Sega chief creative officer Toshihiro Nagoshi (also general director of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) has offered his high praise of Ghost of Tsushima.
On July 25th, PlayStation announced that Ghost of Tsushima had become the fastest-selling first-party original IP PlayStation 4 title; with 2.4 million units sold globally in the first three days of launch.
Now Dual Shockers reports (and translates) that during this Month’s SegaNama livestream, Sega chief creative officer Toshihiro Nagoshi (also general director of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) discussed the game.
Nagoshi had high praise for Sucker Punch Productions, stating it was a game that a Japanese developer should have made.
“We definitely lost to them. 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 [Cinematic 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.”
MC Ayana Tsubaki reportedly added while its true some non-Japanese only had a stereotyped view of Japan, the game showed many did not. Nagoshi added his praise for the game’s graphics and story.
“The game also has a lot of innovative elements, like how it uses shadows really well. I’m sure they worked tremendously hard on all these things too, and it fits the story. It’s amazing. It became the fastest selling new PlayStation IP too. I knew it would sell a lot. 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.”
Nagoshi further praised the use of motion capture, movie direction, expressiveness of characters, and the effort put into its production. Even so, Nagoshi notes that Jin Sakai (the protagonist) did not look cool to him at first, and “I’m sure in any other company, if the designers showed up with his artwork, it would have got rejected (laughs).”
Despite this, he explained it worked because “so many different people put in so much effort” to (partly in Dual Shocker’s words) bring this “old-looking guy” to life.
Tsubaki also mentioned how the game was educational. As the game’s foxes went viral on Japanese Twitter, people learned of Jin’s reactions to the Iinari Shrines and foxes; which in turn taught more people about that era of Japan- something Dual Shockers reports is not that widely known in Japan.
Nagoshi concluded with whole-hearted congratulations to those who worked on the game. In case you missed it, you can find our interview with Nagoshi last year here.
Ghost of Tsushima is available on PlayStation 4. You can expect our review soon.
Image: PlayStation, Wikipedia
