Ghost of Yotei's revenge story and violent action look cool enough, but what really made me leap outta my chair in last night's State of Play was a new lo-fi mode created hand-in-hand with anime legend Shinichiro Watanabe.
The Watanabe Mode is a little different from the first game's Kurosawa Mode - instead of swapping out the game's visual palette, this new one adds sweet lo-fi tunes to the game while you explore, ride around, take a trip to the hot springs, and brutally murder foes. Don't let gory bloodshed stop you from chilling out, man.
Ghost of Yotei has partnered with Samurai Champloo Director Shinichiro Watanabe for a “Watanabe Mode” #GhostofYoteiThe mode plays original Lo-fi beats during exploration and combat directed by Watanabe himself! pic.twitter.com/I6LgoNG3ZcJuly 10, 2025
As you can probably tell by the name, all of the original tracks are led by Watanabe, the anime icon who's directed everything from Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo to the more recent Lazarus. Developer Sucker Punch says the new tracks are "directed by Watanabe himself," though it's not totally clear if he produced or simply oversaw them.
Either way, it's a fantastic ode to Samurai Champloo, which was filled with these kind of tranquil beats, and the show's composer Jun 'Nujabes' Seba, who essentially pioneered and popularized the entire subgenre. Seba might have began as an underground lo-fi hip hop producer, but his legacy was cemented with Samurai Champloo and the inescapable boom of lo-fi over the last two decades. (Lo-fi Girl didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.)
As if that wasn't enough, Ghost of Yotei is still paying homage to samurai film legend Akira Kurosawa with a black and white mode that adds film grain, an old-school audio filter, and even more intense winds. Plus, there's also another mode dedicated to Takashi Miike, the sometimes controversial Japanese filmmaker, that dramatically ups the bloodshed, offering a rather different vibe to the chilled-out lo-fi mode.
