Let's go to Ezo in Ghost of Yotei: Tips for your first few hours

Ghost of Yotei feels like a continuation of Ghost of Tsushima in all the best ways. It’s a new story told with the same mechanics and cinematic style. But it’s been five years since Ghost of Tsushima was released, so you’d be forgiven for not remembering some of the details and mechanics — we sure don’t. 

Fast travel is extensive and convenient

After Yotei’s opening, you’ll be in the open world on your horse. Like Tsushima, the map is dense with stuff to do and things to find (more on this below). And every single thing that becomes a map marker is also a fast travel destination.

Just hover over any icon to get a little popup menu with a picture of your horse. Hitting △ will warp you straight there. If there are multiple things to do at your destination — like the inn’s bounty board, bowyer, and front gate — you’ll get to choose where you land.

You’ll miss out on the cinematic landscapes (genuinely worth the time, honestly), though. And those travelling sections are a good way to find new locations to explore and collectible resources, which …

Collect everything

Yotei is an open-world game, so the advice of “collect everything” is kind of a given. But resources are relatively rare and you need a ton of them for upgrades. You’ll get a few here and there when you visit icons on the map, but the majority are going to come from the traversal sections.

And that means you’ll have to balance the convenience of fast travel with the utility of collecting resources.

When the game tells you to go forge and upgrade: do it

When you first visit your childhood home, you’ll realize that you can upgrade your weapons with a variety of materials. However, you’ll need to adventure a bit first. 

When you find the materials you need, the game will tell you “hey, go back home to upgrade your stuff.” This is a direct upgrade to your dad’s sword, which is your main damage-dealing tool. It really benefits you to just stop what you’re doing, fast travel for the upgrade, and then fast travel back to wherever you were. 

Don’t be like us and hit up a bunch of other side garbage on the way. Be better than us and upgrade your damn sword.

Take advantage of the high ground

Like Obi-Wan, it’s important to recognize (and state, loudly, to whoever else is in your home) when you have the high ground. And while you could use that high ground to slice up a pal, you’ll mostly need it in Yotei to find interesting new areas to explore.

Atsu comes with a trusty spyglass (up on the D-pad) that she can pull out at any time and hold over parts of the environment to highlight somewhere new to explore. But that’s not very useful if you’re on a plain surrounded by hills. So the next time you find yourself at a shrine or lured up a mountain by a fox, take a second to look around with your spyglass (try looking for light smoke rising).

You have to balance progression and exploration

You may be sensing a theme here, which is that it’s very easy to jump off the path to do a bounty or collect some resources, or just tag a new location for fast travel. And that is both true and dangerous.

Now, to be clear, Ghost of Yotei wants to distract you. Golden birds will literally fly into your horse’s face to try and pull you off to some random stuff nearby. And that stuff is important, but so is progressing through the game’s main missions, where you’ll unlock tools that will help you complete side objectives.

Side objectives like Wolf Dens, taking over outposts, and following foxes can give you huge boosts, and it’s worth getting distracted to grab those things. But you can’t just do side stuff all the time, or you’ll end up spending a ton of time failing a stealth section because you haven’t unlocked the damn bow yet.

Remember how generous the fast travel system is? What’s worked best for us is traveling to a thing on the map that will give us something tangible we want (like a skill point), and then leaving the stuff around it unexplored until later so we can go focus on a mission. When we’re ready to go back to exploring, we can just fast travel right back to where we got the skill point. If you adopt that philosophy, you should find a decent balance as you adventure through Yotei.

Take bounties for cash

Another resource you’ll need plenty of is cash, and the fastest way to earn cash is from bounties. There’s a bounty board at the Shadow Inn (the game’s first real hub), and you’ll find bounty posters all over the map.

The earliest bounties — the baddies you can kill early on without too much struggle — will pay 750 mon. That’s enough to pick up both of the bows at the bowyer.

Talk to everyone you can

At any point out in the wild, Atsu can make camp. Doing so will refill your spirit and allow you to pass time until the next morning or night. You can also cook food to get perks like extra spirit or craft arrows to keep your quiver topped up.

Sometimes, a stranger will come join you. These randos can offer you a pop-up shop to buy things, which is great, but they can also offer rumors or even maps that help fill in places for you to go. We found our first Wolf Den, for example, by chatting up some dude who walked up and wanted to share the fire. He told us about some nearby wolves and we were able to place the map he drew on top of our own, which marked it and gave us a Wolf-based skill point when we arrived.

Yotei’s map is also dotted with little rest spots where you can find folks sitting around. There’s also usually a person or two to chat up at settlements. Worst case, you’ll hear a rumor. Best case, though, you’ll get a Traveler’s Map. (The mechanic to add waypoints onto the map is genuinely the coolest mechanic in the game.)

Yotei is big and wide, and it’s easy to miss locations that might give you some rad bonuses. So allow your fellow citizens to help out.

You can turn off the silly physical interactions

Look, we love a good gimmick, but blowing onto the controller’s microphone to stoke a fire is a bridge too far.

You can turn off a lot of the sillier “immersive” controls in the settings. Cooking food at camp, working Atsu’s father’s forge, and starting fires all become a lot more pleasant if you’re not waving the controller around.

The settings are spread around, though. In Settings > Controls, you’ll find Motion Sensor Function Aim (for the bow). In Settings > Gameplay, look for Quick Camp. And in Settings > Accessibility, you’re after Forging Controls and Campfire Controls. You can also just hold the X button to skip most of these mini-games.

Bamboo strikes can be really hard

Bamboo strikes are one of those countless distractions on the map. They’re a speed challenge where you hit a series of buttons as fast as you can and they reward you with an increase of your Spirit (healing and special moves).

Depending on the buttons you need to press, they might also require you to move both hands to one side of the controller. Hitting L1, L3, and a series of D-pad inputs feels all but impossible for just one hand (although, that is the point in this particular example).

Unlike cooking and camping, there’s no turning them off or making them easier, so you’ll just have to be prepared for some awkward hand placements.

Maybe wait until you get some more tools before trying stealth

In the early hours of Yotei, we decided to look around and hunt down a baddie who was occupying a camp. And the easiest way to do that was to sneak around and get some stealth kills.

Unfortunately, you don’t really start Yotei with a great arsenal for stealth. You don’t even have a bow when you first get going. That doesn’t mean you can’t stealth, but it does mean you’re going to have a much harder time doing it. 

If you enter into a camp – or any situation – where you feel like you should probably have a piece of gear that you don’t, you should really consider pushing just a bit further into the main story first and coming back before you waste a lot of time doing things the hardest way possible. 

Chuck every weapon you find

One of the coolest things about Atsu is that she’s unafraid to pick up a dead enemy’s katana and just huck it into their buddy’s chest. Turns out, there are a ton of weapons just lying around on racks and in tents in Yotei, and you can just pick them up and make a makeshift javelin out of it.

These thrown weapons do a ton of damage, and can even break the posture of enemies (empty bottles also do the latter, which is very helpful). If you find yourself cornered or in an uneven fight (and you will, often), try throwing something to deal a lot of damage or even kill enemies outright.