This thrilling trip through Japan is the best the series has given us in years
Keza MacDonald
Wed 19 Mar 2025 15.00 GMT
I have played many Assassin’s Creed games over the years, but I’ve rarely loved them. Ubisoft’s historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin’s Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.
The Assassin’s Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. They’re the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was released this week after a couple of last-minute delays, and I was surprised to find that it makes running around and killing people more fun and interesting than it has been in many years. This is partly down to the setting: 16th-century Japan, the era of warlord Oda Nobunaga, of samurai and shinobi and endless complex, fascinating conflicts. Japan was changing fast, having reluctantly opened up contact with the rest of the world. Shadows’ two protagonists are at the centre of all this change and tumult: Yasuke, a slave turned samurai under Nobunaga, and Naoe, a peasant shinobi building her own resistance movement as her home is torn apart.
Two protagonists, two playstyles: Naoe is fast and quiet, and makes playing stealthily a viable and enjoyable way to experience the game for the first time in ages. Yasuke is strong and skilled, and can cut through enemies when a situation suddenly explodes into conflict. This adds variety and choice to the gameplay. Both characters are genuinely interesting, and I care about their stories. Yasuke appeared right at the beginning of the game and then was absent for about 12 hours; when he showed up again, I was beginning to get bored by Naoe’s quest for revenge, and having someone new with whom to explore this extraordinary setting kept me interested.
And truly: what a setting. I’ve been playing Shadows on a PS5 Pro and it is the most beautiful video game I have ever seen. You know how you just get used to how gorgeous modern games look after a few hours, and forget to admire the scenery? That hasn’t happened to me yet after 15 hours with Shadows. The light, the architecture, the natural beauty of Japan’s mountains, the way you can see the roofs of shrines poking out from the treetops, the delicate beauty of Kyoto’s winding streets … It helps that the seasons change every few hours, letting you quite literally see your surroundings in a new light. I cannot begin to imagine the hours of human effort that have gone into creating this environment. The detail is exceptional.
Click download link
Naoe in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Photograph: Ubisoft
One example of this is in the multilingual script. You can play the whole thing with English voice-acting, or you can play in period-appropriate Japanese and Portuguese with subtitles, which the games calls “immersive mode”. With the provisos that I am by no means an expert in Japanese history and that my own Japanese is extremely rusty, playing like this was astonishingly good. Every conversation feels like a series of delicate and dangerous manoeuvres; much is left unsaid, implied by tone and careful choice of words. You can choose Naoe or Yasuke’s responses at times, and saying the wrong thing sometimes results in an infinitesimal change in your interlocutor’s expression – just enough to let you know that you’ve screwed up. It is, for a game about a ninja on an assassination revenge quest, surprisingly subtle.
If you watched FX’s exceptional TV adaptation of Shōgun, you’ll probably be thinking that a lot of what I describe sounds familiar. And though Shadows isn’t as tense and brilliant as that show, it approaches its setting and story with equal care and respect. Assassin’s Creed’s approach to historical authenticity has always been playful – remember doing quests for Socrates in Odyssey, and getting Leonardo da Vinci to make gadgets for you in renaissance Italy? – but here there’s a more serious tone. Many of Shadows’ characters have real historical analogues. There’s no silliness in the side quests, no japes or banter in the dialogue. It feels … realistic, for want of a better word. Perhaps naturalistic is more apt. There’s nothing realistic about a samurai-shinobi pair running around killing all of Kansai’s powerful daimyo between them, but the world they inhabit sticks close to the historical reality. It’s believable.
There are still some things about Assassin’s Creed that belong in the bin. The Animus is one of the all-time great video game framing devices. All Assassin’s Creed games take place inside a machine that lets you relive the memories of your ancestors, but with all the useful info and overlays of a video game. But that’s all it needs to be: a framing device. We can surely get rid of the modern-day subplots about the Animus and who’s controlling it. Don’t interrupt my fun adventures in historical Japan by making me hunt down glitches and anomalies in the machine. And over the series’ 18-year history, it has acquired altogether too many systems. It’s fiddly and unfocused – there are too many menus for collecting and upgrading equipment, too many different skill trees for your characters’ abilities.
Shadows may be sometimes confusing and overwhelming, but for the first time in a while, I was willing to forgive all that if I got to see more of Japan. If, like me, you’ve skipped the last few Assassin’s Creed games, you might be pleased to find that this is as streamlined and enjoyable as the series has been for a long time.
Keza MacDonald
Wed 19 Mar 2025 15.00 GMT
I have played many Assassin’s Creed games over the years, but I’ve rarely loved them. Ubisoft’s historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin’s Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.
The Assassin’s Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. They’re the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was released this week after a couple of last-minute delays, and I was surprised to find that it makes running around and killing people more fun and interesting than it has been in many years. This is partly down to the setting: 16th-century Japan, the era of warlord Oda Nobunaga, of samurai and shinobi and endless complex, fascinating conflicts. Japan was changing fast, having reluctantly opened up contact with the rest of the world. Shadows’ two protagonists are at the centre of all this change and tumult: Yasuke, a slave turned samurai under Nobunaga, and Naoe, a peasant shinobi building her own resistance movement as her home is torn apart.
Two protagonists, two playstyles: Naoe is fast and quiet, and makes playing stealthily a viable and enjoyable way to experience the game for the first time in ages. Yasuke is strong and skilled, and can cut through enemies when a situation suddenly explodes into conflict. This adds variety and choice to the gameplay. Both characters are genuinely interesting, and I care about their stories. Yasuke appeared right at the beginning of the game and then was absent for about 12 hours; when he showed up again, I was beginning to get bored by Naoe’s quest for revenge, and having someone new with whom to explore this extraordinary setting kept me interested.
And truly: what a setting. I’ve been playing Shadows on a PS5 Pro and it is the most beautiful video game I have ever seen. You know how you just get used to how gorgeous modern games look after a few hours, and forget to admire the scenery? That hasn’t happened to me yet after 15 hours with Shadows. The light, the architecture, the natural beauty of Japan’s mountains, the way you can see the roofs of shrines poking out from the treetops, the delicate beauty of Kyoto’s winding streets … It helps that the seasons change every few hours, letting you quite literally see your surroundings in a new light. I cannot begin to imagine the hours of human effort that have gone into creating this environment. The detail is exceptional.
Click download link
Naoe in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Photograph: Ubisoft
One example of this is in the multilingual script. You can play the whole thing with English voice-acting, or you can play in period-appropriate Japanese and Portuguese with subtitles, which the games calls “immersive mode”. With the provisos that I am by no means an expert in Japanese history and that my own Japanese is extremely rusty, playing like this was astonishingly good. Every conversation feels like a series of delicate and dangerous manoeuvres; much is left unsaid, implied by tone and careful choice of words. You can choose Naoe or Yasuke’s responses at times, and saying the wrong thing sometimes results in an infinitesimal change in your interlocutor’s expression – just enough to let you know that you’ve screwed up. It is, for a game about a ninja on an assassination revenge quest, surprisingly subtle.
If you watched FX’s exceptional TV adaptation of Shōgun, you’ll probably be thinking that a lot of what I describe sounds familiar. And though Shadows isn’t as tense and brilliant as that show, it approaches its setting and story with equal care and respect. Assassin’s Creed’s approach to historical authenticity has always been playful – remember doing quests for Socrates in Odyssey, and getting Leonardo da Vinci to make gadgets for you in renaissance Italy? – but here there’s a more serious tone. Many of Shadows’ characters have real historical analogues. There’s no silliness in the side quests, no japes or banter in the dialogue. It feels … realistic, for want of a better word. Perhaps naturalistic is more apt. There’s nothing realistic about a samurai-shinobi pair running around killing all of Kansai’s powerful daimyo between them, but the world they inhabit sticks close to the historical reality. It’s believable.
There are still some things about Assassin’s Creed that belong in the bin. The Animus is one of the all-time great video game framing devices. All Assassin’s Creed games take place inside a machine that lets you relive the memories of your ancestors, but with all the useful info and overlays of a video game. But that’s all it needs to be: a framing device. We can surely get rid of the modern-day subplots about the Animus and who’s controlling it. Don’t interrupt my fun adventures in historical Japan by making me hunt down glitches and anomalies in the machine. And over the series’ 18-year history, it has acquired altogether too many systems. It’s fiddly and unfocused – there are too many menus for collecting and upgrading equipment, too many different skill trees for your characters’ abilities.
Shadows may be sometimes confusing and overwhelming, but for the first time in a while, I was willing to forgive all that if I got to see more of Japan. If, like me, you’ve skipped the last few Assassin’s Creed games, you might be pleased to find that this is as streamlined and enjoyable as the series has been for a long time.
