Are you ready to meet the Ghosts? Aniplex and Crunchyroll released a new "Character Art" teaser this week for Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, and it's our first look at Takashi Okazaki's warrior designs in motion!
The teaser puts the anime's three revealed warriors front and center: the Assassin, the Hunter, and the Ronin, closing on a group shot of all three. It also carries a promise: "A storm is coming, one unlike any before."
Check out the teaser below!
The staff list is STACKED. Takanobu Mizuno is directing, and Gen Urobuchi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass) handles series composition while co-writing the script with fellow Nitroplus writer Satoshi Maejima. Okazaki, the manga creator behind Afro Samurai, is designing the characters, and KAMIKAZE DOUGA (Batman Ninja) is producing the animation. Gematsu has the full staff rundown.
Production is being overseen by HAYATE Inc., the Aniplex and Crunchyroll joint venture, as Anitrendz notes in its report. The teaser itself dropped in both English and Japanese versions, hosted on Crunchyroll's and Aniplex's official YouTube channels.
The series will stream exclusively on Crunchyroll when it premieres in 2027. A specific premiere date hasn't been announced yet.
The anime is based on Legends, the free co-op multiplayer mode Sucker Punch added to its 2020 PlayStation hit Ghost of Tsushima. While Jin Sakai's campaign stayed grounded in history, Legends went full Japanese folklore, sending up to four players into supernatural battles pulled from the island's myths and ghost stories.
The mode proved popular enough that Sucker Punch released it as a standalone game in 2021, and the base game had sold more than 13 million copies as of 2024.
Each of the three warriors map to a playable class from the game. The Assassin specialized in stealth and a teleporting Shadow Strike, the Hunter picked enemies off from range with her longbow, and the Ronin could summon a spirit dog and revive the whole team at once. If the anime leans into those kits, the action choreography is already half-designed.
Longtime players will spot what's missing. Legends shipped with FOUR classes: the Samurai, Hunter, Ronin and Assassin. Only three have been revealed for the anime so far, so there may be one more warrior waiting in the wings.
The character visuals themselves debuted at Anime Expo earlier this month, where Crunchyroll unveiled the first look at all three warriors. The reveal earned a spot in our roundup of every major announcement from the show. The adaptation was first announced at the start of last year, when we covered the 2027 release window.
Urobuchi's scripts have a reputation for going to dark places, Okazaki's designs gave Afro Samurai one of the most recognizable looks in anime, and KAMIKAZE DOUGA already took a Western icon to feudal Japan with Batman Ninja. That's the same studio behind "The Duel," the black-and-white samurai stunner that opened Star Wars: Visions. Sucker Punch's folklore mode hands that team a premise with plenty of room to get weird.
It isn't the only Tsushima project in the pipeline. A live-action Ghost of Tsushima film from John Wick director Chad Stahelski has been in development at Sony for years, with no release date in sight. For now, the anime is the adaptation with a real window attached.
Okazaki drawing the Ghosts of Tsushima is a pairing I didn't know I needed, and the Ronin design won me over on the first pass. Which of the three warriors is your favorite? Do you think the Samurai class makes the final roster?
Sound off in the comments below!
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