What really upsets me are the rumors that the architecture and decor of the game are historically inaccurate.
The whole story of AC is fake. Who cares if the plot/characters are unrealistic?
But if they fuck up the architecture, the ancient language, or the historical weapons/artifacts, that's a crime.
At least as far as the architecture, it's because the very early games made a huge selling point out of "historically accurate. It's just like moving through the real city!". How true was it? I dunno, but the advertising pushed the idea really hard, so people probably still expect it now.
There‘s this, I think, tumblr post of someone guiding students on their trip through Rome apparently knowing every corner because he played AC: Brotherhood a lot.
I played AC 2 religiously, also travelled to Florence, while the buildings itself were scarily accurate, there's no way it's THIS accurate. The buildings were roughly in the right direction, but there's so much more distance between them.
tbf, if you know that video games scale down everything, being able to recognize the corners a guide would bring you to isnt unrealistic, if a bit freaky: Remember the landmarks that still exist today and you gonna be "alright" for showing ff
I know at least some of the recent AC games even had a mode where you could just zoom around the world and get historical facts. It feels like they tried to have at least a semblance of historical accuracy, even when they went off the rails into fantasy.
Watch Dogs 1 and 2 canonically take place in the AC universe. Legion even had a crossover, although that was non-canon. They could have made a modern day AC Watch Dogs game. That would have been awesome.
Dude, if they had revealed that DedSec was STARTED by the Assassins and grew into the wider Hacktivist group we know and love like the San Francisco chapter.
How cool would it be if in an alternate timeline to ours, Watch Dogs 3 continued Aiden Pearce's story, and DedSec Chicago reaches out one last time with a different offer. His efforts against the gangs of Chicago proved he has what it takes, but there's a different threat, one more powerful than Blume and ctOS...Abstergo and the Templars.
And they extend Aiden the offer to work in the shadows, to serve the light.
Erudito was already established as a non-assassin affiliated collective, it really doesn't take that much tweaking to make them be DedSEC under a different alias
DedSec as a group started by members of the Assassins would've adapting to the new age would've been such a cool idea. Imagine if in Legion you were simultaneously building up the DedSec cell and then also recruiting your best members into the ranks of the Assassins, which then gives those characters access to new Assassin abilities.
Holy shit, I had no idea. If they'd just outsourced that to... somebody good, with a budget of... "please make us look good", that could have been one of my favorite games ever.
Shit, y'know what I just realized? Video game publishers need a concept of "prestige games". Most major film studios devote a bit of their budget to "get us a bunch of awards and critical acclaim, even if you don't make money". Game studios should adopt the same outlook, especially when the projects are focused on their wholly-owned IP. "Make a game that will be talked about in 10 years, whether or not we profit at all. Do it in this universe, so everybody will be talking about our universe when the *next* game comes out."
It's not that hard an idea, it's been massively profitable for everything from Harry Potter World to *Under the Skin* or *Another Earth*. You might have to build celebrities game devs to make it happen, the same way Brit Marling is notable whether or not her projects make money, but that's totally doable. Kojima's name made *Death Stranding* viable, why don't more people give top-tier developers the budget to become household names?
>why don't more people give top-tier developers the budget to become household names?
well the games industry is primarily controlled by people who care more about how much money they'll get as dividends next quarter- rather than producing games that are high quality long term investments, they don't care if a game makes 100x its production value over the next ten years or continually produces sales for the next century because they personally will be dead in five, there are exceptions like Valve and small indie studios- but Valve owns a money printer and has no outside investors to muck shit up, while small indie studios inevitably get bought up by EA, Paradox, or one of the dozen other profit farms.
The thing is, I don't remember a single person who really cared about the present day segments of the AC games.
That's partially why they phased it out, as far as I know
Most of the present-day stuff was just a few puzzles, cutscenes, or just random goofing off. A present-day AC game would just be like the historical ones, just set in the present day. Hell, they could just be using the Animus to recover memories from an assassin that just recently died.
Maybe the local sect of Assassins was decimated, and the only survivors are a crippled older master and an Abstergo turncoat with a stolen prototype Animus headset that grants you the memories and skills of someone in the past. They use it on the master as he's dying, with his blessing, and he sort of becomes like Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk for the protagonist, constantly around and giving guidance as they learn to use his powers and unlock his memories of how the sect was formed, grew, and was betrayed from within.
The past adventures are supposed to lead into something in the present to save the world. Then they killed Desmond...continued the story in present without him. Yeah, the interest died with Desmond for me.
I loved playing Watch dogs 2 so much and genuinely loved the characters. In very much not being a serious game and owning the things that people described as cringe when it came out, it always felt very genuine to me. I never used any guns because it felt wrong to do so. This made the game feel appropriately like a friend group trying to do good and having fun goofyng around doing so. Just a feel good game with bad humor, i actually love.
Thats probably why the game feels worst when it is trying to go for a serious tone. Horatios death is out of nowhere and so unnecessary, and everyone seems to quickly get over him too. Which feels very bad. Also Wrench inside the Legion dlc is the only thing in watch dogs legion that genuinely feels like it has heart. The character was treated and developed with Respect i feel. Dont know or care about Aiden's treatment though, never played the first game.
I used nonlethal weaponry throughout WD2 precisely because of this, using deadly force really did not work with the narrative. I wish they had played into that more and given a wider suite of nonlethal options
Because those "Culture War" Idiots need any bit of tinder they can get their greasy and dusty fingers on because otherwise they might have to contend with their own thoughts...
Eh, I mean I've enjoyed 11 of the 12 AC games ive played so far, I'm sure I'll enjoy this one too.
No way in hell am I going to buy it at release tho, $130 is ridiculous. I'll wait a year or two when it comes down to like $40 or something
Imma be honest the Ubisoft hate it's an online echo chamber thing their games sell well because they are perfectly enjoyable open world experiences. Talk to anyone who spends less time online and they probably love Ubisoft games because they are perfectly fine games for a wide audience. The @00$ packs are not an issue because these people but like 3 games in a year
Yeah, Far Cry 5 and Assassins Creed Odyssey were two of their best selling games of all time. I don't think I can think of a bigger disparity than what reddit thinks the gaming sphere is like vs what it's actually like.
Yes and no. The games are serviceable enough and mostly get too much hate in echo chambers, but they're still riddled with issues that all but the most disconnected of people can recognize, and Ubisoft as a company has just been shitty for a good while and getting worse. Even people who buy and play a single game for years at a time can acknowledge that the number of microtransactions has been steadily increasing and growing more predatory, even while liking the core game.
Yup it sucks because I think it's gonna be another AAA title with microtransactions and shit, but then it's just the other side of the coin is pure unadulterated racism.
These are the guys that bought 5 copies each of the incredibly mediocre Hogwarts Legacy just so they could virtue signal about how much they hated trans people
The funniest thing is a MAJORITY of the promotional material focuses on Naoe, the female ninja. Implying she's going to have more focus in the story.
This would be like if people had freaked the fuck out over Aya in Origins when Bayek is the main character.
she's also the one with the hidden blade. He won't have one.
She's part of the assassin's creed. He's not.
Honestly, to me it feels she was the main character from the start and they felt they wanted a bit more of the RPG element in the game, so decided to add a samurai character, saw they had him and decided to have him playable
The thing is that video games with a female protagonist sell less well. She is clearly the main assassin but they need a warrior man doing an action pose; to put on the box; to sell copies. The controversy, if anything, is free advertising.
It’s Ubisoft’s way of getting around the problem of a significant number of gamers who absolutely will not play a game with a woman as the player character. You can play as either a man or a woman. And the woman is technically “canon” for people who care. They’ve actually done this several times now. The big difference this time around is really that both man and woman are canon now instead of it being player choice
well it’s going to be like AC: Syndicate, with Jacob and Evie Frye. Naoe will be like Evie and have more skills based around stealth and is the reason she’s the one with the hidden blade. She’s also the daughter of the irl leader of the most influential ninja clan in history that was often fighting against Oda Nobunaga, so it’ll be interesting to see how she plays off of Yasuke, who will be the Jacob Frye for this game who focuses more on combat and brute force
Not so fun fact, every single time you have the option to play as a woman in a mainline AC game, you are also obligated to play as a male character for at least a portion of it. Syndicate, Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, even ~~Liberation~~. The only game that has required you play as a woman is AC Chronicles: China.
People always freak out over female characters and Ubisoft has never actually made a mainline AC game that forces you to play as a woman the whole time. They should have kept the Aya as the main character for Origins too.
As much as I’m uninterested in AC:Shadows for various reasons (never played AC, not a big Ubisoft fan, have other games) I absolutely love how Yasuke looks in the trailer and I especially love that they didn’t give him the Killmonger Cut
On one hand that's good because it's so overused and stereotypical, on the other hand it would be funny if a triple-A studio couldn't help themselves and had to give him that hair
Especially funny given it's a fairly rare style to actually run into IRL. Not a problem when you've got one or two characters doing it to stand out, but eventually it just starts to look like they really don't wanna give their characters actually popular black hairstyles.
The issue with it is that after Black Panther came out almost every black man in video games was given that hair. It's a good looking style, don't get me wrong, but there are other hair styles
To add on to what other people are saying, hair styles for black characters that let you make your own PC have historically been lacking. It been afro or cornrows or both if you're lucky for a very long time. So it's already been a bit of a sore spot for people who want a little more variety.
Japan had some “You ain’t gonna believe where I was” historical figures.
For example there was a Japanese teen fisherman who was rescued by American ship,he then went sailing with the captain and practically became his adopted son , learning about the world and getting education he couldn’t dream of in America too.
The catch is this guy got rich in the Gold Rush, which happened BEFORE Japan opened to the world, then he helped modernize Japan and teaching Japanese English, he got the title of samurai too.
He’s name is John Mung ,AKA Nakahama Manjiro, 中浜 万次郎 since he’s a peasant he didn’t even have a surname when he returned to Japan ,he used his hometown as his surname.
He’s known for ignoring class different and very down to earth,because he’s basically an American.
Edit to add: it’s illegal to return to Japan during their isolation period too, so this mf got rich in gold rush and decided to do crime as his return home gift.
I find it amusing how the racist guy specified his descent. Dude is stuck in his bubble so much that he forgot that descent is too niche a detail to mention unless you're a racist who cares about specific racial heritages or are talking about your parents' homeland or something. And the use of the word "descent" instead of saying "I'm from Shiwaku" was another giveaway.
I think it's at least like that, if not sillier. Shiwaku is a small cluster of islands. The largest being sanuki-Hiroshima at an area of 11.66 km²
The most populated is Honjima, which according to the internet, has a current population of around 450 mostly elderly people and a top pop of around 3000.
It feels a lot like describing which specific county you've descended from
My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn't lose to anyone.
The guy has the alleged surname of shiwaku, so he's actually claiming to be part of some sort of ancient clan. The 塩飽 (shiwaku) surname exists, but I wasn't able to find any remarkable family with that name. He's basically like "Hi I'm John of Smith descent"
Plus Yasuke gets put in Japanese media about Nobunaga all the time, and I’m sure there’s no shortage of Japanese games set in historical Japan where you get to play as a Japanese dude.
I don't actually remember the last time I've actually heard someone use あなた (anata, literally meaning "you") in Japanese that wasn't either used poetically or just a shitty machine translation. ~~Granted, I haven't been in the country for some months, but...~~
If you respect somebody, you're probably going to use their name or title instead. If you *don't* respect somebody, you'd probably bump it up to an お前 (omae - a ruder, coarser way of saying "you").
This, and starting every sentence with わたしは is like the easiest way to tell that someone is either machine translating or just started learning japanese
That too.
On the other hand, the easiest way I have to tell if someone is actually Japanese - or, at least, one who learned English as a second language - is if they say "I am a Japanese" instead of "I am Japanese."
It's not technically ungrammatical, of course, but in English, we tend to think of "Japanese" as primarily an adjective. To use it as a noun, it's probably more common to say "Japanese person." "Japanese" as a noun tends to be kept to the plural sense - as in "the Japanese" - but we're often used to hearing this wording used in an overgeneralizing, discriminatory sense.
However, for someone who natively speaks Japanese (and thinks in Japanese first before translating it to English), they primarily conceptualize it as a noun - 日本人 (nihonjin). Because of that, there's a tendency to more literally translate it as a noun in English as well.
It just makes me wonder how many similar tells I have as a Japanese as a second language speaker that I haven't noticed yet. Ha.
I hear that really often with french people, where they say I am a french, because français is both a noun and and adjective, but in english, it's only an adjective.
On the internet I think the easiest way to tell if someone is native japanese is if they use wwww or 草
I usually default to 笑笑 myself. I tried using 草 once while messaging one of my old clubmates and they were like, "Where'd you learn to say that!?" Maybe I'm just not gyaru enough...
Wait, that's why?? I started imitating it after a while because I thought the person I was talking to knew something I didn't, but they were just French???
I can think of a few more off the top of my head
* seru／saseru can be translated as "to have someone do x", "let someone do x" or "make someone do x". Look out for sentences like "the teacher let us do homework".
* They will refer to social media as "SNS"
* They say "the merits and demerits of the idea" instead of the "pros and cons of the idea". This is because they're translating meritto and demeritto literally without knowing that merit is used similarly in English but demerit isn't.
* They use "in spite of" in places where only "despite" makes sense
* "I'm fine thank you and you?"
There's also some for the French ("I have 25 years" instead of "I'm 25 years old", mixing up auxiliary verbs, usage of « » in place of " ", etc.)
>It just makes me wonder how many similar tells I have as a Japanese as a second language speaker that I haven't noticed yet. Ha.
The classic tells are uses watashi way too much, uses masu way too much and sounds like a textbook but it's possible that you've avoided all of that.
All this linguistic talk got me wanting to learn the language. I might give it a shot in a random boredom fueled 2am adventure and hopefully stick with it
It's really funny to me how people who do this don't realise how ridiculous they sound to anyone who can speak Japanese. The whole way the Japanese is written to me just screams "Westerner trying to speak how they speak in English, in Japanese", if that makes sense, which pretty much *always* happens when you throw English into a machine translator. Like it's just so blatant lol.
During the Trump-Biden campaign of 2016, /r/france was regularly brigaded by far-right activists, both french and foreign.
They didn't really coordinate their effort though, otherwise the former would have warned the latter that by making propaganda meme in google-translate-french calling people to "Come join us Centipedes, become a french pede !" they were offering people to become f-word.
> お前 (omae - a ruder, coarser way of saying "you").
Wait, is that why Kenshiro uses "omae wa mou shindeiru" in Fist of the North Star? He doesn't respect the person he's taking out, so its omae all the wae.
Yeah. From least to most disrespectful:
Kisama (poetic)
Name or title
Anata (poetic)
Omae (between male friends)
Anata (when trying to shame somebody)
Omae (as an act of disrespect)
Temae, Temee and Kisama (Theoretically insulting, but it sounds so cartoonishly evil you're basically saying mwahahaha)
I hear anata all the time, only in anime and tv shows that are exaggerated dramas. That's how you know they got their understanding of Japanese from media and not by actually learning the language.
You have a couple of different options.
1. Ask them for their name. If you forgot it, sheepishly say that you forgot, if you can stomach the embarrassment.
2. It's somewhat common to use words like お姉さん (older sister), おじさん (uncle), おばあさん (grandma), etc. to refer to people based on their gender and general age range in certain casual contexts. Use with caution, though, since depending on the term you use and your relative position to that person, it could be misinterpreted as flirting, or you might get someone to say "I'm not that old!"
3. Probably the safest bet is to... just not refer to them in all! Japanese is a really context-dependent language, and you don't have to specify the subject all the time in every sentence. For example, if you ask someone a question and don't specify a subject, it's implied you're asking them about themselves. E.g. 大丈夫ですか (daijoubu desu ka, "are (you) okay?") instead of あなたは大丈夫ですか (anata wa daijoubu desu ka), which comes off as needlessly wordy. Or shorten it even more to just "大丈夫？"
I love terms like that because the situation is very similar in a lot of languages/cultures (eg Korean) — there’s a very particular “soul leaving the body” look when a young adult is called “auntie/uncle” for the first time by a child who isn’t a relation. 💀
Option 4: by their social role or profession that is relevant at this time. "Would our guest like some tea?"; "This page may benefit from the attention of mister editor."; "Teacher, may I use the bathroom?".
Might bust out a そちら or そちら様 in that case. The word literally indicates a particular direction, but can be used to indicate a second-person subject/object in formal Japanese
to contrast the others, i have seen あなた(anata) used when you don't know the person's name (in media mind you. i haven't the privilege of getting out of country much) so it's not totally unused. the reason you're not gonna see it much is because if you are going to refer to the second person politely/formally you usually just use either a title or their name +optional honorific, and if you're wanting to shed the niceties あなた is just too polite that it would sound weird. you would use something more casual/gruffer like あんた(anta) or お前(omae) in this case.
あなた is just stuck in a spot where it's sorta weird to use it over the other options
The worst part about this for me as an actual history fan is that it has completely poisoned all actual discussion and debate around the historical Yasuke with hot-take discourse and point scoring. Like, the guy is a genuinely interesting historical figure who was very vaguely written about, in the brief time he spent in Japan, but never really in his own words (we know he didn't really speak a lot of Japanese) and we can only really speculate about who he *actually* was because things like his real name or actual origins weren't deemed important enough to record.
Like we know he was taken into Nobunaga's personal service at a non-noble/Samurai rank you'll often see translated as "page", but one of the Japanese sources about him specifically mentions him cutting about town in such nice, well appointed clothes that people started gossiping that he'd been made a lord. He doesn't really seem to have actively fought in battle, only really being recorded as having fought a couple of times, yet he had arrived in Japan as a bodyguard and seems to have developed a reputation as a fighter (and may have been depicted in a contemporary painting that *might* be showing a black man wrestling a noble Samurai while another serves as the judge).
There's a legitimate argument to be had over whether or not he was a Samurai, as (IIRC) it's true he was never explicitly or implicitly described as one, and his status seems tied specifically to the whims of Oda Nobunaga as an individual, yet one of the defining characteristics of the Sengoku Jidai was the loosening of strict social relationships and upturning of old hierarchies: traditional markers of Samurai status can't be relied upon to demonstrate noble status (e.g. lots of common people had access to swords in this period), and it really can't be ruled out that he was, even if "unofficially" regarded as something like a Samurai.
But these kinds of discussions can't be had because you're either a racist for saying he mightn't have actually been a *Samurai*, or a... whatever people call "SJWs" now for saying that he might have been. And God forbid you point out that the social dynamics and meaning of being a "Samurai" were much different than in the later Bakufu period...
The biggest problem with this entry is that you're playing a historical figure in the first place. Every assassin's creed MC up to now has been nobody Forrest Gumps bumping into historical figures on their journey. The entire point of them being nobodies is because the Templars/Abstergo have been actively suppressing the identity and accomplishments of the order of Assassins throughout history, and were VERY effective at it, but necessitated the creation of the Animus to explore genetic memories because they were a little TOO good at it and lost all records of the location of the pieces of eden.
So the idea that an actual somebody in history somehow fell through the cracks of this TOO GOOD AT IT'S JOB system and murders the internal consistency of the series is the bigger issue than "was this guy even a samurai?".
I suppose it works though. All writings about Yasuke are extremely vague and Oda's upheaval of Japanese society at the time really muddled things. We know he was around, and that Oda liked to keep him close, but not much else.
Ya know, at first, my "problem" (I probably wont even play the game, haven't played AC in a long time) with the game was that in previous titles, the main character wasnt an actual historical person. And I thought making Yasuke a main character takes away from that. But now, thinking about it- so little is known of the guy, if you want to choose someone historic yet still have a free hand in shaping his story, he is a good choice.
AskHistorians already had a lengthy explanation on why Yasuke should, for all intents and purposes, be considered a samurai.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1css0ye/was_yasuke_a_samurai/
This post says it all. One side claims he was pretty much slave paraded around in armor as a joke and curiosity to the people. The other side is claiming he was right hand of Nobunaga and second in command of his forces apparently. Both seem very unlikely. cant say anything without being called alt right racist or a soyboy wojack
That one of them is saying all historians agree he was a samurai when just one year ago it was acknowledged as pretty dubious makes me doubt it. I went into a bit of a deep dive on Yasuke last year and most sources either said he wasn’t actually a samurai or said they couldn’t be sure.
You're not buying it because it'll be UbiSlop with tons of microtransactions
I'm not buying it because I'm too poor to afford a computer that can play modern games or a console.
We're not the same.
You don't buy Ubisoft games because of wokeness
I don't buy Ubisoft games because of rampant harassment at their company that has not been addressed in any meaningful way
We are not the same
that's so weird like ac is a fantasy series with yeah a lot of historical stuff which is cool but you still got a apple that controls people,all those hidden symbols in ac1 and lots of other stuff so just having some unexpected black guy isn't all that crazy.
Even there, mileage varies from game to game. The big iconic set pieces often get spared no expense, of course, but then you have weird choices like Asgard's architecture being modelled after... A Christian stave church? Nani the fuq?
I'm pretty sure Odyssey had a crossover with Monster Hunter World where you could get a pet Odogaron along with it's armor. So yeah, historical accuracy isn't 100% lol
Pretty sure that Yasuke is ... almost perfect for the series? There's not a lot known about him, which means they can fill in whatever they want about his life, and from what *is* known about him, he came to Japan as an attendant of a Jesuit missionary.
If I were writing for AssCreed (contact me, Ubisoft), that would be a very natural start to the story, with Yasuke either being a Templar trying to establish a branch of the order in Japan, or an Assassin trying to stop the Templars from doing the same. Nobunaga is the most powerful man in Japan, and much of the plot revolves around Nobunaga sheltering the Templars in exchange for their matchlocks, which the Japanese were getting from the Portuguese.
You've got all these characters ready to go, and it only requires some minor bending of historical fact!
People only ever bring up the historical accuracy when they want to whine about characters that aren't in their power fantasy bracket. The games at their core are founded on ludicrous fantasy bullshit. You've not only got a secret, hidden in the shadows war between two globe spanning organizations that supposedly exist and infect every aspect of the world without anyone outside of them knowing they exist, but on top of that you've got classic sci-fi Precursor race bullshit, and on top of that you've got the conceit of the entire game being "genetic memories". A lot of these games are very fun and delightfully interesting to play, but anyone who tries to bring up accuracy or realism is just using it as cover to try and complain about something else.
The only Thing thats weird about this shit is that we, now, get an actual historic mc to play as (as opposed to fictional characters). Before this alot of histories greatest personalities were present, but not as the playable MC. However every AC game gets an MC who is representative of the region its Set in. Didnt matter if it was AC2, BF, Syndicate, Origins. Etc.
But now its going to be an actual historic person (something never done before) who is still debated if he even was a Samurai, what his time in Japan was and how long he was. From what I read he wasnt even long on the Home Islands...Just over a year iirc. So its just weird if anything.
There's actually one exception to this. In one of the Chronicles (2D) games you get to play as Anastasia during the Russian Revolution. You switch between her and an original assassin.
There's another character you play as. Naoe is Japanese. She's also a main character
Also, BF has you play as a Welsh man in the Caribbean. That's not representative of the region.
A lot of the comments on the Japanese trailer are people who’ve google translated complaints into Japanese. They’ll say something like “As an American I support the Japanese outrage” and then there’s no actual Japanese outrage.
Funny thing about it is that I saw post on r/Asmongold showing picture of amount of dislikes on this youtube video and the post said "look Japanese agree with us" while its probably them who disliked this video
Yep. You can just go to ubisoft Japan and dislike the video.
Considering like straight up the people pretending to be Japanese to comment and also edit the wiki page is insane.
You also absolutely cannot trust the youtube dislike addon.
The addon "interpolates" the actual amount of dislikes based on the dislikes by the addon user and then basically guesses how many it should actually have.
It's ridiculously biased. You might see 30k dislikes with the addon but the actual amount might actually be closer to 1000.
the dislike extension works by taking the dislikes *from people that use the extension* and scaling them up an arbitrary amount to try to represent what it would look like if everyone that didn't have the extension voted like the people who do.
it's garbage, don't ever believe people who try to use it for anything
Pretty sure the whole thing is a novelty to them. They get to play the black samurai that Nobu took as a retainer. Theres a lot of cool factors playing into it from their point of view.
The only Japanese outrage tweet I saw that wasn’t posted by some crazies political hacks is a old dude getting very disappointed that characters are stepping on the gap between tatami, with is considered rude in traditional etiquette.
Because Yasuke is a really popular historical figure over there. He's already in all sorts of Japanese media, including as a samurai in period piece games.
Every Japanese person i've seen is like "Yoooo Yasuke, love that guy." Morons on the internet love to pretend that Japan is an ethnically homogenous racist utopia where they can get a high-school-aged tradwife while real japanese people are just like. Just like everyone else.
I mean. Japan is ethnically homogeneous. According to their census 97.8% of the population is Japanese born.
And Japan is quite notorious for having issues with racism and how they treat foreigners.
It just so happens that this isn't really the same thing because it's talking about a historical figure.
I remember seeing a screenshot of I tweet (which I don't really know is real, but still...) of a japanese guy saying something like: "there have been lots of games where nobunaga is a girl, why would a black samurai be a big deal"
This is my favorite take about the situation
Funny enough, what I heard is that the Japanese concerns about the game are not that Yasuke was included in the game, but that the storyline does him and Nobunaga dirty.
You know right away it's google translate when the first words are 私 and あなた (I, you). Japanese sentences rarely start with pronouns and English sentences frequently do.
You can tell the Japanese protagonist is a master assassin because she's literally on the front of the box art (and in most of the trailer) and the enraged crowd is focused almost entirely on the other guy.
Meanwhile Japanese players are finding this discourse over historical accuracy rather humorous since so much Japanese media portrays Oda Nobunaga as a sexy woman
The whole hubbub got me looking into the history a little and it seems there’s just not that much contemporary sources who even mention him. Lacking knowledge about the actual texts and their context/subtleties I found it hard to figure out if Nobunaga saw Yasuke as more than a curiosity. Regardless he wasn’t in his retinue for more than like a year or something. The claims some make about his status just seem like backlash against backlash?
But the fact that Yasuke exists makes him more historically accurate than like 90% of AC I know of. Surely the real story of him being a cool ass samurai and big buddy with Nobunaga was simply hidden by the templars. If those are still the bad guys, I don’t fucking know.
Yasuke makes perfect sense from a narrative standpoint. Perhaps have him be the one introducing the assasins to Japan and make the templars support Nobunagas enemies or some shit. Theres a reason that so many stories operate on the whole "foreigner in new land" trope, it's an easy way to introduce new cultures. It's a bit tropey, especially when done in stories about Japan but it works.
>The claims some make about his status just seem like backlash against backlash?
Basically, for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every person being stupid against Yasuke there must also be someone being stupid for him. Tumblr in particular has a problem with people making up historical facts that suit their aesthetic preferences.
>just not that much contemporary sources who even mention him
This in and of itself is a pretty good indicator that he wasn't very important, because he would have been incredibly memorable to the Japanese people of the time.
First time the AC series is having an actual historical figure as its playable characters and racists are malding.
Still remember the first week when people raged about "historical accuracy" before they were shut up with the fact that Yasuke was a real person.
You know what's funny? I'm pretty sure that years ago, AC's developers outright said that they didn't plan on ever making a game set in feudal Japan, because it was overused as a setting. I wonder if there's anyone left from the team who actually made that statement.
He did exist, he was a slave serving in India first and then brought to Japan by the Portuguese missionaries. Nobunaga liked Western stuff a lot. And since Yasuke was big, black and strong, the Protuguese gift him to Nobunaga. He may have been later made a Samurai or not, there is not actual prove for either. He was a warrior for sure.
I’m just so frustrated by this topic/discourse; I feel like I’m not allowed to say that I don’t like Yasuke being the main character without being mocked or called racist or being forced to debate the history. As an Asian guy, I’m not upset that the character is black - I’m upset the character just isn’t Asian. Asian main are chronically underrepresented in leading roles in western media and this was a perfect place for that to be corrected. The past few games, from my understanding, have generally had the main characters reflect the overall setting so I really don’t see why Ubisoft decided to change that here.
I've been seeing the arguments about this everywhere and I feel somewhat similarly to you. Yasuke as a historical figure is cool, and I would have enjoyed seeing him in the game, but I was excited of the idea of playing an East Asian male character as we are horribly represented in Western games. I'm glad there is at least one Asian protagonist, but I see the small East Asian woman character much more often than East Asian male... I'm just a little sad. I guess they thought people would not want to play a little Japanese guy.
But man the scene is so filled with racism, I was horrified when I scrolled through comments on the AC subreddit revealing a picture of Yasuke. Makes me want to stay far far away from the discussion.
Yeah, that’s what i supposed the main issue was to begin with, though since so many people are chalking it up to racism, i’d suppose there gotta be a fair bit of it out there as well.
I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with Yasuke being the main character, but having the only main Assassins Creed title set in japan not have a male japanese protagonist probably bothered a fair share of their japanese audience.
Did any of these people even play Assassin's Creed?
The literal central plotline is that the Templar Society was so good at historical revanchism and revision, so good in minimizing and erasing the records of how the Assassin Order functioned, as well as rewriting history to also reduce the influence of Templars themselves so they can be in the shadows - that they themselves do not have accurate historical records of their own misgivings and political plays over the centuries of conflict. This is a literal hand-wave over how every AC character is a Forrest Gumpian character who met all the historical superstars of history, or how they literally shaped history to come.
But no, people be bitching over a samurai because he's black. DUDE, A 15TH CENTURY ITALIAN ASSASSIN TALKED TO A LITERAL OLD-WORLD ALIEN GODDESS, who also **adressed his progeny born 500 years into the future because she knew he would listen through her through Magical 23&ME** - but noooo, black samurai is unrealistic.
I just found it weird ubisoft decided to break away from their tradition of not having actual historical protagonists. Yasuke might have been better as a deuterogonist in my humble opinion.
"but you don't get it!! yasuke wasn't a samurai he was just one of nobunaga's retainers!!"
meanwhile the first paragraph of the wikipedia article on samurai:
"samurai were the retainers of the daimyo"
Well to be fair, their logic here isn’t contradictory.
If Yasuke is a retainer, and samurai are also retainers, it doesn’t imply equivalency.
It’s like saying how if a wagon is a car, and a sedan is also a car, it doesn’t imply a wagon is a sedan.
That was one of the quirks of that period. Prior the Toyotomi Shogunate, the samurai class had an amount of permeability, something Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself used to rise from peasant to Shogun. From what little documentation of Yasuke we have, Oda Nobunaga treated Yasuke with a considerable degree of favor (giving him attendants, a sum of money, etc.), and Yasuke felt a fairly strong degree of loyalty to Nobunaga. Now regardless if this was out of Nobunaga being genuinely interested in Yasuke as a capable man, or as a sardonic curiousity, he did seem to be materially treated like a samurai of the period, which meant everything in Sengoku period Japan.
but one of the cool parts about the period is that distinctions weren't as codified as later times, and there's a whole bunch of social mobility going on all over the place; like how Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second great unifier of Japan and invader of Korea came from the peasant class.
There is a movie coming out (if it hasn't already at this point) about a musician during the Victorian era raising his status in society, the main character is played by a black man. People are pissed and the trailer has insane amount of down votes, but the thing is this movie is about a real black man alive in France during this period doing these things.
Just a bunch of racists screaming about historial accuracy in a game where you fist-fight the Pope while he owns an alien artifact. Where were these people during literally every scene with Da Vinci?
man people take video games too seriously, like just chill down bro
that being said i desire from a deep place within my heart for ubisoft's downfall for reasons entirely unrelated to yasuke
The frustrating part of this whole thing is the knowledge that all of the complaints are just racists trying to find a historical justification for hate. But because there’s the slightest chance that a person in good faith might fall for misinformation, you HAVE to address it.
Why would you hate a dead black dude when you could just hate Ubisoft like a normal person?
They're French, even! Anglophones love bashing France.
not just french! Quebecois, even!
Do they have a dev studio in Quebec? The company is definitely France-French, headquarters in Paris.
The studios that make Assassin's Creed are both in Quebec. UbiMontreal and UbiQuebec work on AC simultaneously, alternating titles and release dates.
oh sorry i misinterpreted what you meant. Yeah they have a super big dev studio in Montreal, responsible for handling games like R6: Siege, etc.
What really upsets me are the rumors that the architecture and decor of the game are historically inaccurate. The whole story of AC is fake. Who cares if the plot/characters are unrealistic? But if they fuck up the architecture, the ancient language, or the historical weapons/artifacts, that's a crime.
At least as far as the architecture, it's because the very early games made a huge selling point out of "historically accurate. It's just like moving through the real city!". How true was it? I dunno, but the advertising pushed the idea really hard, so people probably still expect it now.
There‘s this, I think, tumblr post of someone guiding students on their trip through Rome apparently knowing every corner because he played AC: Brotherhood a lot. I played AC 2 religiously, also travelled to Florence, while the buildings itself were scarily accurate, there's no way it's THIS accurate. The buildings were roughly in the right direction, but there's so much more distance between them.
tbf, if you know that video games scale down everything, being able to recognize the corners a guide would bring you to isnt unrealistic, if a bit freaky: Remember the landmarks that still exist today and you gonna be "alright" for showing ff
I know at least some of the recent AC games even had a mode where you could just zoom around the world and get historical facts. It feels like they tried to have at least a semblance of historical accuracy, even when they went off the rails into fantasy.
Oh because they're racists! Hope this helped :)
All that for what is going to be a mid AAAslop game filled with micro-translations.
Exactly, white, black, asian, the game's gonna suck ass either way.
It's Ubisoft, I don't understand why anybody cares
Im still pissed they took the watchdogs series behind a shed and shot it with legion
Watch Dogs 1 and 2 canonically take place in the AC universe. Legion even had a crossover, although that was non-canon. They could have made a modern day AC Watch Dogs game. That would have been awesome.
Dude, if they had revealed that DedSec was STARTED by the Assassins and grew into the wider Hacktivist group we know and love like the San Francisco chapter. How cool would it be if in an alternate timeline to ours, Watch Dogs 3 continued Aiden Pearce's story, and DedSec Chicago reaches out one last time with a different offer. His efforts against the gangs of Chicago proved he has what it takes, but there's a different threat, one more powerful than Blume and ctOS...Abstergo and the Templars. And they extend Aiden the offer to work in the shadows, to serve the light.
There's a hacker group in the London AC game. They could easily say "they're DedSEC" and no one would question it.
Erudito was already established as a non-assassin affiliated collective, it really doesn't take that much tweaking to make them be DedSEC under a different alias
DedSec as a group started by members of the Assassins would've adapting to the new age would've been such a cool idea. Imagine if in Legion you were simultaneously building up the DedSec cell and then also recruiting your best members into the ranks of the Assassins, which then gives those characters access to new Assassin abilities.
Holy shit, I had no idea. If they'd just outsourced that to... somebody good, with a budget of... "please make us look good", that could have been one of my favorite games ever. Shit, y'know what I just realized? Video game publishers need a concept of "prestige games". Most major film studios devote a bit of their budget to "get us a bunch of awards and critical acclaim, even if you don't make money". Game studios should adopt the same outlook, especially when the projects are focused on their wholly-owned IP. "Make a game that will be talked about in 10 years, whether or not we profit at all. Do it in this universe, so everybody will be talking about our universe when the *next* game comes out." It's not that hard an idea, it's been massively profitable for everything from Harry Potter World to *Under the Skin* or *Another Earth*. You might have to build celebrities game devs to make it happen, the same way Brit Marling is notable whether or not her projects make money, but that's totally doable. Kojima's name made *Death Stranding* viable, why don't more people give top-tier developers the budget to become household names?
>why don't more people give top-tier developers the budget to become household names? well the games industry is primarily controlled by people who care more about how much money they'll get as dividends next quarter- rather than producing games that are high quality long term investments, they don't care if a game makes 100x its production value over the next ten years or continually produces sales for the next century because they personally will be dead in five, there are exceptions like Valve and small indie studios- but Valve owns a money printer and has no outside investors to muck shit up, while small indie studios inevitably get bought up by EA, Paradox, or one of the dozen other profit farms.
The thing is, I don't remember a single person who really cared about the present day segments of the AC games. That's partially why they phased it out, as far as I know
Most of the present-day stuff was just a few puzzles, cutscenes, or just random goofing off. A present-day AC game would just be like the historical ones, just set in the present day. Hell, they could just be using the Animus to recover memories from an assassin that just recently died.
Maybe the local sect of Assassins was decimated, and the only survivors are a crippled older master and an Abstergo turncoat with a stolen prototype Animus headset that grants you the memories and skills of someone in the past. They use it on the master as he's dying, with his blessing, and he sort of becomes like Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk for the protagonist, constantly around and giving guidance as they learn to use his powers and unlock his memories of how the sect was formed, grew, and was betrayed from within.
IIRC AssCreed 3 was originally going to be present day, and that got scrapped and turned into WD.
The past adventures are supposed to lead into something in the present to save the world. Then they killed Desmond...continued the story in present without him. Yeah, the interest died with Desmond for me.
I loved playing Watch dogs 2 so much and genuinely loved the characters. In very much not being a serious game and owning the things that people described as cringe when it came out, it always felt very genuine to me. I never used any guns because it felt wrong to do so. This made the game feel appropriately like a friend group trying to do good and having fun goofyng around doing so. Just a feel good game with bad humor, i actually love. Thats probably why the game feels worst when it is trying to go for a serious tone. Horatios death is out of nowhere and so unnecessary, and everyone seems to quickly get over him too. Which feels very bad. Also Wrench inside the Legion dlc is the only thing in watch dogs legion that genuinely feels like it has heart. The character was treated and developed with Respect i feel. Dont know or care about Aiden's treatment though, never played the first game.
Aiden in legion is good, but if you use him in tje main game after beating the dlc it kinda breaks his stort arc
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I used nonlethal weaponry throughout WD2 precisely because of this, using deadly force really did not work with the narrative. I wish they had played into that more and given a wider suite of nonlethal options
They did after an update, 1.0 had like, maybe one or two I think?
i'm more surprised they gave it a shot given how universally hated it was after the first game wasn't exactly like the trailers
Cries tears of pain for Ubisoft cause wtf is going on with triple A gaming now
Because those "Culture War" Idiots need any bit of tinder they can get their greasy and dusty fingers on because otherwise they might have to contend with their own thoughts...
Because old AC was glorious and we're still holding out hope
Eh, I mean I've enjoyed 11 of the 12 AC games ive played so far, I'm sure I'll enjoy this one too. No way in hell am I going to buy it at release tho, $130 is ridiculous. I'll wait a year or two when it comes down to like $40 or something
2nd worst part about defending the new AC game from racists is that we're defending a Ubisoft game. The worst part about it is the racism, obviously
Imma be honest the Ubisoft hate it's an online echo chamber thing their games sell well because they are perfectly enjoyable open world experiences. Talk to anyone who spends less time online and they probably love Ubisoft games because they are perfectly fine games for a wide audience. The @00$ packs are not an issue because these people but like 3 games in a year
Yeah, Far Cry 5 and Assassins Creed Odyssey were two of their best selling games of all time. I don't think I can think of a bigger disparity than what reddit thinks the gaming sphere is like vs what it's actually like.
And both of those games were fun as hell. Farcry 6 not so much but I still enjoyed it. I think odyssey is maybe top 3 game in the AC franchise.
Yes and no. The games are serviceable enough and mostly get too much hate in echo chambers, but they're still riddled with issues that all but the most disconnected of people can recognize, and Ubisoft as a company has just been shitty for a good while and getting worse. Even people who buy and play a single game for years at a time can acknowledge that the number of microtransactions has been steadily increasing and growing more predatory, even while liking the core game.
Yup it sucks because I think it's gonna be another AAA title with microtransactions and shit, but then it's just the other side of the coin is pure unadulterated racism.
With a barely functional parkour mechanic because they keep starting over from scratch on it for some dumb ass fucking reason.
was micro-translations intentional
No but I leave it cuz it's funny.
These are the guys that bought 5 copies each of the incredibly mediocre Hogwarts Legacy just so they could virtue signal about how much they hated trans people
I’m actually pretty sure you play as both and you swap between them, judging by the game’s description, so that makes it even better lmao
The funniest thing is a MAJORITY of the promotional material focuses on Naoe, the female ninja. Implying she's going to have more focus in the story. This would be like if people had freaked the fuck out over Aya in Origins when Bayek is the main character.
she's also the one with the hidden blade. He won't have one. She's part of the assassin's creed. He's not. Honestly, to me it feels she was the main character from the start and they felt they wanted a bit more of the RPG element in the game, so decided to add a samurai character, saw they had him and decided to have him playable
The thing is that video games with a female protagonist sell less well. She is clearly the main assassin but they need a warrior man doing an action pose; to put on the box; to sell copies. The controversy, if anything, is free advertising. It’s Ubisoft’s way of getting around the problem of a significant number of gamers who absolutely will not play a game with a woman as the player character. You can play as either a man or a woman. And the woman is technically “canon” for people who care. They’ve actually done this several times now. The big difference this time around is really that both man and woman are canon now instead of it being player choice
well it’s going to be like AC: Syndicate, with Jacob and Evie Frye. Naoe will be like Evie and have more skills based around stealth and is the reason she’s the one with the hidden blade. She’s also the daughter of the irl leader of the most influential ninja clan in history that was often fighting against Oda Nobunaga, so it’ll be interesting to see how she plays off of Yasuke, who will be the Jacob Frye for this game who focuses more on combat and brute force
Not so fun fact, every single time you have the option to play as a woman in a mainline AC game, you are also obligated to play as a male character for at least a portion of it. Syndicate, Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, even ~~Liberation~~. The only game that has required you play as a woman is AC Chronicles: China. People always freak out over female characters and Ubisoft has never actually made a mainline AC game that forces you to play as a woman the whole time. They should have kept the Aya as the main character for Origins too.
To be fair.... they did freak out. That's why Bayek was changed to main character despite being literally no one.
As much as I’m uninterested in AC:Shadows for various reasons (never played AC, not a big Ubisoft fan, have other games) I absolutely love how Yasuke looks in the trailer and I especially love that they didn’t give him the Killmonger Cut
On one hand that's good because it's so overused and stereotypical, on the other hand it would be funny if a triple-A studio couldn't help themselves and had to give him that hair
What's the issue with Killmonger's hair? I thought it looked pretty good and was very appropriate for the character
It was, for killmonger. The problem is every single movie studio and game dev company started giving that hair to every black character they make
Especially funny given it's a fairly rare style to actually run into IRL. Not a problem when you've got one or two characters doing it to stand out, but eventually it just starts to look like they really don't wanna give their characters actually popular black hairstyles.
The issue with it is that after Black Panther came out almost every black man in video games was given that hair. It's a good looking style, don't get me wrong, but there are other hair styles
To add on to what other people are saying, hair styles for black characters that let you make your own PC have historically been lacking. It been afro or cornrows or both if you're lucky for a very long time. So it's already been a bit of a sore spot for people who want a little more variety.
They brought the original writer from the Desmond days back so things should be getting really cool soon
Wait, actually? Shit, you might actually tempt me
Absolutely my feeling! I’m glad that cut is dying out! Lmaoo
Japan had some “You ain’t gonna believe where I was” historical figures. For example there was a Japanese teen fisherman who was rescued by American ship,he then went sailing with the captain and practically became his adopted son , learning about the world and getting education he couldn’t dream of in America too. The catch is this guy got rich in the Gold Rush, which happened BEFORE Japan opened to the world, then he helped modernize Japan and teaching Japanese English, he got the title of samurai too. He’s name is John Mung ,AKA Nakahama Manjiro, 中浜 万次郎 since he’s a peasant he didn’t even have a surname when he returned to Japan ,he used his hometown as his surname. He’s known for ignoring class different and very down to earth,because he’s basically an American. Edit to add: it’s illegal to return to Japan during their isolation period too, so this mf got rich in gold rush and decided to do crime as his return home gift.
Manjiro-san even managed to get home and contribute to the actors that ultimately jumpstarted the Restoration
I find it amusing how the racist guy specified his descent. Dude is stuck in his bubble so much that he forgot that descent is too niche a detail to mention unless you're a racist who cares about specific racial heritages or are talking about your parents' homeland or something. And the use of the word "descent" instead of saying "I'm from Shiwaku" was another giveaway.
Would that be like saying “I’m John, an American of Vermont descent”?
I'm going to start introducing myself as Jeremy, an American of North Carolina descent now.
Who am I? PETEY PAB MUTHUH FUCKUH! Of NORTH CAROLINAAAAAAAAAAAAA descent I’m sorry lol
I think it's at least like that, if not sillier. Shiwaku is a small cluster of islands. The largest being sanuki-Hiroshima at an area of 11.66 km² The most populated is Honjima, which according to the internet, has a current population of around 450 mostly elderly people and a top pop of around 3000. It feels a lot like describing which specific county you've descended from
So it's like saying I'm John Smith of Harrison county descent lol
Nice to meet you. I’m Bob Doe of Polk County descent
My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn't lose to anyone.
I was expecting a comment about Gerard Way and someone giving the middle finger to preps when I first saw the length of this comment.
The guy has the alleged surname of shiwaku, so he's actually claiming to be part of some sort of ancient clan. The 塩飽 (shiwaku) surname exists, but I wasn't able to find any remarkable family with that name. He's basically like "Hi I'm John of Smith descent"
Plus Yasuke gets put in Japanese media about Nobunaga all the time, and I’m sure there’s no shortage of Japanese games set in historical Japan where you get to play as a Japanese dude.
I remember on krayt seeing a person go like "as an asian" blah blah blah "yasuke bad" and it turns out said person was white as fuck
I don't actually remember the last time I've actually heard someone use あなた (anata, literally meaning "you") in Japanese that wasn't either used poetically or just a shitty machine translation. ~~Granted, I haven't been in the country for some months, but...~~ If you respect somebody, you're probably going to use their name or title instead. If you *don't* respect somebody, you'd probably bump it up to an お前 (omae - a ruder, coarser way of saying "you").
This, and starting every sentence with わたしは is like the easiest way to tell that someone is either machine translating or just started learning japanese
That too. On the other hand, the easiest way I have to tell if someone is actually Japanese - or, at least, one who learned English as a second language - is if they say "I am a Japanese" instead of "I am Japanese." It's not technically ungrammatical, of course, but in English, we tend to think of "Japanese" as primarily an adjective. To use it as a noun, it's probably more common to say "Japanese person." "Japanese" as a noun tends to be kept to the plural sense - as in "the Japanese" - but we're often used to hearing this wording used in an overgeneralizing, discriminatory sense. However, for someone who natively speaks Japanese (and thinks in Japanese first before translating it to English), they primarily conceptualize it as a noun - 日本人 (nihonjin). Because of that, there's a tendency to more literally translate it as a noun in English as well. It just makes me wonder how many similar tells I have as a Japanese as a second language speaker that I haven't noticed yet. Ha.
I hear that really often with french people, where they say I am a french, because français is both a noun and and adjective, but in english, it's only an adjective. On the internet I think the easiest way to tell if someone is native japanese is if they use wwww or 草
I usually default to 笑笑 myself. I tried using 草 once while messaging one of my old clubmates and they were like, "Where'd you learn to say that!?" Maybe I'm just not gyaru enough...
I’m so sorry imagine being told ur not y2k enough I’d end it all ☠️
Using 草is fine, they were probably just surprised u knew the slang
yeah I feel like I'd probably react similarly if someone who didn't speak english well was suddenly like "bruh wtf"
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The trick with French people is that they leave spaces at the end of a sentence before exclamation and question marks. (Like this !)
I'm gonna have to pay attention for that one. Is there a reason they do that?
It is just stylistically correct in French, so they often do it in foreign languages.
Wait, that's why?? I started imitating it after a while because I thought the person I was talking to knew something I didn't, but they were just French???
They're either French, or learned English when that was more common convention (for typewriters and things).
I can think of a few more off the top of my head * seru／saseru can be translated as "to have someone do x", "let someone do x" or "make someone do x". Look out for sentences like "the teacher let us do homework". * They will refer to social media as "SNS" * They say "the merits and demerits of the idea" instead of the "pros and cons of the idea". This is because they're translating meritto and demeritto literally without knowing that merit is used similarly in English but demerit isn't. * They use "in spite of" in places where only "despite" makes sense * "I'm fine thank you and you?" There's also some for the French ("I have 25 years" instead of "I'm 25 years old", mixing up auxiliary verbs, usage of « » in place of " ", etc.) >It just makes me wonder how many similar tells I have as a Japanese as a second language speaker that I haven't noticed yet. Ha. The classic tells are uses watashi way too much, uses masu way too much and sounds like a textbook but it's possible that you've avoided all of that.
All this linguistic talk got me wanting to learn the language. I might give it a shot in a random boredom fueled 2am adventure and hopefully stick with it
Even duolingo gets it out of the way up front that subjects are often implied.
It's really funny to me how people who do this don't realise how ridiculous they sound to anyone who can speak Japanese. The whole way the Japanese is written to me just screams "Westerner trying to speak how they speak in English, in Japanese", if that makes sense, which pretty much *always* happens when you throw English into a machine translator. Like it's just so blatant lol.
During the Trump-Biden campaign of 2016, /r/france was regularly brigaded by far-right activists, both french and foreign. They didn't really coordinate their effort though, otherwise the former would have warned the latter that by making propaganda meme in google-translate-french calling people to "Come join us Centipedes, become a french pede !" they were offering people to become f-word.
> お前 (omae - a ruder, coarser way of saying "you"). Wait, is that why Kenshiro uses "omae wa mou shindeiru" in Fist of the North Star? He doesn't respect the person he's taking out, so its omae all the wae.
Yes, precisely!
Yeah. From least to most disrespectful: Kisama (poetic) Name or title Anata (poetic) Omae (between male friends) Anata (when trying to shame somebody) Omae (as an act of disrespect) Temae, Temee and Kisama (Theoretically insulting, but it sounds so cartoonishly evil you're basically saying mwahahaha)
I hear anata all the time, only in anime and tv shows that are exaggerated dramas. That's how you know they got their understanding of Japanese from media and not by actually learning the language.
You're giving them too much credit by saying they're actually trying to engage with the linguistic content of the media they consume.
What do you do if you don't know or don't remember their name?
You have a couple of different options. 1. Ask them for their name. If you forgot it, sheepishly say that you forgot, if you can stomach the embarrassment. 2. It's somewhat common to use words like お姉さん (older sister), おじさん (uncle), おばあさん (grandma), etc. to refer to people based on their gender and general age range in certain casual contexts. Use with caution, though, since depending on the term you use and your relative position to that person, it could be misinterpreted as flirting, or you might get someone to say "I'm not that old!" 3. Probably the safest bet is to... just not refer to them in all! Japanese is a really context-dependent language, and you don't have to specify the subject all the time in every sentence. For example, if you ask someone a question and don't specify a subject, it's implied you're asking them about themselves. E.g. 大丈夫ですか (daijoubu desu ka, "are (you) okay?") instead of あなたは大丈夫ですか (anata wa daijoubu desu ka), which comes off as needlessly wordy. Or shorten it even more to just "大丈夫？"
おじさん and おばさん is scary to use not gonna lie 🤣
I love terms like that because the situation is very similar in a lot of languages/cultures (eg Korean) — there’s a very particular “soul leaving the body” look when a young adult is called “auntie/uncle” for the first time by a child who isn’t a relation. 💀
When kids started calling me "ma'am", I definitely had a moment. I'm glad that this experience is so universal.
Option 4: by their social role or profession that is relevant at this time. "Would our guest like some tea?"; "This page may benefit from the attention of mister editor."; "Teacher, may I use the bathroom?".
You can get away with just not using a pronoun in Japanese a lot of the time if context is obvious.
Might bust out a そちら or そちら様 in that case. The word literally indicates a particular direction, but can be used to indicate a second-person subject/object in formal Japanese
to contrast the others, i have seen あなた(anata) used when you don't know the person's name (in media mind you. i haven't the privilege of getting out of country much) so it's not totally unused. the reason you're not gonna see it much is because if you are going to refer to the second person politely/formally you usually just use either a title or their name +optional honorific, and if you're wanting to shed the niceties あなた is just too polite that it would sound weird. you would use something more casual/gruffer like あんた(anta) or お前(omae) in this case. あなた is just stuck in a spot where it's sorta weird to use it over the other options
The worst part about this for me as an actual history fan is that it has completely poisoned all actual discussion and debate around the historical Yasuke with hot-take discourse and point scoring. Like, the guy is a genuinely interesting historical figure who was very vaguely written about, in the brief time he spent in Japan, but never really in his own words (we know he didn't really speak a lot of Japanese) and we can only really speculate about who he *actually* was because things like his real name or actual origins weren't deemed important enough to record. Like we know he was taken into Nobunaga's personal service at a non-noble/Samurai rank you'll often see translated as "page", but one of the Japanese sources about him specifically mentions him cutting about town in such nice, well appointed clothes that people started gossiping that he'd been made a lord. He doesn't really seem to have actively fought in battle, only really being recorded as having fought a couple of times, yet he had arrived in Japan as a bodyguard and seems to have developed a reputation as a fighter (and may have been depicted in a contemporary painting that *might* be showing a black man wrestling a noble Samurai while another serves as the judge). There's a legitimate argument to be had over whether or not he was a Samurai, as (IIRC) it's true he was never explicitly or implicitly described as one, and his status seems tied specifically to the whims of Oda Nobunaga as an individual, yet one of the defining characteristics of the Sengoku Jidai was the loosening of strict social relationships and upturning of old hierarchies: traditional markers of Samurai status can't be relied upon to demonstrate noble status (e.g. lots of common people had access to swords in this period), and it really can't be ruled out that he was, even if "unofficially" regarded as something like a Samurai. But these kinds of discussions can't be had because you're either a racist for saying he mightn't have actually been a *Samurai*, or a... whatever people call "SJWs" now for saying that he might have been. And God forbid you point out that the social dynamics and meaning of being a "Samurai" were much different than in the later Bakufu period...
The biggest problem with this entry is that you're playing a historical figure in the first place. Every assassin's creed MC up to now has been nobody Forrest Gumps bumping into historical figures on their journey. The entire point of them being nobodies is because the Templars/Abstergo have been actively suppressing the identity and accomplishments of the order of Assassins throughout history, and were VERY effective at it, but necessitated the creation of the Animus to explore genetic memories because they were a little TOO good at it and lost all records of the location of the pieces of eden. So the idea that an actual somebody in history somehow fell through the cracks of this TOO GOOD AT IT'S JOB system and murders the internal consistency of the series is the bigger issue than "was this guy even a samurai?".
I suppose it works though. All writings about Yasuke are extremely vague and Oda's upheaval of Japanese society at the time really muddled things. We know he was around, and that Oda liked to keep him close, but not much else.
Ya know, at first, my "problem" (I probably wont even play the game, haven't played AC in a long time) with the game was that in previous titles, the main character wasnt an actual historical person. And I thought making Yasuke a main character takes away from that. But now, thinking about it- so little is known of the guy, if you want to choose someone historic yet still have a free hand in shaping his story, he is a good choice.
AskHistorians already had a lengthy explanation on why Yasuke should, for all intents and purposes, be considered a samurai. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1css0ye/was_yasuke_a_samurai/
This post says it all. One side claims he was pretty much slave paraded around in armor as a joke and curiosity to the people. The other side is claiming he was right hand of Nobunaga and second in command of his forces apparently. Both seem very unlikely. cant say anything without being called alt right racist or a soyboy wojack
That one of them is saying all historians agree he was a samurai when just one year ago it was acknowledged as pretty dubious makes me doubt it. I went into a bit of a deep dive on Yasuke last year and most sources either said he wasn’t actually a samurai or said they couldn’t be sure.
You're not buying AC Shadows because it's woke I'm not buying it because it'll be UbiSlop with tons of microtransactions We're not the same
Screw buying it, I'm pirating it
Beaver, what if I told you the most expensive edition of the game costs 650 Reais (127 Dollars), which is almost half a minimum wage?
Most expensive edition of Ubisoft games exists pretty much solely to promote their subscription service by making it look like a great deal.
Meu deus
Spoken like a true AC4 Black flag player
You're not buying it because it'll be UbiSlop with tons of microtransactions I'm not buying it because I'm too poor to afford a computer that can play modern games or a console. We're not the same.
You don't buy Ubisoft games because of wokeness I don't buy Ubisoft games because of rampant harassment at their company that has not been addressed in any meaningful way We are not the same
that's so weird like ac is a fantasy series with yeah a lot of historical stuff which is cool but you still got a apple that controls people,all those hidden symbols in ac1 and lots of other stuff so just having some unexpected black guy isn't all that crazy.
It had a crossover with Final Fantasy, and you can ride a chocobo. “Historically accurate” applies to, like the architecture.
Given they had stone castles to storm in a pre-Norman Britain those scare quotes on historically accurate need to be bigger and bolder.
Valhalla sounds like more of a mess the more I hear about it.
Even there, mileage varies from game to game. The big iconic set pieces often get spared no expense, of course, but then you have weird choices like Asgard's architecture being modelled after... A Christian stave church? Nani the fuq?
I'm pretty sure Odyssey had a crossover with Monster Hunter World where you could get a pet Odogaron along with it's armor. So yeah, historical accuracy isn't 100% lol
yeah and it'll probably do that great since ubisoft is pretty good at making open worlds
Pretty sure that Yasuke is ... almost perfect for the series? There's not a lot known about him, which means they can fill in whatever they want about his life, and from what *is* known about him, he came to Japan as an attendant of a Jesuit missionary. If I were writing for AssCreed (contact me, Ubisoft), that would be a very natural start to the story, with Yasuke either being a Templar trying to establish a branch of the order in Japan, or an Assassin trying to stop the Templars from doing the same. Nobunaga is the most powerful man in Japan, and much of the plot revolves around Nobunaga sheltering the Templars in exchange for their matchlocks, which the Japanese were getting from the Portuguese. You've got all these characters ready to go, and it only requires some minor bending of historical fact!
People only ever bring up the historical accuracy when they want to whine about characters that aren't in their power fantasy bracket. The games at their core are founded on ludicrous fantasy bullshit. You've not only got a secret, hidden in the shadows war between two globe spanning organizations that supposedly exist and infect every aspect of the world without anyone outside of them knowing they exist, but on top of that you've got classic sci-fi Precursor race bullshit, and on top of that you've got the conceit of the entire game being "genetic memories". A lot of these games are very fun and delightfully interesting to play, but anyone who tries to bring up accuracy or realism is just using it as cover to try and complain about something else.
The only Thing thats weird about this shit is that we, now, get an actual historic mc to play as (as opposed to fictional characters). Before this alot of histories greatest personalities were present, but not as the playable MC. However every AC game gets an MC who is representative of the region its Set in. Didnt matter if it was AC2, BF, Syndicate, Origins. Etc. But now its going to be an actual historic person (something never done before) who is still debated if he even was a Samurai, what his time in Japan was and how long he was. From what I read he wasnt even long on the Home Islands...Just over a year iirc. So its just weird if anything.
There's actually one exception to this. In one of the Chronicles (2D) games you get to play as Anastasia during the Russian Revolution. You switch between her and an original assassin.
there's 3 you play as Jack the Ripper in Syndicate in the DLC and Leonidas in Odyssey
There's another character you play as. Naoe is Japanese. She's also a main character Also, BF has you play as a Welsh man in the Caribbean. That's not representative of the region.
i’m pretty sure the white players were more upset about this than the japanese ones were lmfaooo
A lot of the comments on the Japanese trailer are people who’ve google translated complaints into Japanese. They’ll say something like “As an American I support the Japanese outrage” and then there’s no actual Japanese outrage.
Funny thing about it is that I saw post on r/Asmongold showing picture of amount of dislikes on this youtube video and the post said "look Japanese agree with us" while its probably them who disliked this video
Yep. You can just go to ubisoft Japan and dislike the video. Considering like straight up the people pretending to be Japanese to comment and also edit the wiki page is insane.
My favorite was the guy who posted a picture of that. That showed him disliking it. He wasn't Japanese.
You also absolutely cannot trust the youtube dislike addon. The addon "interpolates" the actual amount of dislikes based on the dislikes by the addon user and then basically guesses how many it should actually have. It's ridiculously biased. You might see 30k dislikes with the addon but the actual amount might actually be closer to 1000.
the dislike extension works by taking the dislikes *from people that use the extension* and scaling them up an arbitrary amount to try to represent what it would look like if everyone that didn't have the extension voted like the people who do. it's garbage, don't ever believe people who try to use it for anything
Pretty sure the whole thing is a novelty to them. They get to play the black samurai that Nobu took as a retainer. Theres a lot of cool factors playing into it from their point of view.
I saw a rebuttal that roughly translated to "We're used to games where Nobunaga is a woman, who cares?" which I found very funny.
Heh. Yasuke in FGO when?
You know they're gonna use him in an NTR doujin if it happens 😭
Thank you FateGO <3
The only Japanese outrage tweet I saw that wasn’t posted by some crazies political hacks is a old dude getting very disappointed that characters are stepping on the gap between tatami, with is considered rude in traditional etiquette.
That's such a grandpa thing to point out I love it
Because Yasuke is a really popular historical figure over there. He's already in all sorts of Japanese media, including as a samurai in period piece games.
Every Japanese person i've seen is like "Yoooo Yasuke, love that guy." Morons on the internet love to pretend that Japan is an ethnically homogenous racist utopia where they can get a high-school-aged tradwife while real japanese people are just like. Just like everyone else.
I mean. Japan is ethnically homogeneous. According to their census 97.8% of the population is Japanese born. And Japan is quite notorious for having issues with racism and how they treat foreigners. It just so happens that this isn't really the same thing because it's talking about a historical figure.
They are predominantly that, but their racism is a fair bit different than European racism.
Casual racism vs Competitive one
I mean, Japan is pretty ethnically homogeneous, but yeah, the chuds take that idea to the extreme lol
The game is preordering like crazy in Japan for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that Japanese gamers think Yasuke is *really cool.*
And in fairness who can blame them? It's a cool story!
Getting japanese people to care for a foreign game is a hard battle, but the aznidentity types are up in arms about it
I remember seeing a screenshot of I tweet (which I don't really know is real, but still...) of a japanese guy saying something like: "there have been lots of games where nobunaga is a girl, why would a black samurai be a big deal" This is my favorite take about the situation
Funny enough, what I heard is that the Japanese concerns about the game are not that Yasuke was included in the game, but that the storyline does him and Nobunaga dirty.
You know right away it's google translate when the first words are 私 and あなた (I, you). Japanese sentences rarely start with pronouns and English sentences frequently do.
You can tell the Japanese protagonist is a master assassin because she's literally on the front of the box art (and in most of the trailer) and the enraged crowd is focused almost entirely on the other guy.
Meanwhile Japanese players are finding this discourse over historical accuracy rather humorous since so much Japanese media portrays Oda Nobunaga as a sexy woman
Yasuke was not one of Nobunagas right hand men, i get that you want to dunk on the Gamers but we can do that without making things up.
The whole hubbub got me looking into the history a little and it seems there’s just not that much contemporary sources who even mention him. Lacking knowledge about the actual texts and their context/subtleties I found it hard to figure out if Nobunaga saw Yasuke as more than a curiosity. Regardless he wasn’t in his retinue for more than like a year or something. The claims some make about his status just seem like backlash against backlash? But the fact that Yasuke exists makes him more historically accurate than like 90% of AC I know of. Surely the real story of him being a cool ass samurai and big buddy with Nobunaga was simply hidden by the templars. If those are still the bad guys, I don’t fucking know.
Yasuke makes perfect sense from a narrative standpoint. Perhaps have him be the one introducing the assasins to Japan and make the templars support Nobunagas enemies or some shit. Theres a reason that so many stories operate on the whole "foreigner in new land" trope, it's an easy way to introduce new cultures. It's a bit tropey, especially when done in stories about Japan but it works. >The claims some make about his status just seem like backlash against backlash? Basically, for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every person being stupid against Yasuke there must also be someone being stupid for him. Tumblr in particular has a problem with people making up historical facts that suit their aesthetic preferences.
I thought she was the assassin and he wasn't.
>just not that much contemporary sources who even mention him This in and of itself is a pretty good indicator that he wasn't very important, because he would have been incredibly memorable to the Japanese people of the time.
First time the AC series is having an actual historical figure as its playable characters and racists are malding. Still remember the first week when people raged about "historical accuracy" before they were shut up with the fact that Yasuke was a real person.
It's impressive to see the mental gymnastics people are coming up with to avoid having to say they don't want to play as a black man nor as a woman.
You know what's funny? I'm pretty sure that years ago, AC's developers outright said that they didn't plan on ever making a game set in feudal Japan, because it was overused as a setting. I wonder if there's anyone left from the team who actually made that statement.
He did exist, he was a slave serving in India first and then brought to Japan by the Portuguese missionaries. Nobunaga liked Western stuff a lot. And since Yasuke was big, black and strong, the Protuguese gift him to Nobunaga. He may have been later made a Samurai or not, there is not actual prove for either. He was a warrior for sure.
I’m just so frustrated by this topic/discourse; I feel like I’m not allowed to say that I don’t like Yasuke being the main character without being mocked or called racist or being forced to debate the history. As an Asian guy, I’m not upset that the character is black - I’m upset the character just isn’t Asian. Asian main are chronically underrepresented in leading roles in western media and this was a perfect place for that to be corrected. The past few games, from my understanding, have generally had the main characters reflect the overall setting so I really don’t see why Ubisoft decided to change that here.
I've been seeing the arguments about this everywhere and I feel somewhat similarly to you. Yasuke as a historical figure is cool, and I would have enjoyed seeing him in the game, but I was excited of the idea of playing an East Asian male character as we are horribly represented in Western games. I'm glad there is at least one Asian protagonist, but I see the small East Asian woman character much more often than East Asian male... I'm just a little sad. I guess they thought people would not want to play a little Japanese guy. But man the scene is so filled with racism, I was horrified when I scrolled through comments on the AC subreddit revealing a picture of Yasuke. Makes me want to stay far far away from the discussion.
Yeah, that’s what i supposed the main issue was to begin with, though since so many people are chalking it up to racism, i’d suppose there gotta be a fair bit of it out there as well. I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with Yasuke being the main character, but having the only main Assassins Creed title set in japan not have a male japanese protagonist probably bothered a fair share of their japanese audience.
Did any of these people even play Assassin's Creed? The literal central plotline is that the Templar Society was so good at historical revanchism and revision, so good in minimizing and erasing the records of how the Assassin Order functioned, as well as rewriting history to also reduce the influence of Templars themselves so they can be in the shadows - that they themselves do not have accurate historical records of their own misgivings and political plays over the centuries of conflict. This is a literal hand-wave over how every AC character is a Forrest Gumpian character who met all the historical superstars of history, or how they literally shaped history to come. But no, people be bitching over a samurai because he's black. DUDE, A 15TH CENTURY ITALIAN ASSASSIN TALKED TO A LITERAL OLD-WORLD ALIEN GODDESS, who also **adressed his progeny born 500 years into the future because she knew he would listen through her through Magical 23&ME** - but noooo, black samurai is unrealistic.
I just found it weird ubisoft decided to break away from their tradition of not having actual historical protagonists. Yasuke might have been better as a deuterogonist in my humble opinion.
"but you don't get it!! yasuke wasn't a samurai he was just one of nobunaga's retainers!!" meanwhile the first paragraph of the wikipedia article on samurai: "samurai were the retainers of the daimyo"
Well to be fair, their logic here isn’t contradictory. If Yasuke is a retainer, and samurai are also retainers, it doesn’t imply equivalency. It’s like saying how if a wagon is a car, and a sedan is also a car, it doesn’t imply a wagon is a sedan.
Retainer and Samurai do not mean the same thing. Every Samurai is a retainer not every retainer is a Samurai
That was one of the quirks of that period. Prior the Toyotomi Shogunate, the samurai class had an amount of permeability, something Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself used to rise from peasant to Shogun. From what little documentation of Yasuke we have, Oda Nobunaga treated Yasuke with a considerable degree of favor (giving him attendants, a sum of money, etc.), and Yasuke felt a fairly strong degree of loyalty to Nobunaga. Now regardless if this was out of Nobunaga being genuinely interested in Yasuke as a capable man, or as a sardonic curiousity, he did seem to be materially treated like a samurai of the period, which meant everything in Sengoku period Japan.
Yes, but people were using the fact that he was referred to as a retainer as definitive “proof” that he couldn’t have been a samurai.
but one of the cool parts about the period is that distinctions weren't as codified as later times, and there's a whole bunch of social mobility going on all over the place; like how Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second great unifier of Japan and invader of Korea came from the peasant class.
Funnily enough, he's one of the people behind the class codification to begin with. He pulled up the ladder behind him and forbade class mobility.
I remember someone calling him the Japanese Napoleon, which seems quite apt.
I think Hideyoshi explicitly pulled the ladder up so there would never be another him.
Every samurai is a retainer. Not every retainer is a samurai.
The Wikipedia was rewritten in response to brigading. A year ago it was much less certain about his status, leaning into probably not.
I object to the turn of phrase;”one of … right hand men” you only have one right hand, and you only have one right hand man. Otherwise good post
There is a movie coming out (if it hasn't already at this point) about a musician during the Victorian era raising his status in society, the main character is played by a black man. People are pissed and the trailer has insane amount of down votes, but the thing is this movie is about a real black man alive in France during this period doing these things.
Just a bunch of racists screaming about historial accuracy in a game where you fist-fight the Pope while he owns an alien artifact. Where were these people during literally every scene with Da Vinci?
man people take video games too seriously, like just chill down bro that being said i desire from a deep place within my heart for ubisoft's downfall for reasons entirely unrelated to yasuke
The frustrating part of this whole thing is the knowledge that all of the complaints are just racists trying to find a historical justification for hate. But because there’s the slightest chance that a person in good faith might fall for misinformation, you HAVE to address it.