Japanese grip: the first batch of Assassin's Creed Shadows in Russia sold out in a day

The Assassin's Creed Shadows video game, which relies on historical authenticity, went on sale worldwide on March 20. Russian gamers greeted the novelty with great enthusiasm: they sold out the first batch on the first day of sales, the retailers said. And on Steam, over 2 million unique users played an action movie about medieval Japan in the first two days. Izvestia tested the game and drew attention to numerous historical blunders that have already caused scandals in the media and even in the Japanese parliament. But they did not prevent you from enjoying the passage of Assassin's Creed Shadows.

What is the new part of "Assassin's Creed" about?

Assassin's Creed Shadows (in Russian localization — "Assassin's Creed: Shadows") is a new installment of the once iconic adventure series from the French company Ubisoft. It focuses on parkour, exploring the world, and eliminating "targets." Russians gained access to it at the same time as the rest of the world. Izvestia editors were provided with a copy of the PS5 game by the Russian distributor of video games, Achivka Company.

Over the past year and a half, there has been a series of scandals related to Assassin's Creed Shadows. It even came to a discussion of the project in the Japanese parliament and criticism from the country's prime minister, who condemned the possibility of vandalizing the game by destroying Buddhist shrines.

The game was originally supposed to be released in November 2024, but the release was postponed twice — to February, and then to March 2025. This is the fifth installment in the series of games after its formal relaunch in 2017 — "Assassin's Creed: Origins". Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla and Mirage were released before Shadows.

I-Game Edinburgh: Russia is creating a project about Scotland with voice control

What other technologies does an action movie with detective elements have and will it become popular among users?

After Egypt, Greece and England, the series reached Japan with its strange customs for Europeans, samurai and geisha. For many years, fans have been asking Ubisoft to create Assassin's Creed in the historical period of the "warring provinces era", better known as the Sengoku period, and they got what they wanted, albeit with great delay. While the developers were looking for approaches to this topic, Shadows had two strong competitors — Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Ronin. Moreover, the latter was released just nine days earlier, on March 11, and also attracted the wide attention of the players.

As noted by the head of the "Development of games and the gaming community" group, "M.Video-Eldorado" by Sergey Mezin, Assassin's Creed Shadows is the most anticipated release this spring for gamers.

— We know the love of Russian gamers for Assassin's Creed — the total volume of discs sold in our stores in the last 10 years alone has amounted to more than 300 thousand copies. We are glad that Russian fans of the series were able to start their adventures in Assassin's Creed Shadows at the same time as the whole world," he said.

Over the past 18 years, Ubisoft has sold over 200 million copies of the series of games and earned almost $4.5 billion from them. In terms of popularity, Assassin's Creed ranks alongside The Sims, Lego, and Final Fantasy. Izvestia studied the version for the PlayStation 5 console with the patch installed on the first day. He introduced serious restrictions to the game: for example, you can no longer climb historical monuments, destroy religious sites and attack civilians. Ubisoft took all these measures at the last moment in the hope that the Japanese government would show leniency to the game about its culture. For many years, the formula of the "Assassin" was the phrase: "Nothing is true, everything is allowed," but in the new part, the French had to resort to harsh self-censorship in order to avoid scandals, boycotts and even bans.

What mistakes did the authors make?

For the sake of reaching the maximum number of gamers and regions, Ubisoft tried to sit on two chairs — actively censored its own project after the first dissatisfied ones appeared on the Network, and at the same time resorted to the help of experts on inclusivity and diversity, who came up with the idea of adding a dark-skinned samurai Yasuke, which angered some gamers even outside Japan and caused historical discussions about whether such a person could exist in reality.

In Assassin's Creed Shadows, there are two main characters: the ninja girl Naoe and the African warrior Yasuke, who, according to some historical chronicles, served under the Emperor of Japan Oda Nobunaga. There is no direct historical evidence that Yasuke was really a samurai, and the author of the 2019 book "The True Story of Yasuke," Professor Thomas Lockley, was convicted of inventing facts and manipulating data, including on Wikipedia.

Gradually, the role of the African in the framework of the plot was significantly reduced, the emphasis was shifted to the girl Naoe, but the authors retained the ability to switch between the characters. Everyone has their own set of unique skills and passing style. Yasuke has powerful attacks and is used to acting straight ahead, while Shinobi Naoe is able to use the cat hook and other ninja attributes to sneak into the territory and eliminate her targets.

Ubisoft, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2024 with a series of resounding failures and turned out to be close to bankruptcy, has made several risky decisions here. In particular, she made a canonical game play mode, where the options in the dialogues are selected automatically in accordance with the intention of the authors. Rude or silent? Seduce Nobunaga's relative or invite her to stay in the friend zone? All these options are selected for the player, even if he personally would prefer a different action.

Another bold idea was the immersion mode. It is designed to enhance the immersive experience of Assassin's Creed Shadows and allows you to listen to characters speak in their native languages — Japanese and Portuguese — in those rare cases when native speakers appear in the plot. You can switch to universal English at any time. There is no Russian voice acting, but there are subtitles, which, judging by the quality, were worked on by real people, and not a neural network translator.

There were plenty of historical assumptions in Shadows: Ubisoft put cherry blossoms and rice harvesting into the game — two actions that take place in different seasons. Yasuke was given the opportunity to have a romantic relationship with Nobunaga's younger sister, Lady Oichi, or a samurai invented specifically for the game who refuses to consider himself a man or a woman. They took liberties with the image of the famous missionary Alessandro Valignano, whom director Martin Scorsese immortalized as a key figure of missionary work in Japan in the film "Silence".

In-game process: which projects about neural networks will attract gamers

The collection includes an army of intelligent machines, mechanical beasts and witty AI characters.

But the most paradoxical thing is that all these blunders, as in the case of the February hit Kingdom Come Deliverance II, are not able to destroy the magic of addictive gameplay. They really have little effect on immersion. The game has a stunningly beautiful and detailed world — it reveals itself through amazing fauna: one of the side goals here is to search for rare species of animals, such as a gray heron or a pair of mandarin ducks. The characters sketch these animals in the style of sumi-e, a special drawing technique that involves concentrated contemplation.

Shadows captures the beauty of the moment and the value of the moment in an amazing way. A gamer who puts aside prejudice and comes to this virtual Japan like a real samurai — for whom, as you know, there is only one way - is quite capable of enjoying pleasant little things. There are many of them here — from dynamic weather changes and realistic, gradual melting of snow on the ground and trees to a complex lighting system woven into the drama of the game: you can deceive the guards by extinguishing the lanterns and torches.

The new "Shadows" are not perfect, although the world press does not skimp on high scores. The strength of the game is that Ubisoft has carefully worked out those aspects that make you return to the rather hackneyed setting of feudal Japan with its bloody feuds over and over again: life simulation, a comprehensive combat system and advanced stealth, which almost for the first time in the series allows you to crawl and hide in this way even in puddles. This is the case when the final result — the long—suffering release version - is much more valuable than the components individually, including the lack of realism in historical facts.

Relax, it's just a good game from a company that many wished would fail. Maybe Ubisoft will finally get rid of the specter of bankruptcy that has been hanging over the French gaming giant for a long time.