It took me 26 hours in Assassin’s Creed Shadows to unlock Yasuke

As perhaps the highest-profile game of 2025 so far, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been a major topic of conversation among the gaming community. It’s been out for a few weeks, so the chatter in the Slack channel that we spun up here at Polygon to discuss the game has slowed significantly (especially with some people on the team having moved on to other games that generate feverish posting, such as Blue Prince). Even so, I probably should’ve known that I wouldn’t be able to innocently drop my latest progress update into Slack without my co-workers commenting upon it, baffled anew by the strange ways in which I play video games.

“I’m ~26 hours in as of last night, and I just now unlocked Yasuke,” I wrote on Wednesday morning.

The ensuing thread ended up with 75 messages in it. The first response arrived within two minutes of my initial post, courtesy of our curation editor, Pete Volk:

a real question: how

as in, what have you spent your time doing? what does your objective board look like?

These are good and valid questions, Pete! I wish I had better answers beyond “my brain is broken” and “if you saw the way I play this game you would want to commit seppuku within 10 minutes” and “this is why I pretty much never finish open-world games.”

For the uninitiated, Yasuke is one of the two protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but aside from a snippet of the intro, you don’t get to play as him until you’ve completed the game’s first act. Now, if you’re a normal person, you’ll probably reach that point in 10-12 hours or so. Our guide about unlocking Yasuke allows that it may take some players as long as 20 hours. But longer than an entire rotation of the Earth on its axis? How in the Animus is that possible?!

Here is where I tell you that I am weird. I get easily distracted by shiny objects in games, which is a problem in open-world experiences, as they are typically designed to encourage exploration and investigation. I also love stealth games, but they’re often designed in a way that indulges the worst of my perfectionist tendencies: If you let me engage in save scumming, I will use it to the fullest extent.

Perhaps you can begin to comprehend why an Assassin’s Creed game would be a rapacious consumer of my leisure time. This is particularly true with this Assassin’s Creed game, for which I had previously typed the following progress update into Slack: “I am now something like 16 hours into AC Shadows and I still haven’t decided if I actually like the game.” I was about to start the (justifiably well-liked) quest in which Naoe participates in a tea ceremony, and the reason it had taken me that long to even get there was that I simply didn’t care much for the story up to that point — something that is only slightly less true now that I’ve unlocked Yasuke.

So far, I’ve mostly been ignoring Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ main missions in favor of exploring its version of feudal Japan, and undertaking side activities such as infiltrating castles. The game takes place circa 1579, toward the end of the Sengoku period, a time of widespread civil war during which the prototypical idea of a Japanese castle came into being. They were laid out with a multistory keep surrounded by courtyards, moats, and residential buildings. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the grounds of any castle are full of guards to contend with, along with civilians who will scramble to alert their armed compatriots if they see you.

I want you to understand, dear reader — my presumably “normal” reader — the inner workings of my very special mind. Here is an approximation of my painstaking, scatterbrained approach to infiltrating a castle as Naoe:

• I find a way across the outer moat.
• I eliminate a guard or two, then move to a different spot that’s not far away. Rinse and repeat until all the enemies in an area are dead, so that I can collect all the loot there.
• Aw man, I got spotted! OK, OK, it’s fine — I took them out before they could raise the alarm. Now I have to scrounge around for some health rations, though.
• Hm, that building isn’t anywhere near the keep, but [engages Eagle Vision] ooh, there are two samurai and a loot chest in there? Sure, I’ll go out of my way for it!
• Sweet, I’ve made it inside the keep. Wait, where’s that last Samurai Daisho that I need to kill so that I can unlock the reward chest at the top level of the castle? Dammit… [goes back outside and pores over the castle grounds]
• [20 minutes later] Now I can finally collect my reward and get to the synchronization point atop the keep! Mission accomplished!

Maybe that doesn’t sound all that unusual to you. But you should know that I’m also a compulsive saver, and because there isn’t a quicksave function even in the Windows PC version of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, saving my game is a multistep process. And it’s something I do approximately once every minute, because I really hate losing any progress. As a result, a single castle might take me a whole hour to complete. Is your skin crawling yet at this madness?

I’ve now cleared out enough castles to realize that the process doesn’t change all that much from place to place, so this element of the game is starting to lose its luster for me, even though I still find that the underlying stealth experience delivers satisfying thrills. I do have hope that spending time getting to know Yasuke, now that I’ve unlocked him, will force me out of my obsession with Naoe’s stealth mechanics — since he’s simply not that kind of assassin, or indeed an assassin at all — and break my bad habits. (I don’t have the same hopes for the story to improve, since my co-workers tell me that it doesn’t get more compelling from here on out.)

But why rush? Maybe I’ll just abandon everything and take up virtual sightseeing, trying to recreate shots from my honeymoon in the game’s photo mode. Himeji Castle, here I come…