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Shortly after you begin Assassin's Creed Shadows Claws of Awaji, you'll find Naoe directed towards a master warrior. This sage has something Naoe needs, but he'll only give it to her if she can best him in combat with his weapon of choice – the Bo, a six-foot wooden staff that immediately became my most-treasured possession.
Compared to the various keen blades in the rest of Naoe's arsenal, the Bo initially seems pretty tame. Little more than a big stick, you might expect it to pale in comparison to the Katana and Tanto that let you pry enemy armor apart like clamshells. But what little the Bo loses in terms of raw damage, it more than makes up for in utility. Chosen as a new addition to Naoe's kit specifically because of its crowd-control offerings, it means that you can now stand and fight large groups of enemies without resorting to backup from Yasuke.
The Bo can be used as a simple bonking stick, but its strength lies in the three stances attached to its posture attacks. Hold down the trigger for a powerful, timed strike, and the Bo lets you shift between high, neutral, and low hits; attack high and you can stagger opponents out of even their most deadly moves; attack low and you can sweep them off their feet before driving the butt of the Bo into their spine for a deadly follow up; aim for the midsection and you can knock enemies flying, making use of any long drops in the vicinity to thin out their numbers very quickly.
Wrapped up in a Bo
The extent of the Bo's crowd control, coupled with its range, means that Naoe is able to buy time and space for herself that she didn't really have before. The result is that she can suddenly stand up to far more enemies than she could before – something that's particularly helpful in the heavily-guarded, spy-laden towns on Awaji island. In the base game, I'd have fled from half those fights the moment I found myself facing more than two foes, but in the expansion I can take on groups several times that size and comfortably live to tell the tale.
It's immediately reminiscent of Yasuke's brute force. I definitely preferred Naoe's stealthier approach around Osaka, but you couldn't deny that Nobunaga's giant had the strength and the toolkit that would give him the edge in bigger fights. But with the Bo, I can have the best of both worlds – none of the rest of Naoe's kit is affected by her new weapon, and you can still use your hidden blade to thin out the numbers just as you could before. The difference now is that if things do go wrong – which they often do for me – you don't feel like you're simply running for cover until you can ditch the AI.
While the main focus of the Bo is to be a tactical weapon that's not all about mashing light or heavy attacks, that doesn't mean it's not good at simply bonking enemies into submission. Being a blunt weapon, it doesn't lose animation frames on the sensation of dislodging itself from enemy armor. Instead, it bounces off bones and bonces, ready for a quicker follow-up attack than Naoe's other weapons offer. The result is a real flurrying sensation, quick strikes followed up with devastating frequency, meaning that while each hit might do a little less damage than it would with a sword, your DPS won't really suffer. Coupled with a special that grants Naoe even more speed and even longer range, and you're quickly dancing through entire fights, leaving several extremely concussed soldiers in your wake.
The Bo is one of Claws of Awaji's biggest improvements, but perhaps its best feature is that it's not exclusive to the DLC. The weapon will be available to all players, and while you won't get the short tutorial quest unless you set foot on Awaji itself, learning to master the Bo by yourself is certainly worth it if you're still working your way through mainland Japan. For my money, the best bit of Shadows is picking quietly through a castle as Naoe, but I felt discouraged from fighting if things didn't go my way. Now, I don't have to sacrifice stealth if I want to feel like I'm getting a fair fight, and that means that now I've picked the Bo up, I might never put it down again.
