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.
