Rush through Shadows’ long introduction to reach the good stuff.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a long game. Playing it for review these past few weeks, I clocked nearly 50 hours by primarily sticking to the critical path and stopping to do side stuff here and there. Even knowing roughly how long the story was going to be, I still wasn’t prepared for its slow beginning. It’s an Assassin’s Creed game, so of course it has a leisurely prologue and ramp-up to action, but Shadows’ introduction is so extended that I started to wonder when its second main character would show up.

Just so you don’t go a little bananas like I did, it’s worth knowing that you won’t get to play as Yasuke for a while in Shadows. I didn’t unlock Yasuke until I’d been playing as Naoe for around 10 hours. Without getting into spoilers, I’ll explain:

Like the last handful of AC games, Shadows’ main quest revolves around assassinating a league of mysterious and powerful jerks called the Shinbakufu. This league is set up in the prologue, where you do get to briefly control Yasuke as he’s established as Oda Nobunaga’s most trusted (and deadly) samurai. By and large, though, the first big chunk of Shadows is the Naoe show. By the time Naoe is let loose in the open world, she has a long list of names that need to die, and surprisingly, Yasuke is nowhere to be seen.

The next 8-10 hours is essentially an introduction to Shadows’ main loop: follow leads to unmask Shinbakufu members, track them down, and kill ’em. Naoe is free to pursue two targets in any order, and you’ll have to kill them both before you can progress far enough to get to Yasuke.

I strongly suggest powering through this first chunk of the main quest before getting distracted. I wandered around a lot during this time and couldn’t figure out why there was so little to do other than raid bandit camps. Turns out, Shadows doesn’t truly open up until you can freely swap between Naoe and Yasuke. Once the whole band was together, new faction targets, sidequests, and recruitable allies started flooding into my Objectives tab.

The other reason to beeline to Yasuke’s introduction is that he makes getting good gear much easier early on. That’s especially true when it comes to castles: Naoe is great at sneaking around castle grounds, but opening the big chest in each Tenshu requires killing every elite samurai in the compound—something that Naoe is just flat-out bad at for a long time.

As much as it goes against my nature to rush through a main quest, the sooner you can get to Shadows’ middle chapters, the better.