Ghost of Yōtei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows Have Refreshingly Different Heroines
Upon booting up Ghost of Yōtei, I started feeling just a touch of déjà vu. The game, set in feudal Japan, stars a woman on a revenge mission. Her family has been murdered, her home destroyed. There’s a flashback tutorial mission in which a younger version of the heroine learns, from her father, how to fight. And, of course, you ride on horseback to explore a picturesque open world with side quests alongside main story missions. Another game from earlier this year did all of that stuff, too: Assassin’s Creed Shadows. But after spending more time playing Ghost of Yōtei, I soon saw how different the two games actually are, even though I expect that many other people might make the same uncharitable assumption I did, perhaps even before buying either one of the two games.
Although it was easy enough for me to write those four sentences up top describing the similarities between Ghost of Yōtei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the resemblance actually does stop there. What’s more, Shadows isn’t even really about a woman on a revenge mission; it’s a dual protagonist game, with Naoe as the classic stealth assassin character, and another character named Yasuke, a samurai warrior whose combat style is mixing it up melee-style. Although Naoe’s storyline begins with her acting like she can do it all without anybody else’s help, Shadows ends up being a game about not doing everything alone. Naoe builds a community, as well as a place for that new community to live, through base-building mechanics that aren’t present in Ghost of Yōtei (nor should they be). Even in its combat design, Shadows revolves around two people with very different backgrounds and skillsets, coming together in a shared struggle.
Ghost of Yōtei, meanwhile, is about Atsu’s solitary journey to tick off names on her Arya Stark-esque kill list. She starts out with an exact revenge plan in mind, and the main plot of the game is simply carrying it out. She begrudgingly accepts help from various allies along the way, and they all get featured on a big splash screen in the menu, but there’s nothing here like the base-building and team focus of Shadows. Atsu’s single-minded, cold-as-ice quest is such that she has no space in her heart for anything else; she certainly doesn’t bother with romance. By contrast, Yasuke and Naoe both have multiple options there.
Most interesting is how different it feels to inhabit Naoe and Atsu. They have different personalities, different combat methodologies, and different body types. Naoe is a petite gymnast, which makes sense, because her fighting style involves hiding and springing out onto her foes from cover, as well as climbing rooftops and just generally flipping around like a freaking acrobat. Often in Assassin’s Creed games, I would feel amused by the heavily muscled protagonists kneeling in tall grasses, somehow still hidden from their opponents even though they could very obviously be seen. Not so in Assassin’s Creed Shadows! Naoe is like a tiny needle in a haystack, truly veiled by the patches of grass that have been conveniently cultivated in every fortress she invades. This is also why it’s so much scarier when Naoe gets spotted and has to fight off dozens of attackers, however; she’s clearly not cut out for that, and on the game’s standard difficulty settings, she’s better off running away than trying to stay and fight. Yasuke, of course, is designed for walking right into a fortress and wrecking shop.
Left to Right: Naoe from Assassin’s Creed Shadows; Atsu from Ghost of Yōtei
Atsu is yet more different from both Naoe and Yasuke in terms of how she feels to play, and how her combat style feels. She’s not an Amazon by any means, and she’s a long way off from the muscle-bound powerhouse that is Yasuke. Still, she is taller than Naoe, at least in terms of her relative height compared to her opponents (who are often men, suggesting Atsu is the same height as an average man in this world). She can easily fend off dozens of attackers coming at her simultaneously—even early on in the game, when the player has unlocked very few special abilities. She doesn’t have the same small hourglass body type as Naoe, either, and instead has a more square build, which makes sense given the muscle she’d have to pack on in order to face multiple opponents in close-range sword combat.
Unlike Shadows, in which Naoe is clearly encouraged by design to stay hidden by tall grasses and make use of the extensive stealth options available to the player, Ghost of Yōtei presents relatively little opportunity for stealth. You could play the game as a stealthy character, but it’s definitely not the way the game’s design encourages you to play, aside from a few specific story moments when it benefits Atsu to remain unseen. Early on in Ghost of Yōtei, when the player is still getting shown suggested button prompts, they might see the option to “assassinate” nearby targets, allowing Atsu to perform an Assassin’s Creed-style one-hit kill. But far more often, the early game offers up a very different button prompt called “Standoff.” This button causes Atsu to leap out with her sword drawn, the camera zooming out dramatically to show her standing tall in the face of oncoming enemies. Even as other combatants surround Atsu in these moments, the swordplay design—focused on parries and dodges, as well as switching between weapon types—allows Atsu to take on multiple targets at once and still win.
I always feel powerful and scary as Atsu, and that’s part of the game’s story and tone, too. The other characters in Ghost of Yōtei have come to refer to Atsu as an onryō—a vengeful ghost. Atsu is not literally a ghost in Ghost of Yōtei, but the onryō legend has nonetheless begun to form around her as she takes down various targets in her quest. Sometimes she seems game to embrace the moniker, like when it makes her enemies tremble at the sight of her. Other times, she seems troubled by the weight and intensity of the legend forming around her, and the extent to which she can no longer lead a normal life. And we learn, through various flashbacks to Atsu’s childhood, that she once did have a pleasantly mundane life.
Ghost of Yōtei’s developers created an entire model of Atsu as a child, whereas in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Naoe’s youngest age depicted is 17 (using the same character model). Atsu is 12 years old in her flashback scenes, and that’s also how old she is when she watches her family get murdered and her home burned to the ground. The huge difference in Naoe and Atsu’s ages during their traumatic flashbacks explains some of why the heroines are so different in terms of how they’ve dealt with those traumas. Atsu was robbed of many more childhood years, and it shows in how much colder and distant she is, as well as how fixated she is on her mission. Naoe is more capable of moving past what happened to her and having other experiences in life, even forming new bonds as an adult and seeing a future life for herself—again, she even gets some romance arcs. Naoe also has multiple moments in Shadows during which she chooses forgiveness rather than holding onto anger. That said, the circumstances of Naoe’s trauma—and the motivations of her enemies—are not the same as Atsu’s. It makes sense that Shadows, a story about coming together, gives Naoe a story arc about forgiveness. As for forgiveness in Ghost of Yōtei… not so much, for Atsu.
Atsu’s single-minded quest for revenge makes Ghost of Yōtei a pretty simple game—maybe too simple. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, on the other hand, could have done with some more simplifying; its dual protagonist setup makes the game feel disjointed at times, and despite Naoe’s acrobatic skill, Shadows doesn’t stick its landing. But even the games’ flaws demonstrate how different they actually are. Shadows tries to do so much; Ghost of Yōtei keeps its scope simple. The result? Two games with very different stories, and two heroines I’m grateful I got to play as this year.
Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.
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