Ghost of Tsushima developer Sucker Punch Productions reveals one of the game's grossest, but most historical gameplay features. Fans will have seen the feature in every single Ghost of Tsushima gameplay video but Sucker Punch Productions hadn't spoken much about it.
Speaking to VG247, Ghost of Tsushima creative director Jason Connell revealed how a feature called "chiburi" works. Chiburi, a Japanese term which literally means "shaking off the blood," is when a samurai flicks their sword to remove blood after a kill. Connell confirmed that "there’s actually a function or a button that lets you just stow and draw the sword, and if there’s blood on the sword, he’ll do one of the cool, flick-like actions." Player character Jin is also able to perform chiburi automatically as an idle animation if the character is just standing around with his sword out after a kill.
Jin being able to perform chiburi is just one of several ways that Sucker Punch Productions has dug into samurai traditions in the game. In one trailer for the game, Jin has an argument with his uncle and mentor Shimura about how to fight off the Mongol invaders. Shimura wants Jin to keep to the samurai honor, killing enemies after looking them in the eye, but Jin just wants to defeat the Mongols in any way that he can.
This battle between effective fighting and potentially fatal traditionalism also seems to be why Ghost of Tsushima does not have a karma system. The game's development team didn't want to hold back Jin's development as a character and Jin learning to manage samurai expectations and his mission to defend Tsushima is instrumental to that growth.
However, while chiburi is a real thing, there is some question over whether it is an effective way of cleaning blood off of a sword. If fights in the game are as bloody and as difficult as fans have seen in gameplay trailers, the act of flicking a sword is unlikely to clean all of the blood off of it. A samurai would probably have to take a piece of cloth to the sword, ShamWow style, before putting it back into its sheath, in order to prevent rust.
It's more likely that chiburi is in the game because it looks cool. Sucker Punch Productions has also confirmed that Ghost of Tsushima will have a feature called Samurai Cinema which makes the game look like an old samurai movie. As chiburi is a feature often seen in these kinds of movies, players will have plenty of tools if they want to make an in-game samurai movie of their own.
Ghost of Tsushima launches on July 17, exclusively for the PlayStation 4.
Source: VG247