Assassin’s Creed Shadows – Game Opinion
Assassin’s Creed Shadows has some of the greatest opening hours of any Assassin’s Creed game. The introductions of shinobi assassin Naoe and her unexpected samurai accomplice Yasuke are gripping and exciting. These opening hours are full of flashbacks and stylized battles that show conflicting sides in a war that puts our protagonists on opposite ends. Their decision to eventually work together is preceded by high stakes drama set to a soundtrack that takes some wild swings. It’s hard to resist smiling when a samurai standoff kicks into high gear with a Japanese-cinema-inspired hip-hop soundtrack.
But sandwiched between Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ first 5-10 hours and a 4-5 hour finale is an entirely different game. Frankly, it took a while for me to notice. The stealth mechanics with Naoe remain brilliant throughout, and Yasuke offers a brutal, button-mashing respite from all the crawling and hiding in shadows. Ubisoft’s open-world formula can still be compelling for hours on end. Eventually, though, I came to a realization: it had been hours since anything remotely interesting had happened.
The central thrust of the game—in which you are tasked with finding and assassinating a series of targets on an elaborate murder board—puts the stories of Naoe and Yasuke aside in favor of a series of villain-of-the-week TV episodes with their own stories, characters, and resolutions.
This would be fine if the stories were anything like the TV shows that do it best. Shows that are built on self-contained stories each week rely on a core cast of charming characters combined with the novelty of new locations and fresh stories in each episode. It’s an opportunity to write something fun and twisty, without getting lost in elaborate lore across seasons. The best shows will build up the relationship of the main characters from episode to episode so that when a season finale focuses more on the main cast, it hits that much harder. They’ll also experiment with the storytelling, taking wild swings like musical episodes, knowing that the board will be reset for next week.
This tried-and-true structure is completely lost on the team at Ubisoft. Instead, each of these episodic stories seem to hit a lot of the same beats. They introduce new characters that aren’t particularly intriguing or charming, and there is very little that comes out of Naoe and Yasuke being there, outside of the fact that they will kill someone at the end.
Ironically, Ubisoft managed to get this structure right with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It had a similar structure with similar issues, but handled the storytelling far better. There must have been at least three stories about Eivor helping out too-young boys who weren’t ready to rule their regions. But this is like X-Files having a number of episodes about ghosts—a show goes on long enough and it’s bound to repeat some ideas—and Valhalla was about as overstuffed with content as a 200+ episode TV series.
Instead of feeling like an intentional structure to tell a lot of smaller stories, in Assassin’s Creed Shadows it feels more like a necessity born out of team structure. Well over a dozen studios are credited as having worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Not teams; entire studios. While I can only speculate on how that actually looked for these studios day-to-day, the end result is a game that feels like the result of efficient project management rather than creative necessity.
Whether you beeline it through the main assassination targets or try to see everything the game has to offer, the entire middle of the game is a soup of middling filler content. The gameplay doesn’t advance, the difficulty doesn’t ramp up, the story doesn’t hit, and the style of the opening hours seems to fall away. The voice acting (in the English dub at least) falls off so badly that I stopped being able to take the game seriously (and yes, I know many players prefer the Japanese dub, but Naoe and Yasuke’s English voice actors are so distinct that switching to Japanese took me out of it just as much). I usually balk at the “Ubisoft open-world slop” criticisms, but here I found the accusation hard to deny.
2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage was pitched as a return to the old-school structure of Assassin’s Creed—namely, a smaller scope, a reasonable length, and less RPG mechanics—but it lacked the storytelling ambitions to rise above being a Frankenstein: a DLC of Valhalla turned into a standalone game, with a bunch of elements stripped away to make it feel like the old AC games.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows, by comparison, has everything Ubisoft would have needed for a “return-to-form”. If they drastically truncated the entire middle of the game, players wouldn’t have had a chance to tire of the Ubisoft formula.
But then, what do all those support studios do if there isn’t a massive, 100+ hour game to make? This is where Ubisoft’s entire corporate structure seems to clash with the idea of making a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. This is why an Assassin’s Creed game can’t have meaningful progression of mechanics over the course of it, because every chunk of the end-product has to fit into a series of deliverables by siloed teams spread all over the world. Is it even possible to make a different kind of game in these circumstances?
I certainly hope so. I remain, oddly enough, ready and willing to fall in love with a new Assassin’s Creed game. I still enjoy this series, and I was blown away by some chunks of Shadows, but the ratio of quality entertainment to grist for the content mill was wildly out of proportion this time around.
Red Ring Circus 