Assassin's Creed Shadows: Two Protagonists, One Design Problem

Assassin’s Creed has toyed with dual protagonists before — Haytham and Connor trading chapters in Assassin’s Creed III, Jacob and Evie splitting London between them in Syndicate — but Shadows is the first entry to make the split the entire premise rather than a structural curiosity buried in the middle act. Naoe, a fictional shinobi, and Yasuke, the historically attested African samurai who served under Oda Nobunaga, aren’t playable variations on the same skill tree. They’re built around genuinely different verbs, and the game asks you to live with the friction that produces rather than smoothing it away.

That friction is the most honest thing about Shadows, and also its clearest design flaw. Ubisoft built two characters who are legitimately bad at each other’s jobs, and then built a sixty-hour open world that periodically insists you use the wrong one anyway.

Two Skill Trees, One Map

Naoe plays like a classic Assassin’s Creed protagonist refined by a decade of stealth-game iteration since the series’ Origins-era reinvention: rooftop traversal, a grapple hook, smoke bombs, and a genuine incentive to avoid direct confrontation whenever possible, since her health pool punishes straight fights against armoured enemies. Yasuke is closer to a Souls-adjacent brawler bolted into an open world — heavier, slower, capable of tanking hits and demolishing enemies in melee that would shred Naoe in seconds, but almost entirely unable to use the stealth tools that define her half of the game. He can’t climb the way she can. He can’t vanish into a crowd. He hits like a castle gate falling on you, and that’s the whole pitch.

Splitting the map’s approach options this cleanly between two characters is a genuinely interesting experiment in asymmetric design for a franchise that’s spent most of its life offering one protagonist with an expanding tool belt. When it works, it produces real variety — the same fortress infiltrated two different ways across two different playthrough approaches, rather than the illusion of choice a single stealth-or-loud toggle usually provides.

When the Game Picks for You

The problem is that Shadows doesn’t always let the player choose which character tackles which objective. Certain story missions are locked to one protagonist regardless of what the player might prefer, and several of those locked missions ask the assigned character to operate outside their comfort zone — Yasuke forced through a stealth-gated sequence his kit isn’t built for, or Naoe pushed into a direct confrontation her fragility makes needlessly punishing. These aren’t rare edge cases; they’re frequent enough to read as a structural decision rather than an oversight, presumably made in service of pacing the story’s dual perspective rather than the player’s mechanical comfort.

It’s a real cost, and it’s worth naming plainly: a design built around “play to your character’s strength” occasionally forgets its own rule when the plot needs a specific character in a specific room. The friction this produces isn’t fatal — most of the campaign does respect the two skill sets — but it undercuts the game’s central design conceit often enough to blunt what should have been its signature achievement.

The Series’ Long History With This Trick

Assassin’s Creed has flirted with this idea since Assassin’s Creed III paired Haytham’s more brutal, direct combat style against Connor’s more classically stealth-first Assassin toolkit across the game’s prologue and main campaign, and Syndicate’s Jacob-and-Evie split made the brawler/stealth division explicit for the first time as a whole-game structure rather than a prologue trick. Shadows is the natural culmination of that experiment — the first entry to commit fully to two leads with distinct, non-overlapping combat philosophies across the entire runtime rather than treating the split as a novelty confined to a handful of missions.

Whether that commitment was worth making depends on how much you value asymmetric design over consistency. A single-protagonist Assassin’s Creed lets a player build one deep, coherent set of skills across sixty hours; Shadows trades some of that depth for the variety of never quite settling into a single rhythm. It’s the more interesting design bet, even where it doesn’t fully land.

The Open World Underneath

Feudal Japan gives Ubisoft’s open-world formula genuinely fresh dressing rather than a reskin. Seasonal changes affect traversal and stealth meaningfully — snow leaves visible tracks that can give away a hidden approach, while dense foliage in other seasons offers cover options that vanish once winter strips it bare. The game’s fortress and settlement design draws on real Sengoku-period architecture, and the two-protagonist structure genuinely changes how a given location gets approached on a second visit, which does real work keeping the map from feeling like the icon-soup checklist the series has been criticised for since well before Origins tried to fix it.

That said, the underlying quest structure — clear this camp, tail this target, collect this currency for the upgrade tree — is still recognisably the same open-world skeleton the series has run since 2017, dressed in a new setting and a genuinely interesting mechanical wrinkle rather than replaced by one. Whether that’s a comfort or a complaint probably depends on how tired you already were of the formula walking in.

Yasuke as a Design Statement

Casting Yasuke as a full protagonist — rather than a supporting character or a historical cameo — is Shadows’ boldest structural decision, and it’s worth separating the design conversation from the wider media discourse that surrounded his casting ahead of release. Mechanically, giving a heavy, direct-combat character equal narrative weight to a traditional stealth assassin is a genuinely unusual choice for this franchise, which has spent most of its history treating loud, undisguised confrontation as the failure state a good player avoids. Yasuke’s chapters invert that hierarchy entirely: for him, the failure state is trying to sneak, and the game is at its best when it commits fully to that inversion rather than apologising for it with stealth options bolted on as an afterthought.

Where the design occasionally falters is in balancing the two protagonists’ relative difficulty against a shared enemy roster built to challenge both. Encounters tuned around Naoe’s fragility can feel trivially easy once Yasuke wades in and simply out-tanks them, while stealth-heavy areas built with Naoe’s toolkit in mind can leave Yasuke’s sections feeling like a slog through content the game itself doesn’t fully believe he should be doing. The asymmetry that makes the pitch interesting is the same asymmetry that makes the tuning genuinely hard to get right across sixty-plus hours, and Shadows doesn’t always solve it.

The Hideout as the Other Half of the Game

Between missions, Shadows layers in a settlement-building system — a home base that grows as you recruit specialists, each bringing a passive bonus and a small questline of their own — that owes an obvious debt to the series’ own Assassin’s Creed III homestead and Brotherhood’s recruit system, updated with a more granular building-placement mechanic reminiscent of a management sim. It’s a smart use of downtime between the two protagonists’ story beats, giving the player something to return to that isn’t just another icon on the map, and the specialist recruitment questlines do quieter, more human-scale storytelling than the main plot’s political conspiracy manages, focusing on individual craftspeople and their reasons for throwing in with Naoe’s cause.

This hideout layer also does useful narrative work bridging Naoe and Yasuke’s separate arcs — both protagonists interact with the same home base and the same roster of recruits, giving the story a shared emotional centre even as their individual missions rarely overlap directly. It’s one of the clearer signs that Ubisoft Quebec understood the risk of the dual-protagonist structure feeling like two separate games stitched together, and built connective tissue specifically to counter it.

Combat’s Weight, Finally

Yasuke’s combat design deserves credit on its own terms, separate from the structural conversation above. Where earlier Assassin’s Creed entries since the 2017 reinvention have often struggled to make heavy weapons feel meaningfully different from an agile default, Yasuke’s kit commits fully to weight — animations carry real wind-up, blocked attacks stagger him visibly, and the payoff for a well-timed parry against a katana-wielding enemy captain has a heft that the series’ lighter combat styles have rarely matched. It’s the best pure combat the franchise has produced in years, confined to exactly the character built to deliver it.

Spoilers below

Naoe’s arc centres on a revenge plot: her father framed and killed by a shadowy faction manipulating the collapse of Oda Nobunaga’s rule, sending her out from her ninja village into direct conflict with the political currents of the late Sengoku period. Yasuke’s arc runs in parallel as a more explicitly historical thread, tracking his real documented service to Nobunaga and the political chaos that followed his death, with the two characters’ paths converging as their separate investigations reveal the same conspiracy from different angles. The game closes with both protagonists’ personal stakes resolved on individual terms rather than a single unifying victory, consistent with a story that was always more interested in two parallel character studies than one shared plot.

For the series’ other recent attempt at a huge, systems-dense open world, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla remains the clearer cautionary tale about scope for its own sake, and the wider argument about why the hundred-hour open world has become a budgeting problem applies to Shadows as much as to any of its stablemates — sixty-plus hours of dual-protagonist content is a genuine achievement of production scale, and also exactly the kind of scale that makes the mission-gating friction discussed above so much more noticeable than it would be in a shorter game. For a different studio’s take on samurai-era Japan built around a single, more focused protagonist, Ghost of Tsushima is the sharper comparison, and the contrast between the two games’ approaches to the same setting is instructive about how much a single clear protagonist can simplify design decisions a two-lead structure keeps having to negotiate.