New Assassin’s Creed Shadows Poster Minimizes Yasuke

Video Games

If you wanted some more evidence that things aren’t looking good for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft has just dumped a big sign on the internet. Today, the struggling (to say the least) video game developer released a new Assassin’s Creed Shadows poster to get gamers hyped for the game’s impending – though once again delayed – release. First of all, good luck with that, Sparky. But more importantly, the look of this poster has got to be seen to be believed. If you’ve been following the game’s rollout for the past eight months, you’ll know what a big deal Ubisoft made about Yasuke, one of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ two protagonists, and by far the more prominent one. To quickly recap, Yasuke was a black man who served as a vassal to Nobunaga, but a dubious historian fudged historical records to make him a samurai. That was all the virtue signalers at Ubisoft needed to make Yasuke the lead of their new game, which is set in feudal Japan. There was backlash (against other things too, but making a black guy the hero of a game set in Japan in the sixteenth century kind of epitomizes all of it), and Ubisoft and its defenders effectively called anyone who didn’t like their decision some form of bigot. Well, look at them now:

A new Creed rises over Japan.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows: available March 20, 2025. pic.twitter.com/AOdX493U27

— Assassin’s Creed (@assassinscreed) January 16, 2025

That’s Yasuke in the middle of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows poster, pushed into the background in favor of Japanese characters who have smaller parts than he does. Naoe, the female samurai who is Yasuke’s co-lead, is next to him but clearly standing before him, with her arm holding the sword in front of Yasuke. Above them is a much bigger character, and while I don’t know who he is, I can see he’s Japanese, meaning he’s more in keeping with the setting of the game than Yasuke is. It actually looks like he’s the hero of the game as opposed to Yasuke and Naoe, or maybe the villain, although he doesn’t look particularly sinister in that image. Below and to the front is a young boy who is also featured more prominently than Yasuke; again, I don’t know who this character is – he looks like he was taken from a Japanese version of The Goonies – but he’s positioned as being a leading role. Standing next to and slightly behind him is another female Japanese character who is also focused on more than Yasuke. The rest are more background characters. What this brings to mind the most is Disney’s treatment of Finn on the Chinese Force Awakens poster, as opposed to the American one:

The situations are different, but in both cases, a black character was minimized on a poster to obfuscate his importance to the movie or game. In the case of The Force Awakens, it was because Chinese audiences don’t – or are not perceived to – accept black characters as leads. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it’s because making a black man the lead of a game that’s supposed to be about Japanese history and culture is stupid and smacks of modern-day politics, DEI, and a bunch of other things, and it pissed off both American and Japanese gamers. Now, they’re trying to draw your focus away from their woke preening and towards the Japanese characters that gamers wanted in a game about Japan. It’s a pretty silly move; everyone knows Yasuke is the lead, and there’s no way Ubisoft spent the money to change that – not that they had the time to do so even if they wanted to. This is an act of desperation from a company that’s about to have another big loss at a time when it really can’t afford one. But if nothing else, at least Ubisoft is making us laugh.

Let us know what you think about the new Assassin’s Creed Shadows poster in the comments!

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