How Ubisoft Quebec brought feudal Japan to life in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Of the many studios within the Ubisoft family, its Quebec City team is responsible for some of the publisher’s best and most unique work.

In 2015, Ubisoft Quebec released Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, a rollicking Victorian London adventure that introduced dual protagonists and served as the series’ last action-adventure game before a pivot to heavier role-playing elements with 2017’s Origins. Three years later, the studio’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey provided a grand Witcher 3-esque action-RPG experience set in a wonderfully realized ancient Greece. And in 2020, the Quebec City developer delivered a new IP — something increasingly rare in the gaming space — in Immortals: Fenyx Rising, a criminally underrated (and surprisingly funny) riff on Greek mythology and Breath of the Wild.

I found myself reflecting on all of this in Kyoto, Japan, of all places, where Ubisoft hosted a February 6th media and fan event for the Quebec team’s latest work, Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Set in feudal 16th-century Japan towards the end of the Sengoku period, the action-RPG marks the popular Assassin’s Creed series’ long-awaited foray into the East Asian country.

In many ways, Shadows is the “culmination” of both recurring fan requests and Ubisoft Quebec’s varied portfolio over the years, according to Marc-Alexis Côté, vice president and executive producer of Assassin’s Creed.

“Every new game, I like to think of as adding all the knowledge that we’ve built over the years to try to build the best game that we’ve ever built. And I think there are combinations of things that come from our previous games that are infused into this one,” Côté tells MobileSyrup.

Like Syndicate before it, Shadows features dual protagonists: the historical African samurai Yasuke and the fictional female shinobi Naoe. “This is something that we always found very interesting to try to put into a game, because when you have two characters, they can really bounce off each other. But we wanted to push this further by having more different gameplay [mechanics] and really making those characters feel different,” he says. Yasuke has been designed to prioritize aggressive, combat-heavy approaches, while Naoe’s expertise lies in stealth and parkour.

“And this is something that was very much a technological challenge to be able to accomplish, but we felt it was really important to make those characters feel very distinct,” says Côté.

“And one of the things I love about the game is when you see them together in a cinematic or something like that, and you see them be different, and when you play with Naoe, you can feel this agility that’s built into her so, but this is something we knew we needed to start right from the beginning, knowing our experience on Syndicate.”

Yasuke and Naoe. (Image credit: Ubisoft)

Having played about four hours of Shadows a few weeks prior to our interview, I certainly understand what he means by agility. Indeed, Naoe’s fluid ninja-like parkour and zippy melee attacks were among my favourite parts of the experience. (I’m less sold, so far, on Yasuke’s more traditional repertoire, but hopefully, that improves over the course of the full game.) As it turns out, Naoe’s speedy gameplay has its roots in another Ubisoft Quebec game.

“Immortals: Fenyx Rising is a game we had a lot of fun building because it was all about gameplay and making sure that the game was the most reactive possible. You press a button, something happens, and we wanted Fenyx to be very agile. And all of this knowledge of how we tune the gameplay, we infused into Naoe, in a way. And I know it might sound weird, because we think Fenyx and Naoe are very, very different, but it’s this knowledge that we acquired over the years that we can inject into our games,” says Côté.

Of course, another pillar of the Shadows experience, the open-world Japan setting itself, required looking beyond Ubisoft Quebec for inspiration. During the stage presentation portion of the Kyoto event, Côté stressed the importance of working closely with Japanese creators, including Ubisoft’s own Tokyo and Osaka studios (the latter of which was sadly just closed amid the shutdown of multiplayer shooter XDefiant), to make Shadows as authentic as possible. In situations where audiences have spotted some architectural inaccuracies, Ubisoft has been quick to respond and promises to make the necessary adjustments. (To valid criticism, mind you; much of the “controversy” surrounding this game has been racism directed towards Yasuke under the guise of “historical accuracy” that even scholars have refuted.)

Yasuke surveying the landscapes. (Image credit: Ubisoft)

In fact, the idea of “learning” is something that Côté brought up repeatedly during the presentation and came back to during our chat.

“I would say that the thing that I’ve learned the most is that there’s always something to learn and something more to learn. I think it has been a very rewarding journey that we needed to approach with a lot of humility. You can think that, ‘Okay, this is Assassin’s Creed — we’ve been building those games for the last 18 years.’ But to me, Japan was a unique challenge because it is our first game that is truly not in the Western culture that we are more familiar with. So it required us to approach this with humility and learn,” he explains.

“We’ve learned so many things about this beautiful country that we have tried to capture in the game, but there’s always, always, always something new to learn. Every time we show the game either to our Japanese colleagues or our Japanese fans, I think it’s very important for us to have an approach where we can learn, we can listen, so that we can keep tweaking and improving little things in the game.”

Image credit: Ubisoft

With Shadows, Côté says the team quickly learned that many environmental details of Japan’s landscapes might seem granular at first but are nonetheless important for an authentic depiction.

“What I find interesting is that a lot of the nature can have the impression that it looks similar to what we have [in Canada], but there are so many little details that you need to be careful of. And again, be very aware of those little changes. One funny anecdote for me — when we started building the game and we were showing it to our Japanese colleagues, they were saying, ‘The lighting was off.’ And you could think of this as a small detail,” he says.

“But we actually came here with our art directors so that they could see. What they were telling us is that if you look at how the light falls on the mountain, it’s off in the game. So this is something we paid a lot of attention to. We came here with them to be able to understand and find out exactly what they meant. And it’s funny sometimes, just trying to capture this feeling. And so even though we share many, many things, there is an attention and a love of detail in this country that I’m very appreciative of, and I think it’s helped us push the game constantly forward.”

A panel with actors Makoto Tamura (Naoe’s father, Nagato-no-Kami Fujibayashi), Miyuri Shimabukuro (Naoe) and Mutsuki Iwanaka (Ujiie Kumabe).

During the stage presentation, Ubisoft also shined a spotlight on some of the Japanese talent involved with the game, including actors Miyuri Shimabukuro (Naoe), Makoto Tamura (Naoe’s father, Nagato-no-Kami Fujibayashi) and Mutsuki Iwanaka (Ujiie Kumabe). As Iwanaka noted during a panel, it was initially “strange” to work on a jidaigeki (period drama) about Japan that was first written in English, but it ultimately proved to be a “unique experience that left an impression” on him.

Iwanaka, a noted fan of Assassin’s Creed who got the PlayStation Trophies in every game in the series, also played a live demo of Shadows while Shimabukuro and Tamura complimented the craft of the game. At the event, popular Japanese-American actor Mackenyu (Netflix’s One Piece) was also revealed to be playing Shinobi League member Gennojo, a role he actually recorded lines for in Toronto.

And before all of that, Ubisoft hosted a live sumi-e painting and kabuki performance with gorgeous costumes and balletic choreography titled Orochi (The Great Serpents), as well as a kagami biraki (ceremonial sake barrel opening) with Côté, Shadows creative director Jonathan Dumont and Ubisoft Japan & Korea general manager Ozan Kocoglu.

The live sumi-e painting and kabuki performance.

All of it went a long way towards immersing us in this setting, and that’s before members of the Japanese public were able to go hands-on with the game itself — the first time anyone in the world was able to do that.

So far, Côté says he’s been grateful for the response from Japanese fans towards Shadows. “I’ve seen people being very open to us building this game, and appreciative of the fact that we want to have their feedback,” he says. “And I think one of the things that has stunned people with all the technological improvements that we have done to our game is how much we’ve tried to capture the beauty of this land.”

Bringing to life feudal Japan, specifically, has also presented its fair share of opportunities from both a narrative and gameplay perspective. After all, it was a time rife with civil wars and social upheavals, allowing it to fit in nicely with the series’ central millennia-spanning Assassin-Templar conflict. And by drawing from its work on games that reflect the past (Syndicate) and present (Odyssey), Ubisoft Quebec intends for Shadows to be inviting to fans of both types of Assassin’s Creed experiences.

“One of the reasons we chose this setting was to be this kind of fusion or blend between the past and the present of the franchise. So we brought in a lot of new fans with the RPG trilogy, in a way, with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla. But at the same time, we know we have core fans that have been with us for a long time that have been requesting this ‘return to basics’ kind of gameplay. And I think with Naoe and Yasuke, we can offer both of them in a single package,” says Côté.

Image credit: Ubisoft

“And this is the first time that we truly have advanced physical stealth in AC — using all the innovations that we can bring into an open-world game, with the new consoles, and being exclusively [current-gen]… I think it’s not easy to accomplish the level of variety that you can have in the game with the different seasons, night and day, and package all that into the stealth experience. So we did not just want to add stealth, we wanted to add stealth that felt like it had its place in Japan, especially with the technological advancements that we’ve put into the game.”

He also says Japan allows them to explore different facets of recurring Assassin’s Creed themes.

“Many Assassin’s Creed stories revolve around family. I think we’ve explored a lot of the Western approach to family, and now you get to have a different take. And for me, to see the deep respect and try to capture this deep respect between parent and children — Naoe’s quest that she embarks on, she never questions what her father has asked of her… This is something, again, very different than what we’ve captured in the past. So to bring this to life, I think it injects new life in the franchise, to finally be able to explore Japan.”

Côté also notes that it’s a privilege to be in Japan to promote the game.

“It’s very exciting to be here, and to be able to meet with our Japanese fans as well to thank them for the inspiration that Japan has given us to try to craft this game. For me, it’s a full circle of the project. One of the things I was mentioning to Jonathan [Dumont], the creative director, is how it’s a bit surreal to see an idea that started five years ago on a piece of paper and see it on stage today — see people play it, engage with the game,” he says.

“And I would say just being backstage, all of the things that were created around this game — it’s very exciting every time we create an Assassin’s Creed game. For me, this is part of the magic and the reward for being a creator.”

This interview was edited for language and clarity.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows will launch on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Mac and iPad on March 20th, 2025.