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Ghost of Yōtei and The Last of Us Part I deliver fundamentally different journeys. Yōtei is built around roaming an expansive wilderness in 1603 Ezo, where Atsu follows curiosity while pursuing the people who destroyed her family. The Last of Us Part I is a companion-centered survival story: Joel must smuggle 14-year-old Ellie out of a military quarantine zone, and the assignment becomes a brutal cross-country journey through a collapsed civilization.
That makes the open-world comparison asymmetrical. Yōtei’s official design discussion emphasizes freedom, long sightlines and less intrusive guidance. PlayStation’s description of The Last of Us Part I emphasizes its cross-country narrative, environmental storytelling and directed encounters, but does not call it an open-world game. The best choice depends on whether you want an exploratory revenge-and-redemption adventure or a tightly authored survival drama about two people traveling together.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
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| 1 |
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Ghost of Yōtei PS5 | $53.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Ghost of Yotei (PS5) | $52.95 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Riders Republic PlayStation 5 Standard Edition | $25.95 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Perp The Persistence Enhanced Amélioré(e) Anglais PlayStation 5 | $18.18 | Buy on Amazon |
| 5 |
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Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut | $43.80 | Buy on Amazon |
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Scope: which version of The Last of Us is being compared?
“The Last of Us” can mean the entire franchise, including Part II and its television adaptation. This comparison uses The Last of Us Part I, the 2022 remake of the original Joel-and-Ellie story. It is the version whose official product description provides the clearest contrast with Yōtei’s wilderness exploration. The discussion below avoids plot spoilers beyond each game’s published premise.
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| Category | Ghost of Yōtei | The Last of Us Part I |
|---|---|---|
| Release context | Launched for PlayStation 5 on October 2, 2025 | Launched for PlayStation 5 on September 2, 2022; also offered for PC on PlayStation’s product page |
| Location and period | Mount Yōtei and surrounding Ezo in 1603, in the region identified today as Hokkaido | A ravaged version of the United States during a post-pandemic collapse |
| Lead characters | Atsu, a new protagonist pursuing those responsible for killing her family | Joel, a smuggler, and Ellie, a 14-year-old he is hired to transport |
| World structure | Expansive wilderness designed for free exploration, curiosity and long sightlines | A cross-country journey presented through authored environments; the official description does not label it open-world |
| Primary story engine | Revenge that develops into a story about healing and redemption | A smuggling job that becomes a dangerous journey centered on Joel and Ellie’s relationship |
| Design emphasis | Less intrusive guidance, flexible weapon combat, memorable characters and emotional story moments | Environmental storytelling, updated controls, accessibility options, improved exploration and combat |
| Edition context | Standard, Digital Deluxe and Collector’s Editions were listed at launch | Standard Edition; the package includes the Left Behind prequel chapter |
Edition names and availability can change by region, so check the current PlayStation or PC store listing before buying. The table reflects the launch and product-page information supplied by Sony and PlayStation, not a promise that every edition remains in stock.
#1 Best Overall
- Stunning graphics and gameplay, explore the wild and striking lands around Mount Yotei on foot or horseback. Travel picturesque parts of northern Japan through grasslands, snowy ridges, fields of wildflowers, and more.
- Discover renegade combat, engage in lawless katana combat and battles with adversaires. Train with various sensei as you find and learn to use each new weapon.
- An unconventional story and journey, take in the cultural beauty of Japan, bathe in an onsen, visit shrines to pray, try Sumi-e painting, and so much more.
- Choose your weapon, battle Atsu's opponents as you see fit, with levelled-up dual katanas, odachi, kusarigama and other new weapons.
Ghost of Yōtei’s world: an untamed landscape built to invite detours
A new region and a new historical moment
Yōtei takes place in 1603 around Mount Yōtei in Ezo, the island known today as Hokkaido. Sucker Punch describes the area as outside Japan’s rule at that time, giving the game a frontier setting distinct from the better-known regions depicted in Ghost of Tsushima. The landscapes include open grasslands and snowy tundra, with Mount Yōtei serving as a recurring geographic anchor.
The setting is not simply a change of scenery. A large wilderness changes how the player receives information. Instead of moving between a sequence of tightly bounded urban districts, you can read the terrain, notice distant landmarks and decide which path looks worth following. The studio’s design discussion focuses on preserving that feeling of discovery rather than constantly interrupting it with instructions.
Freedom is a stated design goal
Sucker Punch has described Yōtei as giving players freedom to explore an untamed wilderness. Its later technical discussion highlights longer sightlines and less intrusive guidance. Those choices suggest a game in which the landscape itself does more navigational work: a ridge, mountain, settlement or other visible feature can become the next destination without requiring a permanent stream of map prompts.
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Exploration supports Atsu’s personal journey
Atsu begins with a clear motive. She is pursuing the people who killed her family. Sony’s description also characterizes the story as reaching beyond vengeance toward healing and redemption. Exploration consequently has two functions. It lets you choose where to go in a physical sense, and it gives the character’s emotional movement room to unfold through encounters, landscapes and optional discoveries.
That framing does not mean every activity is detached from the main plot, nor does it establish that every story beat is optional. It means the world is designed to make wandering feel like a valid part of the journey rather than a distraction from a single prescribed route.
Rank #2
- Discover a bold, new story of a warrior in Japan who is on her own mission of vengeance.
- Set 300 years after the critically acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima, Ghost of Yōtei is a standalone experience set in 1600s rural Japan. The story follows a haunted, lone mercenary named Atsu. Thirsty for revenge, she travels through the beautiful, rugged landscapes of northern Japan, hunting those who killed her family many years earlier.
- Sixteen years after her family’s death, Atsu’s quest across Ezo brings her to unexplored lands in search of a gang of six outlaws, but she finds much more than vengeance. Throughout her journey, Atsu will discover unlikely allies, and greater bonds than she could have imagined.
The Last of Us Part I: a directed cross-country survival journey
The premise creates forward momentum
In Part I, Joel is hired to smuggle Ellie out of a military quarantine zone. The job expands into a cross-country journey through a civilization damaged by a catastrophic infection. The official PlayStation synopsis centers on that assignment and on the changing relationship between the two travelers.
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The game moves through varied locations, but variety is not the same as open-world structure. PlayStation’s product description does not market Part I as an open-world game. Its environments are built around authored routes, set pieces, stealth spaces and combat arenas that support the pacing of Joel and Ellie’s journey. You can often look around, search rooms and choose how to approach an encounter, yet the larger sequence remains shaped by the story’s intended direction.
Environmental storytelling replaces wilderness wandering
Part I’s remake description emphasizes environmental storytelling. Abandoned buildings, improvised defenses, personal belongings and traces of everyday life communicate what happened to communities without requiring a character to explain every detail. Exploration is valuable because it reveals context, resources and atmosphere inside a route that still has a destination.
This produces a different rhythm from Yōtei. In Yōtei, a distant landmark can invite a long detour across open country. In Part I, a side room, optional note or concealed passage deepens the immediate location. Both games reward attention, but one treats the horizon as an invitation while the other treats the environment as a layer of meaning along a directed journey.
How the open-world question should be answered
Yōtei: open-ended movement is central
- The developer explicitly discusses freedom in an untamed wilderness.
- Longer sightlines are intended to help players orient themselves through the landscape.
- Guidance is designed to be less intrusive, allowing curiosity to shape the order of discoveries.
- The setting combines grasslands, snowy tundra and mountain vistas around Mount Yōtei.
Part I: exploration within a directed structure
- The official synopsis describes a cross-country journey, not an open-world format.
- Players investigate spaces, gather resources and make tactical choices, but the route is authored around Joel and Ellie’s story.
- Environmental storytelling adds optional depth without changing the game’s fundamental progression model.
- The remake improves exploration and combat while retaining the original journey’s narrative focus.
Calling both games “open worlds” would blur the distinction that matters most. Yōtei’s promise is freedom across a broad natural setting. Part I’s promise is immersion in a carefully staged survival journey. A player who wants to set their own itinerary should look first at Yōtei; a player who prefers a strong sequence of narrative situations should understand Part I on its own terms rather than expect a sandbox.
Their stories begin from different engines
Atsu: revenge that is not the whole destination
Yōtei starts with a personal vendetta. Atsu is hunting those who killed her family, giving the early premise a direct emotional objective. Brian Fleming, Sucker Punch’s co-founder and studio head, described the game as “a story of healing and redemption that runs deeper than vengeance,” told through a new hero on the edge of Japan.
Rank #3
- Battle against over 50 players simultaneously in a massive multiplayer playground.
- Compete in an all-out mass start race—collide, grind, and fight your way to the finish
- Customize your character to show off your style to your friends or show up the competition.
- Bike, ski, snowboard, or wingsuit through a seamless open world in Career mode or multiplayer events.
- Go wild on the heights of iconic US national parks like Yosemite, Zion, and Bryce Canyon.
That wording matters because it prevents a simplistic reading of the game as revenge alone. The official framing says the motive evolves. It does not reveal the later plot, but it establishes that the arc is concerned with what comes after anger: whether a person can recover, change and find a form of redemption while still confronting the people responsible for past violence.
Joel and Ellie: a job that becomes a relationship
Part I begins with an obligation rather than a self-directed quest. Joel accepts payment to move Ellie out of a quarantine zone. As the trip continues, survival demands cooperation, and the relationship between the two characters becomes the emotional center of the experience.
The official premise supports a story about trust, responsibility and attachment developing under pressure. It does not, by itself, justify reducing the game to one single theme or claiming that every player will interpret Joel and Ellie identically. The key contrast with Yōtei is structural: Part I’s story is carried by two travelers whose bond changes during a fixed mission, while Yōtei’s story is carried by Atsu’s pursuit through a world that gives the player more freedom to choose where to look next.
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Yōtei gives the player room around Atsu
Atsu is the only protagonist identified in the published Yōtei material, and the surrounding design goals emphasize memorable characters and emotional story moments. Because the world is intended to support detours, those moments can be encountered against a changing backdrop of wilderness travel, combat and optional discovery.
This structure favors players who like to alternate between focused story missions and self-directed wandering. The emotional effect depends partly on the contrast: a quiet ride across open terrain can make a later confrontation feel more concentrated, while an unexpected character encounter can give a detour its own narrative weight.
Part I keeps the pair together
Part I’s emotional pacing comes from proximity. Joel and Ellie share the journey, and the game repeatedly places their conversations, disagreements and cooperation inside the same dangerous spaces the player is navigating. Even when you search an area or choose a stealth route, the central question remains how these two people respond to one another.
Rank #4
- PS5 Features include raytracing modes and immersive haptic feedback for DualSense
- Use darkness and cover to avoid being overwhelmed by the ship's deadly new inhabitants
- Seek out the weapon fabricators to increase your firepower as you journey deeper, into the dark and terrifying depths, but beware ammo is limited
- Gather materials & schematics for weapon upgrades and suit customizations with buffs
- Harvest DNA material to improve health, toughness and defensive capabilities.Survive an ever changing labyrinth. Each and every expedition into The Persistence will be disorienting and different.Death is just the beginning. Fatal encounters will result in Zimri's consciousness being uploaded into a new cloned body, ready to try again, with any upgraded stats, suits & weapon schematics kept to aid the next attempt to save the ship
Naughty Dog game director Matthew Gallant explained that the remake aimed to offer returning players “new depths of emotion and humanity in the storytelling” alongside greater tension and intensity in the improved gameplay and combat. That statement describes the remake’s goals, not a ranking against Yōtei, but it clarifies why Part I prioritizes character performance and moment-to-moment tension over broad player itinerary.
Combat, guidance and the feel of play
Yōtei’s flexible wilderness approach
Sucker Punch lists flexible weapon combat among Yōtei’s design priorities. Combined with longer sightlines and less intrusive guidance, that points toward encounters in which positioning, approach and equipment can be considered as part of a larger journey through the landscape. The published material does not provide a complete weapon list, difficulty breakdown or combat-stat comparison, so those details should not be inferred from the high-level description.
The important player-facing distinction is that combat sits inside a travel system built to preserve agency. You are not merely moving between combat rooms; you are choosing how to engage with a world whose terrain and visibility are part of the experience.
Part I’s remake refines survival play
The Last of Us Part I’s PS5 description highlights updated controls, accessibility options, improved exploration and improved combat. Those changes are intended to make the original story more responsive and approachable on modern hardware while preserving its survival-focused identity.
Combat in Part I is shaped by scarcity, cover, stealth and the layout of individual spaces. Exploration helps you find supplies and story context, but the game’s tension comes from deciding how to pass through the next dangerous area, not from selecting an entirely different route across a continent. The result is deliberate pressure: each room can be read, searched and approached, yet the journey continues toward its authored destination.
Yōtei is connected to Ghost of Tsushima, but not as a direct sequel
Ghost of Yōtei is set roughly 300 years after Ghost of Tsushima and introduces a new protagonist and region. PlayStation’s FAQ describes it as a standalone story rather than a direct story sequel. The connection is one of evolving design and mythos, not a requirement that players follow the previous game’s plot to understand Atsu’s journey.
Best Value
- Beyond war, ancient beauty endures: Roam vast countryside and expansive terrain to encounter rich characters, discover ancient landmarks and uncover the hidden beauty of Tsushima.
- The rise of the Ghost: Seek support from old friends and new unlikely allies to reclaim Tsushima.
- Mud, Blood and steel: challenge opponents with your katana for an immersive Samurai combat experience.
- Become legends together: play with friends or via online matchmaking in a series of two-player story missions or four-player wave-based survival missions in the legends online co-op
- A whole new island to explore: Travel to Iki Island to investigate rumors of a Mongol presence in a brand-new story with deeply personal stakes.
This distinction is useful when comparing it with Part I. Yōtei’s historical setting and wilderness design may appeal to players familiar with Sucker Punch’s earlier work, but the official description does not present it as the next chapter in the same character’s life. Part I, by contrast, is explicitly the remake of the original Joel-and-Ellie story and includes the Left Behind prequel chapter in its listed package.
Which game fits your preferred kind of journey?
| If you value… | Start with… | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Choosing your own direction through a large natural setting | Ghost of Yōtei | Its stated design goals center on wilderness freedom, curiosity, long sightlines and less intrusive guidance. |
| A tightly authored survival narrative | The Last of Us Part I | Its premise follows Joel and Ellie through a cross-country journey shaped around their relationship and escalating danger. |
| A revenge motive that develops toward healing and redemption | Ghost of Yōtei | Atsu’s pursuit is explicitly framed as deeper than vengeance alone. |
| Environmental storytelling in ruined communities | The Last of Us Part I | The remake description specifically emphasizes environmental storytelling and exploration. |
| Flexible combat inside a wilderness adventure | Ghost of Yōtei | Sucker Punch cites flexible weapon combat alongside open-ended exploration. |
| A relationship-driven journey between two central characters | The Last of Us Part I | Joel’s assignment to transport Ellie is the premise that drives the entire trip. |
| Playing on PlayStation 5 | Either | Yōtei launched on PS5 in 2025, while Part I launched on PS5 in 2022. |
| Playing on PC | The Last of Us Part I | PlayStation’s product page lists the remake for PC as well as PS5. |
What the official material does—and does not—establish
The available descriptions support a clear design comparison, but they do not provide a shared set of numerical benchmarks. There is no directly comparable map-area figure, campaign-length figure, review score, sales total or award count established for both games in the cited material. Adding such numbers would create a false sense of precision.
Likewise, “better story” is a preference judgment, not an objective result supplied by either publisher. Yōtei is the stronger fit if your priority is freedom, a historical wilderness and a revenge arc that opens toward redemption. Part I is the stronger fit if you want a controlled sequence of survival situations and a story whose emotional force comes from Joel and Ellie’s evolving bond.
Release and edition context
Ghost of Yōtei
Sony’s October 2, 2025 launch notice lists Standard, Digital Deluxe and Collector’s Editions for the PS5 release. Edition contents and regional availability can change, so verify the current listing in your market before paying a premium for a special edition.
The Last of Us Part I
The remake launched for PS5 on September 2, 2022. PlayStation also lists a PC version and identifies a Standard Edition that includes the Left Behind prequel chapter. Check the PC system requirements and storefront availability separately from the console listing, because platform features and purchase options can differ.
Final verdict
Ghost of Yōtei and The Last of Us Part I are not competing versions of the same type of game. Yōtei uses an expansive 1603 Ezo wilderness to make exploration itself part of Atsu’s revenge-to-redemption arc. Part I uses a directed cross-country route to put Joel and Ellie’s survival, dependence and changing relationship at the center.
If “open world” means freedom to follow distant landmarks, choose your own detours and let the landscape guide you, Yōtei is the clear match. If you want a focused, emotionally driven survival journey with environmental clues and carefully staged encounters, Part I offers that experience without needing to be an open-world game.
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