Assassin’s Creed Shadows Ended Up Great–If You Played All The DLC

Assassin's Creed Shadows' story has come to an end with the release of Black Tides, the game's final narrative expansion and a tie-in to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced . Black Tides is surprisingly very good. While I still think the opening act of Shadows is strong--it's more affecting and fun to play through than the first 10 hours of Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage at least--and contains several especially excellent performances from Masumi Tsunoda (the English voice of protagonist Naoe), I can no longer easily forgive the faults of Acts 2 and 3. The specific additional stories that best built Shadows up are A Critical Encounter, a crossover with Critical Role's Assassin's Creed Shadows One-Shot that refocuses the game on killing Templars; A Puzzlement, a short but exceptionally tricky treasure hunt that adds the Isu into Shadows and amazingly reminds everyone that Odyssey's Kassandra is trolling everyone in the background of every game; Claws of Awaji, which addresses the lingering threads of Shadows' cliffhanger ending; and then finally, Black Tides.