[4] Eventually the player unlocks "ghost stance", which makes Jin invincible and allows him to kill enemies with a single hit for a limited period of time.

[7] The game's highest difficulty is a more realistic mode in which the player and enemies do large amounts of damage to each other, with all non-boss fights ending in one or two successful attacks.

[10] When the player restores Jin's health or uses special combat techniques, they deplete their "resolve", which is gained by performing feats of finesse such as assassinating or parrying an enemy.

He meets several friends and companions, including a thief named Yuna (Sumalee Montano / Yu Mizuno), her blacksmith brother Taka (Eddie Shin / Kappei Yamaguchi), a female warrior named Lady Masako Adachi (Lauren Tom / Mabuki Ando), renowned kyūjutsu archer Sensei Sadanobu Ishikawa (François Chau / Shigeru Chiba), merchant and con artist Kenji (James Hiroyuki Liao / Setsuji Sato), Buddhist warrior monk Norio (Earl T. Kim / Mitsuaki Kanuka), Clan Sakai's elderly caretaker Yuriko (Karen Huie / Yuri Tabata), and Jin's childhood friend and leader of the infamous Straw Hat rōnin, Ryuzo (Leonard Wu / Youhei Tadano).

Before gathering his allies and assaulting Khotun's final stronghold in Port Izumi, Jin leaves a note for Shimura in his castle asking him to join the effort with the samurai, which he does.

After fending off retaliation by the Eagle's forces, Jin hears Tenzo say, "May your death benefit all beings" to a dying Mongol — the same phrase a masked raider spoke to Kazumasa before killing him.

[39][40][41] Japan Studio also helped connect Sucker Punch with historians who the team consulted on the history of the invasion and local Japanese customs and traditions.

Patrick Gallagher joined the cast in 2017 and prepared for the role as Khotun Khan by watching The Godfather and drawing on his experience portraying Attila the Hun in Night at the Museum.

[38][52] 13 Assassins from Takashi Miike and films directed by Akira Kurosawa such as Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, Yojimbo, Red Beard, and Ran, served as major sources of inspiration for the team.

[53] The ending of Sanjuro directly inspired the game's "standoff" gameplay feature, in which a warrior must wait for their counterpart to make their first move and then kill them with one strike.

[54] The comic book series Usagi Yojimbo, which features a soft-mannered rabbit samurai solving various problems for ordinary citizens, also influenced the team.

[57] The combat system was reportedly the most difficult feature to implement in Ghost of Tsushima, as the team had to build multiple versions of it and modified its design frequently during the game's development.

The team allowed combat to take longer in the game's 1v1 duels, as players likely expected them to be boss fights and these encounters could not end too quickly.

The team initially added icons and a compass to the game to aid the player's navigation, but they realized they spent an excessive amount of time looking at them and ignored the in-game world itself.

While the in-game landmass is geographically the same shape as that of Tsushima Island, Sucker Punch took the liberty of creating the game's individual biomes, ensuring that each region is artistically distinct.

[43] Connell added that the art and environment teams had a hard time switching to Ghost of Tsushima after working for nine years on the Infamous games, which features a "punk rock" visual style.

The team intentionally avoided the traditional assassin design in which characters are dressed in all-black fully-cloth clothing for the ghost outfit in order to make it appear more realistic.

According to Meyer, the team spent a lot of time "scraping them against each other, clanging them together, swinging them, suspending them from the ceiling and spinning them around" in order to record interesting sounds.

The black-naped oriole was chosen as the game's guide bird because it can be found in Japan and Meyer had the opportunity to record its sound during a vacation in Sri Lanka in 2018.

A four-track remix EP titled "Sound of the Storm – Ghost of Tsushima Soundtrack: Reimagined" features contributions from TOKiMONSTA, Tycho, The Glitch Mob and Alessandro Cortini.

[78] Ghost of Tsushima's marketing campaign began in October 2017 when a trailer was shown at Sony Interactive Entertainment's Paris Games Week press conference.

[89] In December 2020, Legends introduced four character outfits based on other PlayStation franchises: Bloodborne, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Shadow of the Colossus.

[93] The Director's cut also includes an expansion in which Jin visits Iki Island to stop a Mongol tribe led by a shaman named Ankhsar Khatun.

[99] In April 2022, Sucker Punch announced that they have stopped working on further patches and updates for both the main game and Legends, as the studio shifted developmental resources to other projects.

[104] Sucker Punch had previously clarified that PlayStation Network account linking was mandatory only for Ghost of Tsushima's multiplayer component, and that singleplayer would not be affected.

[115][113][114] Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell compared them unfavorably to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and considered them to be an "afterthought", criticizing their basic framework and inadequate rewards for completion.

[121] While the performance of the voice cast was praised,[118][114][113][121] several reviewers noted the lack of lip-syncing for the Japanese audio, which was later rectified in the Director's Cut version of the game.

[112] In a mixed review, Keza MacDonald of The Guardian felt that the story lacked intrigue and wrote that Ghost of Tsushima adhered "so closely to the tropes and storylines of classic samurai fiction that it sometimes forgets to have a personality of its own".

[114] Mike Williams from USgamer felt that combat was "decent", but the camera angle and the lack of a lock-on system mean that players cannot easily control the battlefield as opponents swarm in on Jin from various directions with different styles of attacks.

The film will be produced by Stahelski, Alex Young, and Jason Spitz of 87Eleven Entertainment alongside Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan of PlayStation Productions.