Ghost of Yōtei’s open world is full of genuinely riveting optional activities. Bandit camps give you a chance to practice your stealth and combat away from higher-stakes story missions. Shrines offer Uncharted-style platforming challenges that lead to helpful rewards. Tracking down and bathing in elusive hot springs increases your health. I’ve spent much of my time seeking out the samurai game’s bamboo strikes, not because they give you a pretty helpful stat boost, but because of a far more important reason: Look at those little guys!
Look at them!!!
The bamboo strike is a returning feature from 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima. It’s a classic quick-time minigame, in that you need to hit a series of buttons in the correct order in quick succession to complete it. There are three rounds: The first requires three inputs, the second five, and the third seven. In Yōtei, there’s a chance an additional piece of bamboo will fly into the air, at which point you need to tap two extra buttons. Completing two full bamboo strike minigames will increase your spirit gauge, allowing you to heal in combat and perform certain other high-powered attacks.
But your audience for bamboo strikes is what really makes this optional activity stand out in a busy open world. Once you start a bamboo strike game, tiny foxes — one with black fur, one reddish-brown — will run up in the background. (Occasionally, they’re joined by a baby bear.) When you successfully finish a round, they’ll do a little dance, jumping up and down in place, wagging their tails and waving their paws.
And yes, you can pet them. In case there was any dispute about this being the best little detail in a game full of them.
I’m far from the only Yōtei player who’s obsessed with these guys. YouTube and Twitch streamer Radec posted a clip on X (formerly Twitter) noting, “I love how baby foxes will cheer you on in Ghost of Yōtei [loudly crying face].” As of this writing, it’s been viewed 3 million times and racked up nearly 100,000 likes. The Ghost of Yōtei subreddit is similarly full of players gushing.
The foxes are a microcosm of a general sentiment around Ghost of Yōtei: that the small details in this open-world game are perhaps too good. Ostensibly, you play as a woman on a bloody revenge mission, hellbent on killing six men responsible for murdering her family. But the world itself is so rich and full of distractions that you get pulled off that quest with such frequency that it arguably nullifies the narrative. It’s why you see players cracking jokes about ignoring the main quest to play 57 iterations of a barroom minigame. Or why you see players posting riffs on classic memes, like the highway sign, WWE Undertaker, and distracted boyfriend formulas, about getting pulled away from the main story to focus on comparatively mundane tasks. There are very real questions at play about measuring focus against sprawl, and whether or not open-world games — and the stories developers aim to tell — benefit from expanding the scope of a project, be it through busywork quests or aesthetic flourishes like baby foxes and shrinking horse testicles.
But more importantly? Look at those little beans!!!