We rolled credits on Ghost of Yotei last autumn, watched Atsu sit with
everything she had done, and then did the thing we always do with a 100GB game
we love: uninstalled it to make room for something else and felt faintly
guilty about it for a week. So when the Complete Edition landed with Echoes of
Sekigahara bolted on, the question in our group chat was never “is it good”.
It was “do we really have to redownload the whole thing again”. We did. And
for about five hours of it, we were very glad we had.
Who was Atsu before the blood?
Echoes of Sekigahara is the reason to come back, and it is the part Sucker
Punch clearly poured the care into. The hook is a dual narrative: one thread
runs in present-day Ezo, picking up with the Atsu we know, scarred and long
done with mercy, while the other drops you into her past, before the path of
vengeance even had a name. That second thread is the clever bit. The base game
asked you to accept Atsu as a fully formed instrument of revenge, and that was
fine, it worked, but you were always taking her grief on faith. Here you get
to live in the context. You see the version of her that still had something to
lose, and then the game cuts back to the hardened present and every scene
lands twice as heavy because you now know exactly what the cost was. We lost a
whole evening to it without noticing. The pacing is tight, the Ezo landscapes
are still absurdly pretty, and it has one of the richest stories the franchise
has told. Richer than the first game’s Iki Island expansion, honestly, even if
it is not as big.
That size caveat matters, so let us be straight about it. The main campaign is
around five hours. Side missions and bounties tack on several more, and some
of those bounties are genuinely good, but if you were hoping for a second
Hokkaido to get lost in, this is not that. It is a tight, focused story that
knows when to stop.
Which, frankly, more expansions should learn to do.
Big swords, three arrows
The combat additions are the kind of thing that sounds like a bullet point and
plays like a personality change. Massive, heavy weapons are in now, and they
completely alter how you read a fight. Atsu was always a dancer, in and out,
parry and punish. Swinging something enormous turns her into a wrecking crew,
and the game leans into that with slower windups that pay off in that lovely
sense of a line of enemies realising too late that they stood in the wrong
place. We spent the first hour refusing to switch back. There is a real
tactical cost to it too, because every big swing leaves you open, so you
cannot just mash through a camp the way the katana lets you, and that tension
between raw power and exposure is what stops the heavy weapons feeling like an
easy-mode cheat and keeps them feeling like an actual choice you have to earn.
Then there is the new deadeye-style ability, which fires three arrows at once.
It is exactly as silly and satisfying as that sounds. Time slows, you pick
your targets, and three archers on a ridge stop being a problem. It does feel
a touch borrowed from a certain other open-world cowboy game, but Atsu makes
it her own, and the first time we cleared a camp approach without ever drawing
a blade we cackled.
Does it break the balance a bit? Yes. Do we care? Not even slightly.
Most Wanted wanted a bit more
Here is the honest half of the scorecard. The Complete Edition also brings
Most Wanted, a roguelike mode where you push through waves of enemies and then
square up against members of the Yotei Six at the end of a run. On paper that
is a brilliant fit. The combat in this game is good enough to carry a mode
built entirely around repeating it, and getting to re-fight the Six with the
new heavy weapons is a treat the first couple of times. But it is also plainly
the weaker part of the DLC. The runs start to blur together faster than they
should, the structure feels thinner than the roguelike mode deserves, and
after a few attempts we were going back for the story bounties instead. It is
a welcome addition. It is also the bit we will forget about by Christmas,
which is a shame, because the bones of something properly addictive are in
there and it just needed more time in the oven.
Welcome, yes. Essential, no.
So, the redownload
The reviews landing around 4/5 feel right to us. Video Games Chronicle called
it “an expansion worth returning for”, and that is the exact framing we would
use, with one footnote: you are returning for the story. Echoes of Sekigahara
earns its place beside the base game. Most Wanted is a bonus that will suit
the people who treat Ghost combat as a sport and leave everyone else cold.
If you finished the base game and felt even a flicker of wanting to know who
Atsu was before the fire, come back. Five hours of her past, a very large
sword, and three arrows at once. That is worth the hard drive space.
