Assassin’s Creed expansions come in two flavors: straightforward follow ups that elaborate on the drama and intrigue of the main game, or completely bonkers flights of fancy that turn everything upside down by adding unicorns or dragging you to Asgard. Shadows’ expansion, Claws of Awaji, is firmly the former, almost to a fault. Naoe gets some new combat tricks thanks to a whole new weapon type, and the general pace of exploration is made more hectic and tense as enemies are way more dangerous and way more motivated to bring the fight to you. But the land itself doesn’t feel much different than the rest of Japan, and the straightforward adventure is light on revelation and doesn’t make too great a case for its own existence.
The story that carries our heroes off of the mainland and onto the island is much like that of the main game, filled with colorful characters and a shadowy group of conspirators that need to be brought down systematically, but it’s a simple and predictable tale on the whole. It does pick up the threads of Naoe’s missing mother and the growing influence of the Templar order in Japan, but it doesn’t do much to tie those up in satisfying ways by the end. It also doesn’t make much of a case for seeing anymore of this world. For all Valhalla’s faults, each expansion felt like it was introducing a new dimension to the greater world that Eivor and friends occupied. Claws ends, and 16th century Japan doesn’t feel much bigger than it did 10 hours before it.
Awaji Island is just as beautiful as the rest of Japan, but it’s not so significantly different from the mainland that a person who hasn’t already spent 60+ hours playing would be able to spot the difference at first glance, unlike when Eivor went to Ireland in Valhalla, for instance. Awaji is a bit more mountainous, which is more noticeable when having to navigate up and down the length of the map because of the significant lack of fast travel points throughout. And there are some visual gems hidden away like a dark swamp with creepy foliage, or a big warship that’s under construction. But if you’ve seen a mountain caked in winter snow earlier this year, this will look exactly like that.
There’s more of the same kinds of side quests and activities to do on Awaji as well, which is good for gaining knowledge points to invest in the limited amount of new skills and upgrades available to Naoe and Yasuke, but still pretty optional and ignorable otherwise. Side quests seem even more tucked away than the main game – I didn’t come across any of them organically and had to put extra effort into finding people with problems I can solve.
Naoe gets her hands on a new weapon in Claws of Awaji, the bo staff. Fashioned as a hybrid of a long-ranged crowd controller and a single-target mix-up machine, I found it to be much better at the latter than the former. This is mostly because of its novel stance-based attacks, using high jabs to interrupt enemies and low sweeps to take them off their feet and open them up to big, reliable damage. On the off chance I got into extended brawls as the Shinobi, the bo was reliably my second slot choice.
There are new skills for both Yasuke and Naoe as well but I didn’t find them to be particularly spicy enough to unseat my tried-and-true staples tested under dozens of hours of chopping and stabbing. Some new equipment is available to plunder from castles but as it was in the base game, these aren’t really much of a carrot worth chasing unless you really love having all of the icons on the map cleared.
The island of Awaji is thick with opportunities to put all of your skills and gear to the test. It’s dense with folks who at best don’t trust you, or at worse would travel far and wide for a chance to kill you. I felt I was being hunted and conspired against much more than in the base game. Every horse trip longer than 100 meters left me exposed to road traps set by enemy ninja. City guards are much jumpier and more suspicious, and will not hesitate to start a melee in the middle of the market to take you down.
I liked how the general chaos of the island cleverly married with the main quest’s objectives to take down the three trusted taisho of the Templar leader in the region. For instance, those road side ninja? They work for Nowaki, a gun-toting hunter that is terrorizing the region for sport. Stopping to take them out instead of avoiding them gives you the chance to run their pockets for clues to where their master might be hiding. Those jumpy guards all answer to Tomeji, the beefy vanguard that enforces order with an iron fist. He’s very conspicuous in a castle surrounded by his elite guard but picking fights and causing general ruckus will compel him to send those guards out to stop you. And when they don’t return on account of you retiring them early, he’s left more and more vulnerable to your inevitable siege. Using your scouts to track down objectives will put the search zone on high alert thanks to the third big bad on the island: a shadowy spymaster of a thousand aliases. It’s a strange harmony that might have been obnoxious in the larger adventure but is a welcome challenge when considering Claws’ relative brevity.
When the main quest missions come to crescendos that require the team to work together more directly, Claws of Awaji still splits the tasks up between Yasuke and Naoe appropriately, leaving Yasuke to do much of the open combat, and Naoe to take stealth and assassination duty. The handful of new boss fights also do a good job of playing to the pair’s individual strengths, including a very cool stealth battle that kind of evokes Metal Gear Solid and demands all of Naoe’s skills to overcome.
