How To Assassinate The Fox In Assassin’s Creed Shadows

When you finally get to him, the Performer will speak in wistful poetic prose about his homeland, playing lovely shamisen music in a moonlit courtyard, with a gentle lilt in his voice. And no amount of beautiful shamisen playing or poetic turns of phrase changes the fact that the Fox Onryo hired pirates to traffick human beings to the slave trade with the Portuguese—and that motherfucker needs to die screaming. You’re damn right we’re making that happen, let’s go to work.

Preparation

Thankfully, this one’s nice and straightforward: :It’s essentially two boss fights back to back. However, you don’t get to choose who’s going after who on this, which means while she’s usually a stealth-focused character at this stage of the game, Naoe’s hand-to-hand weapons better be top notch. Give her the best Katana you can get your hands on, and if she doesn’t have it already, grab any of her perks where a perfect dodge makes enemies vulnerable. Don’t even bother with Vault if you haven’t already; you won’t get a chance to use it.

As for Yasuke, just make sure to run with a Katana, not a Naginata for this. You will need speed.

The Mission: ‘The Performer’

When the mission starts, you get a bit more backstory explaining how Takeda Motoaki/the Fox is just taking out his revenge on the Niwa for Oda Nobunaga stealing his land. That seems pitiable enough until you remember, yet again, that revenge involved taking slaves, cramming them in houses by the sea waiting for their Portuguese bagmen to show up, killing the ones they don’t like. After it’s nightfall, and our heroes track down the lead pirate Samemaru, Yasuke is all gas, no brakes. You don’t even get a character choice for this mission. The second you get control, you’re playing as Yasuke. Chase down Samemaru through the streets until he leads you into an open clearing, at which point he’ll take his first swipe at you.

Samemaru’s actually no pushover. He has a couple of fairly normal strikes you can parry and counter like normal, but after about three or four hits, he’ll auto-counter with an unblockable. Mostly, he has just a slew of odd and fast attacks that do more damage than you might think. He’s also pretty generous about tossing kunai if he’s more than six feet away from you, which tends to come after an unblockable kick attack. Pick your spots carefully with this guy, batter him with your RT/R2 abilities whenever possible. But this guy will require work.

Yasuke will try to interrogate him about the slave trade he’s running, which is going well until he drops a name: Duarte. You can probably tell where that’s going before the cutscene’s over, but before we can get our Django on, we’ve still got a Fox to deal with.

Control will switch over to Naoe, who starts out on a rooftop. However, you’re actually heading down to the streets for this bit. There’s two objective markers to investigate in Eagle Vision, but you’re actually gonna go to your map. If you’ve done any walking around town whatsoever here, you’ll see the Samurai Yashiki district as its own white marker on the map. Use Y/Triangle to mark it, and head straight over to that marker. You may wanna try climbing walls to go there directly as there’s ronin wandering the streets you don’t want to tango with at the moment. Once you arrive, you’ll see a group of folks praying at a shrine for Takeda Motoaki. When they’re done, follow her home.

Naoe will remark that the estate with the diamond flags belongs to Takeda. When the woman stops, head through the archway straight ahead. You’ll be told to follow the sound of the shamisen. Look right, and focus in to see the soundwaves coming from the nearby house.

Head over there. The door on the right leads to the room with details about the pirates Takeda hired, as well as the Fox mask. A cutscene with the Fox playing his tunes by moonlight follows. Nice guy, but I repeat: the slavery. Time to whoop his ass.

There’s one tiny problem with that, though: This fucker’s good. Probably the first legitimately challenging fight in this game in a hot minute. For starters, his katana’s poison, which is bad news for you if you take too many hits here. But also, his go-to combo string is long enough to psych you out of when it’s safe to swing on him. If you yourself have an affliction you can build up, it’ll help. But less than normal, my dude has quite a lot of health. Largely, you’re doing damage and dodging so you can earn the adrenaline needed to spam the ever-living hell out of your abilities. They’ll do the most discernible damage, and unlike your normal attacks, you just need to hit once. Be patient, be careful, and when an opening occurs, hit hard, not often.

Eventually he’ll die. You’ll get a dialogue choice to pick if Motoaki deserved his fate or was just misguided, and despite being only one right answer here, you can pick either and it’ll have no effect on the plot.

You’ll get the typical chunk of XP for doing the world a service, but the real reward is that, with a name to go off of, Yasuke gets a rip-roaring rampage of revenge all his own against the Portuguese filhos da puta who made him a slave. That might be the best reward in the game right there.