It’s bad enough that Ubisoft is brazenly colonizing Japan’s most esteemed and prestigious era by presenting a historically insignificant figure as a makeshift samurai without any supporting evidence.
Adding to the controversy, its Canadian developers seem burdened with White guilt, and the producer of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows had to use a meditation app to calm down after a tweet by Elon Musk stating that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices ruin art.
Ubisoft continues to excel in targeting Japan with racial insensitivity.
Ubisoft continues to embarrass itself and make its anti-Japanese agenda more blatant. Their recent gameplay demonstration featured the “culturally representative” figure of Yasuke, a Black servant of Oda Nobunaga, decapitating swarms of Japanese samurai to a mix of oriental and EDM music.
Alongside the gameplay demonstration, Ubisoft representatives sent many influencers and bloggers a special collector’s edition with a unique box and a figurine of the game’s main character, Yasuke.
At first glance, this appeared to be a nice gift from the developers or an attempt to win over the increasingly disgruntled audience.
It turned out that the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows collector’s edition literally mocks Japanese culture and history. The box featured characters that attempted to imitate Japanese but were actually a set of nonsensical caricatures.
The Japanese kanji characters on the box are written incorrectly, such as the kanji for 義 in 仁義 (Jingi, honor, and humanity) is incorrect, despite being written correctly in 忠義 (Chuugi, loyalty) next to it. Additionally, Yasuke’s name (弥助) is written on the Collector’s Edition box, but upon closer inspection, the second kanji character (助) appears to be split into two separate characters (目 and 力), altering its meaning and pronunciation entirely.
Considering that Ubisoft hired the esteemed professor Sachi Schmidt-Hori, who specializes in Gender Studies and is a self-proclaimed expert on Japanese culture, it’s perplexing how they managed to misrepresent the Sengoku period in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows with the general focus being on portraying Yasuke as a samurai warrior, let alone the fact that the Kanji written on the esteemed collector’s edition is written incorrectly.
Schmidt-Hori, whose work primarily focuses on writing literature about historical Japan that depicts romantic relationships between adult men and young boys, was consulted by Ubisoft for their upcoming game.
The mistakes didn’t end there as Ubisoft also managed to confuse the crests of two prominent Japanese clans from that era. On the figurine of the game’s main character, the crest of Nobunaga was replaced with the crest of a completely different clan.
Yasuke served under Oda Nobunaga, and his armor correctly bears the Oda family crest (known as the Oda Mokkou). However, his banner, seen in black and yellow, incorrectly displays the Toyotomi paulownia family crest. This is a glaring mistake. Although the Oda Mokkou is the crest most strongly associated with Nobunaga, he also used other crests. In fact, he was awarded the use of the Gosankiri crest when he was made Shogun in 1568.
Although it looks odd for Yasuke’s banner and chestplate to bear different crests, Oda Nobunaga likely had permission to use the Gosankiri crest by the time of the game’s setting, as it had been used by many Japanese families throughout history. However, when a Gosankiri crest is enclosed in a circle, it becomes the crest of the Toyotomi clan, which is likely how this mistake occurred.
Ubisoft seemingly does not understand even the most basic historical aspects of Japan during the Sengoku period, despite extensively developing the game with progressive DEI consultants tasked with ensuring that Assassin’s Creed: Shadows was culturally accurate, representative of Japanese culture and obviously inoffensive.
The game features a fictional setting centered around a supposed historical figure who barely has a footnote in history, serving merely as a servant to Oda Nobunaga. Is it any surprise that Ubisoft failed basic Japanese history?
Despite their proclamations that diversity and representation are in their DNA, it’s hypocritical that they show zero respect for Japan’s heritage, culture, and language.
Hiring gender studies graduates with zero knowledge, merit, or inherent value instead of legitimate consultants, visiting Japan, and doing actual research as game developers used to do decades ago. Considering how Ubisoft seemingly treats clan symbols as mere bumper stickers, even a Wikipedia search would have been more useful.
This calamity is even more audacious and offensive than when Insomniac Games, with the assistance of Sweet Baby Inc, confused the Cuban flag for the Puerto Rican flag in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, inherently misrepresenting the ethnic background of its main protagonist Miles Morales while simultaneously filling the game with genderless and offensive “Latinx” Spanish localization.
It’s evident that Ubisoft never truly considered or cared about actual Japanese representation. A now-deleted line from an interview with Famitsu proclaimed that Ubisoft was looking for a non-Japanese figure as inspiration to serve as “their samurai” in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.
While the series has always featured fictional characters, it has also strived for authentic representation of historical events. In Ubisoft’s mind, it seems the entire country of Japan is wrong and needs education and acceptance that their own history and culture were built upon the foundations laid by Yasuke, who just so happens to be the first “historical” figure to be featured as a playable protagonist in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
The upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows, made by woke Westerners, consulted by a writer of gay shota love stories, features a Black samurai slaughtering countless foes in 1560s Japan and I genuinely cannot wait for it to fail financially.
