The other month came gameplay footage from Sucker Punch Productions’ PlayStation 4 exclusive “Ghost of Tsushima” arriving in stores shortly.
One of the big surprises of that footage was the reveal of ‘Samurai Cinema’ – an option which makes the game black-and-white, adds film grain, dust, scratches and flicker to the visuals, increases the wind elements of the environment itself, and adjusts the on screen title graphics to be much more akin to that style of films.
Essentially its some visual trickery to make the game look more like something of Akira Kurosawa’s works like “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” though some fans have been quick to shout down others making that comparison. Turns out those people are wrong.
The Sucker Punch Productions team, who are known for the “Infamous” game franchise, chatted with EW recently and confirmed that with this mode, now dubbed “Kurosawa Mode,” they sought the blessing of Kurosawa’s estate. Creative directors Jason Connell and Nate Fox also reveal to the outlet they closely studied Kurosawa’s works (particularly “Sanjuro”) to get things right.
Connell says: “We actually did some research on the curves that may have existed on that kind of film that [Kurosawa] might’ve used”. He goes on to say other samurai films were analyzed to get a color palette that matched the look of classic film along with looking at how they portray different times of day and weather.
Audio got a similar treatment: “We actually toyed with the audio a little bit. Our audio team have an internal tool that mimicked sounds of old TV and, specifically, megaphones, radios, TVs back to the 1950s.”
The game itself is huge – divided into three regions filled with more than forty diverse Biomes and hundreds of points of interest and the goal of the open world they built is “if you can see it, you can reach it”. “Ghost of Tsushima” arrives exclusively on PlayStation 4 on Friday July 17th.
