Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ world is stunning, but I enjoyed its Shogun-esque drama more
Ubisoft’s open-world Japan has been long awaited, but its scripted moments proved most compelling
The stakes couldn’t be much higher for Ubisoft’s next open-world epic. It’s now obvious that the future of the company could depend on Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ success, a game which itself is based on a setting fans have been calling for since before ‘tower fatigue’ had even entered the gaming repertoire.
Even though delays have put it uncomfortably close with some other big hitters – not least the Ghost of Tsushima sequel releasing this year – there’s little doubt Shadows will be a better game for its extra development time, and what we played at a recent Ubisoft press event suggests that fans craving another monster open-world experience in Feudal Japan will get precisely what they’re looking for.
The game world in Shadows, which encompasses central Japan regions like Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka during the Azuchi-Momoyama period, is stunningly detailed and yet, mercifully, tones down the icon bloat that so often plagued previous Assassin’s Creed games. Exploring its valleys, towns, and rice fields is a wholeheartedly zen vibe that, thanks to smart UI changes, felt more like discovery than waypoint-chasing.
Shadows’ Japan features lush recreations of the castle towns, grasslands, and mountains of the late 16th century. AC’s first current-gen-only game is really flexing its muscles here, with real-time wind ruffling the foliage, and season changes replacing the red autumn leaves with wintry branches, and frozen lakes. This is a setting a decade overdue in Assassin’s Creed, but it’s difficult to imagine Ubisoft’s developers being able to do it this level of justice before now.
And yet, for me, Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ press demo was at its best during its most scripted sequences. In addition to sandbox gameplay, we were permitted to see the more linear opening of the game, which is proceeded by the new ‘Animus Hub’, which very much looks like the franchise-encompassing Infinity we heard about years ago. Here, players can scroll through every Assassin’s Creed character and boot straight into their games (if they own them).
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features two playable characters. The first is the real-life figure Yasuke, who was a rare African name in Japanese history books. Though there’s some debate on his actual story, here he is portrayed as a Samurai and the tank character of the game, able to smash through walls and cut through multiple foes with little effort. The second character, Naoe, fulfills the shinobi fantasy. She’s a fictional daughter of the real-life ninja Fujibayashi Nagato, who prefers to sneak across rooftops and dispatch her enemies in the shadows.
Shadows’ opening sees Yasuke – then a slave of Jesuit missionaries known as ‘Diogo’ – in his first meeting with Japanese daimyo Oda Nobunaga. This sets up a narrative that, just like FX’s award-winning Shogun series, explores a period when Japan was forced to accept foreign influence, seen through the eyes of an outsider protagonist.
Right off the bat, Shadows doesn’t skirt around these themes, with Nobunaga – who, during this period, is coming to the end of his reign – directly asking about Diogo’s skin color and how it came to be this way. The daimyo sees potential in Diogo, and decides to take him into his own service in exchange for the missionaries’ freedom to practice Catholicism in his lands.
The story soon skips to the future, when Diogo – now ‘Yasuke’ – has been transformed into his one-man army, slaying shinobi and burning the city of Iga to the ground in the name of his master. It’s here where we glimpse the potential of Shadows’ dual-protagonist narrative, as the story soon switches to Naoe’s point of view, who is on the opposite side in the same battle, defending Yasuke’s target.
Compared to Yasuke, Naoe feels far lighter and faster in combat, like a traditional Assassin’s Creed protagonist. She can’t simply brute force her way through encounters like the samurai, instead having to dodge attacks and deal with unblockable moves, exposing opponents to her parries. She can also crawl prone, and climb buildings with a grapple hook.
Shadows’ story moments are dramatic, supported by a swelling musical score, with some fantastic performances. It’s impossible not to be drawn to the Shogun comparisons, but there’s a little bit of Tarantino in there as well. Particularly, the game’s main antagonists, known as The Shinbakufu, are a crew of colorful villains who feel like they’ve walked straight off of the set of Kill Bill.
In the open world, especially in a preview event setting where we’ve essentially been dropped into the middle of a 60-hour game, the tone of the experience, of course, switches from exciting and fast-paced, to relaxed and open-ended. Without proper onboarding, it was difficult to see how Yasuke’s tank controls benefit exploration over the Tenchu perfection of Naoe, but slaughtering our way through an entire castle with the samurai was certainly a welcome contrast.
If its narrative is smartly weaved through the larger package, Assassin’s Creed Shadows could prove to be a notable release for both fans of Valhalla and Odyssey’s country-sized sandbox, and those craving a more cinematic Samurai story. It’s a tricky balance to make, but goodness knows Ubisoft has long enough to plan the franchise’s most anticipated setting.
