Earlier this week, Sony hosted a State of Play presentation dedicated entirely to developer Sucker Punch’s upcoming open-world action gameGhost of Tsushima. One of the biggest surprises during the 18 minute gameplay presentation was the reveal ofGhost of Tsushima’s Japanese dub, allowing players to play the game entirely with Japanese voice acting and English subtitles from the beginning. Joining the cast ofGhost of Tsushimaas the titular “Ghost” himself, Jin, is none other than Japanese voice acting legend Kazuya Nakai.
Nakai is mostly known for voicing the character Roronoa Zoro in the anime adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s best-selling mangaOne Piece. He has voiced the character in a multitude of media, including the over 900 episode long anime for over 20 years and is also known for voicing other anime samurai such asSamurai Champloo’s Mugen andGintama’s Hijikata Toshiro.
Nakai has also lent his voice to other beloved video game characters such as Wakka inFinal Fantasy 10, Shinjiro Aragaki fromPersona 3, and Yamagata fromYakuza 0.
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The Japanese dub is just one of the many ways Sucker Punch Productions is showing its love for Japanese film withGhost of Tsushima. The studioalso announced a “Samurai Cinema” mode, which adds a native black and white filter along with a film grain effect. This mode is for fans of samurai films such as the works of Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi.
Ghost of Tsushimais set on the island of Tsushima during the Japanese mongol invasion in the late 13th century and follows Jin Sakai, a samurai who is trying to free his homeland. From the gameplay presentation released this week, it’s easy to tell that the game is deeply grounded in both real Japanese history and a love for samurai and Japanese film.Fans of anime likeOne PieceandSamurai Champloocan quickly tell why Kazuya Nakai has been chosen to represent Jin in his native language, however in the English audio track Jin will be played by Daisuke Tsuji.
No other Japanese voice actors have been announced forGhost of Tsushima, however we are sure to see more trailers and commercials for the game leading up to its launch in July. It is incredibly exciting to see the attention to detail Sucker Punch have put into fleshing out and authenticatingGhost of Tsushima’s Japanese setting.With Sony beginning to hype the game up, here’s hoping it will be a perfect swan-song to the PlayStation 4’s line-up of exclusives.
Ghost of Tsushimawill launch on PlayStation 4 on July 17th 2020.
