Hamburger Samurai Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

We’re about an hour in and absolutely mesmerised by the sheer world and atmosphere around us. The game has been pulling on our heartstrings from the first moment in which we were cruelly greeted with a pile of bodies that were our protagonist’s family, it instilled fear as our horse was sliding down a slippery slope, but now a sense of wonder as we explore the world around us and Atsu’s past. Ghost of Yotei takes place in the 17th century, but even after two hours of play, it is difficult to say how Ghost of Yotei treats certain aspects of (Japanese) history. We have barely scratched the surface of this title, concerning ourselves with some distractions and side activities that have already taken us some additional steps away from the main narrative path. However, there are some really interesting things that Ghost of Yotei is doing that we’d like to point out.

Are we in the past or in a movie?

It is 1603. The Sengoku period, also known as “the warring states period”, recently came to an end, turning into the Edo period as we know it today. Atsu’s story gets framed by the forces of this past as a renegade samurai, his lieutenant, and his cronies murder Atsu’s family. She also learns her fighting skills during the years of wars she fights in, further south of Japan. On a lighter note, Ghost of Yotei also includes wonderful artefacts of the period, such as the Shamishen. Atsu’s mother teaches her how to play this instrument, and Atsu still carries the Shamisen on her back years later. The music also incorporates a variety of traditional instruments and sounds (although with a twist). We learn how to forge a sword, learn to spot altars from a monk, and ride our horse through the beautiful countryside. The game firmly places us in the 17th century past using these elements… or does it?

If Ghost of Tsushima was described as Hamburger Samurai by developers Sucker Punch, then Ghost of Yotei is Hamburger Samurai: Part 2: Electric Boogaloo. Arguably, many of the choices made in the audio and visual presentation evoke more of a frontier western film than they evoke the past. One clear example of this is the game’s decisions on ‘Kurosawa Mode’. Saturated black and white cinematography and compressed sound are designed to reimagine Akira Kurosawa’s famous samurai films within the game. The truly interesting thing here is, rather than simply accepting this as a faithful or loving reference to the director, these choices are reductive. Kurosawa’s body of work spans across four decades, and while he is undoubtedly famous for groundbreaking films such as Rashomon, or The Seven Samurai, his films do not all fit into the game’s own definition of ‘Kurosawa Mode’. Firstly, Kurosawa’s subject matter did not fixate on feudal Japan. Take films such as Live in Fear, a piece that remains to this day a timely reflection on the threat and terrifying spectre of Nuclear War – not to mention the film’s reinforcement of Japanese and Brazilian international relations. Secondly, even when dealing with feudal Japan, Kurosawa did not exclusively film in black and white. Ran – translated into Chaos – in 1985 is a classic example of this. A recreation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear – remediation squared times infinity – is a full colour picture. The set design and the character design of this film is also firmly rooted in Kabuki theatre, again a startling reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s plays being performative stage pieces. So the game’s choice to have strict boundaries on what is a ‘Kurosawa’ picture is quite a selective choice – but still very interesting over what the developers privilege.

Remediation Plus

Furthermore, some of the promotional material is even clearer about Ghost of Yotei’s relations to history and cinema. In this state of play deepdive, there is great emphasis on three cinematic modes (all three based on key figures of the Samurai movie genre) and how you “can feel like you’re in your favourite Samurai movie”, but no explicit mention of history or the past. Bolter and Grusin have a quite convincing and longstanding argument about remediation. Namely, that popular culture references other modes of culture that then feed into other medium, creating a feedback loop of remediation.

In this context, Ghost of Yotei, does much of the same cultural work, reflecting on Japanese history, performance, and popular media, as well as on American Westerns and the pop culture shaped by mid-twentieth-century cinema. We’d like to suggest that what we see in Ghost of Yotei is something like “Remediation Plus.” The game isn’t just reworking one set of influences, but blending several layers of historical and contemporary media at once. A good example is the ‘Watanabe’ mode. Shinchiro Watanabe’s contemporary contributions to animation from Cowboy Bebop (this author’s favourite ‘anime’), but most notably on show here is Samurai Champloo. In this mode, players wander the frontier plains of Ezo, suffused with the relaxed lo-fi hip-hop beats of the late 1990s or early 2000s. This is remediation plus, an amalgamate, composite collection of references that have no historical boundary and are as much influenced by our contemporary attitudes and perceptions of Japan as by the history itself. Again, this remediation (remediation plus) intends to speak significantly to our contemporary sensibilities – perhaps the American sensibilities of the developers, as well as the perceptions and revisions of history. An added layer of intangible remediation on an otherwise already remediated pop culture product. 

Historical NPC’s (if you turn on the subtitles)

Another element of history can be found in the “type” of NPC we ran into in the first two hours of gameplay. Well, that is if you turned on your subtitles, hidden away somewhere in the accessibility options. We played with English subtitles on, and the random NPC’s populating small villages are designated as “Settlers”. This is a really interesting decision that is fixed in the realms of this period of history for this area of Hokkaido – or Ezo. The game is set in the Oshima peninsula of Hokkaido. This geographical setting is a great narrative decision rooted in the history, echoing both the historical changes that populations in Hokkaido will experience, but also reflecting – as another remediation of both history and popular culture – the narrative pull of a frontier narrative, so popular in western films. 

This notion, that Hokkaido is becoming occupied by a steady, growing migration of settlers from the Shogunate on Honshu, is rooted in the history. Across a period of roughly 300 years, the shogunate’s grip on Hokkaido deepens, and the vast interior of the island – starting from this peninsula – turns towards full incorporation into a Japanese nation, rather than a distant frontier island of barbarians – as noted by the term Ezo.  

There is another, really big, really interesting, thing to say about the peoples in Ghost of Yotei, a point brought up by developers themselves as well; representation of Ainu people. However, since this blog is already quite long and we’ve barely met them in our last stream, you’ll just have to watch our last stream on YouTube, tune in this Friday to watch our upcoming stream or wait till our next blogpost!

Dr Michael Pennington is a historian and researcher focusing on Japanese history in digital games and the preservation of the medium. He has published broadly on the impact of fan-made paratexts in disseminating history, the history of women’s football in the FIFA series, and curations of modern Japan found in strategy timesinks such as Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. He is currently fascinated with grassroots indie games in Japan and documentary approaches to their preservation. Previously, Michael was a curator at the UK’s National Videogame Museum. He convened its preservation network, led on the groundbreaking Animal Crossing Diaries oral history project, and unsuccessfully tried to get Dark Souls 2 and Ridge Racer Type 4 playable in the gallery.

Corine Gerritsen is doing a PhD in the Playful Timemachines project at Leiden University. She is occupied with distinguishing those elements that make up the past in video games. With a background in ancient history, it is unsurprising she plays too many games with ‘Rome’ in the title. She is terrible at platformer-games, but great at being (morally) terrible in Crusader Kings, she enjoys adventuring in Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed or The Whitcher, and loves building cute houses in games as Valheim or Enshrouded. When not playing with pixels, she enjoys going to book cafes, buy gothic novels and fantasy books, and test the absolute weight limit of her bookshelf.
Bluesky: @times-new-roman.bsky.social