Assassin’s Creed Shadows is celebrating its 1-year anniversary today, March 20. Below, we look back at how its dual protagonists could have made an even more meaningful impact.
It’s been a year since Assassin’s Creed Shadows launched, and I’m still thinking about it. My opinion on what the game is remains largely unchanged–I’ve talked about this at length in both my Assassin’s Creed Shadows review and Claws of Awaji DLC review–but if I could take a moment to talk about what Shadows isn’t, I fervently have one wish. Shadows’ best idea, that it tells its story via a split perspective, should have been pushed further. In fact, that should have been the entire focus of the game’s second act–I want Act 2 to have solely been about two distinct characters growing simultaneously, and perpetually being unable to see eye-to-eye with one another while still unified in a shared purpose.
Shadows has two playable protagonists: the shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke. The former is fictional, native to Japan, and driven by vengeance; while the latter is a real person from history, an African outsider, and motivated by duty. The point is that they’re very different people, reinforced by differing playstyles–Naoe primarily relies on subterfuge and stealth, while Yasuke is geared toward excelling in open combat as a powerful warrior. Save for specific missions, Shadows allows you to freely switch between the two as you explore 16th-century Japan.
The setup for this split-perspective narrative is handled better than the past few Assassin’s Creed games that attempted to do two protagonists. Origins treats Aya as a bit of an afterthought to Bayek, Odyssey makes Kassandra and Alexios’ distinct perspectives weirdly interchangeable, and then there’s Valhalla… which is its own type of madness. That game also has two playable protagonists, Eivor and Odin, but squirrels that fascinating tidbit away within optional side quests, opting instead to advertise the two playable options as “female Eivor” and “male Eivor” and imply that the two faces are merely different genders of the same person, which is not true (I’m so annoyed by this, but that’s a completely different topic and we simply must move on).
Of the newer, more action RPG-focused Assassin’s Creed games, Shadows has best handled the establishment of how distinct its two playable characters are. That’s largely because Naoe and Yasuke are represented in the story as separate people within the first few hours. First, we get a prologue with Yasuke, before switching to Naoe for almost the entirety of Act 1, and then we briefly return to Yasuke to see how the most emotional moments in Naoe’s life played out differently from Yasuke’s point of view.
“We chose to focus most of the first act on Naoe because the historical events of the Tensho War and Oda Nobunaga’s campaign were essential to establishing her motivations, the destruction of Iga, and the start of her journey,” Assassin’s Creed Shadows game director Charles Benoit told me while reflecting on the first year since Shadows’ launch. “This period also gave us room to introduce core systems like the Hideout, the spy network, and progression before bringing Yasuke into the story. Since Yasuke remained with Nobunaga until his death at Honnoji, we needed Naoe to carry the early narrative on her own to keep the timeline coherent. Once the two characters meet, switching between them becomes more meaningful, with Yasuke offering a fresh gameplay perspective. In short, the structure was driven by history and by the need to set up Naoe’s world, her motivations, and the game’s core mechanics before Yasuke joins the adventure.”
“Two core themes [of Shadows] are community and chosen family, and while Naoe and Yasuke ultimately come to share the same community–one that they build together–their paths to each other are quite different,” Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate narrative director Brooke Davies told me, also during an interview that reflected on Shadows’ anniversary. “Naoe is launched abruptly into her vengeance arc when Oda Nobunaga brings destruction to the village she’s always called home. Until this point, she’s had a stable family and community, and she becomes so focused on her rage that for a while, she doesn’t care who she hurts in pursuit of her goals.”
“On the other hand, we see that Yasuke’s life has spanned multiple ruptures, and he has been forced to remake himself many times over by the time he meets Naoe. His path to vengeance is a slower burn that even he struggles to fully articulate until much later in the game, leading him to hold a part of himself and his past back from his new friends. Finding a purpose is also very meaningful, because once Naoe and Yasuke find each other and forge a shared path forward, the community they form and their shared desire to protect the people of Japan from the corruption and violence that cracked their own lives wide open become both the glue that binds their group together and their primary source of motivation.”
And if it’s not clear, I love this. With this first act, we see Naoe and Yasuke’s two totally different worlds, and experience how their gameplay differs with contrasting mission structures and objective types–Naoe assassinates targets in hard-to-reach areas, builds a community for lost souls, and rushes in to help the common people with their problems, while Yasuke boldly leads armies into battle, engages in duels that have society-altering effects, and strives to consider how his actions will impact others.
“Because they begin on opposite sides of the conflict, their perspectives naturally brought contrast and tension to mission design,” Benoit said. “Their eventual alliance made it interesting to frame missions around how these two very different characters learn to work together.”
Act 1 of Shadows reminds me a lot of the opening hours of Assassin’s Creed III with Haytham and Conner, or most of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate with Jacob and Evie–both games are also about characters who clash over ideology and perspective. Similar to those games, Shadows’ Act 1 makes clear delineations between its two playable protagonists, with clear transitions between them both so that the player can feel the difference between their two perspectives and see the same events or characters from differing lenses. Act 1 has clear-cut chapters for its two characters, ensuring Naoe and Yasuke only have the spotlight when it matters most to their respective stories.
And then Act 2 begins.
It’s at this point that you can freely switch between Naoe and Yasuke for almost every mission, occasionally even having the choice to move back and forth between them during the same story mission. And to be fair, the ability to do this is great for folks who want to play Shadows as they see fit. I stand by that Naoe is just a superior way to play in terms of gameplay, but after Shadows launched, I saw plenty of folks posting online about how they liked switching to Yasuke for certain missions, or outright focusing on Yasuke for their entire playthrough.
So even if I think Assassin’s Creed is at its best when it balances aspects of stealth, combat, and traversal, there are clearly people out there who fell in love with the series while playing Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla–entries where combat is more of a focus than any other pillar of play. And if that’s what you want, then that’s what Yasuke gives you. Beginning with Act 2, Shadows allows its gameplay to appeal to all sides.
But I cannot get over how this ability to freely switch between the two protagonists compromises what Shadows was seemingly setting up in Act 1: a story told from the perspectives of two very different people. The story of Act 2 (and to a lesser extent in Act 3 and the Claws of Awaji DLC) isn’t as strong as that opening act, because Shadows is structured with the assumption that the player could be going through almost any side quest or main story mission as Naoe, Yasuke, or a mix of both.
There are major story developments in Act 1–Naoe’s dad being killed, Yasuke’s warlord being killed, Naoe learning she killed the parent of an ally, Yasuke learning he killed the mentor of an ally–that simply have more narrative juice than what we see in Act 2. Which isn’t to say that Act 2 is totally devoid of moments like this. Both Naoe and Yasuke get their own personal side stories that you can only complete playing as them–I really like these. From a narrative and gameplay standpoint, these stories are structured and built to appeal to their respective protagonists’ perspectives and gameplay abilities.
But these quests are sequestered off as their own thing, without connecting back to the rest of the events in Act 2. So much of Act 2 does not feel connected to either Naoe or Yasuke’s growth or their distinct perspectives. The main focus of Act 2 is hunting down the members of the Shinbakufu, the secret organization responsible for the death of Naoe’s father. And since these missions can largely be tackled by your choice of Naoe or Yasuke, most are structured in a way that Naoe or Yasuke’s unique perspective on the matter isn’t important. It’s noted, but the changes are small and sometimes not easy to spot on a first playthrough.
“We focused on writing unique dialogue and choices for each character that reflect their different status (samurai vs. shinobi), perspective (Naoe as a daughter of Iga and Yasuke as a newcomer), and relationships and alliances in-game,” Davies said. “The writing team had a lot of fun imagining their individual reactions to a single situation or character, and we also wanted their dialogue to express their personalities (thoughtful and curious for Yasuke, and a bit quicker and to-the-point for Naoe).”
I wish Shadows had forced players to play as either Naoe or Yasuke for every mission, not just the handful unique to them, because I want those differences to transform the scope of an assassination or duel, and I want the developments that occurred in their separate side stories to be a part of the developments in the main plotline. I want to see Naoe begin to apply her mother’s Assassin Brotherhood philosophy to her kills. I want Yasuke to struggle with raising a sword against people he came to know and respect before Oda Nobunaga’s downfall. I want to see moments between the two of them as powerful as Haytham using a rooftop as a good opportunity to school Conner on the hypocrisy of the Continental Congress, or Evie trying to work through the frustration of fixing the explosive aftermath of her twin brother’s irresponsible handling of the Templars in London.
I get why Shadows doesn’t do that. I understand that the current structure lets the game appeal to a wider audience of players who are coming to Assassin’s Creed for different experiences. And I know I’m basically asking for almost the entirety of Act 2 (which disproportionately represents almost two-thirds of the entire game) to be rewritten and restructured–not to tell a different story, but to build on what’s there by doubling down on how different Naoe and Yasuke are. But in its current form, Shadows’ Act 2 loses something when it comes to telling a story. It muddies the protagonists’ growth over the course of an entire arc, splintering it away to personal side quests that feel too separated from the main plotline.
I don’t want all of this to make it sound like I hate Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I don’t! I actually think it’s great. After playing it for about 50 hours for work, I played another 50 or so for fun. I just can’t help but think that in a world perfectly aligned with my personal tastes, Shadows would have continued the pattern it established in Act 1 for the rest of the game. This would have meant that players would not have had the freedom to play the game as they wanted, but it would have curated every mission for the protagonist best fit for that job and storyline, and potentially made space for a clearer and much stronger narrative arc for Naoe and Yasuke.
I’m not sure whether Project Hexe will feature two playable protagonists, but if it does, I hope it uses a format closer to Assassin’s Creed III and Syndicate–one where every mission and story beat is built for a specific protagonist in mind. Only by doing so can it truly make the most of the opportunity that having multiple protagonists presents.
