One of the subtle, cool moments in the recent Ghost of Tsushima gameplay reveal has been Jin performing a Chiburi after killing off all his attackers. Chiburi is the act of flicking the sword swiftly to get rid of blood, a move many samurai fans should be very familiar with. We recently spoke to creative director Jason Connell about story themes, the world, and of course: combat. Like many of you, we, too, were curious about how that flick works. It turns out, there’s a button for it, sort of. In Ghost of Tsushima, you hit a button to sheathe or unsheathe your sword. If you do that after a kill, Jin will perform a Chiburi. But one of Jin’s idle animations also does it automatically, because it’s too cool to leave it up to the player.
“It can be done in a couple of different ways,” Connell explained. “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. I believe he did that one inside the State of Play demo, where he actually just pressed the button. “There’s also an automatic one if you’re standing around for quite a while, he’ll automatically stow it. So, we have kind of both. I think there’s actually even in some of the flourishes of melee combat, he’ll just do a quick one.” You can read the full interview here, where Connell also talks about the lengths the studio went to in order to create a living samurai fantasy, and allow players to embody the character. Ghost of Tsushima comes to PS4 on July 17.
