It's safe to say that the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows marks a pivotal moment for Ubisoft's long-running stealth action franchise. The first Assassin's Creed was an incredibly fresh experience for its time despite its few faults, enough for it to spawn an entire series that quickly became one of the core pillars of Ubisoft's business. The launch of Assassin's Creed 2 in 2009 kicked off a string of yearly entries that greatly expanded the lore of the Assassin's Creed franchise while slowly introducing new gameplay elements, but diminishing returns on 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity and 2015's Assassin's Creed Syndicate led to Ubisoft going back to the drawing board, taking some time to plot the series' next era.
Returning in 2017 with a renewed vision for the franchise, Assassin's Creed Origins marked the beginning of the series' "modern" era, shifting away from the template of the original games in favor of an expanded, open-world RPG format utilizing an impressively detailed and painstakingly researched ancient history setting. The critical and commercial success of Origins cemented this new format as the de facto path forward for Assassin's Creed, and Ubisoft followed it up with the Ancient Greece-set Odyssey and 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla. But while Valhalla would be yet another commercial success for Ubisoft, the new open-world formula for the Assassin's Creed series was already starting to show its cracks like the original games' format had begun to by the mid-2010s. So when Ubisoft first announced Assassin's Creed Shadows back in 2022, players who had found themselves suffering "open world fatigue" from Valhalla's lengthy campaign were weary, even though Shadows would finally deliver on the long-awaited feudal Japan Assassin's Creed game fans had been requesting for years.
As someone who enjoyed both Origins and Odyssey but couldn't find the time and energy to finish Valhalla, I went into Assassin's Creed Shadows with high expectations and a bit of trepidation. For all the enjoyment I've traditionally gotten out of the series, my biggest question about Shadows centered around the game's ability to be engaging while also differentiating itself enough from other historical action RPGs set in Japan, such as Ghost of Tsushima or Rise of the Ronin. After spending roughly 40 hours completing Shadows' main story, I can happily report that Assassin's Creed Shadows didn't just meet my lofty expectations, it far exceeded them. Shadows is both the most tightly-paced and consistently rewarding entry in the modern Assassin's Creed games, delivering a version of Ubisoft's open-world gameplay that regularly fires on all cylinders in terms of its visual spectacle, historical tourism, meaningful side activities, satisfying combat, and compelling plot that drives the player forward.
Better yet, Assassin's Creed Shadows is not in competition with the aforementioned like-minded games, but instead serves as a companion, covering an entirely new era of Japanese history that we haven't seen a modern action RPG tackle and letting the player rub elbows with influential historical figures from the Sengoku Period such as Oda Nobunaga, Hattori Hanzo, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. It features two of the most well-rounded and three-dimensional protagonists in the entire Assassin's Creed series, each of whom has real stakes that connect them to both the historical plot set in feudal Japan and the larger Assassin's Creed timeline chronicling the ongoing struggle between the Brotherhood and the Templars. Simply put, Assassin's Creed Shadows is the best Assassin's Creed game in years, and even though its open-world gameplay can feel somewhat too familiar at times, it never stops being fun and always respects the player's most valuable resource — time.
Assassin's Creed Shadows' Dual Protagonists Mark a Series High Point
The dual-protagonist approach is common within the Assassin's Creed franchise, but none of the other modern entries in the series has implemented it quite like Assassin's Creed Shadows. Unlike Assassin's Creed Odyssey — where the choice between Alexios or Kassandra resulted in playing as one and the other becoming the game's presumptive antagonist — or Assassin's Creed Valhalla — which simply gave players the option to choose Eivor as either male or female — Assassin's Creed Shadows' Naoe and Yasuke are twin protagonists that the players can swap between at will. As such, they're both key figures in the game's narrative, complete with richly detailed backstories, motivations, and connections to the broader lore of the Assassin's Creed franchise.
Naoe is the fictional daughter of Fujibayashi Nagato, a legendary figure from historical Japan who was a prominent shinobi in the Iga Ikki, and Yasuke is the famous African samurai appointed and granted his name and title by Oda Nobunaga. Considering Nobunaga's historical conquest to unite Japan's many warring factions (including an assault against Iga), Naoe and Yasuke initially begin as would-be enemies on opposing sides of a conflict, but the connections that each character shares to the Brotherhood of Assassins and the Knights Templar end up bringing them together with a common purpose — to topple the nefarious organization seeking to direct the future of Japan toward their own self-interests.
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