Japanese Gamers Not Happy With Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Video Games

Despite games journalists’ insistence that it’s only racist Americans who have a problem with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, evidence is piling up that Japanese gamers are not happy with the depiction of their culture either. During Monday’s Ubisoft Forward presentation, the company unveiled an extended trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, showing off the gameplay and the depiction of Yasuke, one of the game’s two protagonists. A Redditor called KotakuInAction compiled some Japanese comments on the trailer, which you can see below, courtesy of former Blizzard producer Mark Kern, alias Grummz:

So let me get this straight. "Ashually Historical Figure, Yasuke" in Assassin's Creed Shadows:

– Battles to rap music
– Walks through villages beating asians up
– Uses excessive non-honorable violence (crushing heads of defeated enemies)
– Makes all villagers bow to him… pic.twitter.com/uTWYnkPv05

— Grummz (@Grummz) June 12, 2024

When I first watched the trailer, the rap music didn’t hit me, probably because this is something Hollywood has been doing forever. I remember when the Black Panther trailers came out, Jeff from WorldClassBullshitters remarked that every time a movie has a black main character now, the music is all rap, even when it doesn’t make sense. (Black Panther is a good example of that because one of the main themes of that movie was African culture vs. African American culture, of which T’Challa is the former.) But it does stick out in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is set in feudal Japan. This reaction is not new, either; a YouTuber compiled a bunch of responses from Japanese people to the previous Assassin’s Creed Shadows trailer (courtesy of @Mangalawyer):

I’d ask what Ubisoft and games journalists will say to this, but we all know they’ll just ignore it and pretend it’s all about racism, the same as they do with every inconvenient narrative. But if this is how Japanese people are reacting to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft may feel the backlash at the cash register when the game is released. And to be fair, they are vowing to fix certain problems, like the inconsistencies with Japanese architecture. But Yasuke is one of the main characters, and the game comes out in November; they can’t change that, and it looks like his prominence and portrayal are a problem for Japanese gamers. This looks like it’ll be a bigger role of the dice than Ubisoft planned, and according to their financials, they need it to be a hit.