Ghost of Yotei

Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favourite games. I finished it twice, including the Director's Cut, so Ghost of Yotei had a high bar to clear. It clears it. Sucker Punch moved the setting to Hokkaido in 1603 and handed the lead role to a new protagonist with a different energy and fighting style than Jin Sakai, and the result feels like a genuine evolution rather than a sequel built on autopilot. The open world is stunning in the way that Tsushima was, but it is built natively for PS5, which shows in the visual density and the sense of scale. This is the franchise's proper PS5 moment. It earns the slot.

Ghost of Tsushima was one of my favourite games of the PS5 era, so I came to Ghost of Yotei with high expectations and a lot of goodwill toward the team. What Yotei does is take everything that worked about Tsushima's wind-guided exploration and expand the canvas considerably, set against Hokkaido in a later period with a different protagonist and a more personal revenge structure. It is a bigger, more confident game, and it lands in this list as the current flagship for anyone who wants a prestige historical open world. Whether it fully surpasses Tsushima is a conversation worth having. But under the logic of recommending the best current version of this kind of experience, Yotei is it.