After 14 games and nearly 20 years, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally brought the franchise to feudal era Japan. In addition to continuing the series’ foray into action-RPG territory, Shadows comes with two playable, fully formed protagonists: Fujibiyashi Naoe, a young shinobi following in her parents’ Assassin footsteps, and Yasuke, an African samurai who served under lord Oda Nobunaga.
Each Creed game rises and falls depending on its lead, and for some of their actors, those roles marked their first time being (or starring) in a video game. That’s the case with both Naoe and Yasuke’s respective actors, Masumi Tsunoda and Tongayi Chirisa. In a recent interview with io9, both revealed they went into their respective auditions knowing it was for a game project, just not Assassin’s Creed specifically. Things at that point had been so secretive, Tsunoda was under the impression she’d be playing a samurai rather than a ninja. Neither had much experience with the franchise beforehand, and hadn’t tested together or even met until the game’s first table read.
That situation isn’t entirely unlike their characters’ relationship early in the game. At the end of the first act, Naoe and Yasuke unexpectedly cross paths as she sets about avenging her village and killing Nobunaga. What’s initially a tense alliance between the pair becomes a genuine friendship, and several reviews for the game have highlighted their dynamic as a high point. That seemed to already be in the cards from the start: during our talk, Tsunoda recalled how well Chirisa had fit her mental picture of what she imagined Yasuke’s voice actor would be like, describing him as a “big-hearted, warm guy with a big laugh. I felt like I knew him already.”
“There was an instant chemistry and comfort level between us,” she continued. “It’s always a blessing when you work with another actor and they’re great, but if you really connect with them on a human level, then it’s not just another work day.”
Part of what drew Tsunoda to the project was the opportunity to portray a Japanese person in Japan, which she said hasn’t always been available to her. In playing Naoe, she sought out advice from previous mocap performers and actors for games, and recalled her training from starring in the 2021 Netflix movie, Yakuza Princess, whose protagonist Akemi undergoes a similar journey to “reclaim her power” after losing her remaining family. As she tells it, playing Akemi in that film was quite instrumental to her voice and mocap performance in Shadows.
“When I first booked Yakuza Princess, I had a fear of sharp objects like forks and knives,” she revealed. “I had to hold a sword in that movie, so to overcome that fear, I took up sword fighting classes. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to channel Naoe’s energy.”
Like his co-star, Chirisa comes from a TV and film background, and can currently be seen on AMC’s Mayfair Witches. He’d done a very small voice role in Wolfenstein: The New Order, but was otherwise new to video games. As a fan of the work done in the Avatar and Planet of the Apes movies, the prospect of doing mocap excited him, and views the filmmaking technique as more supportive of imagination than TV or film. Doing mocap for Shadows “didn’t feel like there was a wrong way of imagining things,” he explained. “It was like theater in that the bigger you were, the better.”
Whereas Naoe was created specifically for Shadows, Yasuke is inspired by a real historical figure. Chirisa’s never played an African samurai before (part of what caught his eye about the part), and he wanted to add to the “rich depth” of Yasuke that’s seen him frequently reimagined for Japanese media. To help inform his interpretation, the actor did his own research on Yasuke’s history during the Sengoku period. There’s not much on where Yasuke precisely lived prior to working under Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, but what records there are allowed Chirisa to “go deep” into the cultures that would’ve existed at the time and sketch out a more historically accurate backstory.
The actor also credited growing up in Zimbabwe—near Mozambique and Angola, two countries Yasuke’s speculated to be from—as helpful to his process. Nothing he learned concerning slavery and trade routes through Africa during that time period was eye-opening to him, but they helped “funnel the emotional journey Yasuke travels from being taken from home to finding himself and becoming one of Nobunaga’s samurai.”
Yasuke’s relationship with Nobunaga and his beginnings as a slave at the hands of the Templars are covered via playable flashbacks, as is Naoe’s evolution into an assassin. Both of their individual tales take place months or years before the beginning of the game and exist as a separate, but connected part of Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ overall narrative. There’s a lot of cutscenes in it, and the mocap for those scenes was pretty intensive: they were shot once a week every month, and they weren’t all done in order.
According to Tsunoda, the game’s writers and production team would provide additional context during shooting to scenes that were out of sequence or confusing. Chirisa said the background help even included when in the story a scene was taking place and the characters’ emotional state at that moment, all of which helped them “find ourselves and the space that we needed to be in.” Additional help came from animation director Matthieu Crosset, who Tsunoda said would advise them on doing proper movement for a video game and how they would look in it.
“Matthieu had the entire playbook of the game in his mind,” Chirisa added. “We always had somebody on the floor with us, and he knew exactly what we needed to do and how it was supposed to look. Everyone in this project really came ready to play. You had to use your imagination, and you had to become the tool, so there wasn’t anything you had to lean on like on a film set.”
Despite production falling into a rinse/repeat structure, he was effusive about getting to be a part of the game, calling it “nothing short of an Alice in Wonderland [experience].”
Early on, Shadows’ creative director Jonathan Dumont likened game development to a marathon, and told Tsunoda she’d be playing Naoe for a “very long time.” What she thought would be a year of work ended up being two due to the game’s two delays, both of which seem to have paid off. A week after launch, Assassin’s Creed Shadows surpassed three million players, and was recently revealed as March’s best-selling game in the U.S., and the second-best of the year so far behind Monster Hunter Wilds.
At time of writing, the Claws of Awaji expansion is the only known continuation of Naoe and Yasuke’s adventures we’re getting. Hopefully, it’s not the last we hear and see of Tsunoda and Chirisa in the games.
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