Don't expect to unlock Yasuke for a while in Assassin's Creed Shadows

assassin's creed shadows yasuke riding a horse

(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.

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.

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Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

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