Since the time-hopping 2007 original, Assassin’s Creed has weaved fantastical conspiracies about an ancient Order Of Assassins and real-world history together to make one of the most successful video game franchises around.
The first few games parkoured between the Italian Renaissance and the American Revolution but recent entries have delved even further into the past. Odyssey, released in 2018, took the sword-swinging action to ancient Greece, before Valhalla recreated the Viking invasion of England two years later. The newest game, Shadows (out March 20), will let players loose in Feudal Japan for the first time.
Music helps to ground each Assassin’s Creed game in its respective era and Shadows sees the return of composer duo The Flight (Joe Henson and Alexis Smith) after their well-received work on Odyssey. “We know how important sound is to video games,” says Smith, whose CV with The Flight also includes soundtracks for acclaimed games Alien: Isolation and Horizon Forbidden West. ”We see games during development and let me tell you, they’re all pretty boring without music.”
Days after they signed up for Shadows, The Flight attended the Symphonic Adventure tour, which is basically an Assassin’s Creed greatest hits show. “It was amazing to see that rich heritage and be reminded of all the fantastic scores,” he continues. “But it was also really intimidating when you’re just about to start a new one…”
Shadows is a game of two halves – which made writing the score difficult
For the very first time in an Assassin’s Creed offering, Shadows features two unique, playable characters that you can pick up and switch out across the game. There’s agile young ninja Naoe, who can slink along undetected; and hulking samurai Yasuke, who takes a much more direct route via the point of his sword. “There’s contrast between the characters, but there’s also contrasts with how they feel and get into various situations, which makes for a much richer player experience,” says Smith. It made scoring the game a bit of a pain though.
The action frequently switches between exploration, adventure, stealth and brutal combat – and the music must match up accordingly. Rather than play things safe and make something that works for all situations, The Flight wanted to play up to those extremes. It’s why Shadows’ mammoth score clocks in at three hours and 40 minutes, which is nearly double what they did for Odyssey. “We basically had to write four different soundtracks that all work seamlessly together,” says Henson. “Yes, it was a challenge but that’s what we do.”
Naoe’s theme is about the power of stealth
“Naoe and Yasuke have very different backgrounds and we wanted to mirror that with the music,” says Smith. The first thing The Flight did was write a five-minute theme for each protagonist that tells a simplified version of their story. Naoe’s, which appears throughout the game in various forms, was built around a traditional Japanese clay pipe and reflects her time growing up in the lush, peaceful forest of Iga before a sudden tragedy.
“The key thing was to have a melody that people could play to each other. Something very simple that you’d play to your child, or something the child would be able to play back,” says Henson.
In typical video game fashion, things get more complicated as Naoe evolves into a highly-skilled assassin. “We wanted to make her feel scary and powerful when she’s in stealth mode. She’s not hiding because she’s scared, she’s very much in control of the situation,” explains Henson. To do this, they used layered whispered dialogue and set it against fast percussion.
Samurai Yasuke needed a nuanced approach
Yasuke’s journey also starts with tragedy but because of his size, his music has a slower BPM. “There is a dark feeling across the whole game and we wanted to reflect that with the score,” says Smith, which is why there’s also a lot of distorted sounds.
However there are moments of calm, which is where tracks like ‘Matters Of The Heart’ (which can be heard below) come into play. “It’s a more peaceful reflection of Yasuke’s theme.”
The Flight worked with a full orchestra to create the cinematic track but also used the traditional Japanese shakuhachi flute. According to developers, the song can be heard when Yasuke romances certain characters throughout the game, with Naoe also given a handful of opportunities for love in an otherwise vicious chain of events. “The vast majority of the score is much moodier and focused on pushing action or exploration but ‘Matters Of The Heart’ is a rare moment of tranquillity and beauty,” says Smith.
Authenticity was crucially important to everyone
As well as speaking to a number of historians and researchers while creating Shadows, the team at Ubisoft wanted The Flight’s score to be built around classic Japanese instruments. “That’s the thing that makes each score unique,” explains Smith. “We never want our music to sound like something we’ve already done. It was really inspiring to work alongside masters of those instruments but also play with the constraints of what each one can do.”
Originally, a Ubisoft executive suggested Naoe’s theme use the Sho, a complicated, expensive woodwind instrument that has to be warmed up before it can be used and needs drying out afterwards. “It was used a lot for horror in traditional plays and has this haunting sound,” which didn’t feel right for the agile ninja. It made perfect sense for The Templar Order who act as the main antagonists in Shadows though.
But The Flight still wanted to give the game a modern feel
Assassin’s Creed Shadows isn’t the first game to be set in ancient Japan with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice released back in 2019 and the hugely popular Ghost Of Tsushima following a year later. The Flight knew they’d have to do more than learn the Nagoya harp to make their score feel different to what else was out there.
“At its heart, Assassin’s Creed is a science fiction franchise and we always wanted to make a modern sounding score,” says Henson. “When we did Odyssey, we intentionally made the music sound older but for this one, we wanted to combine traditional Japanese instruments with something more contemporary,” so they looked at Western films and turned to acts like Wu-Tang Clan for inspiration. “Hip-hop has taken a lot of influence from Japanese music,” says Smith.
“We both came from pop music rather than a traditional film scoring background, so there’s also a lot of avant garde pop that we were listening to while doing Shadows,” he continues before warning us that you can’t tell that from listening to the finished thing. “We just love anything that pushes boundaries a bit.“
‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ is out March 20 for PlayStation, Xbox and PC. The soundtrack is available to stream now