Assassin's Creed Shadows Japanese voice actor says applying his native language to an English script about Japan was "an unusual and interesting experience"

Assassin's Creed Shadows screenshot showing female protagonist Naoe
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Assassin's Creed Shadows is based in Japan, but the script was written in English, and the Japanese voice actors have shared their thoughts on working on the game.

In an IGN video, Mutsuki Iwanaka says: "When I was dubbing my lines, I could hear the English dialogue. Dubbing Japanese lines over the original English in this very Japanese setting made this an unusual and interesting experience."

The Assassin's Creed games are set all over the world, from Baghdad to Boston, London to Cairo. In the earlier games, even though they were originally voiced in English, characters still had accents that sounded region appropriate, but not all of the games are dubbed in the language of the locations they're set in, and I never thought about how strange that dubbing process must be.

Miyuri Shimabukuro, the Japanese voice actor for protagonist Naoe, says it was the romance options that challenged her. "Depending on the player's choices, Naoe may be involved in a romance thread," she explains. "So I had to think hard about how much of that essence to reveal as well."

Makoto Tamura, the Japanese voice actor for Nagato-no-Kami Fujibayashi, seemed to find the whole experience fairly easy. "As far as the tone of the vocabulary goes, the script had already been well translated," he says. "So all I had to do was read out the lines as they were and it was fine. I've watched period films since I was a kid and I love them, so the Sengoku Period vocabulary and samurai speak felt familiar. That part of the script came surprisingly naturally to me."

If you can't wait for Assassin's Creed Shadows, check out some of the best action games you can play right now.

Issy van der Velde
Contributor

I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.