Bringing Jin Sakai Back to Life for Ghost of Yōtei: Most Wanted

It has been amazing to watch the response to Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition, from photo mode shots to Echoes of Sekigahara reactions to flawless fights against Nobushige and beyond. But some of our favorite videos we have seen since launch feature Jin Sakai in Most Wanted, and we have loved watching people tear through bounties as the returning Ghost of Tsushima.

With all of these great new moments featuring Jin, we wanted to dive into a little bit of the process behind bringing him back for Ghost of Yōtei, including all the tiny details that help make him feel like himself. Here is some insight from some members of our team who helped bring him back to life.

How Most Wanted opened the door for Jin’s return

With Most Wanted our goal was to create a new way to experience Ghost of Yōtei’s combat. We were excited to focus on challenge and mastery in a highly replayable format.

We wanted to give players new opportunities to grow stronger and master specific forms of combat, building on the foundation established in the main campaign. Very quickly the idea of a class-based, roguelike model emerged as a path to achieve these goals and as an opportunity to experience combat from perspectives other than only Atsu.

As the team got excited about the idea, plenty of production and logistical questions emerged about what would be possible. We thought Jin Sakai would fit perfectly in this mode, but we wanted to make sure we could deliver an experience that was authentic to his character. During the initial prototyping of Most Wanted, we started with other characters to prove out the idea and get a better understanding of what would be necessary to bring Jin back.

After an early playtest with Jin, I had a conversation with our Lead Combat Designer, Ted Fishman. The joy of playing with Jin again was undeniable, but something had become clearly apparent to Ted. There wasn’t a partial implementation that would deliver the fantasy of playing as Jin. No, if we were to push forward, we had to bring back all of Jin.

The team understood that bringing back Jin would be an ambitious challenge. It would involve the creation of new art assets, adapting to the evolution of combat mechanics between Tsushima and Yōtei, and much, much more. The requirements grew as we discussed the ultimate fantasy of ensuring Jin could play with all his Stances and use his iconic sticky bomb.

As the scope of the work became clearer, the team’s excitement only grew. Instead, everyone was so excited about the prospect of Jin’s return they continued to identify areas where we could deliver the best version possible, and we are so proud everyone can play that version today.

– Parker Hamilton, Systems Design Lead

Adapting Jin’s combat styles to work in Ghost of Yōtei

Playing as Jin Sakai in Ghost of Tsushima, you feel like a master swordsman. It took a lot of collaboration across disciplines to recreate that feeling and bring it forward into Most Wanted. By the end of production though, we were having a blast doing runs as Jin. It was honestly a big relief! It was gratifying to see him finally come back to form after many months.

Jin’s 60+ attack animations, most with their own bespoke kill animations, had to be retargeted to the new character rig, retouched (sorry Mark), and rebalanced for Ghost of Yōtei’s combat systems. Stone Stance’s Piercing Strike in particular decimated everything in Yōtei as originally implemented. In addition, Mark created custom strafe animations for each of Jin’s stances to support the new Focus Attack model (thank you Mark).

We wanted Jin’s perks to play into his classic feel. For example, classic Jin would immediately interrupt enemy combos with a well-timed press of the Block button. The distinction between Parry Deflect and Parry Interrupt didn’t exist in Ghost of Tsushima. In Most Wanted, the Rattling Parry perk causes Jin to deal more Stagger damage on successful parries, causing Parry Interrupt to happen more often. He also has a basket of perks that encourage Perfect Parry.

His unique fighting style is more than that though. Jin’s formally trained Stone Stance is complemented by his ability to dance between katana stances and scrappier tactics like his Quickfire. Empowering Quickfire even directly rewards following up Quickfire with melee.

A bunch of team members including our QA department contributed to filling out his set of perks. As we continued experimenting with the possibilities of Most Wanted, we really embraced the chaos and had a great time finding creative ways of having a great time, even bringing back Jin’s connection with the wind in perks.

Personally, I’m just glad people are having fun with Jin again out in the wild. I saw a clip that was something like, Jin flying through the air in bullet-time, head-shotting an enemy with a Tanegashima, following up with a Sticky Bomb, then a Water Stance flurry which triggered a lightning strike, and it had me beaming.

– Nate Slottow, Programmer

Reviving his animation styles and adding a nod to a cinematic Ghost of Tsushima moment…

When the Animation Team joined Most Wanted, we were ecstatic to bring Jin back into the game. The team was equally struck at the amount of effort we knew it would take to really bring back the whole essence of Jin, considering the amount of production time remaining. The Most Wanted team put an incredible amount of work into making it happen, and seeing Jin back again has been absolutely worth it.

As well as reviving more than 60+ combat animations, the team brought back Jin’s idle actions, which are iconic to his character. Near the end of production, the team had a great idea to incorporate Jin’s rarely seen “bird hold idle” into the Most Wanted menu. The character selection menu gave us an additional way to showcase each character’s demeanor. Jin’s selection animation was inspired by the cinematic moment in Ghost of Tsushima when Jin first recovers the storm blade.

Seeing all the fans’ reactions to Jin’s return has been absolutely awesome. Bringing Jin back to life has been a rewarding experience, and our team hopes everyone has as much fun playing Most Wanted as we’ve had.

– Mark Wheeler, Senior Staff Animator

…and keeping the character model and armor authentic to the original while adding visual updates

Jin Sakai has become an iconic character and has an equally iconic look. Reviving him to not just his former glory but matching the fidelity of Atsu was a challenge but an exciting one. Jin’s armor was one of the first things brought back. Fortunately, thanks to the stellar work of the artist who initially created it (Emre Ekmekci), a large portion of the model still held up. That left a lot of the hard work on the modeling side handled and the fun of giving it a new coat of paint as the primary challenge. Updating the metal, leather, and cloth to match how it looked during Tsushima, yet still have detail now possible in Yōtei, was a fine balance. I used his old texture files as a reference point to match materials to what they were before then added subtle details on top to push it that last 10%. I wanted to add some wear and age to the armor without disrupting how people remembered it.

Now that the armor was in a place we were happy with, the next hurdle was his face and hair. Skin textures, shaders, facial hair, everything had to be tackled and held next to Atsu to make it feel like they were both made in the same era. This was a challenge: I couldn’t tweak his skin too much or else he would look like a different character, but if I left things too unchanged he would look odd next to his counterpart. Using the same textures from Tsushima as a base, we built up from there, tweaking his skin tone, redness, lips, even his scar to look sharper and more defined. We also baked new normal maps to help push his skin detail a bit further. A lot of intentionality went into bringing him back.

Once everything came together, being able to see him posed in all his glory was a real spark of joy. It was an honor to have a part in bringing this character back to life. Seeing fan reactions to his reveal and their excitement while they fight through bounty after bounty has been a highlight of my career.

– Nate Ramsey, Character Artist

Redesigning audio, a new take on Jin’s musical theme…and bringing back Daisuke Tsuji

It was so fun to revisit Jin Sakai and revive many of his special attacks. We took great care in reviving iconic moves like the Heavenly Slash, Dance of Wrath and even Jin’s Ghost Stance directly from the assets used in Ghost of Tsushima.

Reviving his musical theme, including the amazing new version we recorded with Justin Johnson on lap steel guitar, was another fun aspect we knew fans would love to hear.

One of the biggest considerations in bringing Jin back to life was his character movement sounds. We completely overhauled the way we handle character movement sounds between Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yōtei so we needed to take Jin’s old sounds and rebuild them in a way that stayed true to the original, while supporting our new, more dynamic animation tagging system. One of our sound designers, Chris Walasek, took all of our assets we recorded for Jin’s iconic Ghost armor and re-designed his movement sounds to match this new system ensuring the transients of Jin’s movement sounds were consistent with our other characters.

We also knew, when first considering bringing Jin into the world of Ghost of Yōtei: Most Wanted, it wouldn’t be possible without the voice of Jin himself, Daisuke Tsuji. Getting Daisuke back into the booth was a great experience as always. He’s a brilliant actor and really fun to riff with. Hearing his takes on the confrontations with each Yotei 6 member brought us big smiles during the recording sessions and even allowed us to sneak a few Jin lines into the main game.

We hoped fans would be excited to play this fun new mode with one of their favorite characters, and it has been a joy watching as they’ve repeatedly struck down the Yōtei Six with everyone’s favorite samurai-turned-Ghost.

– Rev. Dr. Brad Meyer, Audio Director

We were really excited to work with Daisuke Tsuji again and bring back Jin while staying true to the character. From an art perspective, Jin was originally created for PS4, while Yōtei was built entirely for PS5, so our rendering technology has come a long way. Our goal was to maintain the familiarity of his original design while bringing him forward with the visual fidelity of Yōtei.

This time around, we could push much more detail into his face, hair, clothing, and especially his armor, while keeping the shapes players remember. We also wanted to bring back his iconic imagery and gestures, like the quiet moment before a duel where his thumb pushes the tsuba, and the way he wipes blood from his blade after a kill.

For us, it really came down to honoring Jin while applying everything we’ve learned artistically and technically since Tsushima, and I am so proud of the way everything came together.

– Joanna Wang, Production Art Director

*Internet connection, account for PlayStation, and patch v.2.0 or later required.