Assassins

Assassin’s Creed has long focused each of its stories on a central theme. Almost every aspect of Odyssey’s main campaign and dozens of side quests deal with legacy, for example, while Valhalla’s lengthy story largely centers around fate. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is far less defined, with protagonists Naoe and Yasuke’s journey across 16th-century Japan primarily being about found family, but delving into revenge and honor as well. Thematically, it’s been the weakest narrative theme of the larger, more RPG-focused Assassin’s Creed games, muddied by the main story’s aimless second act.

Those same problems persist in Shadows’ first major story-driven expansion, Claws of Awaji. And while a few changes to the cat-and-mouse formula of pursuing and eliminating targets do make for a more engaging gameplay loop, the persisting narrative issues leave the ending to the DLC, and Naoe’s arc specifically, feeling barebones.

Claws of Awaji takes place after the events of Shadows’ main story. So if you haven’t finished Shadows’ campaign and don’t want to be spoiled, turn back.

Shadows’ main story doesn’t really have an ending. Well, it does, but it’s bad–the worst the franchise has ever had. Naoe learns that her mother, who disappeared 14 years earlier, is a member of a group known as the Assassin Brotherhood and is actually still alive. Yasuke discovers the same Templar Order that originally enslaved him has plans for Japan and declares war on them, and both protagonists succeed in only finding two of the three MacGuffins necessary to ensure the protection of the country.

And that’s where the credits roll. There’s no search for Naoe’s mother. Yasuke does not finish his hunt for the remaining Templars in Japan. And the final objective remains two-thirds finished. The game just abruptly ends, concluding with a surprising and deeply unrewarding cutoff to what’s otherwise a decent story.

Claws of Awaji takes Naoe and Yasuke to the titular island.

Claws of Awaji aims to rectify that by concluding all three lingering plotlines. This makes it feel less like an optional expansion that fans can pay for to see more of a game they enjoy, and more like the actual ending of the game that you must pay for if you want to know how Naoe and Yasuke’s tale concludes. I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes of this game’s development, but how Naoe and Yasuke’s stories were ultimately told feels weird. Ending a game’s story on a cliffhanger isn’t bad. Heck, some of the best Assassin’s Creed games have followed their satisfying endings with a brief and exciting tease of what’s to come, but Shadows’ ending doesn’t feel like a thrilling cliffhanger–it feels like it was unfinished. And to see a conclusion arrive months later as paid DLC feels predatory, regardless of the development team’s original intent.

Those feelings aside, based on its own merits, Claws of Awaji is a decent expansion. Upon finally getting a lead on her mother’s whereabouts, Naoe heads to the island of Awaji with Yasuke close behind. They quickly discover Naoe’s mother alive, but captured, held by the daughter of one of the Templar agents that Yasuke killed in the final hour of the main game, having inherited her father’s station within the Order. The Templar has been torturing Naoe’s mother for over a decade, eager to uncover where she’s hidden the third MacGuffin that Naoe and Yasuke have been looking for.

To get at the Templar who controls the island, Naoe and Yasuke must kill her spymaster, samurai, and shinobi.

To get at the Templar, Naoe and Yasuke must dismantle her control of Awaji, which she maintains thanks to her three lieutenants: a spymaster, a samurai, and a shinobi. Taking each one down resembles the open-ended Act 2 of the main game, in that you can pursue them in whichever order interests you, but aspects of the hunt have been greatly improved.

Each of the three Templar lieutenants controls parts of Awaji and has been assigned to hunt Naoe and Yasuke to stop them from helping Naoe’s mother. For as long as the spymaster lives, for example, his agents will hide among the populace in villages and towns, surprising Naoe and Yasuke with blades hidden away in unassuming clothing. In addition, if Naoe or Yasuke send agents into any area to scout for objectives or enemy defenses, the spymaster will take notice and flood that zone with reinforcements, making getting around undetected very difficult. Similarly, for as long as the samurai lives, he’ll send battle-hardened soldiers out to patrol the main roads and set up roadblocks to make getting from place to place harder, and the shinobi has ambushers with smoke bombs, poisoned blades, and tripwires making sure Naoe and Yasuke can’t sneak around via side roads or hide in the wilderness.

Nowaki the shinobi is one of the best boss fights Assassin’s Creed has had.

Essentially, the enemies in this game are the three pillars of Naoe (stealth, combat, and parkour), and they’re designed to counter her (and by extension, Yasuke) with the skills and strategies that you’ve been honing over the course of Shadow’s runtime. When you’re trailing a target as Naoe and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, you need to take care that no one down below is tracking you, setting up an ambush the moment you descend and try to hide in the crowd. As you ride across the island as Yasuke, you must take care to be wary of the same tall bushes you’d use to hide as Naoe and stand ready to counter when you cross under a tree or ledge that looks like a perch you’d normally air assassinate from.

It’s awesome. It does not rise to the same level of cat-and-mouse thrill that the player-versus-player multiplayer had in the Assassin’s Creed games back in the day, but it comes close to emulating that sensation, and the back-and-forth nature of being both the hunter and the hunted creates some of the most enjoyably tense moments I’ve had in Shadows. And your hunt feels more meaningful this time around, because there’s concrete proof of your efforts. Take out the samurai, and it’s easier to ride your horse on the main road, for instance; kill the shinobi, and you no longer have to worry about being randomly ambushed by her agents. Narratively, you’re actively making the island safer for its citizens and mechanically, you’re actively making the island safer for you–you can feel what you’re doing. This system would have drastically improved the moment-to-moment of Shadows’ gameplay in the main story, and it’s a shame to see it reserved for the much smaller and shorter DLC.

Yasuke’s inclusion continues to negatively affect Shadow’s story.

However, the actual boss fights against the Templar and her three lieutenants falter, save one. Two are straight-up duels, one in which you’re forced to play as Yasuke and the other in which you’re just heavily encouraged to do so. They’re unexciting after having done the same type of fight half a dozen times in the main game already, and are even more of a slog this time around because Yasuke’s opponents have tons of unblockable combos and huge health bars. So much of both fights is dodging and dodging and dodging and getting in one or two hits before repeating for almost 10 minutes. And that’s on the Normal difficulty!

The boss fight against the spymaster is a little more interesting, as it’s focused around Naoe going undercover and collecting information to bamboozle him, but it’s trivially easy to do–over a decade later and new Assassin’s Creed games still can’t do missions that focus on using disguises as interesting or as well as 2012’s Liberation managed to do.

The boss fight against the shinobi is very good, though. It sees Naoe contending with a rival with her same skillset. Hidden in a murky swamp, the enemy shinobi taunts Naoe and tries to shoot her with a rifle. Meanwhile, as Naoe, you can focus your senses to get a general idea of the direction of the enemy shinobi’s voice (but only when she speaks), and purposely setting off her traps can trick her into shooting where she thinks you are, potentially revealing her position. The arena is filled with statue decoys, tripwires, and traps, as well as perches for Naoe and the enemy shinobi to move along and bushes to hide in. You have to deduce where the enemy shinobi is hiding, sneak up on her without being noticed, stab her, and repeat when she drops smoke bombs and scurries off. It’s the highlight of the entire DLC, and the closest Assassin’s Creed has come to a good stealth-focused boss fight.

Naoe also has a new tool in her arsenal in the DLC: the bo staff. The staff can be held in three different stances, with a neutral stance for normal strikes; a low stance for slow, sweeping strikes that can potentially trip an enemy; and a high stance for quick, jabbing strikes that can potentially interrupt an enemy’s attack. It doesn’t change combat in any fundamental way, but the bo staff is loads of fun for the simple reason that ending an enemy’s life with a couple of well-timed and satisfying thwacks is cool. It’s my new favorite weapon in Shadows for that reason alone. There are no new tools for Yasuke, who feels even more secondary in Claws of Awaji than he did in the main storyline.

This DLC once again affirms my belief that Shadows should have always exclusively been Naoe’s game, especially with how the two new major characters, Naoe’s mom and the Templar holding her, are written. It’s both surprising and disappointing to see how wooden Naoe and her mother’s conversations are. They hardly speak to one another, and when they do, Naoe has nothing to say about how her mom’s oath to the Assassin’s Brotherhood unintentionally led to her capture for over a decade, leaving Naoe thinking she was completely alone after her father was killed. Her mother evidently has no regrets about not being there for the death of her husband, nor any desire to rekindle anything with her daughter until the last minutes of the DLC. Naoe spent the final moments of Shadows grappling with the ramifications that her mother was still alive, and then upon meeting her, the two talk like two friends who haven’t seen each other in a few years. And Naoe has nothing to say about or to the Templar that kept her mother enslaved so long that everyone assumed she was dead.

It’s all very odd until you remember that so much of Shadows has to assume that the player might be primarily playing as Yasuke instead of Naoe. The conclusion to Naoe’s arc has to be emotionally cheapened so the experience is the same for both the samurai and the shinobi. The ending of Claws of Awaji is at least more conclusive than that of Shadows, but it’s unfulfilling and inadequate in a different way by failing to live up to the cliffhanger of Naoe’s arc.

Claws of Awaji is a difficult recommendation, but I do recommend it. The DLC wraps up the three lingering narrative threads of the main game’s story, while transforming the main gameplay loop into a more enjoyable cat-and-mouse formula where the hunter becomes the hunted. Yasuke continues to drag this experience down, and is now impacting the emotional payoff of Naoe’s story, but at least Naoe’s shinobi fantasy is still one of the best Assassin’s Creed experiences to date.

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