Immersive mode is a unique setting in Assassin’s Creed Shadows that is designed to make you feel like you’re actually experiencing life in Japan during the Sengoku period while playing the game. It does this by providing voice-over dialogue in a mix of Japanese and Portuguese. Unlike with the canon mode for the game’s story, you can enter or leave immersive mode at any time.
Below, we’ll explain the details of immersive mode, and get into whether it’s the ideal way to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
What is immersive mode in Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
As a megabudget global production, Assassin’s Creed Shadows ships with fully voiced dialogue in numerous languages: English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, and German. But there’s an additional option that delivers a combination of languages to more fully immerse you in the game’s setting of late-16th-century Japan: immersive mode.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes place around 1579, during the campaign by the warlord Oda Nobunaga to unify Japan by force. This was a few decades after Portuguese explorers arrived in the country, becoming the first Europeans to interact with the Japanese. The Portuguese introduced, among other things, firearms (in the form of the matchlock arquebus) and Christianity (through Jesuit missionaries) to Japan.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features Japanese characters and Portuguese characters, and some of them are bilingual — including one of the game’s two protagonists, Yasuke, a warrior from Africa who is brought to Japan as a slave by Portuguese Jesuits at the beginning of the story. The game’s immersive mode allows you to play with characters speaking in their native tongue. Turning it on locks the language options, setting the voice-over to Japanese as the primary language (with Portuguese characters speaking their own language).
If you happen to be fluent in both Japanese and Portuguese, you’re good to go from there. Everyone else will surely want to pair immersive mode with subtitles in the language of their choosing (the available options are English, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Arabic). This setting is actually called Text Language, and it lives in the Interface tab of the System menu.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will ask if you want to enable immersive mode (and/or canon mode or guided exploration) when you start a new game. After that point, you’ll find the option in the Audio tab of the menu, underneath the General category. Note that it’s an on-or-off checkbox that’s a separate setting from Voice Language right above it — if you’re looking for the immersive experience, you don’t want to simply change the audio to Japanese (unless you’re looking to play entirely in that language).
For one thing, the game’s opening is narrated by a character known as the Guide, who is the voice of the Animus, the sci-fi framing device of the Assassin’s Creed series. The Guide’s native language is English, so that’s what you’ll hear if you’re playing in immersive mode — but I initially heard her in Japanese, since I had made the mistake of adjusting the Voice Language setting rather than ticking the immersive mode checkbox. (Had I continued playing that way, even the story’s Portuguese characters would’ve been speaking Japanese.)
Should you play Assassin’s Creed Shadows in immersive mode?
Everything is permitted, as the Order of Assassins says, but yes: I would strongly recommend playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows in immersive mode — as long as you don’t mind reading subtitles for every minute of an approximately 40-hour main story (or an 80-plus-hour objective-a-thon).
Most Assassin’s Creed games are open-world experiences in which you spend dozens of hours roaming around a place of historical importance during a historically important time period. A big part of the fun is feeling like you’re actually traveling back through time and directly experiencing the culture of the setting in question: ancient Greece, the Viking Age, Colonial America, what have you.
If you have the option to walk among the denizens of these places and hear them speak in the language they actually spoke (or, y’know, a reasonable approximation of it), why not take that opportunity? For me, playing Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood in Italian felt so right that it made the default option — everyone speaking in Italian-accented English — seem laughably silly by comparison.
It’s also worth noting something specific about Assassin’s Creed Shadows here: While I’ve only played for about four hours so far, I’ve found the Japanese voice acting to be excellent across the board, whereas the English audio occasionally leaves something to be desired (especially when it comes to dialogue from the background NPCs that populate the world). And immersive mode particularly feels like the right fit for this game, since half of it focuses on Yasuke’s stranger-in-a-strange-land story. The only issue I ran into — in rare instances — was a lip syncing mismatch: characters speaking Japanese with mouths that were clearly still animated to fit the English dialogue. But that might’ve just been a result of turning immersive mode on during a play session.
The nice thing about immersive mode is that you can enable or disable it at will. If it doesn’t work for you, just hop into the menu and uncheck the box. (Note that if you change the audio language to something other than English, you’ll be forced to restart the game — but that simply entails quitting to the main menu, not relaunching the app entirely.)
Just starting Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Beyond our full Assassin’s Creed Shadows walkthrough, here are explainers on how long to beat the game and when you unlock Yasuke, plus if you should play canon or guided exploration modes.
