Yuna is one of the main non-playable characters in Ghost of Tsushima, and it turns out the peasant had a difficult life before crossing paths with Jin. But despite her hardships, Yuna always prioritized her brother above all else.
[WARNING: Spoilers for Ghost of Tsushima below]
Players first encounter Yuna when she rescues Jin Sakai following the Battle of Komoda Beach. She nursed him back to health while hiding from the Mongol invaders. Once Jin is ready to get back on his feet, she agrees to help him rescue his uncle Lord Shimura and press back against the invaders on the condition he helps rescue her brother Taka. Her brother was captured by Mongols but kept alive for his blacksmith capabilities. Yuna promised Jin her brother would make him a special weapon if they saved him.
Yuna continues to be an important character throughout Ghost of Tsushima’s story, even after she and Jin re-take Castle Shimura and rescue her brother. She fights side-by-side with Jin in his final encounter with the Mongols, thereby fulfilling her promise to the samurai, even though she originally tried to flee the island for the mainland. Yuna’s courage and loyalty are explained by her tragic childhood story.
Who Yuna Was Before She Met Jin In Ghost Of Tsushima
Yuna opens up to Jin about her past in a specific scene when the two are sharing drinks ahead of the Battle of Yarikawa. “I think you need this more than me,” Yuna tells Jin as she hands him a drink. After a while, the two friends are clearly intoxicated. When Jin tells her that whatever they’re drinking tastes terrible, Yuna reveals it was her mother’s drink of choice. “My mother loved it. Used to drink it like water,” she explained. However, the conversation takes a dark turn when Yuna implies her mother struggled with alcoholism, and would often turn abusive to her own children, especially when her supply ran short.
“She’d get so mad when she ran out,” Yuna told Jin as they got drunk before Ghost of Tsushima’s next mission. “Yelled at us ‘where is my tea?’” When her mother became physically aggressive towards her younger brother, Taka, Yuna said she realized she had to run away. “She broke Taka’s arm when he was 6. I took him away. Ran as far from her as we could get,” she said, adding that it wasn’t long before her mother succumbed to her addiction. “We heard they found her a month later, face down in the street.”
This revelation provides context as to why Yuna is so protective of her brother over the course of Ghost of Tsushima’s plot – she had been taking care of him all of his life, and was more like a mother figure to him than a sister. Knowing this makes it all the more painful to watch Taka die at the hands of Khotun Khan and later seeing Yuna’s devastating reaction to learning the news.
Yuna is by far one of Ghost of Tsushima’s bravest characters, and her difficult backstory only adds to her compelling persona and relatability.
