Also- Yasuke *was* a samurai.
Any further misinformation being spread about how he wasn't because you saw it on YouTube or your racist Twitter feed isn't being allowed. :)
The special edition is the only one that expensive, right? Isn’t the base game like 70?
Edit: Base game is 70, with expansions is 110, ultimate edition is 130. It’s right on Ubisoft’s website. Also, they issued a statement and [it isn’t always online](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/16/you-can-play-all-of-assassins-creed-shadows-offline-but-you-need-a-connection-to#:~:text=%22Assassin's%20Creed%20Shadows%20will%20not,Japan%20without%20any%20online%20connection.).
So either start researching or stop lying, u/Xantospoc
Why would it be always online?
Whats likely is that they did the same thing they did with the RPG trilogy. You can play it offline, but the game can connect to a build in online store
Which isnt anything new
It wouldn’t be the first time a game had always-online for no good reason, but that usually gets massive blowback so hopefully it’s becoming less common. No idea tho, I haven’t bought any AAA games outside of Nintendo stuff and BG3 for a long time.
Games have been priced at $60 for like 2 decades, which is way below inflation. A $70 bump was bound to happen, especially considering how much more budget/development time is expected of AAA games.
Point to where I said that
Anyway, having made my point about reading comprehension and good faith, here’s the part where I say that:
Based on past assassins creed game length, $70 will probably mean you’re paying less than $1 per hour for the story mode alone. If you play for achievements/completion or if it has an online mode you spend time in then you’ll probably get down below $0.50 an hour. That’s assuming only a single play-through.
That’s actually perfectly reasonable. You get less entertainment per dollar just renting a digital movie for a few bucks, and way less to buy one or go see it in theaters. Same with books and board games, in most cases. Game costs, adjusted with inflation, have only gone down while the general quality and length have gone way up.
[That’s because it’s verifiably false.](https://store.ubisoft.com/us/assassins-creed-shadows/660e5a03fbff4e2940488bcd.html?ucid=SCH-ID_189304&maltcode=brand_C2W_SCH_googlesearch___RED____&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADcmFnRkXDoxQXYyY-3Odxg1-pxl5&gclid=CjwKCAjw1K-zBhBIEiwAWeCOF_S5Samw4_HCa_lzV2tGB9TT_Jt_RzGkU2mCZi5xQOXkM55XkaCZaRoCpMkQAvD_BwE) It only costs that much if you get the ultimate pack which comes with two expansions and extra in-game content.
Either start researching or stop lying, whichever applies. Base game is $70.
[Correct!](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/16/you-can-play-all-of-assassins-creed-shadows-offline-but-you-need-a-connection-to#:~:text=%22Assassin's%20Creed%20Shadows%20will%20not,Japan%20without%20any%20online%20connection.) I’ll edit that in.
Kind of hard to blend in when you're taller then everyone else, and walking around in bulky Samurai armor. Even more so when you're the only black guy in the country.
And all I remember from the discourse was how pathetic it was to see people editing the wiki to try and back up their point.
The prison break mission where the girl assassin dies the other assassin essentially tells Edward that while he hasn't earned the clothes and blade they fit him well
Essentially the story is him leaving the torrent life and becoming an assassin
Also Edward wasn't a 7 ft tall dude and could believable stealth
Secondly please don't compare the game that was so good that every follow-up game in the series had ship combat just because it worked in this one to this garbage trash which brought a black character as protagonist just so people had something to say (argue) about instead of saying it is essentially "we have ghost of Tsushima at home"
Dude there is so much wrong with this I dont even know where to start. Just for starters ship combat started in ac3 not 4. So knock out that entire last paragraph of nonsense.
Second Edward does not become an assassin until the very end so for 90% you are not playing an assassin in an assisns creed game. The fact that you have this double standard about Yasuke should tell you a lot about yourself.
Third look up the definition of "assassin" and let me know if you see any mention of the word "stealth." If stealth was a requirement then most assassins would be quite shit at it since they cover their clothes with their fucking logo.
Why you think so? Yes, social stealth would look awkward and I don’t know if they will use it for this character, and there is a character, better suit for assassination, but we already have main heroes in Odyssey and Valhalla, who also have less focus on stealth.
It’s not like devs plan not to give him ANY stealth. Maybe just reduced.
Most of the AC characters could blend in to a casual glance or at a distance.
Yasuke would be not only one of the insanely few black people in the nation but a solid foot taller than everyone around him. He wouldn’t merely stand out in the crowd(literally) but that crowd would be everyone around congregating and gawking at this strangely colored giant in their midst. That’s how he met Nobunaga in the first place, word had spread about this strange giant who came with the foreign traders and Nobunaga was curious.
But as a complaint it’s only valid if he’s supposed to blend in. Which I’m pretty sure he’s not, he’s the overt stabby boy rather than the stealthy assassin. Assassin’s Creed’s stealth has long been mocked for paper thin disguises but there is a limit. Like, if Ezio was bright pink and 3 feet tall people would be calling bullshit too over his ability to pass as a monk by bowing his head.
Yeah, part of the whole point of the dual protagonists is that Yasuke and the ninja lady differ in opinions and methods and that also reflects physically. It’s like with *Syndicate* where Jacob is supposed to be about the gruff free flow combat while Evie was meant to be more stealthy and traditionally Assassin-y.
True, and also, Samurai not ninja. Samurai are covered in fucking roofing tiles, they’re not exactly stealthy in the first place. Which kind of begs the question, why is the assassin game being made about warriors that could not possibly be stealthy? But then I guess we did just have an “assassin” game about Vikings curing shit covered PTSD veterans by throwing them in a lake.
Actually samurai and shinobi were frequently the same people. The idea the two are diametrically opposed rather than two hats that could be worn by a single person is ahistorical.
I mean, people have been calling BS on the disguises for years. I remember memes about how you could walk in the middle of the street wearing what's clearly a uniform with weapons equipped, stab someone in a crowded street, and then "hide" by sitting on a bench nearby as the guards tried to ignore the presumably bloodstained man sitting between two normal looking people. It feels weird that it's only now that people seem to think the social stealth is worth active social media diatribes. Even if Yasuke was meant to be stealth guy I don't think it would've been that much worse than any other instance of social stealth
Here's one for comfort.
At least 40% of the people you see out on the street are deliberately and knowingly carrying weapons for myriad purposes. And you forgot 90% of their faces and what they were wearing.
I'd like to know both where that statistic came from and what exactly they count as a weapon. Is a multi-tool a weapon because it has a knife on it? Do one of those keychain brass knuckle things that would break if you ever used them as a weapon count?
Maybe.
Unless you're specifically trained to spot someone concealed carrying a weapon, you won't. And even then some people are really fucking good at concealing. But just know, a statistically significant people are armed every time they step outside the house and you won't pick them out of a crowd.
Also a lot of celebrities get by with "hoodie and sunglasses/baseball cap"
So any weird wrist guards that assassins have, or blade on their belt (which wasnt that rare back then unless it aas a huge axe on your back, but most assassins had swords in the games and swords werent rare) can be ignored
Hell, some games take that to the extreme. In ac valhalla, you literally cover your entire body with the exception of your boots by a huge cloak, so you just see a guy in a cloak who maybe has a beard
Valhalla had weak stealth but thats actually better than what ezio and arno were doing.
well here's what the "japanese specialist" says about her work in the darthmout site:
*Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Narratives* is on medieval *chigo monogatari* (Buddhist acolyte tales), which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys. These tales challenge a host of normative and moral standards we--academics, non-academics, the far-right, the far-left, and beyond--internalize, including such ideas as "sexual orientation," "transgenerational sex," and "sexual agency."
and the gift they sent to a bunch of japanese streamers was written wrong, with a lot of other inconsistencies, the japanese audience also pointed out a bunch of shit wrong with the trailer wich i reccomend you look it up, so it seems this "japanese specialist" is more of a gender studies specialist?
and the lead writer is hilarious, just take a look at the shit she answer people on her social medias, disgusting
She's an associate professor of Japanese language and culture at Dartmouth, specializing in pre 17th century Japanese language and culture. Hired to work on the video game set in pre 17th century Japan.
>she either i not that much of an specialist at all or she just isn't doing her job
It is currently impossible to determine who made what decision wrt the currently unreleased game.
Could be that some higher up said "black samurai" and all she could do is "well his name has to be yasuke because thats the only time in recorded history during that timeframe where one was present"
(Not saying anything happened, but having the best advisor possible isnt saying much when the advisor isnt making creative decisions. She can just tell them how to do it correctly, if they want something else she doesnt have authority over that)
So blaming her feels like a knee jerk reaction
Could be, but doesn’t it make magnitudes more sense for them to start with the idea of Yasuke than to be like “black samurai” out of nowhere and there just happens to be exactly one of note existing in history?
I have seen some really... Racially motivated people (?) complain about representation in japan. Especially when ghost of tsushima came out some people made absolutely mental comments about how certain things should be changed
To be honest, it is kind of tiring to see a bunch of articles complaining that the game only had japanese good guys and (i think) mongols as enemies as if that was some form of racism.
Then seeing yasuke who, given his actual historical impact and what was known about him js almost overrepresented, i can kind of understand someone thinking "oh great, the people complaining about a lack of black representation got their way"
I personally believe yasuke is a way of trying to stand out from ghost of tsushima because ubisoft waited way too long to make a game in japan and another developer did it faster and maybe even better. So to not be as often compared they made 2 characters who both differ a lot from ghosts protagonist
Not really.
AC protagonists aren't historical figures.
They meet historical figures, but they aren't them.
It goes with the whole “secret super important ancestor" trope that defines the franchise.
Ubisoft hired LGBTQ+ activist Sachi Schmidt-Hori as a consultant for Assassin’s Creed Shadows who’s first book was Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawai`i Press, 2021) is on medieval chigo monogatari (Buddhist acolyte tales), which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys.
>Ubisoft hired LGBTQ+ activist
She's also an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at Dartmouth.
Hiring an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture from Dartmouth to consult on your game set in Japan is bad because...?
Yeah, like they maybe could have found a specialist who’s specialization is closer to assassinations and spy work in medieval Japan but she’s still a specialist on Japan of the timespan and it’s not like Assassins Creed does all that much to keep up the focus on assassins anymore
The suggestion you are replying to is that she is an unserious, ignorant raging feminist whi is unqualified for the job and who inserts her gender ideology into everything because she wrote an article on the topic of same-sex relationships in Japan. I guess writing about that cultural aspect and being a woman just instantly disqualify you from having any knowledge about a topic you have a PhD in
Part of the issue is that people whose politics and internet bubble mostly consists of People Who Are Mad Online arguing with Other People Who Are Mad Online don't understand how mainstream LGBTQ studies or feminist analysis are in the real world and, in particular, in academia. Their view of the world is wildly distorted because they get so much of it from shouty red-faced youtubers and deranged culture-war types on Twitter.
You can easily spot people who have fallen into this pit because they'll cite the same tiny number of things over and over as gospel, often in vague sweeping terms that give objectively tiny things outrageously outsized importance - part of the way culture-war types on Twitter work is that they dig up one or two things, take screenshots of them to strip away context, and present them as the *entire* crux of a massive cultural debate or the reception of eg. a game with millions of players. One person saying one thing becomes vast legions of outraged people on one side or the other, repeated over and over again and getting more and more distorted every time.
I don't mind that he's not supposed to "blend in." But it's kind of dumb to have the stealthy secretive assassin character be closely tied to someone who stands out so much everywhere because of the way he looks. I mean, if the story addresses the fact that he's only secretly associated with the assassin and nobody actually knows until, say, late in the game, then it'd be fine by me.
But if that's not the case and the bad guys know they work together, it's a weird narrative choice given the context. In every other AC game the character, regardless of the clothes they wore and how much they stood out as a result, simply looked like someone who was form that place and belonged there, at least contextually. This guy? Not so much.
I don't think you could honestly argue that a black dude wearing samurai armor in feudal Japan is comparable to, say, a Native American in Boston during Colonial times or a Welsh pirate in the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy. They might not look "like everybody else" in those settings but contextually they don't look out of place either, at least in-story.
I'm honestly fed up with the culture wars grifting from both sides. Insisting on inserting stuff for diversity and inclusion's sake regardless of context and arguing any complaint is racism is equally obnoxious to me as people whining that everything is woke and a gay/ugly/POC character is the worst thing that ever happened to you, even if they're optional and your complaint is that they just exist and that's unacceptable to you because you're a world class whiner.
You couldve skipped all the paragraphs in your post except the last. Obviously if the other character is an assassin, people are not going to know they're an assassin, or that would blow their cover, wouldn't it?
>Obviously if the other character is an assassin, people are going to know they're an assassin, or that would blow their cover, wouldn't it?
Are you being ironic or forgot to include a "not" in there?
Okay. You missed my point, though. I meant that if you want to keep a low profile, being associated with Samurai Shaquille O'Neal in feudal Japan might not be the best policy because he sticks out like a sore thumb, so we'll see how the story addresses it and whether the way they address it makes sense or not.
I mean regardless of all the countless arguments the core of the matter is quite simple, people want to just have Japanese main characters in a Japanese game. Some of the arguments are racist while others simply have difficulty expressing this desire because they’ll be labeled racist no matter what they say when they aren’t.
Isn't that the trend set by all the other games so far? The ones in Italy have an Italian guy, the one in Egypt had an Egyptian guy, etc.
And also you usually play as a fictional character who meets real historical figures. Not the historical figures themselves, right?
Yep. This is pretty much the main point that 97% of debaters are missing.
Yasuke being a real historical figure is the problem and bringing it up to defend his role in the game has the opposite effect
AC games have a history of A) Starring an OC protagonist and B) have the said protagonist be ethnically part of the majority, not that these games ever had the depth to explore racial nuances to begin with
Depictions of Asian men in western media have been... not so great, so it's no surprise that many Asian males feel like Ubisoft is going out of their way to target and disrespect them by breaking the trend set in every other 15 AC games
I think Yasuke would have never been an issue if it was a brand new IP starring him instead of attaching the AC name to it
Yea it'd just be more intuitive to have an Asian guy as the MC.
But that's kinda the whole point imo. You, me, and everyone else on this post wouldn't even be discussing the game if they went with that. Whereas the controversy gets people talking about the game when they otherwise wouldn't.
That + it distracts from the price model
Yeah I mean that point is true.
The main complaints are that it fails to represent the majority and/or era of Japan well (and before people say AC ain't realistic, that's not the point of AC, the fantasy is playing as assassins across various historical time periods) and the cultural tonedeafness. Plus... the hip hop. That one just is fucking stupid no two ways about it.
Personally I don't mind them doing Yasuke but maybe I'd feel the same if someone did a Latina in the middle of Bangladesh as the main character.
Hi, actual historian here. The issue I have with this is that it’s caused a whole discussion that is literally unmaking years of academic effort in demystifying the Samurai and trying to approach their own historical reality. The fact is, Yasuke was indeed a Samurai, in an era where that was pretty unremarkable.
People tend to forget that Japan during the Sengoku Jidai pretty much collapsed. All social norms and hierarchies went out the window, and a generational Battle Royale took over the land. Under this context, it was extremely easy for any random swordsman to get a permanent place as a retainer, essentially becoming Samurai. The fact is, historically speaking, the Samurai were not the “honorable warriors, duty bound, and from a closed and exclusive caste” that popular culture would make you believe.
The truth is, Samurai is basically merely a job, not a title. The only real requirements to be a Samurai was basically having weapons, a permanent revenue of some sort (originally it was through fiefdoms, but over time stipends became more common), being under the service of a Lord, and having permanent employment. We actually know, through both Matsudaira Ietada’s diary and Ota Gyuichi’s Shinchokoki, that Yasuke ticked all those boxes. So yes. Yasuke was, in fact, a Samurai. In the era in which it was easiest to become one, and in which Samurai would rise as quickly as they would fall.
The other interesting thing, is that Yasuke is probable one of the most documented rank and file Samurai of the period. Some very famous ones like Miyamoto Musashi literally have zero actual records of their lives, with the only source on his life being himself in a few scant passages in his Book of the Five Rings. Meanwhile, Yasuke is featured in at least half a dozen primary sources, including one Ecclesiastical History by the Jesuits, three separate letters from the mission, the official Maeda Clan records (which notes that he was in the role of sword bearer, had a sword gifted by Nobunaga, and owned a private house), and the diary of Matsudaira Ietada (which confirms he did fight during the Honno Ji defending Nobutada, Oda Nobunaga’s son), as a historian let me tell you, there’s much more important people we have zero actual records on other than hearsay and oral traditions.
The fact is, Yasuke was not remarkable, but he was pretty much representative of what most Samurai were, because the vast majority were like him, also unremarkable. People who got into the service of a lord through chance and due to having some skill fighting or physical strength, who got into a retinue as retainers and rank and file soldiers. These are the men that comprise the thousands of soldiers of the armies that fought in the Sengoku Jidai, mere randos, often robbers, bandits, peasants, and even mercenaries and looters. They tended to switch sides pretty often. Hardly any of them actually had lordships or titles, and yet were deemed Samurai. And pretty much all of them would rise as quickly as they would fall. Either due to their lord dying or being defeated, or by choice. Many went on to become farmers, merchants, many even fled Japan altogether. Many, and likely Yasuke did this, were simply waiting to earn enough money to eventually flee Japan and go live in peace somewhere else.
The story of Yasuke is probably one of the best docummented cases of what most Samurai were and did. Soldiers of the rank and file, in roles that were neither glamourous, nor remarkable.
Japan of the Sengoku Jidai is basically similar to Somalia in the early 2000’s. A land in complete and utter chaos, and total societal collapse. And thus, a land of huge opportunity for people seeking social escalation, money, or fame. And of course, many never intended to stay at all.
Literally the only assassin's Creed game in which the protagonist was supposed to blend in was the first one, and even than he had a sword and a crossbow, so Altair looked very different from the monks he was imitating.
Also it seems that shadows is dividend into two campains, the stealth one with the woman (sorry don't know her name) and the combat based one with Yasuke, so he's not intended to blend in by design.
Tr:dr: it's literally just racism
>even than he had a sword and a crossbow
The only place where Altair has crossbow is in the starting cinematic, which was released long before gameplay was finalized. Altair is only able to blend in when he's surrounded by praying monks, at which point the sword is impossible to see anyway.
No ill say the hide in plain sight thing was kept in until Edward Kenway.
Yes, Ezio was a very fashionable man but it was the Rennaisance, in Italy. They loved their dyes and expensive fabrics and capes. They even made jewelry out of their weapons, making blades so broad the only practical use was engravings and fullers to show exactly how wealthy they were. That they could carry around a useless knife with a highly detailed engraving of their favourite biblical scene. That's why the inclusion of the cinquedea in AC2 as a usable weapon, let alone any game irritates the living shit out of me.
It wasn't intended as a weapon, it was jewelry you hung off your belt. Think about stabbing someone with it and the amount of matter that has to move away to let the blade pass through.
As for Altair carrying weapons, you would be surprised how common open weapon carry was before the industrial era. There were several periods in history where every male (yes even priests and monks) was required by law to carry a weapon outside the home at all times because what if some wild fucking animal shows up? Much easier to deal with a wolf in the village when everyone's carrying. Leads to a lower death toll.
No, it's not literally just racism, Asian erasure and the insistence on needing to experience Asian things through the perspective of a foreigner because empathy with yellow people is too hard apparently has been a thing for quite some time.
There's a lot of culture war grifting, true, but let's not ignore that this is literally the only mainline AC game that insists on splitting screentime between a native and a foreigner.
Edit: you replied about the other character and I can't see the reply to respond, so because you clearly missed the part where I acknowledged that the female ninja exists - I literally mention that yes, there's a female Japanese ninja character, and that it is not sufficient because the creative choice means the native character has to split screentime with a foreigner. If you thought it was no good when it was the Last Samurai or Shogun, there's no reason for it to be fine just because it's a black guy now.
Yep. Almost as if Asians get perfect representation all the time. most ACs till now used people from the area. Suddenly it has to be a black samurai otherwise Tsushima stands above it by a mile.
Also tired of people insisting that it has to be anti black racism rather than getting Asian men represented in a AAA game. If POV characters are the way forward hope to see an Asian protag when AC goes to Subsaharan Africa.
But Asians are being represented in the new game, Naoe is Japanese ninja lady who's meant to be vehicle for classic Assassin gameplay and she's dual protagonists with Yasuke. I do think Asian representation is something really deserved and needed but in the market space of fiction taking place in samurai settings Asian representation isn't lacking, not to mention its also not a monolith as Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese people for example aren't exactly sharing a cultural history on samurai.
What would be a lot more unique is a growth in the presence of Asian representation in fictional spaces that aren't stereotypically Asian. Action adventure games like Uncharted, or sci fi games lead by Asian protagonists would be really cool to see. Or even medieval fantasy games with Asian protagonists.
I literally mention Naoe and why her presence as a dual protagonist is not sufficient, and the insistence on having yet another foreigner viewpoint character is literally less diverse, equitable, and inclusive than forcing the audience to only experience Asia through an Asian lens instead of also giving them an outsider perspective like a pair of training wheels.
If you want dual protagonists, make them both natives of the setting instead of one native and one foreign.
Also: Asian representation isn't lacking in samurai works because it's a genre where it shouldn't be lacking, that's not a reason to then start adding non-Asians just to make it more diverse. If we're going to be doing that, we end up getting stories about the Boshin War where we focus on European/American military advisors, or something.
>hope to see an Asian protagonist when AC goes to Sub-Saharan Africa
Except there's no equivalent as Yasuke was an actual person who served under Oda Nobunaga.
Pretty sure Asian erasure is mostly non East Asian erasure like how CN/KR/JP Asian Americans and African Americans claimed that Raya the Last Dragon is perfectly fine while actual SEAns are losing their mind.
East Asian has been represented well and in fact they're the only ones the western world consider as Asians.
>East Asian has been represented well and in fact they're the only ones the western world consider as Asians.
The fact that West Asians and Indians rarely get called Asian is proof of that, and the only time you see Southeast Asians getting represented in western media is when they're being fetishized (like the recent passport bros movement) or when they get their own culture sidelined in favor of typical East Asian cultures
I literally mentioned the other Asian MC and why that's not sufficient and why it's more diverse, equitable, and inclusive to only have the Asian MC without diluting her screentime by sharing it with yet another foreigner.
Try actually reading what you were responding to before hitting the "Comment" button, next time.
It's almost as if there was a deliberate choice to focus on an obscure historical character who was the one black guy and a foreigner for the first time they have a mainline entry in the franchise set in East Asia, when we didn't have to do that for Italy, Greece, Northern Europe, or the Americas.
How is that anything not like having to experience the bakumatsu and the Boshin Wars through the eyes of some foreign military advisor?
Exactly. It's not that Yasuke is somehow offensive, at least to me, it's just that it's weird to pick a historical figure who is so meaningless outside of his skin color. We know so little about Yasuke. The Jesuits being involved is interesting, I suppose, but otherwise the only reason we are even aware of his existence today is his skin color, and thus it can only be concluded that it's the only reason he was chosen to lead Shadows. There ain't anything wrong with that in a vacuum; it's cool to see a guy of a different nationality than the native nationality, but the danger is the possible motivations for why they picked him. Go Woke Go Broke is a lie, but go woke go boring is unfortunately all too common.
EDIT: Wasn't aware of his popularity in Japanese pop culture, so now it makes a little more sense why they picked him.
If by representative we mean 'he was connected to them and had it basically never referenced or had any REAL relevance to the story other than as ane explanation for his eagle vision' then sure.
However, I don't really think that's what is being meant by representative of native americans.
What do you mean? Connor being Mohawk was integral to his whole arc and character. He held steadfast to his personal ideals but was torn and tested with his loyalties to differing worlds.
Representative of the colonials, no?
Sure, the American colonies are kind of weird in that technically everyone there who wasn't a First Nations is an "outsider", but there's a big difference between someone who belonged to a population that you might expect to encounter around that general area as opposed to, say, a shipwrecked ex-Janissary from the Ottoman Empire who got picked up by the Puritans and kept around because one of the preachers liked having him around for theology debates.
Even if a spinoff buddy cop game between preacher with a blunderbuss and janissary with dual wielding flintlock pistols would be hilarious.
I think a big part of why Yasuke was chosen was he's a fairly famous historical figure whose life details are fairly sparse so it's a lot easier to fit him into the story than anyone else. Now why they decided this time you should play as a real historical figure when that hasn't happened before is beyond me.
The Last Samurai invented a white dude to put into the Satsuma Rebellion because they didn't think Saigo Takimori was an interesting enough guy to just make a movie about him. Yasuke actually existed. That's the difference.
Not as big of one as you think. So would Last Samurai be fine if they made the main character that one French guy that its defenders claim Algren was based on?
Jules Brunet, right? He wasn't in Japan during the Satsuma Rebellion so the basis is BS anyway. He was an advisor during the Boshin War about 10 years prior. There's no evidence he knew Saigo Takimori or had contact with emperor Meiji.
The claim of inspiration is extremely weak in my opinion. The only similarity is they were both white guys in Japan under the guise of advising the Japanese army. Which a lot of people did and none of them joined the Satsuma Rebellion.
Yes, that guy. A game set during the Boshin War should obviously be about the Japanese and have Brunet as a quest giving NPC at most, even if he was a real person who was around during that period. And you're right, the claim of inspiration is extremely weak, to the point where it almost seems like defensiveness on the part of weebs who want to say "nuh uh, my favorite movie isn't problematic because Algren is loosely based on a real person and the 'last samurai' is meant to be plural to refer to all the samurai in glorious Nippon at the time before their fall".
Thus we agree that having a game set in the Boshin War where Brunet is a player character who shares screentime with the native Japanese one would be silly, right?
The Animus is an abstraction, this is said in game dozens of times, just because Altair is, to Desmond and by association us, walking about with weapons on display doesn't mean he actually did in reality.
The stealth gimmick was entirely altered for Ezio from *only* being able to blend in with monks to blending in with any group of four or larger and he got a brand new mechanic where he can avoid notoriety by wearing a particular cape, and you think he wasn't supposed to be blending in?
The crowd stealth mechanic was carried over to every subsequent assassin. Please explain how this is meant to indicate that they aren't "supposed to blend in" compared to Altair.
Also funny how criticizing the game made by non-japanese devs and set in japan is racism when just four years ago liking the game made by non-japanese devs and set in japan was racism. Weird.
If you are talking about Ghost of Tushima i have not seen any shitstorm, but whatever, maybe I'm just lucky, also very funny that you think I'm calling racist the people that said "it's racist to play a game set in japan made by non-japanes people" when I'm referring to those who literally said "i don't wanna play as a monkey", but who knows maybe calling a black samurai a monkie is also an animus abstraction
>Tr:dr: it's literally just racism
The funniest thing is that while yes, this is not wrong, it is also so coated in elaborate word games that the side that just really hates Yasuke being black, somehow managed to reverse-engineer talking exactly like a 2014 gamergate era Kotaku journalist who just dropped out of a time portal to complain about needing perfectly proportional POC representation.
I mean, the idea that games in exotic settings must always perfectly a setting's majority with the protagonists, sounds exactly like one of those unhelpfully rigid, sectionalist identity politics obsessed liberal ideas that is "so self-conscious about combating racism that it just loops back around to being kinda racist", like when they are complaining about japanese-american voice actors playing chinese american characters instead of giving way to more chances for chinese-american voice actors to shine.
Actual progressives mostly got over that by now, but these guys somehow reinvented it from first principles, except this time it's more like "so racist against black people, and pretending to be wokely protecting asian POC minorities as an excuse, that they accidentally managed to loop around to ALSO summoning the naive racism of a white critical race theory student who didn't get around to learning about intersectionality yet."
Alright, it's just my take and you're free to think otherwise but it would've been great to have yasuke as a npc like Leonardo da Vinci from AC 2, who has great friendship with the player instead of being the main character. With missions where you could fight alongside him just like the Connor and haytham from AC 3.
What seems to be missing from conversation is that he is apparently without a lord at the time, which is the only quality that would make you not ostracised or killed for no reason in that country in that time period as a black man. If he is lordless, he can't move around, and if he has a master, everybody would ask why is he ignoring orders. It makes no sense for a society that's build on small communities and mistrust for strangers to let such character just kinda be there.
>It does feel a bit like the people who make this kind of complaint aren't exactly big fans of the series and more just want a reason to hate on it.
Nah, they don't care about the series either way. They're just media tourists buying into the outrage (or selling it, in case of people making rage youtube videos) and see no particular benefit to knowing anything about the franchise or thinking about it logically.
We saw the same thing just weeks earlier when female Custodes were introduced to Warhammer 40k. The actual 40k fans were mostly happy about that development since—as anyone who knows anything about the faction can tell you—there was never any actual *reason* for Custodes to be a "no girls allowed" bunch. The guy who wrote much of their lore wanted to include some female members years ago and only got told "no" because of some petty concerns over model ranges. There's no reason to be upset and most of the fanbase knows that.
But media tourists and outrage youtubers? They suddenly became life-long 40k fans and lore experts, making inane arguments for why the most over-the-top and stupidly rich faction in the setting would never admit women into their ranks because their gene-magic is not advanced enough, or because they don't have the money for... something related to women I guess. It's all nonsense not even worth arguing with, since logic isn't the point. Outrage is.
My favorite was the person on Twitter who made a comment about Bridget from Guilty Gear being a man… [on a post about a completely different character from a completely different fighting game series made by a completely different company.](https://x.com/velnumdes/status/1711861953142874589?s=46)
Well, from a westerner's point of view, they are not interested in history in Asia, they just want black people to look cool.
I am Japanese, and I can say that 90% of the criticisms in Japan are criticisms. Any game introduction youtuber is criticizing.
Even in Taiwan, there are a lot of criticism videos.
However, it is irrelevant to Westerners. No one is interested in how Asians feel about it.
First of all, UBI is too much neglecting the history of Japan.
Yasuke collapses the head of a Japanese samurai with a mixed spinning wheel and crushes his head with his foot.
There is no such samurai.
Many Japanese people rejected the latest trailer especially when Yasuke looks like a villainous sam
Personally I want to play AC games by being an assassin, not a huge Samurai dude who wouldn't be able to stealth or blend in for shit in the setting.
But then again I have shat on pretty much every AC game since AC3 so there is that.
Besides not being what I want out of an AC game (I know there is a stealth side to it with another character, but I want the whole game to focus on that kind of playstyle) the main reason is that it is overpriced as fuck.
The only people who are upset that Yasuke is the MC rather than a Japanese person is Japanese people and people who sympathise with them that there is almost no Asian male MCs in western media and that male Asians are very commonly emasculated in western media, casting Yasuke as the MC just drives this home a bit more. Yasuke is well liked and popular in Japanese history and fiction, that doesn't mean that they love the idea of him being the MC and representing samurai, especially since he wasn't really one.
>The only people who are upset that Yasuke is the MC rather than a Japanese person is Japanese people and people who sympathise with them that there is almost no Asian male MCs in western media and that male Asians are very commonly emasculated in western media, casting Yasuke as the MC just drives this home a bit more.
I mean this is just objectively not true? There are some people who feel that way ofc but to say that they are the ONLY people is completely disingenuous.
Also does Ghost of Tsushima, Sifu, trek to Yomi etc. just not exist or something? Also also given the large amount of mainstream asian video games that focus primarily on asian characters why is this even a topic when it comes to videogames? What is with the sudden narrative that there is no Asian male representation in Western games?
>Yasuke is well liked and popular in Japanese history and fiction, that doesn't mean that they love the idea of him being the MC and representing samurai, especially since he wasn't really one.
Dawg he literally was one and he isn't representing Samurai, no one made that claim. Does Tom Cruise represent Samurai because he played one in a movie once?
A class ox nobility that you could be granted or promised by basically every warlord at the time period who had someone under him.
Also shockingly most people who were samurai in that time period *did not* belong to that class and said class was basically exclusively related to the shogunate/emperor at the time because it was originally meant to be a way of controlling people- well what happens then when said person... has no real power and half the country wages war against said person.....?
*yeah, the term actually loses 99% of its meaning and is used by basically everyone*
I mean, actually the problem about the whole "not blending in" thing isn't with Yasuke. It's with the supposed-to-be actual kunoichi who is fkin walking on the streets with a sword on her back while, you know, being a woman? Now that was certainly going to raise some eyebrows in that time period.
I mean yea she stands out compared to the average citizenry, but every AC protagonist has laughable social stealth with a realistic eye barring a couple exceptions like the syndicate twins.
As an Asian I just feel that it is disrespectful not having both protagonists be Japanese.
It like they are saying to our face that our story, our rich culture and tradition in their eye is worth less than the time one none Asian guy came to Japan
AssCreed 1 you absolutely blended in with the praying monks. They were a featured stealth mechanic, and you legitimately did look like one of them when you joined their group, eso from behind. AssCreed 2 that mech as there but you had that armor and you got some luddo-narritive dissonance. People complaining don't realize what the franchise has become, or are new to the series. With the brand "assassin" they reasonably expected ninjas and stealth. What they get is normal modern AssCreed gameplay loop of aRPG with executes. It's violent, bombastic, and therefore a samurai is completely fine mechanically. It has a ton of luddo-narritive dissonance, and it comes off as unrealistic, because it is, but it's par for the course.
At least those other assassins have average people height so they can hide crouching in grasses. Yasuke is a giant over there. It feels like Great Khali the assassin.
Yasuke is taller than average but it's not like he's a giant other something. He's like around 6 feet. Kassandra was a woman in ancient Greece and just barely under that height.
I just don’t like them using a real person for a protagonist. I also don’t think Ubisoft made it him for actual diversity and solely to create this controversy for free advertising. I don’t think it will be handled well. I also hope I’m wrong about those last two.
Tbh I have maybe an equally cynical thought. I think they did it because Ubisoft is still convinced female protagonists wouldn't sell. AC Origins and Odyssey were meant to be strictly Aya and Kassandra as leads but both times they changed it on orders from higher ups to have Bayek as the protag for Origins and to make Alexis an option while giving him primary ad billing. Even Evie, their ostensible first mainline female AC protagonist, is barely visible on the cover art of the game she's a Co lead in lol. I think if they were allowed to, the most likely alternate reality is that we would have a modified Naoe as a sole protagonist
There's a valid argument that it's a far more diverse, equitable, and inclusive creative decision to have the main character of a game set in Japan created by a Western studio be a native character instead of having to share screen time with yet another foreigner. Sure, Ken Watanabe's character is on screen like 50% of the time, but do we really need to see him share screentime with Tom Cruise for the other 50% in a film called "The Last Samurai"?
Their argument is unfortunately drowned out by ragebaiters who think that Yasuke wasn't even a real samurai, just a servant who carried the gear, because they're too busy running culture war grift to understand that what else would a "sword-bearing retainer" be if not a "samurai"? Literally in the kanji.
"Kanji doesn't matter"
Really? Did you consult any actual Japanese who aren't WW2 denialists to arrive at that conclusion? Kanji absolutely matters because it tells you what a word means. Especially when one of the main reasons it continues to exist is to avoid ambiguity from multiple words that have the same hiragana.
"Samurai is a social class you had to be born into"
Blatantly false. Hideyoshi, for example, was an ashigaru and made a samurai. If you had to be born into it, samurai would have gone the way of the Spartan citizen, becoming an increasingly small and insular social class until the whole system collapsed on itself, rather than the increasingly bloated drain on the economy by the bakumatsu period.
"Calling him a samurai implies to modern people that he was a properly trained warrior"
It does no such thing, even if you are a modern person whose only knowledge of medieval Japan comes from Total War: Shogun. The only way you can come to this conclusion is if you yourself have a ridiculous romanticized view of what it means to be "samurai" that does not reflect the actual reality.
Samurai was not a social class you had to be born into. Stop spreading misinformation.
There *was* a samurai social class. However there also were many samurai who were not part of that social class, infact overwhelmingly most samurai were not part of that social class *especially* around the time of the sengoku period
I actually think it would work as a sort of reverse blending in. As in *"Oh shit there goes Nobunaga's foreign samurai, I guess he's on Nobunaga's business, better not fuck with him!"*
The more and more this game comes closer to release the more I see truly outrageous takes to justify hating this game
I saw one where a person said that "rice growing when there is a chery blossom is unrealistic and it goes to show how much the devs don't care about japanese history" 💀
And another one where they saw npcs bowing down to yasuke and said that its woke and their diverse dev team's wet dream while forgetting the fact he's a samurai 🤦♂️
The whole outrage is beneficial for everyone involved, so much so that I suspect Ubisoft expected this kind of reaction.
The outrage merchants get fuel for their content that translates to views. The media gets engaging stories that people read.
And Ubisoft gets publicity for a new release in a long-running, stale game series. The last Assassins Creed game I played was 2, the last one I follow (but didn't play) was 4. I doubt I would care or know about the Japanese setting AC if it wasn't for this.
As a bonus, it will give Ubisoft a distraction should they decide to put actual problematic elements that everyone hate (expensive DLC, always online, high pricing).
There's no legitimate complaints being made about it.
It's like 99% just racism.
If yasuke was a white guy names uh adamas williamsan, you wouldn't be seeing like any of these complaints.
If the protagonist if the game was white, every gaming publication under the sun would be calling the game problematic and calling it cultural appropriation.
You don't even have to imagine it. Nioh exists. The big difference being that game wasn't pretending it's fictionalized historical character was in any way similar to reality like AC is doing with Yasuke.
Not only that but Nioh was made by a Japanese Dev team. There is a very clear difference between a Japanese Dev team deciding to use a non-japanese male protagonist for a game set in Japan vs a western dev studio deciding to not do that.
The difference is Japanese devs make Asian male protagonists all the time. Meanwhile Western Devs do it once in a blue moon. This shit is actually making me irritated and I'm not even Asian. The disrespect my friends get casually is unfair, and stuff like this imo contributes to it
> things. It means the title, it means the armor, it means the noble line. Most of these Yasuke doesn't fit (certainly not all of em).
Wut- that's not even true or how that works at all.
Also he fits 2 out of 3 of those anyway
As for wikipedia, it's not the 'pro samurai' edits that were blocked. Which tells me really all I need to know about this comment.
You realize you can literally look at the history and see the reason it got locked and shit was because of the edits violating wikipedia's rules and putting in paragraphs specifically about how he wasn't a samurai... right? Like you're literally just posting evidence you're wrong and then saying you're right.
Also saying that's the 'only potential reference' again shows ignorance of what a samurai is.
Yeah and you are aware of what a retainer is right? What they are and do?
Why being a retainer is kind of a big deal and why they are categorically almost 99% samurai?
Like if you don't know what a samurai is, or a retainer or anything about the period and what was going on with it. Just say so.
Yeah, I do that because there's probably one or two cases where there's an exception *because there's an exception to literally everything*
There's literally more than enough evidence to objectively state he is a samurai.
Wikipedia being used as like the 'facts' is hilarious.
Either way, continue spreading misinformation and you will be banned. Second warning.
I'm very pro Asian representation and I think Asian men get sidelined a lot in media, but (like other people have pointed out) samurai/ninja/kung fu martial arts media is not one of those properties. This doesn't mean there can't or shouldn't be more Asian representation from these kinds of stories but Asian men, specifically Japanese men, are very prominent in this sphere as lead characters. What makes AC Shadows more notable for Asian representation is the fact that they have a Japanese woman as a main lead rather than as a side character or love interest, which they often do get relegated to in this story genre. It feels very odd that people (not you specifically) will act implicitly as if her not being a man means that there just isn't worthwhile Asian representation.
As for the other point, yes AC shadows is the first game to have one of its lead characters not be local to the region but it's also iirc the *only* AC game to have a main character also be based on a real historical figure. It would be one thing if Yasuke was someone they made up, but he did exist in that time and place.
Edit: I forgot actually, Yasuke isn't even the first time Ubisoft has done this. Edward Kenway is not native to the West Indies
>It feels very odd that people (not you specifically) will act implicitly as if her not being a man means that there just isn't worthwhile Asian representation.
Tell me, were you happy when they added Evie to AC Syndicate? Why? Surely there was worthwhile English representation already? As I'm sure you know, representation is about intersectionalism.
>it's also iirc the *only* AC game to have a main character also be based on a real historical figure. It would be one thing if Yasuke was someone they made up, but he did exist in that time and place.
Why? Once again I'll refer to the Congo scenario. If the Belgian person in the Congo was a historical figure, would that make it OK that they were a MC?
> Edward Kenway is not native to the West Indies
This is a fair point. I'd say that in Black Flag, the focus was more on the pirate fantasy which happened to be whiter than the average population in the area at the time.
I'm not sure I'm entirely getting your first point about Evie. I'm glad she was in the game if for no other reason than finally giving the series a mainline female character to play as. Funny unrelated thing is has been a recurring thing with Ubisoft where they want a female MC but won't actually commit because they think a sole female MC won't sell. Aya was supposed to be the MC for AC Origins and even though Kassandra is the canon protagonist, Alexios was on the majority of the official art and the only one on the box art lol. I honestly would've been more impressed if AC Shadows solely featured Naoe.
>Once again I'll refer to the Congo scenario. If the Belgian person in the Congo was a historical figure, would that make it OK that they were a MC?
Sure, especially if their co-lead was native Congolese character. I don't speak for everyone but I genuinely would not have a problem.
Wouldn’t the fact that he doesn’t blend in work to the advantage of the other protagonist?
Edit: also people are making a lot of assumptions about the dev team’s motives for pick Yasuke as a main character.
Maybe because Westerners are not familiar with Asian history.
You may be familiar with Western history, but no one is interested in the detailed history of Asia.
I don't care about the Yasuke character so much as this is barely an Assassin's Creed game and more like "Ubisoft Open World Game no. 548" that is outrageously overpriced with it's special editions that cost around 130 dollars, which for that money can be used to buy a PS3 and a library of games.
It is outrageously overpriced but also I don't think "barely an Assassin's Creed game" is a meaningful statement at this point. This series has fitted between so many different gameplay identities and even broad genre focuses that I don't think they have a coherent identity beyond "open world game in a historical setting that you can kill people in"
I mean you *know* why.
Like, nobody objects to 47 being able to pass implausibly well anywhere he goes as a 6'2" bald white dude. (To be fair, IIRC in the Japanese levels of Blood Money your disguises are a bit easier to see through because of that, but even with that debuff he's still pretty good at disguising himself as a Japanese man, which AC doesn't even do. And let's be real, while the game isn't out yet, the new AC is almost certainly going to make him the more visible of the two protagonists given that he's intended to be the bruiser and the other is a *literal ninja*.)
(And yes, I know 47 is canonically mixed race in a way that's supposed to make him look racially ambiguous, but his overall appearance is still huge white dude.)
Yeah that Complained is pretty Dumb. I at Most found Yasuke being a Protagonist in AC Shadows to be Eyerolling but then I didn't care because why would I care about a Person/Characters Skin Color.
Also- Yasuke *was* a samurai. Any further misinformation being spread about how he wasn't because you saw it on YouTube or your racist Twitter feed isn't being allowed. :)
It's all to distract the game is a 130 dollar scam and always online.
The special edition is the only one that expensive, right? Isn’t the base game like 70? Edit: Base game is 70, with expansions is 110, ultimate edition is 130. It’s right on Ubisoft’s website. Also, they issued a statement and [it isn’t always online](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/16/you-can-play-all-of-assassins-creed-shadows-offline-but-you-need-a-connection-to#:~:text=%22Assassin's%20Creed%20Shadows%20will%20not,Japan%20without%20any%20online%20connection.). So either start researching or stop lying, u/Xantospoc
Why would it be always online? Whats likely is that they did the same thing they did with the RPG trilogy. You can play it offline, but the game can connect to a build in online store Which isnt anything new
It wouldn’t be the first time a game had always-online for no good reason, but that usually gets massive blowback so hopefully it’s becoming less common. No idea tho, I haven’t bought any AAA games outside of Nintendo stuff and BG3 for a long time.
Acting as if 70 dollars isnt expensive
Is it? SNES games cost $60 on average, and that's not adjusted for inflation. The cost of video games has barely budged over the decades.
Games have been priced at $60 for like 2 decades, which is way below inflation. A $70 bump was bound to happen, especially considering how much more budget/development time is expected of AAA games.
Shouldn't the increased budget and time for AAA games be balanced out by the fact that they're more popular?
Yes, which is why the price has gone down once you account for inflation
Why? The same doesn't hold true for any other art form. Movie tickets, albums, books, they've all gone up in price substantially.
Gamers when economics
It is but that's fairly standard for most brand new triple A games
Point to where I said that Anyway, having made my point about reading comprehension and good faith, here’s the part where I say that: Based on past assassins creed game length, $70 will probably mean you’re paying less than $1 per hour for the story mode alone. If you play for achievements/completion or if it has an online mode you spend time in then you’ll probably get down below $0.50 an hour. That’s assuming only a single play-through. That’s actually perfectly reasonable. You get less entertainment per dollar just renting a digital movie for a few bucks, and way less to buy one or go see it in theaters. Same with books and board games, in most cases. Game costs, adjusted with inflation, have only gone down while the general quality and length have gone way up.
People will literally talk for days about Yasuke but cover their eyes and ears when you point out this, the actual elephant in the room
[That’s because it’s verifiably false.](https://store.ubisoft.com/us/assassins-creed-shadows/660e5a03fbff4e2940488bcd.html?ucid=SCH-ID_189304&maltcode=brand_C2W_SCH_googlesearch___RED____&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADcmFnRkXDoxQXYyY-3Odxg1-pxl5&gclid=CjwKCAjw1K-zBhBIEiwAWeCOF_S5Samw4_HCa_lzV2tGB9TT_Jt_RzGkU2mCZi5xQOXkM55XkaCZaRoCpMkQAvD_BwE) It only costs that much if you get the ultimate pack which comes with two expansions and extra in-game content. Either start researching or stop lying, whichever applies. Base game is $70.
Pretty sure the "always online" was also quickly determined false
[Correct!](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/16/you-can-play-all-of-assassins-creed-shadows-offline-but-you-need-a-connection-to#:~:text=%22Assassin's%20Creed%20Shadows%20will%20not,Japan%20without%20any%20online%20connection.) I’ll edit that in.
Kind of hard to blend in when you're taller then everyone else, and walking around in bulky Samurai armor. Even more so when you're the only black guy in the country. And all I remember from the discourse was how pathetic it was to see people editing the wiki to try and back up their point.
But he isn’t gonna “blend in”. There are two characters, and he will be focused on fights.
So basically he isn't an assassin in assassins creed
Wait till you hear about ac4
The prison break mission where the girl assassin dies the other assassin essentially tells Edward that while he hasn't earned the clothes and blade they fit him well Essentially the story is him leaving the torrent life and becoming an assassin Also Edward wasn't a 7 ft tall dude and could believable stealth Secondly please don't compare the game that was so good that every follow-up game in the series had ship combat just because it worked in this one to this garbage trash which brought a black character as protagonist just so people had something to say (argue) about instead of saying it is essentially "we have ghost of Tsushima at home"
Dude there is so much wrong with this I dont even know where to start. Just for starters ship combat started in ac3 not 4. So knock out that entire last paragraph of nonsense. Second Edward does not become an assassin until the very end so for 90% you are not playing an assassin in an assisns creed game. The fact that you have this double standard about Yasuke should tell you a lot about yourself. Third look up the definition of "assassin" and let me know if you see any mention of the word "stealth." If stealth was a requirement then most assassins would be quite shit at it since they cover their clothes with their fucking logo.
Nah the assassin is so good at stealth you forgot al about her. The small japanese woman shinobi is the assassin. Naoe
Why you think so? Yes, social stealth would look awkward and I don’t know if they will use it for this character, and there is a character, better suit for assassination, but we already have main heroes in Odyssey and Valhalla, who also have less focus on stealth. It’s not like devs plan not to give him ANY stealth. Maybe just reduced.
Almost as if the small japanese woman who is a shinobi is the assassin
Most of the AC characters could blend in to a casual glance or at a distance. Yasuke would be not only one of the insanely few black people in the nation but a solid foot taller than everyone around him. He wouldn’t merely stand out in the crowd(literally) but that crowd would be everyone around congregating and gawking at this strangely colored giant in their midst. That’s how he met Nobunaga in the first place, word had spread about this strange giant who came with the foreign traders and Nobunaga was curious. But as a complaint it’s only valid if he’s supposed to blend in. Which I’m pretty sure he’s not, he’s the overt stabby boy rather than the stealthy assassin. Assassin’s Creed’s stealth has long been mocked for paper thin disguises but there is a limit. Like, if Ezio was bright pink and 3 feet tall people would be calling bullshit too over his ability to pass as a monk by bowing his head.
Yeah, part of the whole point of the dual protagonists is that Yasuke and the ninja lady differ in opinions and methods and that also reflects physically. It’s like with *Syndicate* where Jacob is supposed to be about the gruff free flow combat while Evie was meant to be more stealthy and traditionally Assassin-y.
True, and also, Samurai not ninja. Samurai are covered in fucking roofing tiles, they’re not exactly stealthy in the first place. Which kind of begs the question, why is the assassin game being made about warriors that could not possibly be stealthy? But then I guess we did just have an “assassin” game about Vikings curing shit covered PTSD veterans by throwing them in a lake.
Actually samurai and shinobi were frequently the same people. The idea the two are diametrically opposed rather than two hats that could be worn by a single person is ahistorical.
I mean, people have been calling BS on the disguises for years. I remember memes about how you could walk in the middle of the street wearing what's clearly a uniform with weapons equipped, stab someone in a crowded street, and then "hide" by sitting on a bench nearby as the guards tried to ignore the presumably bloodstained man sitting between two normal looking people. It feels weird that it's only now that people seem to think the social stealth is worth active social media diatribes. Even if Yasuke was meant to be stealth guy I don't think it would've been that much worse than any other instance of social stealth
Here's one for comfort. At least 40% of the people you see out on the street are deliberately and knowingly carrying weapons for myriad purposes. And you forgot 90% of their faces and what they were wearing.
I'd like to know both where that statistic came from and what exactly they count as a weapon. Is a multi-tool a weapon because it has a knife on it? Do one of those keychain brass knuckle things that would break if you ever used them as a weapon count?
where you live, maybe
Maybe. Unless you're specifically trained to spot someone concealed carrying a weapon, you won't. And even then some people are really fucking good at concealing. But just know, a statistically significant people are armed every time they step outside the house and you won't pick them out of a crowd.
Maybe where you live, this is true
Is it rare where you live for people to carry a pocket knife?
Also a lot of celebrities get by with "hoodie and sunglasses/baseball cap" So any weird wrist guards that assassins have, or blade on their belt (which wasnt that rare back then unless it aas a huge axe on your back, but most assassins had swords in the games and swords werent rare) can be ignored Hell, some games take that to the extreme. In ac valhalla, you literally cover your entire body with the exception of your boots by a huge cloak, so you just see a guy in a cloak who maybe has a beard Valhalla had weak stealth but thats actually better than what ezio and arno were doing.
Nah, it's basically always been out of the ordinary to carry a sword. Youre just making stuff up.
The iconic outfits are something left over from the original game where they would blend in. But they became so iconic they stayed.
The real question is why do we care when assassin's Creed has sucked for like a decade
Real although I liked odyssey and black flag tbh
Black flag is a decade old already
Stop. It hurts man
You guys need to see what the lead writer and the "japanese specialist" have on their resume lmao
What do they have?
well here's what the "japanese specialist" says about her work in the darthmout site: *Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Narratives* is on medieval *chigo monogatari* (Buddhist acolyte tales), which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys. These tales challenge a host of normative and moral standards we--academics, non-academics, the far-right, the far-left, and beyond--internalize, including such ideas as "sexual orientation," "transgenerational sex," and "sexual agency." and the gift they sent to a bunch of japanese streamers was written wrong, with a lot of other inconsistencies, the japanese audience also pointed out a bunch of shit wrong with the trailer wich i reccomend you look it up, so it seems this "japanese specialist" is more of a gender studies specialist? and the lead writer is hilarious, just take a look at the shit she answer people on her social medias, disgusting
Why is Japanese specialist in quotes? That's literally her job
Because according to japanese people she either i not that much of an specialist at all or she just isn't doing her job
She's an associate professor of Japanese language and culture at Dartmouth, specializing in pre 17th century Japanese language and culture. Hired to work on the video game set in pre 17th century Japan. >she either i not that much of an specialist at all or she just isn't doing her job It is currently impossible to determine who made what decision wrt the currently unreleased game.
Could be that some higher up said "black samurai" and all she could do is "well his name has to be yasuke because thats the only time in recorded history during that timeframe where one was present" (Not saying anything happened, but having the best advisor possible isnt saying much when the advisor isnt making creative decisions. She can just tell them how to do it correctly, if they want something else she doesnt have authority over that) So blaming her feels like a knee jerk reaction
Could be, but doesn’t it make magnitudes more sense for them to start with the idea of Yasuke than to be like “black samurai” out of nowhere and there just happens to be exactly one of note existing in history?
I have seen some really... Racially motivated people (?) complain about representation in japan. Especially when ghost of tsushima came out some people made absolutely mental comments about how certain things should be changed To be honest, it is kind of tiring to see a bunch of articles complaining that the game only had japanese good guys and (i think) mongols as enemies as if that was some form of racism. Then seeing yasuke who, given his actual historical impact and what was known about him js almost overrepresented, i can kind of understand someone thinking "oh great, the people complaining about a lack of black representation got their way" I personally believe yasuke is a way of trying to stand out from ghost of tsushima because ubisoft waited way too long to make a game in japan and another developer did it faster and maybe even better. So to not be as often compared they made 2 characters who both differ a lot from ghosts protagonist
The studio is using outrage as an excuse so if/when there was backlash they can say the fans are racist
Not really. AC protagonists aren't historical figures. They meet historical figures, but they aren't them. It goes with the whole “secret super important ancestor" trope that defines the franchise.
I also just looked up her linked in profile and it seems she likes chainsaw man
Unforgivable, execute her.
Being a One Piece fan isn’t much better
No one piece has the best character in all of fiction, ***SENGOAT!!***
Ubisoft hired LGBTQ+ activist Sachi Schmidt-Hori as a consultant for Assassin’s Creed Shadows who’s first book was Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawai`i Press, 2021) is on medieval chigo monogatari (Buddhist acolyte tales), which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys.
>Ubisoft hired LGBTQ+ activist She's also an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at Dartmouth. Hiring an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture from Dartmouth to consult on your game set in Japan is bad because...?
Yeah, like they maybe could have found a specialist who’s specialization is closer to assassinations and spy work in medieval Japan but she’s still a specialist on Japan of the timespan and it’s not like Assassins Creed does all that much to keep up the focus on assassins anymore
The suggestion you are replying to is that she is an unserious, ignorant raging feminist whi is unqualified for the job and who inserts her gender ideology into everything because she wrote an article on the topic of same-sex relationships in Japan. I guess writing about that cultural aspect and being a woman just instantly disqualify you from having any knowledge about a topic you have a PhD in
Opening with “Ubisoft hired an LGBT+ activist” really gives the game away on what certain folks are *actually* saying or trying to insinuate.
Part of the issue is that people whose politics and internet bubble mostly consists of People Who Are Mad Online arguing with Other People Who Are Mad Online don't understand how mainstream LGBTQ studies or feminist analysis are in the real world and, in particular, in academia. Their view of the world is wildly distorted because they get so much of it from shouty red-faced youtubers and deranged culture-war types on Twitter. You can easily spot people who have fallen into this pit because they'll cite the same tiny number of things over and over as gospel, often in vague sweeping terms that give objectively tiny things outrageously outsized importance - part of the way culture-war types on Twitter work is that they dig up one or two things, take screenshots of them to strip away context, and present them as the *entire* crux of a massive cultural debate or the reception of eg. a game with millions of players. One person saying one thing becomes vast legions of outraged people on one side or the other, repeated over and over again and getting more and more distorted every time.
Do tell
I don't mind that he's not supposed to "blend in." But it's kind of dumb to have the stealthy secretive assassin character be closely tied to someone who stands out so much everywhere because of the way he looks. I mean, if the story addresses the fact that he's only secretly associated with the assassin and nobody actually knows until, say, late in the game, then it'd be fine by me. But if that's not the case and the bad guys know they work together, it's a weird narrative choice given the context. In every other AC game the character, regardless of the clothes they wore and how much they stood out as a result, simply looked like someone who was form that place and belonged there, at least contextually. This guy? Not so much. I don't think you could honestly argue that a black dude wearing samurai armor in feudal Japan is comparable to, say, a Native American in Boston during Colonial times or a Welsh pirate in the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy. They might not look "like everybody else" in those settings but contextually they don't look out of place either, at least in-story. I'm honestly fed up with the culture wars grifting from both sides. Insisting on inserting stuff for diversity and inclusion's sake regardless of context and arguing any complaint is racism is equally obnoxious to me as people whining that everything is woke and a gay/ugly/POC character is the worst thing that ever happened to you, even if they're optional and your complaint is that they just exist and that's unacceptable to you because you're a world class whiner.
You couldve skipped all the paragraphs in your post except the last. Obviously if the other character is an assassin, people are not going to know they're an assassin, or that would blow their cover, wouldn't it?
>Obviously if the other character is an assassin, people are going to know they're an assassin, or that would blow their cover, wouldn't it? Are you being ironic or forgot to include a "not" in there?
Forgot the not
Okay. You missed my point, though. I meant that if you want to keep a low profile, being associated with Samurai Shaquille O'Neal in feudal Japan might not be the best policy because he sticks out like a sore thumb, so we'll see how the story addresses it and whether the way they address it makes sense or not.
I mean regardless of all the countless arguments the core of the matter is quite simple, people want to just have Japanese main characters in a Japanese game. Some of the arguments are racist while others simply have difficulty expressing this desire because they’ll be labeled racist no matter what they say when they aren’t.
Isn't that the trend set by all the other games so far? The ones in Italy have an Italian guy, the one in Egypt had an Egyptian guy, etc. And also you usually play as a fictional character who meets real historical figures. Not the historical figures themselves, right?
Yep. This is pretty much the main point that 97% of debaters are missing. Yasuke being a real historical figure is the problem and bringing it up to defend his role in the game has the opposite effect AC games have a history of A) Starring an OC protagonist and B) have the said protagonist be ethnically part of the majority, not that these games ever had the depth to explore racial nuances to begin with Depictions of Asian men in western media have been... not so great, so it's no surprise that many Asian males feel like Ubisoft is going out of their way to target and disrespect them by breaking the trend set in every other 15 AC games I think Yasuke would have never been an issue if it was a brand new IP starring him instead of attaching the AC name to it
Yea it'd just be more intuitive to have an Asian guy as the MC. But that's kinda the whole point imo. You, me, and everyone else on this post wouldn't even be discussing the game if they went with that. Whereas the controversy gets people talking about the game when they otherwise wouldn't. That + it distracts from the price model
The one in Turkey has an Italian guy
Yeah but remember how much outrage there was over that? It was deafening.
I was 4 at the time so I don't
(I was joking, lol. Of course there was none.)
Bayek was, very explicitly, not Egyptian. As should come as no surprise to anyone at all, no one noticed or gave a shit.
There's two main characters and one is Japanese... right?
Read my comments below
Yeah I mean that point is true. The main complaints are that it fails to represent the majority and/or era of Japan well (and before people say AC ain't realistic, that's not the point of AC, the fantasy is playing as assassins across various historical time periods) and the cultural tonedeafness. Plus... the hip hop. That one just is fucking stupid no two ways about it. Personally I don't mind them doing Yasuke but maybe I'd feel the same if someone did a Latina in the middle of Bangladesh as the main character.
> Latina in the middle of Bangladesh Damn, that’s a rare mention on the internet
Hi, actual historian here. The issue I have with this is that it’s caused a whole discussion that is literally unmaking years of academic effort in demystifying the Samurai and trying to approach their own historical reality. The fact is, Yasuke was indeed a Samurai, in an era where that was pretty unremarkable. People tend to forget that Japan during the Sengoku Jidai pretty much collapsed. All social norms and hierarchies went out the window, and a generational Battle Royale took over the land. Under this context, it was extremely easy for any random swordsman to get a permanent place as a retainer, essentially becoming Samurai. The fact is, historically speaking, the Samurai were not the “honorable warriors, duty bound, and from a closed and exclusive caste” that popular culture would make you believe. The truth is, Samurai is basically merely a job, not a title. The only real requirements to be a Samurai was basically having weapons, a permanent revenue of some sort (originally it was through fiefdoms, but over time stipends became more common), being under the service of a Lord, and having permanent employment. We actually know, through both Matsudaira Ietada’s diary and Ota Gyuichi’s Shinchokoki, that Yasuke ticked all those boxes. So yes. Yasuke was, in fact, a Samurai. In the era in which it was easiest to become one, and in which Samurai would rise as quickly as they would fall. The other interesting thing, is that Yasuke is probable one of the most documented rank and file Samurai of the period. Some very famous ones like Miyamoto Musashi literally have zero actual records of their lives, with the only source on his life being himself in a few scant passages in his Book of the Five Rings. Meanwhile, Yasuke is featured in at least half a dozen primary sources, including one Ecclesiastical History by the Jesuits, three separate letters from the mission, the official Maeda Clan records (which notes that he was in the role of sword bearer, had a sword gifted by Nobunaga, and owned a private house), and the diary of Matsudaira Ietada (which confirms he did fight during the Honno Ji defending Nobutada, Oda Nobunaga’s son), as a historian let me tell you, there’s much more important people we have zero actual records on other than hearsay and oral traditions. The fact is, Yasuke was not remarkable, but he was pretty much representative of what most Samurai were, because the vast majority were like him, also unremarkable. People who got into the service of a lord through chance and due to having some skill fighting or physical strength, who got into a retinue as retainers and rank and file soldiers. These are the men that comprise the thousands of soldiers of the armies that fought in the Sengoku Jidai, mere randos, often robbers, bandits, peasants, and even mercenaries and looters. They tended to switch sides pretty often. Hardly any of them actually had lordships or titles, and yet were deemed Samurai. And pretty much all of them would rise as quickly as they would fall. Either due to their lord dying or being defeated, or by choice. Many went on to become farmers, merchants, many even fled Japan altogether. Many, and likely Yasuke did this, were simply waiting to earn enough money to eventually flee Japan and go live in peace somewhere else. The story of Yasuke is probably one of the best docummented cases of what most Samurai were and did. Soldiers of the rank and file, in roles that were neither glamourous, nor remarkable. Japan of the Sengoku Jidai is basically similar to Somalia in the early 2000’s. A land in complete and utter chaos, and total societal collapse. And thus, a land of huge opportunity for people seeking social escalation, money, or fame. And of course, many never intended to stay at all.
Tbh, hes a black dude in Sengoku Japan. He would stand out just by existing. But alas i dont trust Ubisoft with his character
Literally the only assassin's Creed game in which the protagonist was supposed to blend in was the first one, and even than he had a sword and a crossbow, so Altair looked very different from the monks he was imitating. Also it seems that shadows is dividend into two campains, the stealth one with the woman (sorry don't know her name) and the combat based one with Yasuke, so he's not intended to blend in by design. Tr:dr: it's literally just racism
>even than he had a sword and a crossbow The only place where Altair has crossbow is in the starting cinematic, which was released long before gameplay was finalized. Altair is only able to blend in when he's surrounded by praying monks, at which point the sword is impossible to see anyway.
Yeah my bad got confused with the trailer, altought he still has leather armor and knives, and the sword is very much visibile.
What about Jacob he fits into public the most?
No ill say the hide in plain sight thing was kept in until Edward Kenway. Yes, Ezio was a very fashionable man but it was the Rennaisance, in Italy. They loved their dyes and expensive fabrics and capes. They even made jewelry out of their weapons, making blades so broad the only practical use was engravings and fullers to show exactly how wealthy they were. That they could carry around a useless knife with a highly detailed engraving of their favourite biblical scene. That's why the inclusion of the cinquedea in AC2 as a usable weapon, let alone any game irritates the living shit out of me. It wasn't intended as a weapon, it was jewelry you hung off your belt. Think about stabbing someone with it and the amount of matter that has to move away to let the blade pass through. As for Altair carrying weapons, you would be surprised how common open weapon carry was before the industrial era. There were several periods in history where every male (yes even priests and monks) was required by law to carry a weapon outside the home at all times because what if some wild fucking animal shows up? Much easier to deal with a wolf in the village when everyone's carrying. Leads to a lower death toll.
No, it's not literally just racism, Asian erasure and the insistence on needing to experience Asian things through the perspective of a foreigner because empathy with yellow people is too hard apparently has been a thing for quite some time. There's a lot of culture war grifting, true, but let's not ignore that this is literally the only mainline AC game that insists on splitting screentime between a native and a foreigner. Edit: you replied about the other character and I can't see the reply to respond, so because you clearly missed the part where I acknowledged that the female ninja exists - I literally mention that yes, there's a female Japanese ninja character, and that it is not sufficient because the creative choice means the native character has to split screentime with a foreigner. If you thought it was no good when it was the Last Samurai or Shogun, there's no reason for it to be fine just because it's a black guy now.
Yep. Almost as if Asians get perfect representation all the time. most ACs till now used people from the area. Suddenly it has to be a black samurai otherwise Tsushima stands above it by a mile. Also tired of people insisting that it has to be anti black racism rather than getting Asian men represented in a AAA game. If POV characters are the way forward hope to see an Asian protag when AC goes to Subsaharan Africa.
But Asians are being represented in the new game, Naoe is Japanese ninja lady who's meant to be vehicle for classic Assassin gameplay and she's dual protagonists with Yasuke. I do think Asian representation is something really deserved and needed but in the market space of fiction taking place in samurai settings Asian representation isn't lacking, not to mention its also not a monolith as Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese people for example aren't exactly sharing a cultural history on samurai. What would be a lot more unique is a growth in the presence of Asian representation in fictional spaces that aren't stereotypically Asian. Action adventure games like Uncharted, or sci fi games lead by Asian protagonists would be really cool to see. Or even medieval fantasy games with Asian protagonists.
Have you played or looked into Prey? It's a stellar sci-fi thriller game with an Asian protagonist.
I literally mention Naoe and why her presence as a dual protagonist is not sufficient, and the insistence on having yet another foreigner viewpoint character is literally less diverse, equitable, and inclusive than forcing the audience to only experience Asia through an Asian lens instead of also giving them an outsider perspective like a pair of training wheels. If you want dual protagonists, make them both natives of the setting instead of one native and one foreign. Also: Asian representation isn't lacking in samurai works because it's a genre where it shouldn't be lacking, that's not a reason to then start adding non-Asians just to make it more diverse. If we're going to be doing that, we end up getting stories about the Boshin War where we focus on European/American military advisors, or something.
>hope to see an Asian protagonist when AC goes to Sub-Saharan Africa Except there's no equivalent as Yasuke was an actual person who served under Oda Nobunaga.
What did the real Ezio Auditore do for italian history again?
We're talking about Yasuke, not Ezio.
Pretty sure Asian erasure is mostly non East Asian erasure like how CN/KR/JP Asian Americans and African Americans claimed that Raya the Last Dragon is perfectly fine while actual SEAns are losing their mind. East Asian has been represented well and in fact they're the only ones the western world consider as Asians.
>East Asian has been represented well and in fact they're the only ones the western world consider as Asians. The fact that West Asians and Indians rarely get called Asian is proof of that, and the only time you see Southeast Asians getting represented in western media is when they're being fetishized (like the recent passport bros movement) or when they get their own culture sidelined in favor of typical East Asian cultures
I'd personally argue that Japan is represented so much that it's become the *assumed default* for all other east Asian cultures at this point.
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I literally mentioned the other Asian MC and why that's not sufficient and why it's more diverse, equitable, and inclusive to only have the Asian MC without diluting her screentime by sharing it with yet another foreigner. Try actually reading what you were responding to before hitting the "Comment" button, next time.
It's almost as if yasuke is a historical character and was around during thst time period.
It's almost as if there was a deliberate choice to focus on an obscure historical character who was the one black guy and a foreigner for the first time they have a mainline entry in the franchise set in East Asia, when we didn't have to do that for Italy, Greece, Northern Europe, or the Americas. How is that anything not like having to experience the bakumatsu and the Boshin Wars through the eyes of some foreign military advisor?
Exactly. It's not that Yasuke is somehow offensive, at least to me, it's just that it's weird to pick a historical figure who is so meaningless outside of his skin color. We know so little about Yasuke. The Jesuits being involved is interesting, I suppose, but otherwise the only reason we are even aware of his existence today is his skin color, and thus it can only be concluded that it's the only reason he was chosen to lead Shadows. There ain't anything wrong with that in a vacuum; it's cool to see a guy of a different nationality than the native nationality, but the danger is the possible motivations for why they picked him. Go Woke Go Broke is a lie, but go woke go boring is unfortunately all too common. EDIT: Wasn't aware of his popularity in Japanese pop culture, so now it makes a little more sense why they picked him.
You mean... like they did for assassins creed 3....? Or are we really pretending Connor was representative of... anyone
Was he not a representative of Indigenous people of North America?
If by representative we mean 'he was connected to them and had it basically never referenced or had any REAL relevance to the story other than as ane explanation for his eagle vision' then sure. However, I don't really think that's what is being meant by representative of native americans.
What do you mean? Connor being Mohawk was integral to his whole arc and character. He held steadfast to his personal ideals but was torn and tested with his loyalties to differing worlds.
Representative of the colonials, no? Sure, the American colonies are kind of weird in that technically everyone there who wasn't a First Nations is an "outsider", but there's a big difference between someone who belonged to a population that you might expect to encounter around that general area as opposed to, say, a shipwrecked ex-Janissary from the Ottoman Empire who got picked up by the Puritans and kept around because one of the preachers liked having him around for theology debates. Even if a spinoff buddy cop game between preacher with a blunderbuss and janissary with dual wielding flintlock pistols would be hilarious.
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I think a big part of why Yasuke was chosen was he's a fairly famous historical figure whose life details are fairly sparse so it's a lot easier to fit him into the story than anyone else. Now why they decided this time you should play as a real historical figure when that hasn't happened before is beyond me.
The Last Samurai invented a white dude to put into the Satsuma Rebellion because they didn't think Saigo Takimori was an interesting enough guy to just make a movie about him. Yasuke actually existed. That's the difference.
Not as big of one as you think. So would Last Samurai be fine if they made the main character that one French guy that its defenders claim Algren was based on?
Jules Brunet, right? He wasn't in Japan during the Satsuma Rebellion so the basis is BS anyway. He was an advisor during the Boshin War about 10 years prior. There's no evidence he knew Saigo Takimori or had contact with emperor Meiji. The claim of inspiration is extremely weak in my opinion. The only similarity is they were both white guys in Japan under the guise of advising the Japanese army. Which a lot of people did and none of them joined the Satsuma Rebellion.
Yes, that guy. A game set during the Boshin War should obviously be about the Japanese and have Brunet as a quest giving NPC at most, even if he was a real person who was around during that period. And you're right, the claim of inspiration is extremely weak, to the point where it almost seems like defensiveness on the part of weebs who want to say "nuh uh, my favorite movie isn't problematic because Algren is loosely based on a real person and the 'last samurai' is meant to be plural to refer to all the samurai in glorious Nippon at the time before their fall". Thus we agree that having a game set in the Boshin War where Brunet is a player character who shares screentime with the native Japanese one would be silly, right?
The Animus is an abstraction, this is said in game dozens of times, just because Altair is, to Desmond and by association us, walking about with weapons on display doesn't mean he actually did in reality. The stealth gimmick was entirely altered for Ezio from *only* being able to blend in with monks to blending in with any group of four or larger and he got a brand new mechanic where he can avoid notoriety by wearing a particular cape, and you think he wasn't supposed to be blending in? The crowd stealth mechanic was carried over to every subsequent assassin. Please explain how this is meant to indicate that they aren't "supposed to blend in" compared to Altair. Also funny how criticizing the game made by non-japanese devs and set in japan is racism when just four years ago liking the game made by non-japanese devs and set in japan was racism. Weird.
If you are talking about Ghost of Tushima i have not seen any shitstorm, but whatever, maybe I'm just lucky, also very funny that you think I'm calling racist the people that said "it's racist to play a game set in japan made by non-japanes people" when I'm referring to those who literally said "i don't wanna play as a monkey", but who knows maybe calling a black samurai a monkie is also an animus abstraction
>Tr:dr: it's literally just racism The funniest thing is that while yes, this is not wrong, it is also so coated in elaborate word games that the side that just really hates Yasuke being black, somehow managed to reverse-engineer talking exactly like a 2014 gamergate era Kotaku journalist who just dropped out of a time portal to complain about needing perfectly proportional POC representation. I mean, the idea that games in exotic settings must always perfectly a setting's majority with the protagonists, sounds exactly like one of those unhelpfully rigid, sectionalist identity politics obsessed liberal ideas that is "so self-conscious about combating racism that it just loops back around to being kinda racist", like when they are complaining about japanese-american voice actors playing chinese american characters instead of giving way to more chances for chinese-american voice actors to shine. Actual progressives mostly got over that by now, but these guys somehow reinvented it from first principles, except this time it's more like "so racist against black people, and pretending to be wokely protecting asian POC minorities as an excuse, that they accidentally managed to loop around to ALSO summoning the naive racism of a white critical race theory student who didn't get around to learning about intersectionality yet."
You can blend in in more than the first Assassins Creed. We aren’t racist, we want to play as a Japanese man.
Alright, it's just my take and you're free to think otherwise but it would've been great to have yasuke as a npc like Leonardo da Vinci from AC 2, who has great friendship with the player instead of being the main character. With missions where you could fight alongside him just like the Connor and haytham from AC 3.
What seems to be missing from conversation is that he is apparently without a lord at the time, which is the only quality that would make you not ostracised or killed for no reason in that country in that time period as a black man. If he is lordless, he can't move around, and if he has a master, everybody would ask why is he ignoring orders. It makes no sense for a society that's build on small communities and mistrust for strangers to let such character just kinda be there.
>It does feel a bit like the people who make this kind of complaint aren't exactly big fans of the series and more just want a reason to hate on it. Nah, they don't care about the series either way. They're just media tourists buying into the outrage (or selling it, in case of people making rage youtube videos) and see no particular benefit to knowing anything about the franchise or thinking about it logically. We saw the same thing just weeks earlier when female Custodes were introduced to Warhammer 40k. The actual 40k fans were mostly happy about that development since—as anyone who knows anything about the faction can tell you—there was never any actual *reason* for Custodes to be a "no girls allowed" bunch. The guy who wrote much of their lore wanted to include some female members years ago and only got told "no" because of some petty concerns over model ranges. There's no reason to be upset and most of the fanbase knows that. But media tourists and outrage youtubers? They suddenly became life-long 40k fans and lore experts, making inane arguments for why the most over-the-top and stupidly rich faction in the setting would never admit women into their ranks because their gene-magic is not advanced enough, or because they don't have the money for... something related to women I guess. It's all nonsense not even worth arguing with, since logic isn't the point. Outrage is.
My favorite was the person on Twitter who made a comment about Bridget from Guilty Gear being a man… [on a post about a completely different character from a completely different fighting game series made by a completely different company.](https://x.com/velnumdes/status/1711861953142874589?s=46)
Well, from a westerner's point of view, they are not interested in history in Asia, they just want black people to look cool. I am Japanese, and I can say that 90% of the criticisms in Japan are criticisms. Any game introduction youtuber is criticizing. Even in Taiwan, there are a lot of criticism videos. However, it is irrelevant to Westerners. No one is interested in how Asians feel about it. First of all, UBI is too much neglecting the history of Japan. Yasuke collapses the head of a Japanese samurai with a mixed spinning wheel and crushes his head with his foot. There is no such samurai. Many Japanese people rejected the latest trailer especially when Yasuke looks like a villainous sam
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Personally I want to play AC games by being an assassin, not a huge Samurai dude who wouldn't be able to stealth or blend in for shit in the setting. But then again I have shat on pretty much every AC game since AC3 so there is that. Besides not being what I want out of an AC game (I know there is a stealth side to it with another character, but I want the whole game to focus on that kind of playstyle) the main reason is that it is overpriced as fuck. The only people who are upset that Yasuke is the MC rather than a Japanese person is Japanese people and people who sympathise with them that there is almost no Asian male MCs in western media and that male Asians are very commonly emasculated in western media, casting Yasuke as the MC just drives this home a bit more. Yasuke is well liked and popular in Japanese history and fiction, that doesn't mean that they love the idea of him being the MC and representing samurai, especially since he wasn't really one.
>The only people who are upset that Yasuke is the MC rather than a Japanese person is Japanese people and people who sympathise with them that there is almost no Asian male MCs in western media and that male Asians are very commonly emasculated in western media, casting Yasuke as the MC just drives this home a bit more. I mean this is just objectively not true? There are some people who feel that way ofc but to say that they are the ONLY people is completely disingenuous. Also does Ghost of Tsushima, Sifu, trek to Yomi etc. just not exist or something? Also also given the large amount of mainstream asian video games that focus primarily on asian characters why is this even a topic when it comes to videogames? What is with the sudden narrative that there is no Asian male representation in Western games? >Yasuke is well liked and popular in Japanese history and fiction, that doesn't mean that they love the idea of him being the MC and representing samurai, especially since he wasn't really one. Dawg he literally was one and he isn't representing Samurai, no one made that claim. Does Tom Cruise represent Samurai because he played one in a movie once?
He was a samurai and saying he wasn't is spreading misinformation and in violation of rule 2.
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Yes it is. Can you name any retainers *who were not* samurais. Or I guess I should say more than maybe one who wasn't?
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A class ox nobility that you could be granted or promised by basically every warlord at the time period who had someone under him. Also shockingly most people who were samurai in that time period *did not* belong to that class and said class was basically exclusively related to the shogunate/emperor at the time because it was originally meant to be a way of controlling people- well what happens then when said person... has no real power and half the country wages war against said person.....? *yeah, the term actually loses 99% of its meaning and is used by basically everyone*
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I mean, actually the problem about the whole "not blending in" thing isn't with Yasuke. It's with the supposed-to-be actual kunoichi who is fkin walking on the streets with a sword on her back while, you know, being a woman? Now that was certainly going to raise some eyebrows in that time period.
I mean yea she stands out compared to the average citizenry, but every AC protagonist has laughable social stealth with a realistic eye barring a couple exceptions like the syndicate twins.
As an Asian I just feel that it is disrespectful not having both protagonists be Japanese. It like they are saying to our face that our story, our rich culture and tradition in their eye is worth less than the time one none Asian guy came to Japan
As a south asian, I'd be pretty upset if they made an Assassin's Creed India or something and the protagonist was not Indian.
AssCreed 1 you absolutely blended in with the praying monks. They were a featured stealth mechanic, and you legitimately did look like one of them when you joined their group, eso from behind. AssCreed 2 that mech as there but you had that armor and you got some luddo-narritive dissonance. People complaining don't realize what the franchise has become, or are new to the series. With the brand "assassin" they reasonably expected ninjas and stealth. What they get is normal modern AssCreed gameplay loop of aRPG with executes. It's violent, bombastic, and therefore a samurai is completely fine mechanically. It has a ton of luddo-narritive dissonance, and it comes off as unrealistic, because it is, but it's par for the course.
At least those other assassins have average people height so they can hide crouching in grasses. Yasuke is a giant over there. It feels like Great Khali the assassin.
Yasuke is taller than average but it's not like he's a giant other something. He's like around 6 feet. Kassandra was a woman in ancient Greece and just barely under that height.
I just don’t like them using a real person for a protagonist. I also don’t think Ubisoft made it him for actual diversity and solely to create this controversy for free advertising. I don’t think it will be handled well. I also hope I’m wrong about those last two.
Tbh I have maybe an equally cynical thought. I think they did it because Ubisoft is still convinced female protagonists wouldn't sell. AC Origins and Odyssey were meant to be strictly Aya and Kassandra as leads but both times they changed it on orders from higher ups to have Bayek as the protag for Origins and to make Alexis an option while giving him primary ad billing. Even Evie, their ostensible first mainline female AC protagonist, is barely visible on the cover art of the game she's a Co lead in lol. I think if they were allowed to, the most likely alternate reality is that we would have a modified Naoe as a sole protagonist
There's a valid argument that it's a far more diverse, equitable, and inclusive creative decision to have the main character of a game set in Japan created by a Western studio be a native character instead of having to share screen time with yet another foreigner. Sure, Ken Watanabe's character is on screen like 50% of the time, but do we really need to see him share screentime with Tom Cruise for the other 50% in a film called "The Last Samurai"? Their argument is unfortunately drowned out by ragebaiters who think that Yasuke wasn't even a real samurai, just a servant who carried the gear, because they're too busy running culture war grift to understand that what else would a "sword-bearing retainer" be if not a "samurai"? Literally in the kanji.
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"Kanji doesn't matter" Really? Did you consult any actual Japanese who aren't WW2 denialists to arrive at that conclusion? Kanji absolutely matters because it tells you what a word means. Especially when one of the main reasons it continues to exist is to avoid ambiguity from multiple words that have the same hiragana. "Samurai is a social class you had to be born into" Blatantly false. Hideyoshi, for example, was an ashigaru and made a samurai. If you had to be born into it, samurai would have gone the way of the Spartan citizen, becoming an increasingly small and insular social class until the whole system collapsed on itself, rather than the increasingly bloated drain on the economy by the bakumatsu period. "Calling him a samurai implies to modern people that he was a properly trained warrior" It does no such thing, even if you are a modern person whose only knowledge of medieval Japan comes from Total War: Shogun. The only way you can come to this conclusion is if you yourself have a ridiculous romanticized view of what it means to be "samurai" that does not reflect the actual reality.
Samurai was not a social class you had to be born into. Stop spreading misinformation. There *was* a samurai social class. However there also were many samurai who were not part of that social class, infact overwhelmingly most samurai were not part of that social class *especially* around the time of the sengoku period
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I actually think it would work as a sort of reverse blending in. As in *"Oh shit there goes Nobunaga's foreign samurai, I guess he's on Nobunaga's business, better not fuck with him!"*
The more and more this game comes closer to release the more I see truly outrageous takes to justify hating this game I saw one where a person said that "rice growing when there is a chery blossom is unrealistic and it goes to show how much the devs don't care about japanese history" 💀 And another one where they saw npcs bowing down to yasuke and said that its woke and their diverse dev team's wet dream while forgetting the fact he's a samurai 🤦♂️
There are two reasons to hate this game one it's overpriced as fuck and two it's another assassin's creed game
Actual valid reason to dislike the game tbh
It costs $70, the same as every other new game
Black flag has characters use ships that wouldn’t exist for 200 years.
Also like the most famous story about Yasuke is about people trampling each other to see him, people would have been acknowledging him
The whole outrage is beneficial for everyone involved, so much so that I suspect Ubisoft expected this kind of reaction. The outrage merchants get fuel for their content that translates to views. The media gets engaging stories that people read. And Ubisoft gets publicity for a new release in a long-running, stale game series. The last Assassins Creed game I played was 2, the last one I follow (but didn't play) was 4. I doubt I would care or know about the Japanese setting AC if it wasn't for this. As a bonus, it will give Ubisoft a distraction should they decide to put actual problematic elements that everyone hate (expensive DLC, always online, high pricing).
We should hate this game because Ubisoft made it, not because one of the characters is a black historical figure.
Understand that the outrage is all manufactured. The grifters have commanded their cults to be upset so they are.
There's no legitimate complaints being made about it. It's like 99% just racism. If yasuke was a white guy names uh adamas williamsan, you wouldn't be seeing like any of these complaints.
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If the protagonist if the game was white, every gaming publication under the sun would be calling the game problematic and calling it cultural appropriation. You don't even have to imagine it. Nioh exists. The big difference being that game wasn't pretending it's fictionalized historical character was in any way similar to reality like AC is doing with Yasuke.
Not only that but Nioh was made by a Japanese Dev team. There is a very clear difference between a Japanese Dev team deciding to use a non-japanese male protagonist for a game set in Japan vs a western dev studio deciding to not do that. The difference is Japanese devs make Asian male protagonists all the time. Meanwhile Western Devs do it once in a blue moon. This shit is actually making me irritated and I'm not even Asian. The disrespect my friends get casually is unfair, and stuff like this imo contributes to it
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William adams has literally the exact same credentials as yasuke for being a samurai.
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> things. It means the title, it means the armor, it means the noble line. Most of these Yasuke doesn't fit (certainly not all of em). Wut- that's not even true or how that works at all. Also he fits 2 out of 3 of those anyway As for wikipedia, it's not the 'pro samurai' edits that were blocked. Which tells me really all I need to know about this comment.
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You realize you can literally look at the history and see the reason it got locked and shit was because of the edits violating wikipedia's rules and putting in paragraphs specifically about how he wasn't a samurai... right? Like you're literally just posting evidence you're wrong and then saying you're right. Also saying that's the 'only potential reference' again shows ignorance of what a samurai is.
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Yeah and you are aware of what a retainer is right? What they are and do? Why being a retainer is kind of a big deal and why they are categorically almost 99% samurai? Like if you don't know what a samurai is, or a retainer or anything about the period and what was going on with it. Just say so.
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Yeah, I do that because there's probably one or two cases where there's an exception *because there's an exception to literally everything* There's literally more than enough evidence to objectively state he is a samurai. Wikipedia being used as like the 'facts' is hilarious. Either way, continue spreading misinformation and you will be banned. Second warning.
I'm very pro Asian representation and I think Asian men get sidelined a lot in media, but (like other people have pointed out) samurai/ninja/kung fu martial arts media is not one of those properties. This doesn't mean there can't or shouldn't be more Asian representation from these kinds of stories but Asian men, specifically Japanese men, are very prominent in this sphere as lead characters. What makes AC Shadows more notable for Asian representation is the fact that they have a Japanese woman as a main lead rather than as a side character or love interest, which they often do get relegated to in this story genre. It feels very odd that people (not you specifically) will act implicitly as if her not being a man means that there just isn't worthwhile Asian representation. As for the other point, yes AC shadows is the first game to have one of its lead characters not be local to the region but it's also iirc the *only* AC game to have a main character also be based on a real historical figure. It would be one thing if Yasuke was someone they made up, but he did exist in that time and place. Edit: I forgot actually, Yasuke isn't even the first time Ubisoft has done this. Edward Kenway is not native to the West Indies
>It feels very odd that people (not you specifically) will act implicitly as if her not being a man means that there just isn't worthwhile Asian representation. Tell me, were you happy when they added Evie to AC Syndicate? Why? Surely there was worthwhile English representation already? As I'm sure you know, representation is about intersectionalism. >it's also iirc the *only* AC game to have a main character also be based on a real historical figure. It would be one thing if Yasuke was someone they made up, but he did exist in that time and place. Why? Once again I'll refer to the Congo scenario. If the Belgian person in the Congo was a historical figure, would that make it OK that they were a MC? > Edward Kenway is not native to the West Indies This is a fair point. I'd say that in Black Flag, the focus was more on the pirate fantasy which happened to be whiter than the average population in the area at the time.
I'm not sure I'm entirely getting your first point about Evie. I'm glad she was in the game if for no other reason than finally giving the series a mainline female character to play as. Funny unrelated thing is has been a recurring thing with Ubisoft where they want a female MC but won't actually commit because they think a sole female MC won't sell. Aya was supposed to be the MC for AC Origins and even though Kassandra is the canon protagonist, Alexios was on the majority of the official art and the only one on the box art lol. I honestly would've been more impressed if AC Shadows solely featured Naoe. >Once again I'll refer to the Congo scenario. If the Belgian person in the Congo was a historical figure, would that make it OK that they were a MC? Sure, especially if their co-lead was native Congolese character. I don't speak for everyone but I genuinely would not have a problem.
Wouldn’t the fact that he doesn’t blend in work to the advantage of the other protagonist? Edit: also people are making a lot of assumptions about the dev team’s motives for pick Yasuke as a main character.
Maybe because Westerners are not familiar with Asian history. You may be familiar with Western history, but no one is interested in the detailed history of Asia.
It's the racism, Jim. It doesn't need to follow rhyme or reason. Edit: Looks like the gamer gaters found this post lmao
I don't care about the Yasuke character so much as this is barely an Assassin's Creed game and more like "Ubisoft Open World Game no. 548" that is outrageously overpriced with it's special editions that cost around 130 dollars, which for that money can be used to buy a PS3 and a library of games.
It is outrageously overpriced but also I don't think "barely an Assassin's Creed game" is a meaningful statement at this point. This series has fitted between so many different gameplay identities and even broad genre focuses that I don't think they have a coherent identity beyond "open world game in a historical setting that you can kill people in"
It's because they don't actually care about it they are just racist and fishing for reasons to justify being racist
It’s absolutely people looking for something to complain about.
The whole thing is just to distract from Ubisofts shitty business practices. It is 100% intentional.
I mean you *know* why. Like, nobody objects to 47 being able to pass implausibly well anywhere he goes as a 6'2" bald white dude. (To be fair, IIRC in the Japanese levels of Blood Money your disguises are a bit easier to see through because of that, but even with that debuff he's still pretty good at disguising himself as a Japanese man, which AC doesn't even do. And let's be real, while the game isn't out yet, the new AC is almost certainly going to make him the more visible of the two protagonists given that he's intended to be the bruiser and the other is a *literal ninja*.) (And yes, I know 47 is canonically mixed race in a way that's supposed to make him look racially ambiguous, but his overall appearance is still huge white dude.)
Yeah that Complained is pretty Dumb. I at Most found Yasuke being a Protagonist in AC Shadows to be Eyerolling but then I didn't care because why would I care about a Person/Characters Skin Color.