WHAT IS IT?

A long-overdue journey to Japan for the venerable stealth-action series.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s wildly all over the place: some of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is excellent, some of it is pretty good, other parts are mediocre or inexplicably bad.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Japanophiles, Cosmo Jarvis, Ansel Elgort.

EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF THE ASSASSIN

Since its inception, the Assassin’s Creed series has often strained to balance its many competing strands.

On the one hand, each game has its own, period-specific story to tell, ranging from the redemptive journey of 12th century assassin Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad in the original game, to the seafaring adventures of pirate Edward Kenway in series highlight ACIV: Black Flag.

These games also need to be, well, fun, with moment-to-moment gameplay which is engaging, inventive, and evolving. Much of your enjoyment of any given AC hinges on how well it handles its trademark mix of stealth, combat, and parkour-inspired exploration.

Then there’s that other thing about AC, the whole meta-narrative of it all, each game technically taking place (spoilers!) within a near-future virtual reality system controlled, alternatingly, by the modern-day Assassins and Templars. Amusingly, many of these games are technically “played” within the confines of fictional game studio Abstergo Montréal, a stand-in for real-world developer Ubisoft Montréal.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, AC has for a long time functioned as the greatest sightseeing tour in gaming, treating us to loving, and increasingly realistic, recreations of Renaissance Italy (ACII and AC: Brotherhood), the Caribbean (the aforementioned Black Flag), Revolutionary-era France (AC Unity), and 19th century London (the underrated AC Syndicate), among other locales.

AC Shadows is at its best in that last category, providing gamers an opportunity, long overdue for a series which has ninja written all over it, to traipse around an impressively accurate recreation of 16th century Japan. (It is, in fact, possible to play Shadows with a map of Japan open next to you, using real-world guidance to navigate the game.) As for those other aspects – the gameplay and narrative, the metafictional elements – it’s decidedly a mixed bag, suggesting that this latest Assassin’s Creed, already delayed multiple times, wasn’t quite ready to make the leap out of the shadows.

LIVE BY THE CREED

Taking place during the Sengoku period – for those keeping track, that’s slightly before the events depicted in James Clavell’s Shōgun, with which Shadows shares a number of overlapping characters – AC Shadows follows the parallel stories of famed “African Samurai” Yasuke and a fictional shinobi named Fujibayashi Naoe. The story touches on many of the real-world events of this era, which was marked by civil war and the ever-growing presence of Portuguese traders and missionaries.

Of the two, Yasuke – based on the real figure of the same name, one of the first non-Japanese to be made samurai – is clearly the more interesting character. While little is known of the real Yasuke, Ubisoft has crafted a compelling narrative inspired by the experiences of a Black man who, in an era when the slave trade was flourishing, rose to the rank of samurai under daimyō Oda Nobunaga.

It’s too bad then that Yasuke’s generic, combat-heavy gameplay is far less interesting than that of his stealthier counterpart, Naoe. Small and quick, Naoe is a kunoichi – female ninja – with all the standard tools at her disposal, ranging from a grappling hook and smoke bombs, to an assassin’s knack for quietly disposing of foes with a tap of the “assassinate” button. Yet what Naoe makes up for in gameplay, she sacrifices in storytelling, with a lazy, cliché-ridden revenge plot shamelessly cribbed from too many prior Japan-set narratives. It’s as if Ubisoft sought to split the difference in terms of story and gameplay between its two lead characters, and ended up shortchanging both.

(At least Ubisoft did succeed in triggering the worst parts of the Internet, eliciting a whole host of bad faith – i.e., racist – opposition to the presence of a Black samurai in this game. Bonus points to Shadows, then, for successfully angering the MAGAheads.)

DIE BY THE SWORD

The very first thing I did in AC Shadows was open the map and scan for locations familiar from my travels to Japan. The very next thing I did, storyline and Ubi-style GPS indicators be damned, was immediately set out for Osaka, infiltrating its central fortress and climbing the fabled Osaka Castle to see how it compares with real life. (Answer: quite well.)

Much like Red Dead Redemption before it, AC Shadows thrives on the freewheeling nature of its open world: go anywhere, do anything, don’t worry about the story unless you want to. Again and again, Shadows finds ways to reward the curious player, whether it’s through sidequests, hidden areas, quasi-random encounters, enemy encampments, or an overabundance of the series’ trademark viewpoints. Series maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” is no truer than here, in this fourteenth instalment.

This, dear reader, was a huge relief to your resident Guardian critic, who’d grown weary of the series’s recent trend towards more fictionalized settings, reflected in games like the Viking-era Valhalla or the Islamic Golden Age-set Mirage, which imagine what places might have looked like during eras for which little, if any, infrastucture remains today. To put it in perspective, where a classic AC title like the London-set Syndicate would impress with its down-to-the-millimetre accurate recreations of Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and the National Gallery (among other noteworthy locations), the more recent, “Ancient Britain”-set Valhalla, managed to conjure up precisely one famous landmark: Stonehenge.

Happily, the Japan of Shadows represents a return to form, offering up a plethora of real-world landmarks like Osaka Castle, Himeji Castle, the Kyoto Golden Pavilion, and many more which can still be visited today. Purely as a sightseeing exercise,Shadows is marvelous.

WE WORK IN THE DARK, TO SERVE THE LIGHT

It’s in other areas where Shadows habitually comes up short.

Let’s take the “Scouts” mechanic. In theory, it’s meant to help pinpoint objectives on the map, or smuggle resources out of enemy encampments… except for Shadows‘s unfortunate tendency to leave you short on Scouts, forcing you to return to your hideout, manually locate the Scouts “station”, then spend your hard-earned mon to recruit more Scouts, one by one. It’s a slow, laborious process, and there’s nothing more frustrating than staring at an enemy cache with a greyed-out “smuggle” icon because you haven’t refreshed your Scouts recently.

Then there’s Yasuke, who Ubisoft clearly couldn’t decide what to do with. At some point, a version of this game existed in which Yasuke functioned solely as the big hulking bruiser, handing over stealth duties to his ninja counterpart Naoe. Sadly, someone at Ubisoft clearly had second thoughts, because the version of Yasuke we get here is less overpowered samurai, and more awkward, clumsier version of Naoe. So not only do you get the absurd sight of this giant, heavily-clad samurai leaping rooftop to rooftop, he’s still less nimble overall, leaving many platforms frustratingly out of reach. Even more maddening is the fact that Yasuke’s stats are barely any better than Naoe’s, meaning he’s just as ineffective against tougher foes: it takes forever to whittle down enemy health, and your own death by one-hit-kill is far too common.

Visually, Shadows is all over the place. Sometimes – especially at night, and especially when it’s raining – it looks incredible. Most of the time, however, it’s a mixed bag of lovely (the vegetation) and unacceptably bad, with certain graphical elements so undercooked they look like PS3 models. This is especially true of the game’s terribly rendered animals, many of which look (and move) like furry potatoes.

Speaking of – AC Shadows also sorely lacks the kind of dynamic world we’ve grown accustomed to in open-world games. Yes, NPCs will generally react if you do something dramatic right in front of them, but otherwise tend to go about their pre-programmed business. You can, for example, steal a horse straight out from under the eyes of an enemy soldier, and he’ll do nothing. You can also, as I’ve done on several occasions, repeatedly stab a civilian while they stand stock-still, unfazed. This is also true of the game’s wildlife, which prove far too tolerant of your sword-wielding antics.

Then there all the frankly baffling choices which undermine the experience in other ways. Take, for instance, Shadows‘s truly bonkers soundtrack, which intermittently replaces its traditional Japanese musical stylings with dreadful, and dreadfully out of place, J-Pop and J-Rock. Then there’s Shadows‘s overcrowded UI, which constantly clutters your screen with too much information, like deploying not one but two different on-screen indicators to signify when you’re hidden. (I long for Ghost of Tsushima‘s clean interface.)

Also frustrating, in no particular order, are: any time Shadows drops an unskippable cutscene just before a boss fight, the awful rhythm minigame Yasuke is subjected to when learning new techniques, the inexplicable inability to toss bodies over an edge to conceal them, and the unfortunate fact that, after many long years, Assassin’s Creed has finally fallen victim to the plague of yellow paint, employing glaringly artificial yellow markers to indicate where it’s okay to climb. These markers aren’t everywhere (thank god), but they’re unnecessary and distracting.

Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is the way Shadows handles its diversity of languages. While the game purports to offer immersive audio by having dialogue play out in Japanese and Portuguese, Ubisoft has inexplicably failed to hire voice actors who actually sound like they’re struggling along in their second language. Hence, the incongruity of African-born Yasuke, employed by Portuguese traders, speaking flawless Japanese because Ubisoft just went out and hired a fluent Japanese voice actor. It’s not only lazy, it’s immersion-breaking: from a storytelling perspective, it’s important that Yasuke sound like someone learning the language and ways of this new culture. (Readers/viewers of Shōgun can readily attest to this.)

NOTHING IS TRUE, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED

Make of this what you will, but it takes a very long time before Shadows bothers to dip into any Creed lore whatsoever, preferring its alt-history narrative over any of the Assassins vs. Templars business you might expect. For what it’s worth, I would have preferred more of the classic AC shenanigans, since it’s that stuff which helps differentiate this game from the vastly superior Ghost of Tsushima. That said, I did appreciate the narrative conceit of presenting Shadows as just one of several “memories” to choose from, the main menu doubling as a way to quickly access other AC games in your library. (Or, if we’re being less charitable here, funnelling you to the PlayStation Store to buy them.)

Which is not to say I didn’t have fun the majority of my time with Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The parkour gameplay is great as always, though noticeably better when you’re controlling Naoe. The option of “guaranteed assassinations” against stronger foes – the default setting only whittles down their health, before forcing you into combat – is entirely welcome, though needlessly buried in the menu.

The missions are fun if not especially varied, and the sidequests stay interesting by either building out the world in meaningful ways, or offering useful rewards to better equip your characters. Perhaps most exciting is the fact that Assassin’s Tombs are back in a big way, in the form of both kofuns (literally, “tombs”) to explore, and specially designated “Paths” which offer compelling platforming challenges through secret areas. Also, building and decorating your home compound is awesome, and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll spend far too many hours deciding where to place your various outbuildings (stables, a forge, etc.), then carefully decorating with lanterns, sakura trees, tea sets, and so on.

Criticisms aside, I can’t quite say that I disliked any particular moments in AC Shadows. It’s just that it regularly fell short of expectations, while finding small ways to irritate which probably should have been caught in the development process. If not for the ability to freely explore a huge chunk of 16th century Japan, I probably would have enjoyed – and scored – this game less.

As it is, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is still worth checking out as a decent entry in the Creed series, one that contributes to the lore in limited, albeit interesting, ways, while also serving as a fairly good Tsushima-alike until Ghost of Yotei arrives later this year.

***
Final score: 8/10 Jin Sakais.

Visit the official website for Assassin’s Creed Shadows here.

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows (PS5) Review: Go Ninja, Go Ninja, Go appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

WHAT IS IT?

The loveliest video game of 2024.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s gorgeous.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Disney artists.

A BRUSH WITH DESTINY

For its first couple hours, Neva contents itself with merely being the most beautiful video game you’ve ever seen. But then, something happens, and, though the core gameplay remains the same, its world begins to unfold in altogether unexpected ways.

It’s a bold, if not entirely successful, bid to be something more than just “that game that looks like the Sleeping Beauty background”, and developer Nomada absolutely deserves credit for it. We’re going to refrain from spoiling the nifty ways Neva evolves, but just know that this game is both more (and occasionally less) than it appears…

DOG DAYS

Neva picks up where games like Ōkami and Journey – and Nomada’s own 2018 title Gris – left off, with some of the most strikingly illustrated graphics of any video game ever made.

Neva is essentially a Ghibli-style fairy tale about a young woman named Alba (the player-character) and her pet/companion, Neva.

When Neva begins, the title character is merely a cub. Over the course of its four or so hours – corresponding to the four seasons – Neva grows into a formidable fantasy animal, a sort-of cross between a wolf, dog, and deer. In that time, Neva also becomes perhaps the most precious thing of all: your best friend.

If Neva was just four hours of Alba and Neva wandering through gorgeously rendered 2.5D landscapes, that would be enough. If anything, its main weakness comes from its “gamier” aspects, like overlong combat sequences or finicky precision platforming. These are, if we’re being honest here, distractions from the main event: watching Alba and Neva move across a world that looks like it was painted by Eyvind Earle.

That said, Neva certainly is and does more than just show off developer Nomada’s artistic chops. Its simple, fable-like story begins with a death (as these stories often do), then unfolds as a series of challenges through which Alba/Neva must overcome an ever-growing darkness. It’s a tale told a thousand times over, but it’s told well here, simply, with minimal to no dialogue and an evocative art style which communicates more than most games accomplish in hundreds of hours of dialogue.

THE JOURNEY NOT THE DESTINATION

Gameplay in Neva is simple, if not quite simple enough. Alba (you) can run and jump and dash and activate light towers and, on occasion, swing a shadow-destroying sword to fend off the dark, oozy, creeping things threatening the world.

The wolf-dog Neva is largely there to back you up, providing combat support and, as your pet grows/ages, assisting with relatively simple environmental puzzles.

At any time, you can stop whatever you’re doing and, with the tap of a button, pet the dog. Or hug. Or scritch around the neck. All are appreciated.

Neva is unabashed about its influences. There’s a healthy dose of Limbo and Inside, the two critically acclaimed “silent wanderer” titles from Danish studio Playdead. There’s also quite a bit of Journey (my #1 all-time favourite game), right down to Neva‘s central mountain, which has clearly been lifted from that 2012 masterpiece. In its painterly aesthetic, Neva also reminds me of Ōkami, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, also stars a magical wolf.

Speaking of coincidence, Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is possibly another influence, with its similar tale of a young woman’s bond with her wolf and 2.5D graphics. Then again, it could just be that stories of magical wolves and dogs are irresistible.

A BEAUTY THAT SLEEPS

Most of all, Neva plays like a classic Disney film come to life. Evyind Earle may not be as familiar a name as Ub Iwerks or Walt himself, but his contributions to the Disney canon are legion. As the lead background painter on Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Sleeping Beauty, he solidified a house style which favoured sparse, geometric shapes and bold, striking colours. (Here’s a nice article about Earle with lots of examples of his art.) Clearly, Nomada’s creative director Conrad Roset is a fan.

It’s too bad there aren’t more games that take inspiration from classic animation. Cuphead is an obvious example, as are the Samorost and Machinarium titles from Amanita Designs, and the remarkable (and criminally overlooked) Ni No Kuni from Studio Ghibli.

Neva is a fine addition to a very small but illustrious pantheon and one of the Great Games of 2024.

***
Final score: 9/10 paintbrushes.

Visit the official website for Neva here.

The post Neva (PS5) Review: You Can Pet the Dog, and You Darn Well Better appeared first on Toronto Guardian.