Assassin’s Creed: Shadows – a historic frolic through feudal Japan

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Japan, 1581: Iga province is burning down around you. You watch on, injured and helpless as the Oda Nobunaga - the warlord responsible for numerous civil wars and the eventual unification of the country - smirks from a nearby hill. You draw your katana, the blade shining in the flickering light of the flames. This is Assassin’s Creed: Shadows – part exciting ninja game, part history lesson. It’s an odd combination but it comes together in a sprawling historical-fiction adventure full of discovery and deception.

The tumultuous period that saw the unification of Japan and the fall of Nobunaga in the late 1500s is an ideal setting in which to play around as a sneaky shinobi and a brave samurai. The series’ science-fictiony framing device is that you, the player, are diving into your ancestor’s memories to hunt down a mysterious artefact by taking down a group of menacing masked samurai, one at a time. But mostly the game leaves you alone to enjoy feudal Japan.

In this fraught time period, there is a sense of constant danger, each conversation like careful steps on a knife’s edge. The story is complete fiction of course, but it does weave around actual historical events and figures, and the developers at Ubisoft have clearly gone to great pains to make the settings feel authentic, both landscapes and the people who inhabit them. You’ll automatically remove your shoes when entering a building, and famous temples appear as they would have looked then, rather than as the tourist destinations they are now.

The world truly is gorgeous, with several provinces to explore in all seasons and weathers, and period-accurate cities including Kyoto and Osaka. Giant temples rise up over busy towns full of stalls and workshops, while mossy shrines are scattered along winding paths through the countryside. You’ll see Japan in all colours, too, from the gentle pinks of spring’s sakura blooms, to the fiery-coloured leaves blanketing the hills in autumn, to the inky darkness of a winter’s night. It’s easy to be distracted by the view mid-mission when you’re surrounded by ancient red torii gates, or notice a random puppet performance in the street. Ubisoft’s Japan feels alive. It also feels totally overwhelming, at times.

As much fun as it is to roam the countryside on horseback, scouting out new villages and historic sites, there’s just so much of it that it’s easy to feel lost. There are plenty of missions and side quests that will guide you around the map, but there’s a lot of repetition in those tasks. To kill a high-level samurai you will need some help; the person who can help you wants a favour, which involves finding another person who wants you to kill a different samurai, and so on. Over the game’s long run time, this starts to grate.

you can pet all the cats (and dogs) in Japan if you want.

The dual protagonists do help to alleviate the feeling that you’re stuck in a repetitive loop. For the first 10 to 15 hours of the game, you’ll step into the sandals of shinobi Fujibayashi Naoe, a young woman seeking revenge after her home was destroyed, and help her to rebuild her life and set up a network of spies and rebels from a secret mountain base. Then there’s Yasuke, a principled black samurai based on the real historical figure of the same name, who appears briefly in the game’s introduction, then disappears until Naoe gets close to Nobunaga.

Naoe is light on her feet, capable of scaling walls and temples with ease, while also melting into shadows to creep around enemies. Her stealthy approach makes for some fun sneaky moments, such as stabbing through paper shoji screen-doors for a surprise attack. That tip-toe approach comes at a cost, though, when she’s faced with a brawl. Enemy strikes hit her hard and she’ll quickly get overpowered in a fight. Yasuke, on the other hand, is brutally strong, and capable of running straight through those screen doors and shrugging off sword strikes like they’re a tickly irritant. He can still assassinate foes like Naoe can, but he does it head-on rather than in the shadows. In a series that has traditionally prioritised stealth, it feels extremely liberating when you bust through a castle’s gate and face everyone head on. Both characters are viable options to play through most of the game and you can swap between them (mostly) at will.

Unfortunately, no matter whom you play as, you’ll have to put up with a few niggles in a fight. While dodges and parries feel amazing when you can pull them off in one-on-one scraps, you’ll often find yourself surrounded as more opponents are alerted to your presence, which makes it really tricky to see where hits are coming from. When you’re creeping around castle rooftops and taking your time picking enemies off, springing backwards into the shadows afterwards before scoping out your next kill, everything feels as it should. But the instant you get into a fight on the ground it starts to feel messy and frustrating.

While I did find myself getting annoyed running back and forth between quest givers, I still can’t stop thinking about Shadows. Excellent performances and emotionally resonant moments, such as Naoe’s painful recovery after she loses everything she holds dear, mean you’ll feel every bit of sorrow and anger alongside the game’s heroes. Events are often troubling, as power struggles between lords often come at a huge cost to locals, and you see the unwelcome effects of your actions on your allies.

Few other games have done such a good job with this setting, as you run through lush bamboo forests before scaling ancient castle walls and sneaking inside to steal treasures. These moments of brilliance more than compensate for its weaker points.