Assassin’s Creed Shadows Preview – Strike from the shadows, kick from the rooftops

thesixthaxis.com:

It’s pretty strange to think that it’s been almost half a decade since Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Sure, there was Assassin’s Creed Mirage as a back-to-its-roots palette cleanser, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the first ‘full’ new game in the modern action-RPG style since 2020, though with Ubisoft Quebec as lead developer, it’s more a successor to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. With such a passage of time, you’d hope for some big changes to the formula, shifting the focus point and tone of how the game plays. We’ve been hands-on with a few hours of the game, its prologue and a more open mission from later in the story.

Running through Assassin’s Creed Shadows are its two contrasting characters – Naoe a female shinobi assassin, and Yasuke, an African samurai based on the real historical figure. The opening of the game introduces them separately, with Yasuke coming to Japan as an enslaved bodyguard to a Jesuit missionary who rescued him from drowning, and who is in Japan to try and receive Oda Nobunaga’s favour. Nobunaga, much like the historical account, is fascinated by seeing a black man for the first time, but also spots the potential in him as a warrior and breaks him from his servitude to fight for him, giving him the name Yasuke – he’s called Diogo prior to this. The prologue skips around his timeline, jumping ahead to a siege by Nobunaga’s army, with Yasuke able to charge through in the hunt for the enemy leader as the castle burns around him and the battle rages.

On the other side of this fight is Naoe, whose path to becoming a member of the Assassins is much more straightforward and obvious, but also significantly more tragic. There’s a great Tarantino-esque reveal of the cabal of bad guys at the end of the prologue – apt when considering how heavily inspired by Westerns he has been through his filmmaking career, and some of the crossover and blending of ideas they had with Japanese cinema.

Eventually, the pair are united in their cause, to track down this cabal