Sony's Ghost of Yotei Anniversary Post Sparks Backlash Over Erika Ishii

Sony just wanted to celebrate one year of Ghost of Yotei. Instead, it walked straight into a thousand-comment pile-on.

The anniversary promo video was supposed to get fans hyped. But the replies turned into a battlefield fast, and two separate controversies ended up colliding in the same thread.

First up: the physical media fight. A wave of players flooded the comments with #NoDiscNoBuy, pushing back hard against Sony's earlier announcement that it will stop producing discs for first-party games starting in 2028. For a lot of you, that decision still stings, and an anniversary celebration was apparently the perfect place to say so.

Then there's Erika Ishii, the actress behind Ghost of Yotei's protagonist. She's become a lightning rod once again, with some players digging up past comments and posts. According to the source, Ishii identifies as genderfluid and uses all pronouns on social media. She has also voiced strong support for Black LGBT+ communities, called for donations to help LGBT+ people cover rent and gender-affirming surgery costs, and previously referred to police as terrorists and white supremacists. An earlier comment where she called herself a "princess" had already triggered a round of attacks.

Some of the replies got ugly. One player wrote that seeing what they called a "disgusting woke radical" in a promo for an anti-consumer console was a "nightmare." Another jabbed at Sony's casting choices directly. It's the kind of comment section that turns a simple anniversary post into a full-blown culture war.

Not everyone is piling on, though. Plenty of players argue that a character's appearance and an actor's personal identity shouldn't be the yardstick for judging a game, and that these controversies have nothing to do with the actual development of Ghost of Yotei.

So here's the question: did Sony pick the wrong face for this promo, or are players just using her as a proxy for frustrations that go way beyond one actress? Drop your take in the comments.