No relation to your favorite Winged Shadow. Or me, either.
Well, guess Ubisoft is in the doghouse again.
Bad enough I can’t play Batman: Vengeance on Windows 10 because the start-up screen isn’t sending me to the actual game’s startup screen because apparently you can’t open one program with another…or at least you can’t with this one and there is no direct opener to the game. It’s getting on my nerves, but it’s an old game and ain’t ticking anybody off but me. I still want to do that Let’s Play series, folks. Honest.
No, Ubisoft has ticked off Japan, or at least Japanese gamers who are fans of the Assassin’s Creed video game series. Originally a sci-fi story of a man in our future reliving the life of an ancestor from our past to learn how to deal with a shared enemy, fans really just wanted to play as the stealthy assassin in the past using retrotech hidden weapons and jumping into haystacks. I don’t know if the sci-fi plot was properly concluded or not, but that’s what the franchise became and fans couldn’t be happier.
At least until the trailer and information for Assassin’s Creed: Shadows came out. Reading the comments of the Japanese and Western commenters on the above video, standing at 270K likes and 625K dislikes at the time of writing but possibly longer by the time you read this due to my posting schedule, Shadows has fans of the game really upset. It’s a multi-level failure we should take a look at, because while we don’t know what the quality of the story or gameplay is, we know the basic plot, and it’s being called cultural appropriation. (Told you today’s Daily Video would be important.)
Creative Director Jonathan Dumont and Assistant Director of Cinematic Design Akim Milne took part in a breakdown of the trailer, explaining their perspectives on why they chose what they did. Let’s watch that before getting into the story proper. They’re actually explaining that they used split screen as an homage to Japanese culture. You wish that was the dumbest thing you’re about to see.
First off I have seen zero complaints about playing as Naoe, other than some claims that she’d be a side character. Between these trailers and looking at the official website that doesn’t feel like the case, that both characters have a story arc and you’ll be switching back and forth between them. Thus comes the first problem. This is a play mechanic that the franchise dropped when they dropped Desmond, the guy from the future reliving his past lives to regain his ancestors’ skills as an assassin to fight the enemies of his time. Granted I could be wrong about that as someone who hasn’t had a chance to play the games…I’m still trying to get Batman to stop Mr. Freeze. However, I’ve never seen ads or reviews from the other games have a second player character since they dropped the future period element.
It’s mostly historical accuracies that have come up. I’ve also read comments from the Japanese gamers (thanks to YouTube using Google Translate) and they’ve pointed out things like representations of different seasons being shown together, having Nobunaga’s armor bearer sitting at his side when he actually wouldn’t, the shape of the mats they’re sitting on…minor things to Westerners who aren’t that in tune with Japanese culture but they picked up on it and called it out. You could also question Naoe as a ninja. While female ninja (kunoichi) existed their method of killing when required was less blade and more poison. Otherwise they gathered information using their feminine wiles versus their opponents libidos. Yes, they slept with their targets. On the other hand, Assassin’s Creed I thought was about a guild of assassins, and no reason she couldn’t join that. Playing as a girl isn’t a problem. Fans of the games wanted to play as a ninja, one of the inspirations for how the assassins guild operates, and here you go. You even get her with the signature weapon of the franchise, a gauntlet with a hidden blade. I’ve only heard positive things about Blue-Eyed Samurai, a story about a woman samurai seeking revenge for her mixed race heritage. Again, nobody has a problem with the ninja. It’s the samurai.
I’m going to link to a video by Gaijin Goombah before the historical person Yasuke was controversial because he was enslaved by a new slave master, the race war. It was the first time I heard of this guy and at the time it was an interesting bit of trivia. Leave it to the usual suspects to grab on to it and ruin everything. This is the same crowd that complains about “cultural appropriation” like the girl from today’s Daily Video while at the same time telling Japanese storytellers how to tell their stories. They accuse lolicon of being kiddie porn, any short girl with breasts is “uncomfortable” (try watching I Am Shauna Rae, clods–not every short girl has her medical condition but they exist), and Sailor Moon doesn’t look Japanese enough because she’s blond. They insist black characters go where history and historical inspiration makes that questionable while ignoring using African or Jamaican culture and folklore in actual stories, which would be less controversial and more interesting. You wouldn’t stick a white person in those unless it was about the slave trade, which is the only way you’re getting that setting unfortunately. So when they found out that there was an actual black man who lived in feudal Japan for a month and was close to the man behind Japanese reunification, they jumped at the chance to use him everywhere, because apparently THEY are allowed to culturally appropriate Japanese history and culture. But don’t you dare wear a kimono or schoolgirl outfit and say a lolicon character is “kawaii” or you’re the evil appropriator.
The problem is Yasuke wasn’t some badass samurai. He was the weapons carrier for Nobunaga, essentially the caddy to Japanese Tiger Woods. (Yes, that was on purpose. Theo from yesterday would call that petty, I call it snarky.) Could he fight? He’d better since he was on the battlefield, but he wasn’t a solo operating samurai. The trailer also shows that he’s one of the people responsible for destroying Naoe’s village, which is a rare moment of historical accuracy. Why would he side with her in some Japanese assassin’s guild when the man he pledged his loyalty to was the man she’d want revenge on the most? Even the Japanese commenters were calling this cultural appropriation, noting that Yasuke isn’t as big (historically of course given he towered over everyone) to them as it is to the activism over accuracy crowd, and felt insulted. They wanted to play a normal Assassin’s Creed game, and instead they’re playing half of it as a 6ft black man in heavy armor in feudal Japan, and rewriting his story into “black savior”. If he were white, the same people supporting this would throw a fit about “white saviors”, but white savior bad, black savior good and Japan should be happy or something. He kind of stands out in a crowd and you aren’t playing his historical journey, or you’d end up being a slave at the end thanks to treachery by a member of Nobunaga’s court. Fans were noting that the previous games tried to be historically accurate when it came to historic figures, which I can’t confirm but I’ll trust the actual players, while this was more of a “what if” scenario that took time away from the stealth killing gameplay fans wanted out of a feudal Japan story. Yasuke is basically Desmond, a barrier to the fun part of the game, and you don’t usually play as a historic figure.
Fans on both sides of the language barrier instead pointed to Ghost Of Tsushima, a game so culturally respectful and historically accurate (within the bounds of having a fun game to play and story to enjoy) that even the Japanese were surprised Sucker Punch Productions wasn’t a Japanese company. Instead they’re from Washington state, and did more research than the Ubisoft crew did for a game in a franchise that almost demanded have a ye old Japan ninja story, who apparently had no problem getting European locales and history correct. Supposedly the director even said they chose Yasuke specifically to be a point of view character for Western gamers, again avoiding “white savior” problems to introduce people to Japan. Not that the Japanese gamers needed it. It’s like having a POV character from Boston in your Revolutionary War game. No player in this franchise needed that POV character with Ghost Of Tsushima or in stories set in Rome and other European locales, so why would they need one here. They even refer to it as the better Assassin’s Creed in Japan game when it comes to the story. Give Jin Sakai the gauntlet blade and make him ninja instead of samurai and you have it.
Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is scheduled to drop on November 15th, but will there be enough players to make it worthy of happening. I even saw suggestions of making Yasuke’s story DLC, but it’s too late for that now, and if you have to play both characters during the game it will be weird going from stealthy ninja to tank samurai. If they wanted to give Yasuke his own game, fine. Just make sure you remember he’s, as one of the Japanese commenters called him, the “baggage carrier” and not the super-samurai that’s better than the Japanese samurai. That’s what they’d do, though, isn’t it? They don’t want to play a samurai, they want to be the ninja. Speaking of which, can someone help me get Batman: Vengeance running? What? He’s a ninja.
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