BW Media Spotlight

UbiSoft is not making a lot of friends with their latest Assassin’s Creed game. In the name of diversity–in the game set in Japan–they took a long-awaited ninja story, shoved in the only black “samurai” (or rather the shogun’s short-time retainer), and tried to turn the caddy into Tiger Woods. Even focusing on the woman ninja as the second player character hasn’t garnered too many negative reactions, because the kunoichi were something that happened in Japan in the feudal period. Still, this has been enough of an issue that Japanese gamers are now petitioning UbiSoft to change their minds rather than let this bit of cultural appropriation, or maybe we should call it historical appropriation, hit the shelves. Basically you’d have a better chance selling an XBox in Japan than you would Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. I’m talking the original XBox.

If that wasn’t enough of a problem for the company, one of the designers for a planned but dropped mobile game also set in Japan dropped what he was planning. The creator is currently only known on XTwitter (not associated with XBox) by the name of his current project, @InfintaleComic. Confirmed by Bounding Into Comics to have been working at Aeria Game Studio (now going by Gamigo because changing game company names never confuses anyone), the otherwise unnamed creator laid out the plans for this mobile game, which would have set Assassin’s Creed finally in Japan. It’s probably not where the hardcore gamers, who usually treat mobile games as an insult because media snobbery is everywhere, would have wanted and despite the earlier snark I don’t necessarily blame them. If you’re playing as one of the assassins guild members as part of one of the most famous group of assassins, even though ninjas didn’t do as much assassinating as people and Hollywood think, you want all the controls on the big TV, now what your phone or tablet can get away with.

I was just going to post his tweet but it doesn’t want to embed with the full story. So I’m going to have to copy/paste it all in.

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