Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It is set during Oda Nobunaga’s rule in feudal Japan. The game follows Fujibayashi Naoe and Yasuke, two characters with different playstyles, allowing players to approach a mission in various ways.

The music in the video game series is pivotal in setting the tone of each of the games with composers including Jesper Kyd for Assassin’s Creed, Brian Tyler for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Sarah Schachner for Assassin’s Creed Origins, and many more. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, The Flight’s Joe Henson and Alexis Smith were tasked with bringing to life the music in the franchise known for blending historical and sci-fi sounds.

Henson and Smith did not come from traditional scoring backgrounds. They started in the London music industry, with Henson as a bass player and Smith as a studio musician. An EA contact would steer the band into the video game industry, with the duo working on Zubo and Spare Parts. They would later work on Horizon Zero Dawn, Alien: Isolation, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and more.

“Assassin’s Creed, it’s a franchise where I love the music and I love the game,” Henson tells Nerd Reactor. “I remember seeing the trailer for the first game and being wowed by it. And then all the scores, the composers [Ubisoft] brings in the music, it’s always brilliant. When we first started working on Assassin’s Creed, it’s like, ‘Wow, it’s an Assassin’s Creed game.’ You’ve got that pressure, and then the pressure of the amount of music you have to do, the size of the game, because these open-world games are huge. There’s a lot of responsibility in many ways. Yeah. But it was a lot easier the second time. We knew what we’re doing, and we were working with the same team. So there was a shorthand between us.”

On how The Flight was chosen to compose Assassin’s Creed Shadows:

“They do blind listening,” Henson explained. “When they do these, they ask a few people. They don’t know who it is. They just choose the music, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. We kind of knew straight away what we wanted to do, and it was influenced by our past and our lives combined. We knew what we wanted to do, and then it seemed to be what they were after somehow.”

On working with Japanese musicians:

“We found a selection of Japanese musicians from London and work with them,” Henson said. “And that was really inspiring as well because we’ve seen the instruments, we’ve seen them being played, but being in a room with somebody and watching them actually doing it is incredible. That was really inspiring and fed back into what we were doing. And they’re very difficult instruments.”

On the instruments in Shadows being more complex than Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s instruments:

“The technology of the time period of Odyssey was a lot less advanced,” Smith said. “So the instruments have a narrower range and are not as complicated. Feudal Japan isn’t actually that long ago, and these instruments we’re talking about are quite advanced, instruments that aren’t any different now than they were in that time period. So the level of skill and practice in order to actually get a good sound out of them is a lot more.”

On the main theme of Assassin’s Creed Shadows:

“To know about the main theme, you’ve got to know about what we did first,” Smith said. “The first thing we did on this game is we wrote theme pieces for each of the two characters. Because this is the first AC where there are two completely playable characters you can swap between them at any time. So they had to both have their own individual themes and instruments, palettes, sounds and feels. And we wrote two pieces that were kind of like a short story version of their character arc, of their background, and where they end up in the game. That gave us their individual stories.

“And then the main theme is for them to come together and work together. We knew we wanted it to be a banger and use all their instrumentation together, because these are the two characters who start quite far apart and end up together, working together for the good of – I don’t want to say too much. This is them working together. That’s why it’s quite heroic.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is now available on consoles and PC.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.