The re-imagined Yatsuke, a former slave turned retainer returned to his slave owners under the next regime, as featured in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, and the source of the game’s continuing controversy.
If you already know this story, yes, that article title is a pun.
I really do try to avoid the internet drama. I want to see the end product, but the creative process is also fascinating. What’s happening now as Ubisoft continues to commit the public relations version of a kamikaze run with Japan over Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is a fascinating train wreck of mistake after mistake in an effort to continue the historically inaccurate narrative that Yasuke was some great black samurai when he basically carried the weapons, less Tiger Woods and more Tiger Woods’ caddy.
As fans want to be playing ninjas in a game where ninjas are practically the inspiration for the player character in previous games, they instead get some scenes with a female ninja (rare but likely enough to not raise too many eyebrows) and a hulking (for Japan) samurai, but it’s the treatment of that “samurai” that has gotten Ubisoft in continuing trouble, and their latest blunder with a little statuette and recent response to the Tokyo Game Show…by avoiding it…is doing a lot of eyebrow raising.
Some of you may call this choice controversial, if not for sociopolitical reasons then for his cursing, but Az of the YouTube channel HeelvsBabyface has a really good compilation of every mistake that has come along in this game and in other recent Ubisoft releases, except he missed one (see, that’s an IGN link: political affiliations be damned around here–I look at stories) involving the appropriation of fan-created flags treated as real life historical feudal era Japan flags for an art book. In other words, whether we’re talking the game itself or the promotional and licensed material Ubisoft can’t help but fail at this project time and again. Az has the rest of it, though.
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