Ghost of Yotei's toughest optional boss kicked the butts of even the most seasoned hack and slashers among us, and the developers at Sucker Punch Productions loved watching every minute of it.
Ghost of Yotei's lead combat designer, Theodore Fishman, spoke about the studio's approach to boss battles in its open-world sequel during GDC 2026 in a panel attended by GamesRadar+, cheekily explaining that anyone who encountered Takezo the Unrivalled "probably hate this guy with every fiber of your being."
"The goal here [with Takezo] was we were going for a super boss," Fishman explains. Super bosses are usually found in JRPGs and represent the biggest challenge a player could possibly take on, one that's almost impossible without grabbing every other upgrade in the game first. "That was the most important thing we wanted to do. We hadn't done it before."
"We wanted to stretch ourselves and our players," he adds. "You really feel like you're build crafting, and there's a challenge, literally, on top of the hill... I personally really enjoy watching people die to this. I love it so much. Seeing players' reaction and seeing how they try to solve it. Was it perfect? No! But did it get a different emotional response and experience that players didn't have from our game before? Yeah, it was great!"
Fishman also delved a little into "good old Saito," the game's real final boss, which he says are always hard to design "because there's a lot of expectations about how many phases there are, what the challenge is, and then players are going to play the game in completely different ways." For Saito, the team wanted to "lean into the feeling of the nightmare, the trauma within her family, to revisit it and get her revenge." That's where his four phases come from, and why Sucker Punch decided to give him "every weapon in the game" - to challenge the "journey of mastery" that you've just been on.
A previous version of this article erroneously stated that Fishman spoke directly with GamesRadar+ when this specifically came out of his GDC 2026 panel.
