As the rare Assassin’s Creed fan who actually gives a shit about the overarching narrative (and yes, I am a fool for it: as Six mentioned, they more or less put a bullet in it over a decade ago), it has been a long, painful road. It’s easy to forget now, but even before Assassin’s Creed III, the Desmond Miles Era did its best to kick the can down the road. Instead of following up on the world-shattering revelations brought about by Assassin’s Creed II, Ubisoft built a trilogy centered around their incredibly popular Italian Renaissance assassin, Ezio Auditore, leaving Desmond stranded in a hallucinatory dream world. And when they finally returned to the core plot, they ended five years of build-up by killing him off, pushing the “precursor race” well into the background, and maintaining the Assassins vs. Templars status quo so the money would keep rolling in.
Despite this disappointing end, Ubisoft never had it in them to entirely abandon the plates they kept spinning. A decade after the first game, they even came up with a new trilogy, complete with Layla Hassan, their first central modern-day protagonist in five years! …and then Valhalla rolled around, which saw Layla ushered off the stage to avert a world-ending crisis, assisting Desmond’s ghost (????) in maintaining order.
Even Becs and Shaun, two side characters who somehow outlasted the rest of the series’ cast, seemed more than a little fed up. Would this be the way it’d play out for them every time, teaming up with a new hero who’d die every 5-8 years? It felt like the writers were acknowledging an unspoken truth about Assassin’s Creed: as long as it was designed to be a series that’d ride on until the wheels fell off, there’d be no closure, no satisfying ending, no opportunity for a decade + of Easter eggs and near-future conspiracies to manifest into something meaningful. The moment-to-moment trips through history were the only things that mattered anymore.
At the same time as it frustrated me over the meta-narrative’s inert state, Valhalla somehow managed to reignite my love for Assassin’s Creed. Their third attempt at turning the series into an action RPG finally hit the sweet spot: for once, swinging my sword around felt good, rather than acting as a press-to-win button (classic Assassin’s Creed) or resembling a feeble attempt to flail at the opponent (ARPG Assassin’s Creed). More importantly, they finally made their ARPG feel like a legitimate role-playing game: I was making choices with the same weight and consideration as something you’d see in The Witcher 3, undertaking investigations and picking sides that could very well change the world around me. It felt thrilling and fresh in equal measure, a path forward for a venerable franchise that once felt like it was straddling the line between old and new.
Once I developed a taste for the new format, I was always going to be on-board for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Though I started doubting the game as the release date drew ever closer (through a combination of lukewarm previews and Ubisoft itself catching on fire), having the opportunity to see the series expand its RPG ambitions across two characters was an exciting prospect. Would they lean even harder into the cues they took from The Witcher last time? And would there be greater chances for clandestine shenanigans, now that we’d left the plunder-heavy Viking warriors behind?
It’s a little too early to tell whether they’ve successfully taken the things I loved about Valhalla and ran with it. But while I share a few of the same frustrations as Six RE: the plot being rather predictable, I’ve enjoyed the way it’s presented, as well as its insistence that I pay careful attention to the world around me.
Let’s start with the music. When talking about a game set in Sengoku-era Japan, you probably have some idea of how it’d sound: the twang of a koto, haunting flute melodies, the beat of a taiko drum…it’s all here, in one form or another. Except Shadows loves pairing dramatic scenes with unexpected shifts in the soundtrack, yanking you right into the moment. When you watch Naoe’s father cut down before her by a posse of masked individuals on horses, the mood shifts, bringing out the sorrowful guitars and horns you’d expect from a spaghetti western. At the pivotal battle where Iga villagers drive Oda Nobunaga’s son, Oda Nobukatsu, out of the valley, a warlike rock anthem plays in the background, one where the instruments go into overdrive as Naoe fights her first real opponent. By finding a sweet spot between so many genres and moods, the soundtrack immediately made an impression on me, rising beyond my expectations to deliver something exciting and unique.
As Six mentioned, neutrality on Oda Nobunaga is impossible, to the point where I always look for hints on the work’s stance whenever he shows up in a piece of fiction: their portrayal of Nobunaga will inform how they approach the man who betrayed him, Akechi Mitsuhide, and vice versa. While the opening few hours of Shadows tried shrouding Nobunaga in some ambiguity, showing him acting as both a thoughtful ruler and tyrant, all of that flew out the window as soon as I met Mitsuhide in person for the first time. He asks you to assassinate Nobunaga, pulls out the evil leader’s mask while claiming it belongs to the warlord, and…oh yeah, this game thinks Mitsuhide is a fucking snake. I didn’t even need the reveal 40 minutes later – I knew the score immediately, and was completely unsurprised when Nobunaga’s final moments portrayed him as someone who used ignoble methods of achieving noble ends.
While the overarching plot is a little too predictable, the handful of missions where you snuff out one of the traitors during a tea ceremony are Shadows at its best. It started simply: I had to roam the streets of a port town, looking for trade deeds that would get me in with a wealthy merchant. Bouncing around the area, I came to a sudden stop when I saw two men in an alley, having a lively debate about whether their forged deeds would pass muster. I only listened to a portion of the conversation before interrupting them, claiming I worked for one of the officials they’d mentioned off-handedly. When they asked whether their brother or sister worked in that location, I swore under my breath, knowing full well that I’d have the answer if I listened to their conversation just a little longer.
It sounds like such a small thing, asking you to repeat the clue words you overhear in a conversation. Except Shadows never went out of its way to tell me “Hey, you should really listen before interrupting”: it let me dig my own grave, jumping right into the fray, completely unaware that it would quiz me on a few facts relayed outside of a cutscene conversation. In a AAA landscape where characters will literally start shouting a puzzle’s solution at you if you pause for more than five seconds, seeing a big-budget video game expect a level of care and attention from me was refreshing. I know full well that the bar I’m using to judge them is literally resting on the floor. But I’ll always celebrate when a game trusts me to think through a challenge, even when I fail spectacularly to make good on that trust.
After I guessed that their sister worked there, these two traders knew I was full of shit. Thankfully, I still had one trick up my sleeve: I politely informed them that I came from a village of warriors, and if they wanted to keep their head attached to their neck, they should just give me the damn papers. One of them tucked the papers in his clothes and made a run for it, underestimating the power of incredible violence as I leapt on him with my wakizashi blade.
Once I knew that Shadows expected me to pay attention, the rest of the related missions went smoothly! I picked a cover name on the spot, then stuck to it whenever the game prompted me in a conversation. I perfectly memorized, then executed my role in the tea ceremony, knowing exactly how far to bow, or turn my tea cup so its art always faced the host. The party went off without a hitch, and everyone was thoroughly relaxed…including the woman I was here to kill. After a brief struggle, another name was crossed off, and I could resume my hunt for revenge in earnest.
It’s sequences like this that make Assassin’s Creed Shadows so much more than an open-world icon checklist (though there’s plenty of that too, despite what the “Immersive Mode” description might lead you to believe. They just added an extra step!). If I’m playing a ninja, infiltrating a community without raising their suspicions, I want to feel like I’m putting in the work to make it happen, beyond following objective markers and slashing X number of enemies. I want to be an active part of the story. And if the tea ceremony is any indication, Ubisoft have gone even further than they did in Valhalla to make that desire a reality.
Now that the first leg of the journey is out of the way, we’ll finally get more time with Yasuke! Aside from a brief prologue mission, the first eight hours have been all Naoe, all the time: I’m excited to see how he approaches missions out in the open world. Yet I can’t help but worry that the combat-heavy side will have fewer opportunities to surprise me with an unexpected pop quiz, or won’t expect me to pay as close attention. With any luck, those fears won’t come to fruition…
