Assassin's Creed Shadows claims to offer two protagonists, but the choice between Yasuke and Naoe seems pretty rigged

Assassin's Creed Shadows is out, and the choice between whether to play Yasuke or Naoe for the bulk of the experience is one that will clearly divide players. Stealth or combat? Agility or strength? I wasn't certain myself, at least until I picked up the controller and quickly realised that my experience as Yasuke was hardly feeling as indestructible as the character himself.

Sure, I like Yasuke more as a character, but I'm finding playing as him to be a real slog – something to be endured rather than savored. And on closer inspection, it reveals a foundational flaw in the whole "dual protagonists" idea as Ubisoft has approached it.

Rogue vs. Fighter

To see how Yasuke and Naoe stack up against each other, I made a little pros and cons list. Starting with Naoe, she obviously has the speed and agility edge. She's better at parkouring by a significant margin, with a longer jump and reach, and that's before you include the grappling hook – everybody loves a grappling hook. And now I think of it, that hook itself is one of numerous tools and gadgets at her disposal: smoke bombs, kunai, distraction bells, and plenty more that clogs her utility belt.

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Also, she has a lot of cool weapons! The tanto is a blur of elegant steel, but the kusarigama is a complex chain whip that gives you options for battlefield control. She also gets the series' staple "Eagle Vision", which pairs nicely with her ability to perform numerous kinds of assassinations that are specific to her.

And then there's Yasuke, who, um… has more health and can carry a couple extra ham sandwiches. And he has a katana! Well, Naoe has one too, now that I think about it, but Yasuke's is, uh… well, no, it isn't more interesting to use, it's actually a bit stiff and choppy compared to Naoe's more flowing and organic animations. But he does have the naginata, that big glaive with the inaccurate attack patterns, and that giant kabano club, which can do roughly one attack per election cycle. There's also a gun that doesn't do much damage, and a bow that's not very exciting to use.

Exploration fairs no better than combat. Half of Yasuke's parkouring is spent limply hanging from a wall, slowly realizing you don't have the ability to scrabble further up, before dropping back down and sadly walking around the obstacle instead. If he's feeling particularly daring, you might get the chance to push a box slowly. The only thing that stands out is his big kick, which is admittedly superb in how cartoonishly powerful it is – when he spoke about coming from a distant land, I didn't realize he meant Krypton.

What's odd is that Yasuke's not weaker than Naoe – in fact, it's the opposite. He has a lot more health and the fact that he flourishes in the fail state of a stealth game (being seen) means that he's never really at a disadvantage. But to me, powerful doesn't equate to fun, and I kept banging my head against this sticking point: to my eyes, Naoe is a weaker character who is given all sorts of toys and abilities that have to be used cleverly to overcome those superior odds, which is where the game comes alive. But Yasuke is a tank who has had those toys taken away to stop him from being too overpowered. And it sounds like a fair compromise when you're purely thinking about numbers, but passively having a longer health bar just isn't as engaging as any of the powers that Naoe's rocking, nor the challenges that she goes up against.

Making a character flat-out hard to kill is buff that's hard to walk back or correct for, because ultimately everything in an action game comes down to making yourself harder to kill. So having skipped several steps and made Yasuke into a brick shithouse who's effectively playing the game on easy mode, Ubisoft strips him of everything else. For me, Shadows wasn't a game about balancing the strengths and weaknesses of two equally valid methods, just the glum realization that the deuteragonist was a bulletproof demigod and must therefore have everything else taken away from him for balance. So much more power, but so fewer ways to creatively use it.

The immovable object

But the issues go deeper than that. Before even playing Shadows, I remember telling somebody that for the dual protagonists thing to work, it would have to feel like each of them offered a complete experience, rather than just being half a character each and having both feel insubstantial. For what it's worth, I think Naoe does just about reach that state of completeness, but poor Yasuke does not.

See, there's a natural logic and rising tension to Naoe's gameplay model that doesn't apply to Yasuke's. When you play as Naoe, you're demonstrating elegance, stealth, and wit, navigating around foes and eliminating them strategically. When you screw up the stealth, you're then forced into a combat situation you're not optimized for. Tension rises, pulses quicken. This elusive shadow has been forced into the spotlight! It's a natural raising of the stakes, the situation getting scarier and more perilous as you screw up. Stealth is where you flourish, but fucking up forces you out of your comfort zone and you have to earn your way back into obscurity. Fairly standard procedure for sneaking games, no problems there.

But for Yasuke, that tension decreases over time. You can stab a couple of people from stealth if you're so inclined, but you really don't need to, because you're far more lethal just smashing down doors and hacking at people. Naoe's natural rise and fall is replaced by a more flatline experience, and Yasuke's implicitly discouraged to play stealthily by how bad he is at it. For him, the series' traditional fail state is the optimal way to play! As a result you're pretty much locked into one mode of operation, and you never really leave it. It makes everything monotone, and it's not helped by Yasuke's weapons being pretty dull to use.

You and me (but mostly me)

The two protagonist's disparity is even reflected in Shadows' opening hours, in which we get about 15 minutes of screen time with Yasuke before backflipping through the entire first act as Naoe. And yes, she is more fun to play, but I wish there wasn't an obviously inferior choice! On a narrative level Yasuke's certainly the more interesting of the two protagonists (at least in theory), though that makes it all the more agonizing that so much of his arc happens offscreen or is jammed into truncated, unthreatening flashbacks.

Still, I'm not opposed to the two-character concept in Assassin's Creed games – I just think this is the wrong dichotomy to base it around. Next time I'd like to see both characters focused on stealth (where the series is clearly more comfortable), and dividing their methods accordingly. Ranged versus melee, or social stealth and disguises versus actual sneaking. I promise, there is potential in this idea – but the manner in which they've built Yasuke shows there's a way to go before Ubisoft masters it.

Whether you're playing as Yasuke or Naoe, these Assassin's Creed Shadows tips are worth checking out