The allure of Assassin's Creed Shadows

Plus, Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition and John Green's new book!

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is finally out — and early sales paint a somewhat rosy picture. Ubisoft announced it had shipped one million copies of the game, though it’ll need to keep its momentum to truly turn the company’s fortunes around.

I’ve also warmed on Shadows since I previewed it in January. The game’s uneven dual-protagonist structure had worried me:

You can’t swap between characters when you’re in story missions or when you’ve alerted foes, so you’ll have to carefully weigh your approach before each objective. Extract a drunk from a hostile bar? Surely a job for the ninja, Naoe. Meet a contact that’ll almost certainly betray you? Tank up as the samurai, Yasuke.

At times I miscalculated to hilarious results. I steered Yasuke into an estate crawling with enemies, crashed through a paper screen, backstabbed the first man I saw, who happened to be right next to the NPC I needed to talk to and who acted like she hadn’t just seen me perform a brutal murder. I then managed to slip away but could barely clear the surrounding walls in my heavy armor. As I stumbled out with none (miraculously) the wiser, I had the sinking feeling that Naoe’s better suited for most missions.

I was right about Naoe’s suitability, but I undervalued just how important Yasuke’s skills can be. Dozens of hours deeper into the game, I revised my perspective in a NPR piece published this week:

The game starts strong before taking languid detours. Within the first hour, Shadows deftly introduces its two protagonists. You first play as Yasuke, a towering Black man who attracts stares wherever he goes, as he leaves his Portuguese masters and transforms into an honor-bound samurai dedicated to the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Moments later, you play as Naoe, a young shinobi who desperately fights to save her village from Nobunaga's forces, only to watch mysterious masked figures kill her father and leave her for dead. Unoriginal as these motivations might be, it's a faultless setup for a revenge story where a well-placed blade can solve most problems.

But then Shadows turned achingly slow. I puttered around the Japanese countryside for the next eight hours as Naoe. I befriended a dog, meditated to uncover flashback sequences, and attended a tea ceremony steeped in intrigue. The game didn't feel like it had truly begun until Yasuke reemerged, first as a foe and then as a friend.

While Naoe is a Swiss Army knife, Yasuke is a hammer. The game habituates you to Naoe's typical Assassin playstyle — aerial parkour, stealthy takedowns, deadly tools, etc. Once you unlock Yasuke, you can swap to him when you're not around enemies, trading flexibility for sheer power.

At first, I saw little reason to deviate from Naoe. While she's best suited for most circumstances, one experience taught me the value of strategic switch-ups. I'd infiltrated a castle in Kyoto as Naoe, stalking a corrupt samurai before a wary archer blew my cover. As soldiers flung themselves over my path, I desperately fought and killed two assassination targets. Marked as "wanted" by local authorities, I scrambled to safety with a mostly depleted health bar.

Switching to Yasuke, I returned to the castle. Unable to rely on my usual stealth, I barreled into enemies and shrugged off their blows. Attacks that had nearly crushed me now barely dented my heavy armor. Naoe had already conquered most of the castle; Yasuke finished the job. Rarely had payback felt so sweet.

Since writing the NPR article, Shadows has continued to tug at me despite my complaints. I’ve grumbled at its occasionally lackluster dialogue, its predictable enemy encounters, and, most of all, its sluggish pace. Even series defender Stephen Totilo — who analyzed the game in a Here & Now segment I produced — acknowledged the game’s slowness. Ultimately, though, he came to appreciate that quality:

I was, to put it plainly, bored during many of Shadows’ early hours, and I was not in the mood to reach the game’s many shrines only to have the brakes applied to an already minimal velocity. And what was the point? There is no flashy reward for most of that meditating and praying, nor is the gameplay for those parts dynamic or exciting.

In time, though, as bouts of action became more frequent and as Naoe and Yasuke began to show more emotional range, I came to appreciate the game’s abundant opportunities to stand still and take some deep breaths. […]

These serene pauses are game design in the service of slowing players down to look and to wonder. They are set amid a lavishly detailed landscape in a game that is sending a message that, yes, sometimes hundreds of people and millions of dollars might be spent to simply create a video game event that isn’t about high-pulse action but of serenity.

Totilo strikes a chord here. Shadows has bored me and still often does, but my thoughts keep turning to it. Something in the combination of its smooth Sekiro-for-dummies combat, its interlocking side-quests, and steady progression systems keeps drumming against my brain. It’s rewarded me for taking my time, defying my impulse to rush from objective to objective. I’ve no idea if I’ll finish it, but I don’t think I’ll regret the dozens of hours it’s extracted from me.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, meanwhile, has been a bridge too far. Even more glacially paced and sprawling than AC Shadows, this new edition of a 2015 game has exhausted me.

It’s got a good set-up. What’s left of humanity has crashed onto a planet called Mira after Earth became collateral damage in a war between alien forces. My character woke up in a cryopod with a convenient case of amnesia, rolled through an exotic wilderness, and fought some space dogs. I was then forced through an hourlong tour of the main hub and its many characters.

By the time the game’s open world beckoned again, I had nearly forgotten how its combat mechanics worked. Then I remembered that I didn’t really like them — I struggled to quickly swap abilities in what felt like a turn-based system masquerading as real-time.

While it’s aggravated me, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition has wowed other critics. The Washington Post’s Gene Park even described it as “one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.” Perhaps I’m the problem? Why can I tolerate — perhaps even praise — AC Shadows’ slowness and find it insurmountable in XCX?

It likely comes down to genre. Xenoblade Chronicles X is too much a traditional JRPG underneath its modern mecha trappings. Its writing is just a bit too interminable and stuffy. I can’t fault anyone for enjoying it, but I’ve played enough to know it’s not my cup of tea.

Finally, a foot surgery shortened my work week so I have only one more item to report. I produced an 11-minute interview between Here & Now host Robin Young and author John Green on his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. It’s part jaunty history of the civilization-shaping disease, part biography of TB survivor Henry Reider, and entirely a call to action. As Green put it:

“If we believe, as I think we all do, that every human life has equal value, we must live that belief. My brother had cancer a year and a half ago — and at no point in my brother's cancer treatment, even though it costs over 150 times more to cure Hank [Green] than it costs to cure Henry — at no point did anyone say this is a bad investment or this isn't cost-effective, or this just doesn't make sense. We would never say that to someone like Hank. And so why are we saying it to someone like Henry?”

It was an incredibly rewarding piece to produce, and — in much lighter news — I also had the pleasure of chatting with Green before the taping started. He called my Axolotl shirt + pocket square combo “epic,” the best compliment I’ve received in weeks (and yes, indicates how much I aspire to a simultaneously nerdy and old-fashioned dandy aesthetic).

I beg your forgiveness for this self-indulgent anecdote. It’s not everyday you get to meet a YouTuber and writer you’ve followed for years!