It’s Wild that took nearly 20 years to the biggest stealth action series and dozens of games. Assassin’s Creed Shadows makes the most of its theme. A pair of ninja and samurai heroes share a well-written and fun center stage for passing through giant castles and playing malicious battles. In addition to the settings, most of the changes will focus on making small tweaks to established systems, such as messy maps and skill trees, doubling what actually worked in the 2023 Assassin’s Creed Mirage. It’s not a perfect reset as there are so many imbalances and missed opportunities, but I’m more confident than ever.
Like a river in the rainy season, the story of the Shadows is filled with cliches that are fictional signatures set in this era. Warriors wander the land, bringing honor to themselves and their masters. Absent rulers have wealthy bureaucrats exploit the poor. The bandit embraces the countryside with a cold grip of terror. If you’re a fan of James Cravel’s General or Kurosaki Aki’s great movies, you’ve certainly seen the majority of what the protagonists Yasuke and Naoe are made to navigate. This is not a bad thing, and the morally complicated intersecting plot still keeps the plot high. This is the same trick that the Valhalla story of Assassin’s Creed made it work when they did it. I don’t think I was particularly surprised by the regular writing, but the whole thing is littered with outstanding moments of tense reflections and strange events. The typical assassin creed plot woven into it fits perfectly into a war era torn by the Japanese war, like a blade hidden in the sheath of the wrist.
The lead itself is great. You spend many early games with Sharp Witted and Broody Naoe, one of the last ninja warriors of the Iga clan, thrusts her through tragedy. The tragedy strikes her partially at the hands of the charismatic Hulk Yasuke, a tireless warrior of justice and peace. When they start working together, they are often the most trusted consuls of each other, and have a healthy and often different perspective on the events taking place around them. In other words, they really balance each other and don’t think they’ll win a popularity contest against other series stars like Eggio or Edward, but together they act as a bright light at the heart of the revenge’s mostly dark story.
The basic reason for the entire story is to play an almost self-contained chapter in each of the nine regions of the map. That said, Shadows does a better job of making sure at least some story elements and characters don’t just disappear completely when they leave the area like their predecessors. Not every new master or businessman you meet will become completely irrelevant once you have solved their problems. I also found that these sections and the overall time it took to move from chapter to chapter are filled with more active and frustrating fillers than in the past games. It’s full of “Go here and do it” so that the bridge can build a bridge during moments larger than I like, but it’s organized in a way that allows you to enjoy in your leisure time without getting too lost between plot points, like a way to read a good book.
Most of Shadow’s missions begin with the purpose board and are bigger and more elaborate charts of those who need help and targets that require elimination, adopted by Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Thematically, this approach coincides with the tone of using all the information collected to identify hidden members of the Secret Society who are trying to plunge Japan into chaos. Functionally, the way to organize outstanding tasks and stakeholders is much more useful than the old bullet quest list. However, this effectiveness costs exchange some of the magic of exploration. I couldn’t kill them, and not only did he get tucked into my board, but the exact number of the remaining silhouettes of the gang also stumbled over and over at a jerk who couldn’t speak to me to find out that I didn’t think they were on board until then. But that’s a transaction I do every time.
When I selected a quest, I had a list of short clues that would help me identify where my goal is. Past games have previously given hints to identify such targets, hoping to create friction between your efforts to find your quarry, but the shadows are the first I felt I’d always looked at my map and actually guessed where the place in question was using those clues and educated guesses. Scouts, one of the assets that can be developed in a hideaway, can be used to assist in the narrowing process, ping areas on the map, and highlight unidentified targets within the zone. This is a bad way to remove the mist of war from afar, as it does not reveal hidden locations or features of maps outside the mere marker. Also, whether you find something or not, a scout is one scout and scouts are replenished in a very small number of ways, so scouts are a real risk, especially if you are trying to make progress in the main story early on.
Rather than illuminating the map with a tooltip galaxy, the shadows rely primarily on sparse point-of-interest icons to push them into the area needed to see face-to-face details. Even if you climb to the high point of signature to see your surroundings, what you see is the bevy bevy icon that tells you it something You’re there, but you have to jump off that perch and check them out for yourself to know what. I love this. I could feel the years of these games have begun to redraw the conditioning of the checklists that have been planted in me. Not only did I have to go through the countryside and truly explore things without expecting too much of an epic reward, I also didn’t feel the urge to check off everything I could do in the area.
Most of these undiscovered places fall into one of many reliable categories, such as castles that you try to sneak in and steal special gear from the many villages scattered across Japan, but you cannot be sure unless you incorporate it for yourself. The general thing that stops to deal with whenever I come across them was world activity. These are small places and events that add knowledge points when completed, raise knowledge levels, and add new options to your skill tree. Not all of these events are exciting. Running around the temple, you can see that the missing scroll pages are not my favorite, but in many cases it doesn’t take much time. And in the case of something like a horse archery challenge, they can add interesting distractions from the action for short spells.
During my outings, I spent some time in this repetition, a retreat, in the village of Raven’s Thorpe in Valhalla. After collecting minerals, crops and timber around the world, these resources can be used to build and upgrade important buildings here to access new assets. I spent most of my time managing my own equipment, but other important buildings have the ability to provide more passive additions and manage them outside of my hideaway. I personally can’t bother decorating the house so I’m glad I had to dote too much in this place, but for anyone interested in such a thing, you’ll never be hungry for the option to liven up the place as I was absolutely flooded with unlocked cosmetics on the natural course of completing tasks and looting.
However, real tourism is all over the world. Japan in the 1500s is a beautiful place. There are symphonies of colour on every hill and every lake. Each season brings incredible landscapes, sometimes covered in autumn reddish brown or embedded in deep white snow. In fact, I found this weather to be some of the best I’ve experienced in an open world. It was tough to move by watching the powerful wind pick up and bringing a rolling thunderstorm, especially as a flock of birds ran around to find safety and seeing nature reacted to everything in real time. It’s not nothing, but in the shadows of a few dozen hours, I’ve come across a very few bugs in a game of this size.
The main 40-hour story revolves around a double protagonist who tries to expel and eliminate members of a deadly organization called Simbakufu. Once you have selected your target, the Multi-mission Arc offers you regular opportunities to handle the situation with Yasuke’s power or Nae’s stealth. However, while certainly there are scenarios where one is more useful than the other, in general there are few quests where NAOE is not suitable for the task at hand. This depends on how those abilities are divided between them. If the classic Assassin’s Creed play style is a combination of exploration, parkour, stealth and combat, the NAOE does all this competently and excels in Parkour and stealth. Yasuke, on the other hand, cannot climb very well or creep very much due to his size and lack of general bounty. He is a devastating force in combat, and perhaps the most dominant and dominant protagonist of the series, but Naoe can help Yasuke pave his own path when Yasuke works out well and solves it well. As much as I like Yasuke, he is far more limited in his style, one-dimensional, and most of the game is not designed to exploit his strengths in ways that feel intentional.
Shadows is especially disappointing as it sometimes finds a way to coordinate missions around both skills in larger, more important and important battles that both heroes need to work together to succeed. These special missions are divided into sections where you can choose which characters to continue, and change what is asked according to your choice. In later game missions, Nae secures the boundaries of the castle walls, takes the gunmen along, and Yasuke raids places in this chapter asking enemies to challenge hostage life duels. Depending on who you are playing, you are either weaving in blockades to drop certain soldiers without warning the entire castle, or in a fierce duel against a powerful samurai. It was great and really disappointing the more homogenous space between these moments.
The whole battle is more challenging than in the past. In groups, especially, the enemies are more aggressive and rely on combos and unblockable attacks as often as possible. They also tend to have solid defenses. Both block a lot, many of which are armored and give them essentially a second life bar. Defeating them effectively means having your own strong defenses, dodging and deflecting their blows, making them vulnerable and giving them an advantage before they recover. You need to carry out different abilities more thoughtfully than before. I didn’t feel that combat was a chore in itself.
When Yasuke’s Yasuke, Naginata, Kanabo, Bows, and even even guns play as Yasuke, Starient’s combat really sings. He is the man’s juggernaut outside the toy, capable of literally running through the walls and shaking the earth with his blows. He is also tough and can do more blows before succumbing to his wounds. The NAOE is very fragile in comparison, and can do a lot of damage when enemies are vulnerable, but she struggles to stumble them without the help of tools. She was easily overwhelmed by mobs, especially armored bruisers, and when the numbers exceed three or four enemies, she felt that dropping smoke bombs and disappearing was almost always better than trying to fight them all in an open brawl.
On the other hand, Naoe is a threat when hitting from the shadows or catching an enemy that you don’t notice. This assassin’s beliefs take the “shadow” of her name seriously, and darkness is an important part of her stealth game plan. There are some new features that help her to avoid craving while being easy, and some things that come back like her Eagle Sense. For a long time, the long double assassination has also returned, all of which adds up, making NAOE one of the most robust assassins in the series. Yasuke can’t hold a candle at his ninja counterpart in this arena.
Improved combat abilities is less benevolent and boring than Valhalla’s skilled constellations. Naoe and Yasuke have a skill tree focused on weapons and specializations, and all nodes find themselves far more shocking than a simple passive damage bonus (still exists, but small amounts). Obtaining new abilities is obviously the most impactful, but some of the actual hidden gems can add new features to the weapon, allowing you to turn certain attacks into grapples with Naoe’s chain scythes, allowing you to pull enemies away from obstacles and cliffs. Yasuke and his abundant weapons were made for a few skilled trees that I almost ignored. Especially his bow and Teppo.
Speaking of excess, Shadows takes a big step from the work done around Valhalla and Mirage stocks. Picking up from fallen enemies is either too many randomized color layers of gear as an unforgettable quest reward that has no chance to turn it into my rotation. Base stats like damage may relate them as a stop gap in the final divide to line up the bad guys and stats at your level, but that’s only until you find that next legendary gear to level up your already favorite piece, or gain enough resources. Legendary gear skills like Kanabo transform an enemy into sh shotgun rena bullets when breaking armor is shocking in the way that the general percentage buff to the XYZ skill obtained from the lower layers of the gear doesn’t even get close.
