For as long as Assassin’s Creed established its custom of setting each new title in a new country and era, fans have begged Ubisoft to bring the series to Japan. It’s surprising it took them so long, but now we finally have it: Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Personally, I’ve skipped the last couple of AC games owing to their focus on action RPG mechanics, which has been a smash hit with the majority of people but has left fans of the first few ACs a bit wanting. Assassin’s Creed Shadows bridges the gap between the two different styles of play, leading to a brilliant experience no matter what kind of fan you are.

While we were waiting for Ubisoft to give us the highly requested game set in Japan, Sucker Punch created the fantastic open-world adventure Ghost of Tsushima, which featured a lot of the same mechanics an Assassin’s Creed would offer. So when Shadows was finally unveiled a few years later, the biggest question in my mind was what Shadows could do better, or even differently, to Sucker Punch’s masterpiece.

The truth is, they are very comparable games, but complaining about that would be like complaining about being given two similarly delicious cakes to eat. Sure, they have some very obvious similarities — including but not limited to the way both depict historical samurai and shinobi philosophies, their celebration of Japanese culture in side missions, and the way the exploration is designed —  but Assassin’s Creed’s iconic collection of gameplay elements shine through and stop it from feeling derivative. Assassin’s Creed gameplay is so familiar at this point that it’s like a warm blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. Any new elements Shadows adds are dwarfed in the face of the familiar mix of exploring, sneaking, looting, and assassination. Ubisoft already nailed the general formula ages ago, so now it’s just tinkering around with the minutia of the formula to see what sticks best, letting the backdrop of a new historical setting do the work to make it feel new.

The slice of Japan open for exploration is huge, but not as huge as Odyssey or Valhalla (thank God). It’s still large enough to keep you busy for up to 80 hours, but maybe not for 100+, and the main story you will be able to do in 50 if you don’t get distracted, though the way each area of the map is levelled means that you’ll have so spend at least some time doing other quests for the sake of EXP. Shadows cleverly scales up the rewards from early quests to suit your current level, so going back and completing an area remains worth your while.

You can also get rare gear and decorations for your hideout by completing quests given to you by the Animus itself via the new Animus Hub. The Animus Hub purports to be a way to link all the games together, though exactly what that means remains vague for now. The main menu shows previous protagonists in a timeline (though only ones from modern-gen platforms), and in what is a hilariously blatant self-advertisement, selecting them will open the PlayStation store’s listing for the game (if I had the games installed, I suspect it would have launched them). Ubisoft says that this hub will be integrated into each new game in the series and will evolve as the series does. That’s a bit vague, but for now what it does is group all your progress and achievements in one place, as well as functioning as a bit of an in-game store. Completing the quests that it provides you earns you a premium currency for this store, which is a bit of an ominous precursor to what could be a vehicle for microtransactions, boo. I largely ignored these.

Stealth or steel

The partnership between Naoe and Yasuke forms the bedrock of Shadows. Although it takes a long time to open up the ability to play as Yasuke; once that happens you can explore the world and engage with it as your preferred character. In doing so, it essentially separates “old” cloak-and-dagger Assassin’s Creed gameplay from the “new” action RPG stuff. If you prefer a combat-heavy style of gameplay you might prefer playing as Yasuke, but if you’re a classic AC fan like me, you might like Naoe better. Yet, the two gameplay styles are not completely distinct from each other. Naoe can still face multiple opponents in combat as long as you time the parries right, and Yasuke can still sneak around and perform assassinations when he needs to, but neither is as good as the other.

Despite so much of the first parts of the game playing as Naoe, the game does an impressive job of giving them an equal share of the limelight so that she doesn’t feel like”the main character”. Both of them are present in major cutscenes, regardless of which character you are playing when you trigger it. It feels like they’re always a united front. Even some quick shared lines between them often imply their deepening friendship without wasting time on forced unfunny banter. It feels genuine.

I reasoned that perhaps the restricted areas were designed more with Yasuke in mind, so once he became available I tried again. So let me now tell you about how I more or less unintentionally murdered a whole castle with Yasuke.

Combat was definitely easier as Yasuke, but it presented its own problems. Yasuke can’t use Eagle Vision, so locating each Samurai Daisho isn’t as easy. He can hide, but not as effectively, so I’d alerted — and subsequently murdered — half the castle in my efforts to even find them. Presently, I was searching for a station to refill my healing items. A glowing yellow dot told me that there might be one inside a nearby dwelling, so I checked it out. Inside was a samurai minding his own business. I would have knocked him out if I were Naoe, but Yasuke could only do a ‘brutal assassination’. The samurai’s head went flying. The glowing dot just turned out to be regular loot. 

There was another glowing dot in the room next door, so I thought I might as well grab that one too. This one had another samurai inside, and a civilian worker too. I had to kill them both, or they would have alerted the entire castle. Upon killing the civilian, the game warned me that killing too many innocents would cause me to desynchronize. I wondered what made the samurai not innocent in this context, considering I was the one doing the home-invading. I did eventually kill the last Samurai Daisho and claimed my prize, as well as a quest item unique to Yasuke that I could not have collected if I had been playing as Naoe. However, without Naoe’s grappling hook, I couldn’t climb up to synchronise with the viewpoint. 

Killing those elite warriors gets easier as you get more mastery points and upgrade your skills, and now that I have a bit of practice the restricted areas don’t go that badly for me. But they remain an irritant, and I actively avoid them if I can, because it’s such a bummer that the duo can’t tackle them as a team the way they do so well in the main missions. If you really must switch characters, you have to completely leave the restricted area and exit combat, which often defeats the purpose. I also felt like a rampaging murderer, but this is where my subjective taste comes in as a player who never preferred the RPG elements.

When it was Altair and Ezio, explicitly members of a secret order of Assassins who selected their targets purposefully, there was at least a pretence that every slain guard was a necessary evil against the Templar Order. It’s a thin justification, and it doesn’t explain the pickpocketing and pilfering the player will undoubtedly do throughout those early games, but it was just enough to make you come away without feeling like a total scumbag. But the newer RPG elements like base building, upgrading, and gear collecting require more side missions for all the collectable resources you now need, and in a series like Assassin’s Creed, that means more people to kill. I’m not clutching at any imaginary pearls here, but I’m troubled by a lack of narrative justification that would lead me to reasonably believe that honourable and kind Yasuke would ransack an entire castle full of civilians and guards just doing their jobs, just for the sake of those resources. 

Make no mistake. I’m thinking about this because Assassin’s Creed Shadows has made me care deeply about its world and characters, and I’m a pedantic asshole when I care. Get this game, it’s really damn good.