, that blend of kind of Wild West through the lens of feudal Japan with a very strong melody is what led us to Touma. He was the one composer out of everybody that we were looking at that just nailed all of those elements. And then throughout the process of writing the music and recording the music, it was just every single cue that he provided was just another great melody. And you hear that throughout the game and it's definitely been something that we have heard throughout development from play testers, from employees, from anybody who's been playing the game is just how amazing the music is, how unique it is, but also just how memorable. Walking around the halls of the office, everybody is constantly humming a melody from some track or another. So it's good when every track is an earworm.
How did you make sure that you stayed true to an authentic sound?
It was an interesting concept because the authenticity had to have both of the Japanese elements and the Western elements because this was sort of feudal Japan, but the stylized score had to be in the style of a traditional Japanese score with the wild West. So there are two authenticities that I need to follow up. And also the melody Brad mentioned, they had to be very memorable. And I made myself a perfect guinea pig because I'm so forgetful, I can't memorize anything. So it's like, if I wrote something and if I could hum it the next day, I think the melody might have a chance to be called a very memorable melody.
So it was sort of like a good practice to do that in the process. But as for authenticity, I had to sort of like go back to my roots in Japan. I was born and raised in Japan and I came to the States when I was 16. I feel like two of those sort of like my background helped me combine the style of Japanese and the wild West in a little bit of sort of like a, because this game takes place in 1603. Yeah, so he had to have the feel of the old, rugged Wild West. That was a challenge too.
And yeah, I just want to sort of emphasize here that we were fortunate to have a brilliant team, starting with Brad and all the team members at SIE, my orchestrator, Chad, and of course the Japanese solo instrumentalist who gave us a lot of ideas. I just want to say it took a whole village of brilliant brains and minds and talents to form this entire score in the soundtrack.
And you collaborated with Shinjiro Watanabe, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. He worked on Cowboy Bebop, among other things. How was that collaboration and how important is that to this game?
Ghost of Tsushima was very much inspired by samurai cinema and Ghost of Yōtei is no different and if anything, more so. And so, obviously we were fortunate enough to work with the Kurosawa estate on Ghost of Tsushima. We managed to maintain that relationship.
So we have Kurosawa mode. And then, Nate and Jason, our creative directors just had the idea of like, what if we also like to reach out to some other folks within that realm and inspire us and see if there's something that they'd be willing to do. So Takeshi Miike was one of them and he is just an amazing auteur of a filmmaker and 13 Assassins has been very important to us. He also made Blade of the Immortal and hundreds of other movies. So we worked with him on a combat mode where the cameras are closer, it's more bloody, it's more muddy because his movies are always very gritty. And then he also named a sword kit in the game for us. And then with Shinichiro Watanabe — something that we all love is the lo-fi music that he really helped popularize with Samurai Champloo. And the music that Nujabes did for Samurai Champloo is iconic. And you can hear that echoing throughout the game blending lo-fi and Hip-Hop and jazz. So we reached out to him and asked him if he'd be interested and he was. So we worked with his music production company and it was really great because they gave us, we worked with them and we got a few unique pieces. And then we also gave them two of Toma's themes, Atsu's theme and the Yotei 6 theme. And they did these really awesome lo-fi remixes of those as well. So just hearing that kind of collaboration too was just like, oh man, it's so cool. And to hear this thing that Toma created in this completely different lo-fi way.
It's interesting when you play the game in Watanabe mode because it is such a different shift of kind of how the game feels because the music is just so different. But yeah, I think it's something that obviously we've seen so many fans react so positively to when we revealed it at our State of Play. So I'm really looking forward to how fans enjoy it when they're actually playing through themselves.
A lot of these places may not have been built and established in 17th-century Japan with this music in mind. So, how was it combining the music that you had written and assigning them to these specific moments of the game?
If I should jump in real quick, because this is definitely much more of a Toma question, but the funny thing is you mentioned 17th century and folk music. And if anything, even before we got to Wild West through the lens of Feudal Japan, the genesis of the music for the game was actually, rather than 17th century Japanese folk, it was 1970s Japanese folk. And it wasn't super intentional, but Jason Cannell, one of our creative directors, was talking to me when we were first working on the game and asked if I knew of any Japanese folk music, because he was thinking that would just feel really cool as riding your horse through this big, vast, epic landscape. And I found a track by an artist named Kenji Endo called Curry Rice, and it was from the 70s. And it's about just a guy making curry rice, but it was just beautiful, just acoustic guitar and vocals, very soulful, very intimate. And then from there, Jason found another artist. Her name is Hako Yamasaki, and she's still active and around, but she had an album in the 70s called Tobimasu and just absolutely beautiful music. And again, it's just her and an acoustic guitar.
Yeah, I wasn't sure about 17th-century Japanese music, because I'm assuming back then, the musical style was completely different. And I wasn't sure if that would be appropriate or
proper for the Hokkaido scene, because it was so separate from what was sort of like a mainstream over there in Japan. But the 1970s, sort of a folk style, was the first sort of initial idea that I heard from the team. And like I said earlier, I'm so forgetful that when I started writing the demo for Atsu's theme, I think, I believe it was the third take. The first and second, I don't know what I was thinking about. I wrote this epic Hollywood score, sound of a main theme, and everyone's like, ‘This is not what we're looking for.’
And then I was like, ‘Oh, that's right, the Hako Yamasaki style, the 70s.’ So I kind of sat a little while and kind of tried to bring back my DNA and what that vibe felt like back in the 70s. I was born in 74, so I don't remember too much of it, but I do remember a little bit of the vibe of that time. And I was like, yeah, I was little, but then I remember the adults around me and the whole town and then the whole old Japanese vibe. I remember that as a little kid. And I sort of took that idea with the support of the team and came up with that melody, and that became Atsu's theme. And it just kind of felt right because I didn't have to overthink about it. I just had to kind of sit and kind of feel through what that feels like. And then melody came, so I just didn't resist it, and I just kind of went for it. And since it came out so naturally, I think it resonated with everybody because it was not constructed. It was more like, it came out, it basically flew. It was a flowing process. But the first and second demo, it was like a construction phase.
So, whenever something happens in the game, whether it be a battle or a stealth mission or your health is low, how does the audio respond to certain statuses of the player in the game?
That is a very complex question. We've got a lot of different underlying systems that control various things. So we do have what we call a music encounter system, specific to
music, that will kind of go between, I am getting near an enemy area, I am sneaking around the enemy area, I am in combat, or I am in an enemy area, they are aware of me, but I'm not actively engaged.
The music team has taken Toma’s music and deconstructed it and built all these transitions between those kinds of edges. And Toma wrote the music for those kinds of edges, but then we kind of have to massage all the transitions so that it's seamless. And that's kind of how the core engagement loop works with music. But then, yeah, we do lots of other things across, not just music, but sound design and dialogue, where, as you mentioned, low health, we might, generally what I do with low health is I have little like notched EQs in the mid frequencies. And as you get lower and lower in health, I open up, make those filter cuts wider and wider. So just the middle of the mix just gets sucked out.
So it feels like you're dying because you can only hear really tiny, low end muddy stuff. We do stuff where you can drink sake in the game. So if you drink too much, maybe there's a little warbliness that goes on there, or maybe Atsu's voice just gets pitched down just slightly. Some really fun stuff that we do. And also to your point, and probably what's more important than those little things is the moment to moment mixing that we do. And a lot of that is in service of the narrative, the story, the dialogue, and then Toma's beautiful music. So we might have a scene where all of the birds and wind and everything is playing naturally, but if it's a really tight, intimate scene between two characters, and we really want to focus on this really serious thing we turn down all the songbirds and maybe let the wind settle a little bit so that the melody kind of swells up and you're just listening to the dialogue. And that is a very intensive process that we pour through the entire game with a fine tooth comb to dial in all the mix settings for every single moment in the game to really make sure that the emotion is always at the forefront.
There's a lot of moments in this game where you're in between missions; whether you're riding a horse through a field or you're collecting things on a side quest. How important are these aspects in terms of the music compared to the main quests and the main objectives?
I mean, that's probably the case just because when you're following the main missions you're after Atsu's main conquest of killing the Yotei 6. But then if you're like, I mean, this game is so, it's unlike Ghost of Tsushima in that it's so easy to get lost in a very good way. You could be going towards your next mission and then there's just something that piques your interest that you see on the horizon. You're like, ‘Oh, what's that?’ You go over there and it's a villager with a story or it's a fox to follow or a Sumi-E painting to do. There's so many things that you can just run into in the world and experience that we definitely wanted to make sure that everything had a voice and space for a voice.
And I think the big difference there is that the narrative is the kind of evocative emotional music that Touma wrote. And then we also had him write it's also, a lot of it is a pretty dark story. I mean, Atsu’s family being murdered and her on this revenge quest is, it's not a happy story for the most part, but it's also taking place in this beautiful world. I mean, our version of Ezo is just gorgeous to look at. And so we wanted to have music that reflected the beauty of Ezo. And so Touma wrote a lot of music that was like that, serene, idyllic and beautiful. And that's the stuff that we usually play in those moments when you're engaged in a side quest and not necessarily engaged in combat or things that are quite so tied to Atsu's main story.
I think the soundtrack contains a lot of the variation, which is a dark story to a very intense combat story to somewhat of a traditional Japanese music really feel like authentic tracks to those fast, beautiful nature of Hokkaido, almost like getting in touch with the nature spirit of Hokkaido to speak with the music and it's like a soul healing sort of track. So I feel like it's a really nice compilation of variety in this one soundtrack to go along with our gameplay.