Ghost of Yotei swaps notes with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's magical music mechanic, offering songs that can "guide you" to treasure in the open world

Ghost of Yotei, meet N64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; Ocarina, meet upcoming Ghost of Tsushima sequel Ghost of Yotei – I join you together now across time and space to celebrate the fact that you both have a cool mechanic that fuses music with magical action.

Similarly to how the 1998 game lets Link learn songs for his arcane Ocarina to do things like summon fairies or secure the Master Sword, Yotei creative director Jason Connell tells IGN in a new interview that protagonist Atsu can use her ancestral shamisen as a tool.

The frosty shinobi apparently carries the three-stringed instrument everywhere she goes – it belonged to her mother, says Connell – and it works a bit like the Traveler's Attire outfit in Ghost of Tsushima, which allows you to track and recover artifacts.

"You could use it almost like a completion tool or a navigation tool in order to get through the world," Connell says about the clothes.

So, with Atsu's shamisen, "there's actually songs that you can learn inside of the open world, and those songs can then guide you to certain types of things." You'll be able to collect music throughout Ghost of Yotei to build your repertoire, too, including the Song of Vanity, which Connell says "might guide you to cosmetics.

"We know how people love dressing up in the game and putting on cool outfits," he continues as I wonder if calling it the "Song of Vanity" is supposed to make me feel ashamed of myself. "So I'm really excited about showing more of that and for players to get an opportunity to use that."

"The beauty of open-world games is in the exploration," so Ghost of Yotei devs are aiming to solve Ghost of Tsushima's repetition problem.