The studio behind Ghost of Yōtei, Sucker Punch Production, has acknowledged that it might have gone a bit too far in terms of difficulty for optional boss Takezo the Unrivalled. However, the developer has also been enjoying watching players struggle with the fight. In an interview with GamesRadar during GDC 2026, lead combat designer Theodore Fishman spoke about Takezo, and how players “probably hate this guy with every fiber of your being.”
Fishman explained that the design goal behind Takezo was to create a “super boss,” similar to what we would see in classic JRPGs where there would be several optional boss fights designed explicitly to test the player’s tactics and capabilities. This “super boss” also presented a novel challenge for Sucker Punch Productions, since the studio hadn’t really done anything like it in the past. “The goal here [with Takezo] was we were going for a super boss,” he said. “That was the most important thing we wanted to do. We hadn’t done it before.”
The studio wanted to ensure that the boss was challenging enough to force players to come up with their own tactics to take him on. This meant promoting more build crafting. Ultimately, while the game design behind the boss wasn’t perfect, Fishman revealed that the studio was quite happy with the overall reaction the encounter elicited from players.
“We wanted to stretch ourselves and our players,” he continued. “You really feel like you’re build crafting, and there’s a challenge, literally, on top of the hill… I personally really enjoy watching people die to this. I love it so much. Seeing players’ reaction and seeing how they try to solve it. Was it perfect? No! But did it get a different emotional response and experience that players didn’t have from our game before? Yeah, it was great!”
Fishman also spoke about the design of the final boss, Saito, and how its fourth phase was designed around the concept of leaning “into the feeling of the nightmare, the trauma within [Atsu’s] family, to revisit it and get her revenge.” He discussed the difficulty of designing the fight, “because there’s a lot of expectations about how many phases there are, what the challenge is, and then players are going to play the game in completely different ways.” As for Saito’s ability to use just about “every weapon in the game,” Fishman explained that the studio wanted players to experience the culmination of the “journey of mastery” that they had embarked upon.
During GDC 2026, art director Joanna Wang had also spoken about Ghost of Yōtei. However, her subject of discussion was its open world, and how the studio managed to make a world that feels larger than the one in Ghost of Tsushima without it actually being the case. This was achieved through “contrast between openness and confinements” which is visible in how Ghost of Yōtei mixes up its wide-open fields with narrow corridor-styled zones. Through this, the exploration felt more impactful, and “In the end, the actual playable space wasn’t larger than Ghost of Tsushima, but it feels larger.”
Ghost of Yōtei is available on PS5. For more details, check out our review. Also take a look at the co-op multiplayer Legends mode.
