Nuno Caro: You are serious? My God, you’re serious. What makes you think you can win?
Yasuke: [..] That no one is untouchable. That even you are just one blade of grass in a withering field.
Conversation from a cutscene featuring Yasuke and Nuno Caro from Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Table of Contents
Context
I have been playing the Assassin’s Creed games since the very first one. The first release in the video game series came out in 2007 when I was 14. Memories from that time are hazy but I think I played that game a year or so after release. I remember falling in love with the series. I remember being there at release with a paid-for copy of the sequel Assassin’s Creed 2 which was unplayable for a couple days because the newly implemented uPlay DRM was unable to authenticate with Ubisoft servers.
I remember Venice, Florence, Rome, Constantinople from the Ezio trilogy of games which solidified my love for the Assassin’s Creed series and a love for the many joys and pleasures of open world video games that continues to this day. I loved the dual story lines in the games, the one on the game’s “real” world and the world that you inhabit most, the one in the Animus.
The central conceit of the Animus slowly started to disintegrate and dissolve as the series progressed and it ultimately reached a painful, badly written conclusion in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I like many considered the Animus and the “real world” plot lines to be core to the DNA of the series and it is honestly quite sad that it got discarded like that.
Eighteen years later we have Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I am 31 years old now and this series has been part of my life for more than half of that time. That by itself is just a fact I sit with and contemplate sometimes. How does one even begin to review such a game? I certainly cannot dump my entire life story in this review but I can slice out a tiny portion for y’all and provide some context as to where I come from when I talk about Assassin’s Creed.
I have never written a review for a Assassin’s Creed game before this, which is wild when you consider how long I have been playing games in the series. Maybe the reason I haven’t reviewed Assassin’s Creed is because it was too personal, a series too close to my heart. It was just for me, my precious baby. But that changes with this review. So let’s get into it.
The Game
Let’s start with the basics – Assassin’s Creed Shadows like Valhalla, Odyssey and Origins before it is a open world action-adventure game with light RPG elements. Shadows is the fourth game in the RPG style AC games since the series underwent a soft reboot with Assassin’s Creed Origins.
Each AC game since the first one is set with a specific historic period as the backdrop, this one is no different. Shadows is set in 16th century Japan towards the end of the Sengoku period. Now this in itself is a big moment for the series – ask any long-time fan of the AC series and they’ll tell you that they have long since wanted a AC game set in Japan with shinobi assassins and all the other trappings of such a setting. I am no different, I have a affection for samurai and shinobi so I was very much looking forward to this game.
Shadows follows on the heels of Ghost of Tsushima, a game I love and one that I ended up playing twice, once on the original PS4 release in 2020 and then four years later on the PC. I thought that Ghost of Tsushima did Assassin’s Creed better than Assassin’s Creed had done in recent years and it became the comparison point for Shadows, not other AC games. Ghost of Tsushima had set a high bar for “samurai open world video game” for me.
I am going to divide up this review into two more sections, one I’ll talk about mechanics and and another where I’ll talk about the narrative elements of this game. I’ll start with mechanics.
Mechanics
One of the most interesting aspects of Shadows is that Ubisoft is going back to something they had only done once before in this series – dual playable protagonists. The last time they did this was with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, released in 2015 and which became last of the “old” style of Assassin’s Creed games before the soft reboot with Origins in 2017. I loved Syndicate at the time I played it and thought that the dual playable protagonist idea was a good one. So when Shadows came out I was really curious how Ubisoft was going to handle that mechanic considering how much the series has changed since Syndicate.
I am generally quite happy with the way the two playable protagonists are designed, at least from a mechanical point of view. Naoe, the kunoichi is light and nimble, more suited to stealth than open combat – she can use a katana, a tanto, kusarigama and of course she can throw around shuriken and kunai. Yasuke on the other hand is a samurai, not stealthy at all and excelling in open combat with weapons such as the trusty long katana, the teppo (arquebus), the naginata and the kanabō war club which you can use to bash enemies heads into paste.
Naoe and Yasuke play very differently and I found them both fun to play in their own way. I think if they were both equipped the same, this game would be much less interesting. When I wanted to take the stealthy approach to a mission, I would choose to play as Naoe. When I just wanted to walk into a castle and fight every enemy in open combat I chose Yasuke. Both were satisfying to playand the more fleshed out stealth mechanics that were available to Naoe had enough depth to keep things interesting as someone who is not the best at stealth in video games.
The combat in this game is similar to the ones in previous AC games, which is to say it is fine. Good variety of weapons and abilities. What is not fine is the atrocious lock-on system which completely falls apart when there are multiple enemies attacking you. When multiple enemies attacking, you can end up switching lock-on targets in way that feels janky and unpolished. I ended up not using the lock-on system for anything other than one-on-one fights.
This game introduces light base-building mechanics in which you collect resources from the world to build out various buildings in your “home” base. These buildings in turn provide various useful bonuses to you. There are also a lot of cosmetic and decorative items and buildings you can collect as you progress. Ultimately, I didn’t engage with this system too deeply, I only did what was necessary to get the bonuses and then went out back into the world. I don’t play these games to do base-building so I wasn’t interested in engaging with this aspect of the game.
One criticism I had of AC Valhalla was that the open world map was very cluttered with objectives and items to collect. Shadows is much better on that front, the map while just as big as the Valhalla or Odyssey is a lot less cluttered. Climbing to a eagle vantage point to do the signature pan around of the surrounding area does not result in a bunch of points of interest being marked on your map. There is still much to explore in Shadows’ world but you have to put in the effort to ride around and find things by yourself.
Another mechanic that was introduced to Shadows was “seasons”, the game switches between four seasons – spring, summer, fall, winter which changes the appearance of the game world quite dramatically. This has mechanical impacts, such as wind and rain proving advantageous to Naoe’s stealth capability as the noise of the world masks the noise you make to enemies. It is also visually and aurally impressive – rain storms in spring and summer look and sound fantastic and so do the brown leaves of fall and the snowed out landscapes.
Mechanically, this game is a reasonably good iteration on its predecessors (Valhalla, Odyssey, Origins) with additions which if they do not improve the game are generally inoffensive (base-building). All-in-all, this game is more Assassin’s Creed in the “new” RPG style. I still sometimes crave the simpler nature of the “old” style of AC game but all these years later it is hard to say if I’m looking through rose-tinted glasses towards a past that wasn’t as rosy as nostalgia paints it out be.
Narrative
Narrative is where Assassin’s Creed Shadows starts to falter quite significantly and it starts from the very beginning of the game. Naoe primary motivation is introduced at the beginning as a rather boring revenge plot which then morphs into a plot about keeping a promise that she made to her father. It is all rather droll stuff.
Yasuke on the other hand is a far more intriguing character who is also unfortunately hamstrung by the fact that his primary motivation for most of the game is…yep, another different revenge plot. That said, Yasuke feels more connected to the world of the game, his former role as a samurai for one of the highest lords of the land means that he is recognized by a lot of the other characters you interact with, both allies and enemies.
Speaking of enemies, you assassinate so many named enemies throughout the game. It felt like for every primary antagonist’s assassination quest you get introduced to a side character that will give you six other named targets you have to kill e.g – “go kill 6 of my former students who have turned rogue”. I don’t remember any of their names because the game gives you nothing to remember them by.
It may seem strange to complain about having to assassinate a bunch of people in a game series called Assassin’s Creed–the problem I have is that these assassination targets have very little to no story attached to them and as such they feel like more like busywork between story missions than a way to flesh out the world of this game.
I played this game for about 70 hours and I can count on one hand the number of story moments in this narrative that made me feel any strong emotion. For me a good video game RPG is built on the framework of a strong narrative with complex characters and a interesting plot. It felt like Shadows lacked both and left me feeling hollow at the end of my journey with the game.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows ships with a mode the game calls “immersive mode” which locks the audio language to Japanese and Portuguese with English subtitles. I recommend this mode over playing the game with English audio. This is because I genuinely find the Japanese voice acting with the exception of Yasuke’s English voice actor to be superior in quality over the English. I played a chunk of the game with English voice acting before a friend told me about the difference at which point I switched over and the difference was quite stark.
As is typical for many a RPG, Shadows has some romance options for both Yasuke and Naoe. With the exception of Naoe’s romantic interactions with Katsuhime I found most of these romance subplots to be rather uninteresting. They felt like they were tacked on to the narrative as an obligation to the genre the game is in rather than being compelling sub-plots of their own. It is similar to how I feel about romance sub-plots in most YA fantasy novels. If you are the kind of video game RPG player that really cares about the romance aspects of their RPGs, this ain’t the video game for you.
Overall, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a weak showing from a narrative standpoint compared to the last few games. I think this particular weakness is even more glaring now that I have played several other RPGs over the last few years with much stronger narrative chops: Baldur’s Gate 3 and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth to name a couple examples.
Conclusions
I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with the Assassin’s Creed series as a whole over the last couple weeks while playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows and in the process of writing this review. I have been thinking if I still really love the Assassin’s Creed series anymore. In some ways I felt like I was playing Shadows as a nostalgic obligation.
The word that’s on my mind is: empty. As big and beautiful the world of Assassin’s Creed Shadows may be, it left me feeling empty, the gorgeous landscapes of Japan only a temporary salve on that feeling of emptiness. Mechanical satisfaction from the combat and the stealth wasn’t enough to satiate me. I didn’t end up caring for most of the characters or the world and as such Shadows failed as a game for me.
The conclusion I keep coming back to is that both Assassin’s Creed and I have changed significantly in the many years since I played that first game. Assassin’s Creed hasn’t been the same Assassin’s Creed I fell in love with during the Ezio trilogy and hasn’t been in a long time. I played Shadows hoping that maybe this time my love for the series would be rekindled but alas it was not to be.
Ultimately, I think that I simply do not enjoy Assassin’s Creed games as I once did and that’s okay. I need to let go of the of past and be aware of what these games are now as opposed to what they were more than a decade ago. I think I need to admit, mostly to myself that the primary reason I play these games now is that I enjoy playing the Ubisoft model of open world game every once in a while and nothing more.
Oh and one last thing – Ghost of Tsushima remains the better samurai open-world video game.
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