Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ story has come to an end with the release of Black Tides, the game’s final narrative expansion and a tie-in to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. Black Tides is surprisingly very good. It’s not perfect (it’s got some extremely annoying boss fights) but its story missions and animations and pacing and structure are all leaps and bounds ahead of the base game for Shadows. It left me wishing that Black Tides, as well as the other bite-sized post-launch expansions that led up to this three-hour finale, had been the true plotline of the base game all along.
Since I’ve reviewed Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I’ve increasingly soured on the structure of the base game’s story, as well as how the story concludes. While I still think the opening act of Shadows is strong–it’s more affecting and fun to play through than the first 10 hours of Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage at least–and contains several especially excellent performances from Masumi Tsunoda (the English voice of protagonist Naoe), I can no longer easily forgive the faults of Acts 2 and 3.
Act 2 is simply way too long and aimless, with dozens upon dozens of targets hidden in repetitive hunts that lack the necessary cohesion and structure to give protagonists Naoe and Yasuke compelling character arcs. This entire 35-hour chunk of the 50-hour story is just too disjointed and purposeless. And then Act 3 pulls too far away from Naoe, the better hero to play as, to focus on Yasuke, and while this three-ish-hour conclusion finally begins to bring Shadows’ story into the Assassin’s Creed mythos and Assassin-Templar conflict, it ends frustratingly abruptly.
That ending was then followed by several story-driven expansions, releasing every few months in the year following Shadows’ launch. And almost every single one of them increased my appreciation for Shadows, building on one another to give the action-RPG the ending it always deserved. The specific additional stories that best built Shadows up are A Critical Encounter, a crossover with Critical Role’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows One-Shot that refocuses the game on killing Templars; A Puzzlement, a short but exceptionally tricky treasure hunt that adds the Isu into Shadows and amazingly reminds everyone that Odyssey’s Kassandra is trolling everyone in the background of every game; Claws of Awaji, which addresses the lingering threads of Shadows’ cliffhanger ending; and then finally, Black Tides.
In my review of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Claws of Awaji expansion, I talked about how the DLC addresses my biggest qualms with the base game’s structure during Act 2. Namely, that the DLC makes the target hunt more meaningful by providing concrete results for your efforts, shortening the overall hunt, and building up each of the targets of the hunt to be more memorable. In a similar way, Black Tides addresses my issues with Act 3, as it gives emotional stakes to Naoe and Yasuke’s partnership, and ensures the two’s journey ultimately concludes with both joining the greater mythos of the series.
In Black Tides, Naoe and Yasuke encounter Black Cross agents (elite Templar operatives who largely have only existed in Assassin’s Creed books and comics up to this point) named Eamon Hathaway and Nirmala. Both Black Cross immediately make it clear that they’re not in Japan to follow up on the efforts of the Templar members that Yasuke has already killed in Japan–Eamon even comments that the machinations that Yasuke and Naoe foiled during the main game mean extremely little to him. Even though the Templar Order wants Naoe and Yasuke dead, Eamon says he’s willing to leave them be if they agree to let him and Nirmala be.
Our heroes do not just let things be, of course. Naoe and Yasuke investigate the two and, in an incredible twist, the two learn that the Black Cross are in Japan searching for the Observatory, the exact same McGuffin that Edward Kenway, the Assassins, and the Templars are still looking for over 100 years later during the events of Black Flag.
Given that the Observatory is in Jamaica and not Japan, Black Tides’ race between the Templars and Team Naoe/Yasuke ends with both sides failing to find the site. However, the search does lead to a strong possible explanation as to how the Assassins possessed one of the cube-shaped blood vials ahead of the Templars. And, most fascinatingly, Black Tides hints at a potential reasoning for how Achilles Davenport was able to identify the Isu artifact at the end of Rogue’s story on sight and realize he had too quickly misjudged Shay Cormac. In both cases, it seems as if Naoe and Yasuke took what they learned over the course of Black Tides’ story and informed the leadership of the Assassin Brotherhood.
Black Tides also seems to imply that the reason Yasuke is such a towering individual with a knack for warfare and an almost absurd level of plot armor when it comes to surviving what should be fatal wounds is because he has an abnormal amount of Isu DNA, making him like Odyssey’s Kassandra. He’s basically Assassin’s Creed’s version of a demigod, which retroactively sort of narratively explains why Yasuke has some of the superpower-like abilities of the action-RPG Assassin’s Creed games, while Naoe’s abilities are more human. It’s an intriguing final reveal that feels on par with Minerva speaking to Desmond through Ezio at the end of Assassin’s Creed II, or Abstergo Entertainment IT head John Standish revealing himself to be a Sage. Black Tides has me wanting to go back and replay Shadows to see how the development team might have been hinting toward Yasuke’s true nature all along.
In short, Black Tides establishes that the main plotline of Shadows is a silly goosechase in the overall politics of the rest of the world (which feels extremely validating based on how I felt the game mishandled that plotline), delivers several fun nods to other Assassin’s Creed games and stories (including Shao Jun–the best part of Embers and Chronicles: China), reminds the audience that Kassandra is a delightful troll who should be included in every Assassin’s Creed game in some way from here on out, and sets up the plotline for the next entry in the series: Black Flag Resynced. It ends in a way that–while still a bit of a cliffhanger–feels far more conclusive and rewarding than the base game of Shadows, and makes me excited to see what happens next (even if I already know what that story is because I played the original Black Flag 13 years ago). For the first time, Shadows feels like a true Assassin’s Creed.
Black Tides also just looks better than the base game Shadows. The cutscenes seem sharper, with the characters’ faces being more expressive and the voice acting being more memorable and less wooden–I was totally caught off guard by just how goshdarn charming and witty Eamon was, which felt like a nod back to when Assassin’s Creed had incredible villains. And the cutscenes had, remarkably, animations. Characters moved and acted like people, not awkward puppets, and duels between characters featured people running and sliding and jumping and twirling … this seems silly, but trust me, lifelike movement has been missing from Assassin’s Creed since the switch to the Ubisoft Anvil engine back in 2020. In fact, that is one of my biggest worries about Black Flag Resynced–some of the brand-new cinematics look very bad in comparison to the original cutscenes.
Best of all, Black Tides doesn’t continue Shadows’ habit of undermining its best idea: its two protagonists. The story has missions exclusive to Naoe and some that are exclusive to Yasuke. We get to have moments purposely structured for one hero or the other. And guess what? It’s perfect. Because the story makes sure Naoe is in one spot and Yasuke in another instead of leaving it up to player choice, their relationship can actually develop based on the events of the story, and every mission can be structured with intent around their respective combat and traversal abilities. It took us until the end of the game’s development to get here but we did, and it reinforces that Shadows should have always been like this.
And that’s my main takeaway for Black Tides: Why are we getting this story at the end of a year’s worth of content drops? Why were all of Shadows’ best ideas reserved for paid expansions and free updates?
Shadows is what it is; there’s no changing it now. But I can’t help but wish that the game’s fantastic first act had led into a far more concise and narrative-driven Act 2 that emulated the structure of Claws of Awaji, and then concluded with the Black Cross coming in for a Templar-centric Act 3 that set up Black Flag Resynced. And for this hypothetical reimagining of Shadows, we could have gotten memorable villains that you wanted to interact with, not simply check off of a massive kill list, and the cutscenes could have injected more life into each character than the uncanny, puppet-like movements that we got.
Still, thanks to Black Tides, I’m now more looking forward to Black Flag Resynced than I was a few months ago. I’m more confident that Ubisoft can achieve some level of life and dramatic performance with cutscenes in the Ubisoft Anvil engine, and I’m now curious as to whether Black Flag Resynced will feature new storylines that tie it more heavily to Naoe and Yasuke’s tale. But as excited as I am, I’m also a little sad. This last update for Shadows hinted at a stronger vision for the game than the one we got and, for the first time in my 100+ hours with Shadows, I understood (even if only briefly) what Ubisoft Quebec was going for with the dual-protagonist set-up. Shadows has always been a good action-RPG, but apparently this entire time, it could have been a great Assassin’s Creed.
