If you take a step back and look at the Assassin’s Creed series as a whole, it’s nuts that it took Ubisoft this long to decide to tackle Japan as a region. So many game series have either taken place in Japan or travelled there in some capacity. It took nearly 20 years for Ubisoft to get there. Assassin’s Creed has been to the Holy Land, Italy, Greece, Egypt, France, London – I’m sure I’m missing a few. I’ve always admired Ubisoft’s dedication to showing off some lesser visited areas in video games and showing off their architecture and history. I wondered what an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan would look like. Would it feel out of place in the traditional AC formula? Would it feel exciting to traverse? Well, I’ve played a lot of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and I have got the answers I’ve been asking. Without saying too much right away, I think Ubisoft mostly knocked it out of the park with this one.
In Assassin’s Creed Shadows you play as dual protagonists Naoe and Yasuke. Naoe is a young shinobi who is seeking revenge on the man who murdered her father. Yasuke is a slave from Portugal who is taken under the wings of Oda Nobunaga in exchange for the safety of Portuguese priests in Japan. He eventually becomes a legendary samurai and is finally treated like a human being for the first time in his adult life. For the first 10 hours or so, you mostly play as Naoe. There is a brief section where you play as Yasuke right at the start, but that is over quickly. To me, Naoe serves as the main protagonist of the game. The most interesting story beats go to her character and her story. Yasuke’s inclusion in the game serves Naoe’s ambitions and revenge plot, and it sort of makes Yasuke feel like a supporting character rather than a proper protagonist.
My biggest issue with Yasuke isn’t his inclusion in the story but it’s how he plays. Yasuke is a very tall, playable character, and he feels comically strong. You are able to cut through enemies like it’s no big deal, you’re able to break down lock doors by running into them, and you’re able to kick bad guys like a hundred feet away from where they stand. Playing Yasuke almost feels like you’re playing the Incredible Hulk. It’s pretty satisfying in combat – kicking ass while putting in minimal effort – but the positives about playing Yasuke end there. Yasuke’s inability to do seamless parkour is a really weird decision. It completely removes his gameplay from the typical AC style and makes him feel like a slow/sluggish presence in this game. Not only that, but he isn’t able to rely on stealth either. He isn’t even able to climb up to synchronization points, aka the vantage points in which you can view everything around you and open up the map some more. These are in every single Assassin’s Creed game and have always been reachable by the player character. Yasuke is the first playable character who cannot get to these vantage points, and it bummed me out every single time I tried to reach one while playing him. It’s a shocking gameplay decision not to allow him to reach these heights (literally), as it majorly separates him from every other protagonist in the series. Thankfully, you’re only forced to play as Yasuke a few times throughout the game, but he feels like a series of missed opportunities and strange gameplay decisions. Unfortunately, he felt pretty terrible, and I dreaded knowing that I would have to play as him again. It’s reasons like these that I played as Naoe every single chance I could get.
Naoe is a much smaller protag than Yasuke. She is a shinobi who can run at high speeds and climb virtually anything in sight, and she’s extremely proficient in combat. Using weapons like a katana, a kusarigama (sickle/ball and chain combo), and a tanto (small knife/hidden blade combo), her fighting style is varied and satisfying. She does noticeably less damage than Yasuke, but the fun thing about her combat is that it feels much more stylized and ultimately satisfying to pull off. You constantly feel like you’re in a David and Goliath situation, and it makes for really gratifying combat. I loved using the kusarigama to sweep large crowds of enemies, and I enjoyed using the tanto in smaller groups. Cutting up a few samurai with a little pairing knife felt really cool. I would typically use the katana in one-on-one fights because I liked living in the ninja fantasy of it all. Naoe also has a grappling hook that allows you to climb to greater heights and swing across large sections of dangerous enemies waiting below. The biggest gameplay issue with her is that even into the mid-to-late game, she struggles to deal with large groups of enemies – even with a strong kusarigama equipped. There are a ton of elite-level, heavily armoured samurai with a ton of HP, and they take forever to kill. Yasuke can deal with these guys without issue, which is frustrating because I don’t want to play as him.
Both characters have skill trees in which you can upgrade various parts of your kit. Each protag has a selection of weapons they can upgrade and unlock skills for independently of each other. There are also general trees that apply to the character regardless of the weapon you’re using. I found Naoe’s skill tree to be fun and exciting to get unlocks for, as you can upgrade her stealth or her parkour, as well as gain new escape tools such as smoke bombs. Yasuke’s tree focuses on upgrading his brute strength and overtones his already overturned kit into a bruting killing machine. One of his unlocks allows instantly blocking attacks for nearly a full minute. Each upgrade in Naoe’s kit makes her more fun and satisfying to play while still allowing for a challenge in combat. Yasuke’s upgrade tree takes away from a challenge in combat and makes it feel way too easy the more you progress. I like feeling powerful and still having a challenge when I play games, especially as I get into the later parts of them. I don’t like having that sense of gratification taken from me, and to me, Yasuke’s tree takes that satisfaction away. Any sense of challenge goes out the window with Yasuke; frankly, I find that boring and uninteresting.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows also has a seasonal cycle that goes from spring to summer, fall and winter. Each season drastically changes not only how the environment looks but how the game itself plays. During the summer, everybody is outside, and it’s beautiful, so you’ve got a ton of rooftop traversal you can do to sneak through castle grounds. Doing so in the wintertime can cause icicles to fall and alert grouped-up enemies of your presence. Bodies of water will also freeze in the winter, so you won’t be able to swim sneakily into crowded areas. However, the weather system only really impacts the way Naoe plays. Yasuke is going to just brute-force his way through everything, so there aren’t really any interesting implications that weather provides for his gameplay – which is unfortunate.
Without exaggeration, I think Assassin’s Creed Shadows is one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous games I’ve ever played. There were so many moments across my many hours where I had to take a few minutes in the photo mode to snap some pics. There was always something to look at, whether at the top of a synchronization point showcasing vistas overlooking miles of beautiful Japanese landscapes or a simple walk through the forest to see the sun cascading through the leaves. I’ve never seen a game get the colour green so right before. Did you know that humans can see more shades of green than any other colour – I learned that from Fargo. I would often sit and stare at the gorgeous horizons found in this game and count all the different greens I could see. I enjoyed taking my time and walking/running to my destination instead of taking my horse. I’d stand and watch cranes fly across shallow pools of water with nothing else in view but the gorgeous blue sky. It’s been a while since I’ve played a game that took my breath away as much as the visuals in this game did. Here are some pictures I took!
Not only did the game take significant swings in how it looks, but also how it sounds. There were three main composers who worked on this game, including The Flight (a duo based out of the UK; they previously worked on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), Japanese psych-rock band TEKE::TEKE, and Thunderdrum in collaboration with Tiggs Da Author. This group of artists came together to create an engaging and sometimes-at-odds-with-each-other soundtrack. Sometimes you’ll get accurate to the time period instrumentation to coincide with roaming the countryside. Other times, while in battle, you’ll have big booming orchestral moments with Japanese instruments. Other times, you’ll have full-blown Japanese rock music and shredding guitars. It’s kind of all over the place, but it feels intentional. You’ve essentially got three completely different vibes happening all the time, and the fact that you can never really pinpoint what the next song will sound like is pretty interesting. I would have maybe liked a little more cohesion sonically, but there was the obvious intention behind making these artists work on this project together.
Other than how Yasuke is handled gameplay-wise, my biggest issue with the game is the English voiceover work. I couldn’t connect with a single one of the main actors when they were speaking in English. Unfortunately, I really found Naoe’s voice just didn’t fit with her character, and I didn’t like her delivery at all. Obviously, when these games are being recorded, there is a director who tells the actors what inflection to use, and it’s possible that I just didn’t connect with anything this director was getting the actors to do. But I really couldn’t play the game in English for too long. Thankfully, the game has a couple of cool modes. I really enjoyed that there is an immersion mode, which allows you to play the game in both Japanese and Portuguese. It was cool to hear characters bounce between both languages when speaking to native speakers of those languages. I also found the Japanese voices overall to not only sound better, but they make a hell of a lot more sense historically. I prefer to watch shows and movies in their native language with subtitles, so I had no issue doing the same here. There is also a mode that allows the story to play out canonically. Instead of deciding what Naoe or Yasuke say in various dialogue moments, they will just say what is canonical to the story. I found that this really helped push the narrative in an interesting way, and it also made the voice acting and intention sound a hell of a lot more natural.
There’s also a somewhat interesting base-building mechanic. You have this hideout where you can upgrade weapons, look at the world map and select missions (which you can do anywhere anyway), as well as pick up contracts and refill your scout slots. Scouts are used on the world map to find objectives and undiscovered map markers. You can use one at a time to search a small area of the map, or you can use all of them at once to search a huge area on the map. You can also tag certain collectibles that you find throughout the world for your scouts to pick up at the end of any given season. These collectibles often have resources to build new structures in your hideout as well as different cosmetic things such as walkways and arches that you can put up. I’m not sure if it will be this way on the final release, but the hideout seems to run at a choppy 30fps on PS5. Everywhere else runs at a flawless 60fps, and it is such a huge smack in the face when the game suddenly changes framerate in the hideout. Every time I would go to the hideout, I would do my best to get what I needed and to get out of there ASAP because the whiplash in framerate changes actually gave me a headache.
It’s unfortunate that nearly every single one of my major issues with this game is Yasuke-focused. I like his character in the story, but he feels like a background character and a character whose sole purpose is to push Naoe’s narrative along. In gameplay, he feels sluggish and at odds with the entire formula of Assassin’s Creed. Given his rise from a slave to a legendary warrior, I wish his gameplay celebrated him the way the story attempts to. Naoe is the complete package when it comes to how she plays. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, at its best, reaches the heights of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Black Flag – at its worst, it hits new lows for the series. However, these lows are infrequent and don’t last very long. The fact that you can largely ignore the lacklustre gameplay Yasuke provides and focus on the incredible gameplay attached to Naoe makes this game one of my favourites in the series. It’s unfortunate that the dual protagonist route didn’t work at all for me in this case, but this game proves that Ubisoft is taking great steps to make this iconic series one worth getting excited about. If you want to experience one of the best Assassin’s Creed games, you need to play this. You’ll just have to grin and bear about 5-10% of it.
