Wow this uhm is a whole lot of nothing... The positives first. The game looks amazing, sound design is great and it runs super smooth with all the nice NVIDIA features but thats about it. Naoe and Yasuke are so bland its really a shame. The story of a young shinobi and the first black samurai could be so interesting, but instead they decided to go with the most generic revenge plot you could imagine and without the templars and assassins.  Yasuke is just there for the ride and doesnt get anything to do, but in the absolute last minute he gets something to do and kills some templars they just squeezed in there and it really is laughable how they did it.  Naoe on the other hand gets her dad killed and kills a bunch of randos who arent connected to the templars, oh sure the templars helped them build someting, wow really interesting... You never get to know whats in the box, which got stolen from you and the assassins in this, are basically just an origins story. At some point youre on youre way to find out something about the Kakushiba alliance and once Naoe finds out she says something like ,,Ah yes, the Kakushiba names themselfs the assassins...'' BRO WHAT?! This is like the 20th game in the series and they wanna explain the assassins to us and how they got to Japan?! Bro who cares how they got there, just show us the assassins and let us kill templars, but no lets just give Naoe just a generic revenge plot and an origin story. Gameplaywise you just run around and kill a bunch of guys with the same weapon for skill points and materials. Thats it, that is everything. But what the biggest problem is, that they completely missunderstood the criticsm of their worlds. Everyone said that their worlds are to big and filled with filler content, so what did they do? They just keep the size but ereased all the bases and other stuff you had to loot in the previous game. So now you just have to kill a bunch of samurais in the base and loot a chest. And you can do some handsigns with Naoe, wtf is this supposed to be? Shoot arrows with Yasuke from a horse, cool... and learn some Kata or whatever they are called with Yasuke, but never get a move or anything from it, just knowledge point, wow super exciting. Thats all there is to it, yes you can hunt some random NPCs from a assassin board for some xp but these are just random NPCs with some context, but who cares.  And thats about all there is. We now have a huge open world with filler content so trimed back that it feels like a backdrop.  Nothing wrong with backdrops, the Mafia games did this very well, but then dont make it insanely big and make it smaller and make your filler content more frequent and maybe meaningful and dont let me run 10 minutes to the next one with nothing in between.  Traversel is also super boring. You cant deviate from the path, if you want to make some miles, stay on the path or you wont get anywhere. Moving with Naoe is fun however and if you really REALLY want you can make some shinobi roleplay, but you seriously have to try it. Most of the time you get in, throw some kunai against some heads and thats it. With Yasuke however it is atrocious! He is such a tank, he cant climb or really slowly and its fine that both of them feels very diffirently but with Yasuke begin so slow, he basically gets useless for exploration. He is slower, cant climb and so on, so you just use Naoe all the time. I'll say that its pretty funny doing a leap of faith with Yasuke tho. I dont know what to say anymore, i am super dissapointed with this game. The setting could be so cool with cool characters but its just a whole lot of nothing like always with Quebec games, no story and boring gameplay loop. Ubisoft Quebec proves yet again, that they dont understand what Assassins Creed is about. They failed with Odyssee and Syndicate and they keep on failing Funniest thing about all of this is, the longer the game is, the longer the review gets and after writing all this, i feel like i wasted my time, hey sorta like playing this game.
                                                                
                                                            
                                                            
                                                                
                                                                    
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                    
                                                                
                                                                
                                                                    
                                                                        
                                                                            
                                                                                So bad  RTX4090  13700K  But unable to start the game normally