Assassin' Creed Shadows' open-world Japan is beautiful, but Ubisoft really makes you work before you can enjoy it

Assassin's Creed Shadows' version of Japan is extremely pretty. From the minutiae of its temples and terraced paddy fields to the sweeping vistas of its forests, seas, and mountains, it's a contender for one of the prettiest open-world games in years. The trouble is, you'll have to do some legwork before you get to enjoy it properly.

This article contains minor spoilers for Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Assassin's Creed Shadows opens to a lengthy cutscene as Yasuke – under his Portuguese name Diogo – first encounters the powerful Oda Nobunaga. Skipping forward, Diogo has become Yasuke, Nobunaga's 'one-man army' in his quest for a unified Japan, and the ensuing combat tutorial keeps the action locked to a single village. Stray too far and the glitchy 'invisible' walls that warn of impending desynchronization keep you locked to Shadows' narrative.

Around this time we get the last glimpse we'll get of Yasuke for some time, as the action moves to Naoe. Introduced through more cutscenes, she's the vehicle for a few more tutorials, before she's laid low. Meditative minigames, lengthy flashback sequences, and an honest-to-goodness training montage return her to her former strength – at which point she's shepherded towards a family friend to explain Shadows' Hideout system.

After that there's a little more freedom, but my bet is that you'll be heading to the town of Sakai, where you'll contend with a few generic fetch and follow quests before you get to your first important assassination. After that, I started to get the most out of the open world, but by this point my playtime was stretching beyond two hours, and I was itching to explore.

Closed world

Assassin's Creed Shadows has a lot of work to do in its opening hours. It's got two characters to introduce, and with both their motivations and their playstyles differing drastically from one another, that's a time-consuming process. It's got series-first mechanics to explain thanks to the Hideout, and an interesting twist on leveling due to your need to accrue Knowledge from the world – which in turn means showing off a bunch of other minigames.

At least a full in-game hour went by before I had my first opportunity to step outside the bounds of the game and experience any of the world's open-ness. Another went past before I felt I could actually step off Shadows' early-game narrative conveyor belt and choose my own direction. I was closing in on three hours before things truly opened up and I felt I had some genuine freedom to explore.

I was itching to explore properly. The world is beautiful, detailed, and impressively varied even before you account for its rotating seasons. Even better, Shadows really encourages you to engage with its map. It's rare that it'll tell you exactly where your new objective is – instead, it'll have you gather up clues, hinting that a target can be found in a certain region, or west of a certain town. Real-world geography applies too – rivers and mountains are genuine obstacles, not just hurdles for you to jump up, Bethesda-style. There's a reality to Japan that few games like this manage to capture, so it's frustrating to be kept from it for so long.

Eventually, the freedom that I so craved was given to me. One of my highlights of the time I've spent in Shadows so far has been rowing down a river towards a distant castle as dusk and a thunderstorm rolled in in front of me, before using the subsequent rainfall to disguise my ensuing killing spree. But Ubisoft's reluctance to let me enjoy its world through those first few hours, coupled with the often sedentary pace that it allowed its story to run during that time, feels like the kind of thing that risks turning off players expecting a pacy open-world romp.

It's hard not to think of other iconic open-world games. Skyrim's intro is infamous, but as soon as you're out of Helgen, you're free to wander in whatever direction you like. The Witcher 3 doesn't give you its entire world straight away, but it's not long before you're given free reign to explore the miniature map of White Orchard. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes a similar approach with the Great Plateau. Those games' willingness to let go of their players' hands so early is a big part of their enduring popularity. Whether Shadows' world holds up against those genre-leading RPGs is a question that I'm not ready to answer yet, but after six hours in-game, I wish I'd had a chance to learn a little more about it myself.

Check out our Assassin's Creed Shadows review.