How Ghost of Tsushima Hopes to Remain Faithful to Japanese Culture
“It’s important to many people at Sony that we get this right.”
Chris Zimmerman is talking about the depiction of Japan in Ghost of Tsushima, the videogame his studio Sucker Punch demoed at E3 this week. Set in 1274, during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, Tsushima finds Sucker Punch in an unusual situation: they’re an American developer making a game about Japanese history for a Japanese publisher. That relationship with Sony is key to ensuring that Sucker Punch remains respectful and accurate in its depiction of Japanese history and culture, according to Zimmerman.
That accuracy is less about broad strokes and more about the finer details that many might not even consider. As Zimmerman says, “We haven’t done anything where we’re like ‘we want to do this’ and they go ‘no, that’s not Japanese.’ It’s really more about innocent mistakes.”
He gives an example of the kind of input Sony’s Japanese producers have made during the game’s development, pointing to the demo they showed at E3. In the demo the character Masako saves the main protagonist Jin from a Mongol assailant. “What we’d written for her to say then was ‘Hello, Jin. You’re late.’ And our Japanese producer was like, ‘no, that’s not Japanese at all. She would never say that.’ So we just edited it to ‘Jin, you’re late.’ So little things like that, that we would just dismiss.”
Another example: the characters in the game speak in Japanese. It’s set in 1274, though, and so obviously the language is not exactly the same as the one spoken today. Neither are the kanji that are used on-screen at the start of vignettes. To keep Tsushima as accurate as possible, Sucker Punch had to make sure the language matched the time setting.
“We try to find people that are native Japanese speakers for our cast, like Daisuke [Tsuji], the lead actor,” Zimmerman says. “But it turns out we still need a dialect coach on stage, because he needs to not speak modern Japanese, he needs to speak 13th century Japanese. So he needs to be coached in how to say things. And when we write things on screen, those are not modern kanji. Those have to be 13th century kanji. So it’s important to us to have a team of people around to make sure we get all the details right. Would you have known those aren’t the right kanji? But somebody will, right? All the details are like that—they don’t have to hit for everybody. Knowing that we’ve got it as right as we can, knowing that those details are going to hit and make the game more special for people, are kind of what we’re aiming for.”
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