Assassin's Creed Shadows Japanese voice actor says applying his native language to an English script about Japan was "an unusual and interesting experience"
Must have been a tad confusing
![Assassin's Creed Shadows screenshot showing female protagonist Naoe](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/2698EkxZkrnDj8H5VStkiV-1200-80.jpg)
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.
- Assassin's Creed Shadows' Japanese setting has been "very, very tricky" because Ubisoft wants to be "respectful" and "avoid telling a culture about their own culture"
- Assassin's Creed Shadows forced Ubisoft to "craft the crap" out of its new-style open world, ensuring you won't have Points of Interest every 50 meters
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."
The Japanese voice cast for Assassin's Creed: Shadows give their thoughts on recording Japanese lines from a Western studio: pic.twitter.com/duJrZcyHy8February 12, 2025
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.
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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.
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