Open-world games tend to structure themselves around a central, driving plot. You’ve got to save the planet from catastrophe in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. In Avowed, you’re seeking the cure for a spreading contagion. The rest of the side-quests — their mini-games and their hidden zones — are mostly extraneous. They’re rest stops along the shoulder of the five-lane highway of plot.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows reverses this formula. Its story line feels diminished and sits in the background of a more vibrant world.

Like past Assassin’s Creed games, Shadows serves up a clear premise: saving Japan from malevolent actors, this time through two controllable characters, Yasuke and Naoe, an African-born samurai and a young shinobi, who are each on tours of vengeance. They’re on the hunt for the Shinbakufu, a group of masked figures set on taking over 16th-century Japan. By the time the credits roll, Yasuke and Naoe will have stabbed, bludgeoned and gutted the lot. But this rote activity of checking bad guys off a list is hardly where the meat of the game is found.

The more remarkable moments to be found in Shadows are in its world, in the gaps between missions, which find you traversing feudal Japan on galloping horseback, driving through its misty gullies and over its forested, windswept peaks. The wilds around you are alive with deer, scampering foxes and rooting tanuki. Elsewhere there are magnificent temples whose realistic depictions are as accurate as you’ll find without airfare, and where your character can solemnly pray before a shrine while the sad twangs of a biwa, a small wooden lute, resound in the background.

It’s a stunningly realized depiction of a country that one would assume gamers are already deeply familiar with. As saturated as the zeitgeist is with feudal Japan, where recent gaming hits like Ghost of Tsushima, Nioh and Sekiro are set, Shadows offers more, digging deeper to deliver a fascinating, grounded picture beyond the wild, natural world. It also captures the many layers of Japan’s feudal society: the bamboo huts of its villages, the quiet shrines and temples, the towering castles and forts of its cities.

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