Ghost of Yōtei: Erika Ishii Interview

Ghost of Yōtei is now available on PS5, and players are taking their first steps into the lavish, dangerous world of Ezo, joining Atsu on her quest to hunt down the Yōtei Six and discover a life beyond revenge. To mark launch, and delve further into the process of bringing this new protagonist so vividly to life, we were joined in the PlayStation Podcast studio by Atsu’s voice actor Erika Ishii, who also lends their likeness to the character.

Note: Interview condensed for clarity and brevity. You can listen to the full interview on the latest episode of the PlayStation Podcast, available now.

PlayStation Blog: by the time this interview goes out, players will have finally got to step into the shoes of Atsu. But for you, the character has been part of your life for a long while now. So how long has that been and what did those initial conversations look like with the team at Sucker Punch Productions?

Erika Ishii: It has been almost three years of my life now. I was a huge fan of Tsushima, and so it was both a tremendous pressure that I put on myself, and very, very exciting. I think the first conversations that we had were us sharing how geeked up we are about samurai films and about video games.

PSB: One of the wonderful things was when you discovered the cosplay guide, and I remember seeing you geeking out about, I believe it was Ellie (from The Last Of Us) you cosplayed as, and now there’s a cosplay guide with your face and your character going out to the PlayStation audience. That must be really exciting.

Erika Ishii: Yeah, it’s so wild, because I do feel like the Cinderella story. I was a fan, I was a cosplayer, and, you know, I would go to release parties, and you know, now I get to be part of that. And who knows, maybe somebody will cosplay Atsu or play the game, and years later, they’ll point to Ghost of Yōtei as something that inspired them to start telling their own stories. I mean, that’s the dream.

PSB: Speaking of cosplay, there was also a wonderful Astro bot cameo. You had a little Atsu bot in Astro How was that, seeing that for the first time?

Erika Ishii: There was, of course, the feeling of triumph you get from whenever you get the Astro bots, and then on top of that… I think I feel like a broken record, but I truly am flabbergasted and honored to get to have all of this. I played through all of Astro Bot, and I’m at 100% Bots until this DLC dropped. It’s so cute. The wolf is adorable. And yeah, it just feels like a surreal fever dream.

PSB: So obviously Atsu not only looks like you and sounds like you, but which parts of who Atsu is, in terms of values, relationships, vulnerabilities, what sort of things felt most personal to you, and how did you protect that authenticity in your performance?

Erika Ishii: From our first conversations, discussing the character and our love and the homage we wanted to pay to classic samurai films and to classic revenge films. She’s very much of that legacy. And as she relates to me, I think Atsu is still sort of young in a lot of ways, definitely emotionally. They did not have therapy back then, and I think that Atsu is what happens if I, or really any of us, give in to those really angry and fearful urges. And I think at her rawest, like most emotional core, Atsu, is scared and vulnerable. I think, you know, of course, she’s this incredible warrior, and we get to play the sort of samurai fantasy of the Dual Katanas and the Muskets and the Yari. But I think also what really resonated for me about Atsu was just that raw, emotional core of hers.

PSB: What do you hope players can take away from meeting her?

Erika Ishii: I really want them to have fun playing this game. Because while the story is compelling and really, truly – Sucker Punch does narrative like few game studios – I think there’s just something really fun about truly living out that fantasy. Yes, there’s, you know, the emotional character arc, but I just, I want people to feel badass. I think that I’m also a huge fan of westerns, and that was something we talked about as well: she is sort of that spaghetti Western samurai film hybrid – of feeling like the lone wanderer, striking a cool pose, silhouetted in the door frame of the saloon. And I want people to be able to sort of live that cinematic fantasy.

PSB: You’ve inhabited many characters over the years, both in video games and otherwise, but from an improv/TTRPG background, how did that help you shape and find Atsu’s character?

Erika Ishii: One thing about improv is it’s a lot about listening and about making a strong choice in reaction to something that you hear. And I think that was incredibly instrumental with Atsu because the script, I have the benefit of an incredible script by great writers that are written for me for Atsu, whereas in Critical Role or the like, you have to be the writer, the actor, and in some small ways, the producer of your character. So with Atsu, the script was written, but being able to hear it – and to hear other characters react to her and reacting to them in an authentic way – I think, is where a lot of improv and spontaneity comes in. Because you can memorize the lines, but the way that you say them, in some ways, has to be a surprise to you, because, unless you’re a character who is reciting a speech that they have memorized, you don’t know what you’re going to say as a character. So I think that’s always been very helpful.

PSB: It sounds like even from the first reads, it was pretty intense at times in terms of those scenes, in terms of the levels of emotion. Were there any moments you can recall where your background in improv and in actual play helps you nail those intense scenes?

Erika Ishii: It’s very scary. But I keep saying it is this duality of excitement and fear. You are literally, you know, in a very vulnerable suit. You know, the mocap suit is a spandex unitard, and you’re in a white padded room. And it’s sometimes, it’s just you. If you’re with other actors, you get to be with other actors. But there were some scenes that were just me and my horse, or just me having an emotional moment, an emotional beat, and when it’s you know, you have to create all of those circumstances yourself. There’s something in improv and in tabletop called scene painting, where usually a DM, or sometimes a player, will describe the scene, they’ll set the scene, they’ll have all the details of this landscape and perhaps some items. It’s like black box theater for theater goers, where it’s really just you in a room with a bunch of people looking at you. And you know that every minute that those cameras are rolling, it’s all you.

PSB: Did you have a chance to look at concept art? Was that any visual help while picturing those scenes?

Erika Ishii: Truly huge, huge thanks to Sucker Punch. They kept me in the loop whenever there were writer meetings, if I had questions about the character or about the story, or about what was happening. I could ask them. I had a dialect coach. And the concept art, the artists are so phenomenal at [the studio]. We got concept art of locations, of the characters. It really helped to do that scene painting.

I had the fortune of getting to see some of the cinematics as they were completed, which, again, is very unusual for voice acting, because usually you do your work and that’s it. But for this, since I was there for the entirety of production. I got to see some progress. I got to see some gameplay. And that is so, so paramount as a performer like because the more data we have to build this little database in our head of what the world is, just the more immersive it can be for us. And so, yeah, just they did a great job of getting me immersed.

PSB: So the game launches October 2. Where does October 2 find Erika, how are you marking launch?

Erika Ishii: I am going to get together with some of the cast, and we’re gonna have our own sort of small celebration. Our director, our fearless leader, who directed all of the voiceover, is sort of gathering us together. And this again, is an unusual project, in that I got to work with most people. I got to be in the booth or in the mocap volume with a lot of folks. And so there’s this camaraderie that we don’t always get in games. And this cast is something really, really special. They’re all unbelievably talented. A lot of them are just video game veterans and also video game nerds, but it’s a mostly all Asian and Asian American cast, and that’s something that just doesn’t really happen a lot in. There’s sort of a shared, sort of “in the trenches” feeling with us together. So we’re gonna celebrate it and that weekend.

And for me, I’m going to be out “sick” a lot of that week, playing the game. It’s odd: I’ve never played a game extensively with me, as me, like this. I don’t know how it will be. I don’t know how I’ll react. I think beyond launch and beyond the world, getting to meet Atsu is a bit of a fog of war for me. I think I just kind of have to navigate it, one bit at a time.