I bet some of you had the same reaction I did when Ubisoft first told us that Assassin's Creed Shadows would have two protagonists: Why do you need sneaky shinobi Naoe and stalwart samurai Yasuke when you could just make one character who's super stealthy and a master swordsman? It worked well enough for Ezio back in the day and sounds like a lot less effort. Not to mention there's a very successful Japan-set open world game specifically about a samurai-shinobi called Ghost of Tsushima.
Turns out Shadows was once on a Tsushima-like trajectory, but Ubisoft made the decision early on to split its fantasies in two.
"When you say 'Let's make an Assassin's Creed in Japan,' the first reflex is 'We need a ninja,' right?" creative director Jonathan Dumont told PC Gamer at Ubisoft's Quebec studio last week. "The shinobi is such a one-for-one with an assassin. In early prototyping, as we were looking at other archetypes, we felt like we wanted to do a samurai as well because it's very iconic."
In a vague description of this prototyping phase, Dumont and game director Charles Benoit said you'd play as a shinobi who could also put on armor to get stronger in combat.
"But it felt a bit weird. Like, why am I suddenly better and worse in combat?" said Benoit. "It's not really representing what the samurai and the shinobi are if it's the same character."
"[The samurai] was sort of diluting the ninja a bit, but we wanted to do the samurai. So we said yeah, let's have two characters."
Jonathan Dumont, creative director
Benoit wasn't pointing fingers at Sony while he said this, but he inadvertently made a solid point about Ghost of Tsushima. I love that game, but the dissonance of roleplaying a samurai who's also a ninja did bother me. It felt goofy to wear heavy samurai armor while crouching through tall grass, so much so that I'd constantly swap between armor and Ronin robes to help with immersion. Jin Sakai was amazing at everything, which took some tension out of getting busted in a Mongol camp. Of course, it wasn't Sucker Punch's goal to accurately represent the samurai in Jin—his arc is literally a samurai adopting incongruent and controversial stealth techniques as a means of survival.
Dumont also alluded to multiple branching shinobi/samurai skill paths once mapped onto a single character. "[The samurai] was sort of diluting the ninja a bit, but we wanted to do the samurai. So we said yeah, let's have two characters."
I can't argue with the logic. The best Assassin's Creed games are the ones that dive headfirst into the historical warrior archetype it chooses to depict—assassins, pirates, Victorian street gangs—and Ubi's attempts to map hidden blades and stealth kills onto its Viking and Spartan fantasies did dilute the series' stealth identity. It got so bad that Ubi made an entire course-correcting throwback game, Mirage, just to remind us Assassin's Creed could still center the assassin brotherhood.
But these games haven't really been about assassins for a long time. Shadows' dual protagonists are a reflection of who plays these games in 2025—plenty of Ezio-era diehards, for sure, but also tons of folks who primarily know Assassin's Creed as action games with loot rarity and set bonuses. Ubi thinks there's room in Shadows to make a game for both crowds.
"The early games were a bit more stealthy and parkour-ish, and people love that. And then from Origins on, people really like to fight," Dumont said. "So trying to have those two things in the game for all the fans is the goal. That's why I refer to it as the ultimate Assassin's Creed game."
I'd say cramming two different styles of action game into one "ultimate" RPG sounds like hubris, except I played six hours of Shadows last week, and it works so far. Naoe is Assasin's Creed's most capable infiltrator to date, and Yasuke's combat suite is deep and instantly fun. They could've been mashed into one character who's good at everything, but it's more interesting that Naoe is a crappy samurai and Yasuke is a hopeless shinobi.
Will that fun map onto a full 40-50 game? I'm eager to find out. Two delays later, Assassin's Creed Shadows is finally releasing on March 20.
