Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Is The Shovel That Keeps Digging

All the people who worked on Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. An endless sea of white people making a game about a black man in Japan.

I’m just waiting to see how long it takes before UbiSoft gets France into a war with Japan.

That’s kind of sad given the various French/Japanese co-productions going at least as far back, if not further, than Mysterious Cities Of Gold to today’s Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir. However, UbiSoft continues to tick off the entirety of Japan. For a country accused of being cowards during World War II now having a group that keeps pissing off the enemy from that war, they better be glad Japan is only allowed to have a defensive military (someone needs to tell Marvel Studios that, but American’s ticking off Japanese creators is hardly news anymore).

I wasn’t going to go over this subject again. I thought I said my peace. That was before the next time they screwed up. With the latest act of stupidity it seems that the history/religion-ignorant creators making Assassin’s Creed: Shadows have made another big blunder. On its own I could write it off as just video game mechanics, and I’m not saying anything we’re about to discuss was done on purpose beyond turning the “caddy” into “Tiger Woods”. Unfortunately for UbiSoft it’s been mistake on top of mistake for this latest installment in the franchise, and that’s got them in hot water not only with Japanese gamers but the Japanese government. If you thought the US government going after “violent video games” anytime someone connects a slapfight to Mortal Kombat or something is bad, here’s your roller coaster ticket because the ride is starting.

So where do we begin for those new to this controversy? Full disclosure: I’m not a player of these games because I never got the chance, but here’s what I have learned through reviews and conversation. The original game starred a man from the future having to go through his ancestral memories to find important history about his ancestors’ role in a group of assassins battling to stop a questionable depiction of the Knights Templar from gaining control of mystic artifacts and probably ruling the world or something. Eventually the future guy storyline was dropped and games just had you playing the fan-preferred assassins from various time periods story, though I don’t think they made it to the 20th century yet.

The latest game is set in a place fans have been asking for since the early years: Japan. Because the assassins work like ninjas, why not just be an actual ninja? Apparently there aren’t enough ninja games or something? I kid, because I totally see the appeal, but with Japan being a more isolationist country I don’t know how they’d have ties to a European guild of assassins. Like I said, I never played the game. While this isn’t the first attempt to go to the Land Of The Rising Sun, it is the one that got made…and probably the one that shouldn’t be.

The game has you playing as two characters again, but in the same time period. There’s Naoe, the franchise’s first female assassin (allegedly, as everyone wants to be first, even if they have to lie about it) and the actual Japanese character. Not a lot of complaints about her and “kunoichi” were female ninja. Sometimes a woman can get into places a man can’t, especially if the target for assassination or just espionage is a horndog who falsely believes women inferior to him. Ninja didn’t just do the cool pre-Batman stuff we all know them for. Sometimes they were “Matches Malone”, going undercover to do their deeds. Again, no issues here. The problem lies with Yasuke. Ever since this tale of a black retainer bought from slavery by the shogun, only to be sent back to his slavers after a revolt led to his new master’s death, was revealed to the world, the usual suspects when crazy over the “black samurai”. Except he wasn’t a samurai. He was just the guy who carried the shogun’s weapons. He could probably defend himself, but he wasn’t the emperor’s right hand sword. Making him a player character in a story that shouldn’t have him in it because the fans wanted ninjas and not samurai as it is would already be a blunder, but just a gaming blunder. They’ve also recently said that you can stick to one character the whole game, so I don’t care about that.

I stay out of the culture war on this site because I’m more concerned with the end product. Any problems leading up to it are trivia to me. However, this story just gets UbiSoft, a team of all white French people I remind you, deeper in trouble the more that gets revealed. The subject of Yasuke is already a sore spot with Japan, tired of Western culture warriors telling them what their media should be, how Japanese characters should be drawn, and now being told what their history is. A statuette of Yasuke at a broken shrine gate to promote the game, bringing thoughts of shrines destroyed at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and any place bombed with non-atomic bombs, could be seen as a mistake. Likely a result of how the statuette is designed and not intended to be a damaged gate, but all these piled-on mistakes have consequences, and this recent video from early gameplay samples just makes them look worse.

Catch more from Skatha on YouTube

Here’s the full 50 minute remote preview gameplay footage if you’re interested. Already you see the ability to attack and scare innocent people, but we also see that you can destroy Shinto shrines that exist even today. This is a biproduct of game mechanics, a destructive environment, and maybe not intentional. This probably could, and should, be fixed because this is one case where maybe your hero shouldn’t have this option. Villain, maybe, but it’s strange to see Yasuke pray in the same temple area he’s going on a rampage in. It’s also odd to watch a giant black man play Spider-Man in samurai armor, but I don’t know how heavy that stuff is. I watched parts of the full footage (which features said parkour moment among other in-progress gameplay) and this is when the two protagonists are allies. You know the gamers who are only going to play this game to laugh at it might do that unless they’re more culturally sensitive than the people behind the game–but it really pissed off the caretakers of that shrine.

I’m working with Google Chrome’s translation so take it for what it’s worth, but the Japanese news site The Sankei Shimbun reported that the caretakers would be seeking some kind of pushback against this desecration of their shrine, virtual or otherwise.

There is only one month left until the scheduled release of French company Ubisoft’s game “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows” on March 20th. Set in Japan during the Warring States period, one of the main characters is a black man named Yasuke who served Oda Nobunaga. The game has attracted attention due to growing concerns that unreliable details, such as Yasuke’s portrayal as a strong samurai, could be spread abroad as historical fact, but now suspicions have emerged that real temples and shrines have been featured in the game without permission. In particular, when a video of Yasuke entering a shrine and destroying the altar was released on a video streaming site, criticism arose on social media. A representative from the shrine told Sankei Shimbun, “We will take appropriate action.”

The shrine in question is “Harima Province Sosha Itatehyozu Shrine” (Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture), which is said to have a history of over 1,400 years. As the release date approached, YouTubers began releasing early gameplay footage of Shadows on streaming sites one after another, and a video of Yasuke rampaging through the shrine and destroying objects placed there with his sword became a hot topic. In the English version, the location was displayed as “itatehyozu Shrine.” This was only a video of the player operating in this way, but at least in the early game software, it seems that the interior of the shrine can be “destroyed.” On social media, there were reactions such as “It’s a terrible disrespect for Japanese culture,” “It’s an insult to Shinto,” and “It’s insensitive.”

When asked if they had received any prior contact from UBI regarding the use of the game, the shrine’s representative expressed their displeasure, saying, “No. If there had been, we would have refused.” They declined to comment on the details of the “appropriate action,” but it is possible that they are requesting that the game be removed. A representative from the Association of Shinto Shrines, which has been rumored to be taking action on social media, denied this.

The article states that representatives from the shrine had not given permission for a lot of what was used, another cultural no-no, such as architecture, flags, and lanterns connected to the shrine, and that’s when they didn’t screw things up. Then of course there’s the historical inaccuracy.

Yasuke was a real person, but there are few historical documents remaining, so it is not possible to say for sure whether he was a samurai or not. Shadows is the first Assassin’s Creed game to be set in Japan, and UBI “adopted” Yasuke, rather than a Japanese person, as the main samurai. It is not uncommon for games based on Japanese history to use characters and stories that contradict historical fact, but there are already people overseas who believe that Yasuke was a “legendary samurai” who played brilliant roles in battles, and concerns have grown that an influential and popular game will help spread that belief, leading to an online petition calling for the game’s release to be canceled. “There is a lot of criticism from overseas fans, not just Japanese, who say ‘Japanese history should be respected,'” said a game industry insider.

Whatever the shrine’s caretaker do or don’t plan to do, one member of the Japanese government took to YouTube in order to voice his frustration and urge the current majority Liberal Democratic Party (and do NOT confuse them with the US’s liberal-dominated Democratic Party) to push to deal with this game by interviewing representatives of the shrine. You can let YouTube auto-translate in the captions but if you’ve used auto-translate on YouTube you know it’s not the best. The video’s title according to Chrome’s translation is “[Speak up] A game that tramples on the hearts of Japanese people: Takeshi Nagase (Hyogo Prefectural Assembly Member representing…” and there the title cuts off in English. Just in case you thought manga/anime titles were too long. This one doesn’t even fit the description.

Catch more from Nagase Takeshi Channel [Hyogo Prefectural Assembly Member, Liberal Democratic Party] on YouTube

So UbiSoft has gone from upsetting Japanese gamers and historians with a false history to play to their fellow culture warriors (pretending to do this in the name or “representation”, and telling Japan what their history is) to upsetting the government and religious sect–not that they care about the latter–over a game mechanic they should have double checked. At this point it doesn’t matter how good the story is when we know it’s historically inaccurate for the sake of playing to a group who probably won’t play the game anyway, or how good the game mechanics are when we know it wasn’t thought out when it comes to cultural sensitivity. I guess they pick and choose which culture to support. They went for the one that won’t care and continue to tick off the ones who absolutely care.

UbiSoft: finding new and exciting ways to screw up royally. This game has all the signs of only being played by reviewers and the few gamers they didn’t tick off. I don’t see many fans of the series or newcomers getting this game except to trash it, and it’s too far along to just drop given how much they’ve dumped into it. Maybe they’ll be surprised…but I rather doubt it at this point. Hopefully they’ll remember all this if they ever attempt another game in this franchise and put the right people on it. If not, this may become another dead franchise.