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This is the game for which I will pour my soul and dedication into writing an honest review. Let’s start with the fact that I’ve been waiting for an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan for over a decade. It’s the setting everyone was eager to experience—playing as a ninja/shinobi with the hidden blade, engaging in katana combat, and exploring the dynamically changing world of feudal Japan. They’ve successfully achieved this, but did they truly deliver what players wanted? That’s what I will explain from my perspective, after spending 180+ hours playing and completing everything in the game.

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I have to say it outright: it’s bad. I did not enjoy the story at all. You might ask yourself, "Why didn’t this goober enjoy the story? It was perfect! It had drama, betrayals, and so much more…" No, it didn’t.

A good story in a video game usually starts with one fundamental aspect—voice acting. At the beginning, I set the game’s audio to English, only to find myself nearly falling asleep to the dull, lifeless conversations. The voices lacked energy and emotion, making everything feel unnatural. Naoe comes across as just another talking NPC, and Yasuke is reduced to a big, screaming warrior—that’s it. I ended up skipping almost every cutscene because I felt bored and didn’t want to waste time listening to their bland dialogue.

Compared to Valhalla and its predecessors, the main quests feel soulless, as if the developers rushed to push the game onto the market rather than spending four years crafting a compelling narrative. The Shinbakufu arc was boring, and the activities surrounding it felt repetitive, serving as little more than pointless grinding. The lackluster storytelling stripped away a significant portion of my interest in the game.

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The game's main protagonists yet again, have the same backstory of how I lost one of my parent and because of that, we have something in common and we should fight together to make the world a better place aaahh story. It's like Batman and Superman's mother is named Martha and alright we are allies and we MUST fight for this cause aaah story.

Alright, so who is Naoe and why she is not boring as a character? She is a girl, from a modest family that lives in Iga (region), who has been through some challenging times, a core element of how she regained control of herself and her goal in life to bring peace to the world of feudal japan. Yasuke, on the other hand, is a slave turned Samurai, under Oda Nobunaga's rule, being the fiercest weapon of mass-destruction with a Naginata and a teppo. Other characters in the game exist merely as fillers—NPCs with zero significance to my experience, aside from Nobunaga himself, who piqued my curiosity about Japan’s real-life feudal history.

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Here comes the best part of my review—I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay, both in combat and stealth, with a particular appreciation for the stealth mechanics.

Starting with combat, I liked that Naoe deals less damage, requiring a stealthy approach, while Yasuke allows players to charge in full force and obliterate enemies. Combat feels smooth and satisfying. Yasuke’s aggressive, yet controlled combat style is enjoyable, especially the way he adopts a samurai stance before unleashing powerful strikes.

The finishers are decent, maintaining the violent flair seen in Valhalla. However, I’d love to see a future assassin character who struggles with rage, delivering truly brutal finishers that reflect their psychological turmoil. I’m not asking for a Kratos-style berserker, but a character whose violent tendencies make them compelling—a fighter with deep-seated issues that truly justify their vicious executions. That would really invest me in their story.

The stealth mechanics are amazing. The visibility UI shows how noticeable you are based on the lighting in your environment, requiring careful movement. The dynamic season system adds another layer of strategy—frozen ponds within castle grounds, icicles falling when you climb walls, creating noise that can alert enemies. I appreciate these small, immersive details.

Unlike Valhalla’s massive skill tree, this game offers distinct skill trees for each weapon, as well as separate skill sets for stealth (Naoe) and combat (Yasuke). After reaching the level cap, you unlock mastery skills that further refine your stats. Once I had fully optimized Naoe’s abilities, I hardly felt the need to play as Yasuke anymore.

The "AAA experience" moments included showing respect at temples, quick-time events, and drawing animals to hang up as decorations in my base.

One glaring issue is the lack of a bulk sell/deconstruct option at the blacksmith—something that should have been included at launch. When they added it, it crashed the game, so they removed it, promising a fix. A month later, it's still missing.

Overall, the gameplay was solid, but it didn’t give me the thrill I expected.

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The franchise is known for their big open worlds, being detailed at every hill, road, city, and so on. Here, I was a bit disappointed. The world for me, felt not that big, compared with Valhalla and Odyssey, and I expected it to be much more than that. The world is empty... We have very dense forests now, less accessible areas, a couple cities thrown here and there, small villages that act as a world filler and a couple of bases/castles as just activities.

I explored the world in less than 100 hours with every activity done, while in Valhalla I had to do everything for the base game in like 150 or more. The uniqueness of the game is the dynamic change of seasons. The world is indeed beautiful in all 4 seasons. But my issue is, that I cannot change the season when I want to. For example, you have to do activities to make the season circle to fill faster, for you to change it, instead of allowing me to change whenever I want.

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The visual part of the game is beautiful. I played with DLSS and FSR, High with RT and got around 80-90 fps. There were some areas where I had fps drops, also there was a problem with opening the character menu, and then when I had to get back in the game, I had crazy fps drops because I guess it wasn't optimized. Now everything is fine, they have addressed this issue in the last patches. Overall, the game was very balanced and optimized from the beginning, of course with small issues that were fixed fast within the first week.

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I have made a bad choice, by being stupid enough to pre-order this game at full price including deluxe edition and to think that Ubisoft will do a good job with this one. I have learned from my mistake now, and I will never, ever pre-order a game from them.

Maybe after a year or two, after good reviews and a good turbo sale, I will consider it. I don't think that the upcoming DLCs will be a redeeming factor for the game, personally I have lost my interest towards the game after killing the fourth member of the shinbakufu.

Maybe I will return in a year or two, after patches, and when every expansion will be on the table, right now, I just completed the game for the sake of completing it, without the satisfaction that I had hoped to have.