Assassin’s creed: Shadows, the latest in Ubisoft’s most famous franchise got a world premier trailer around June starring two protagonists, one of african origin named “Yasuke” who and a japanese protagonist named “Naoe”. As soon as the trailer was released there was a substantial controversy online of portraying Yasuke as a samurai when there isn’t any legitimate proof of his title during Nobunaga’s period, there were accusations of pandering to the masses instead of historical accuracy etc.
People were mainly upset about this kind of portrayal of Yasuke but there was also some racial hate as there seemed to be a group of people simply upset about the color of his skin.Ubisoft’s response was to say that they had made this choice to make his story more open-ended enabling players to reach their own conclusions at the end of his story.
This response did not help as much as Ubisoft would have hoped as veteran fans of the series have been wanting an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan since AC:2 and Brotherhood, two of the most iconic games in the franchise and this historical “inaccuracy” will somehow make the game unenjoyable.
There’s is Now a Petition?
It seems there are people upset enough about this “inaccuracy” to file a petition demanding the cancellation of this game. I mean we all know how historically accurate “Ezio Auditore” was, right? And jumping off of towers with conveniently placed haystacks to fall into with no one in broad daylight noticing it? Right?
The Change.org petition is organized by a person named Shimizu Toru, criticizing the historical accuracy of the Samurai, the petition claims that this kind of portrayal is a “serious insult” to the japanese culture and accuses the game of racism, somehow there are 73,000 thousand signatures on it.
Now how many of those signatures are there because people agree on the claims made and how many are there because of pointless hate towards the franchise we’ll never know.
Will this Make a Difference?
There is no way a game belonging to this iconic of a franchise under this industry giant is actually going to get canceled because a small minority is upset over some baseless claims. Assassin’s Creed was never about historical accuracy, the only historically accurate part of the game is the game’s backdrop or setting, the point in time in which the game’s events occur, nothing more, everything else such as important story elements and story characters is purely fictional, historical representation while trying to be close to the real thing is still in the end fictional. This furthers the argument, what historical inaccuracy are people actually mad about? The first few games in the series are about the pursuit of finding a tool that can control and subdue the minds of others and communicating with an advanced race that lived long before who predicted that the world was going to end.
Conclusion: Yeah Man it’s so “Historically Inaccurate”
It’s going to be a tough pill to swallow for people arguing that the game is historically inaccurate, either they have not at all paid attention to the story of assassin’s creed in the last decade or they have nitpicked so majorly that they feel they are too far gone to start backtracking now.
The story from the beginning was being able to live as an Assassin who was the main character’s ancestor through a machine that searches through hidden memories of the protagonist to find said ancestor.Then reliving as the said “ancestor” to find these all powerful artifacts before the “Templars” find them so they cannot start their master plan of subjugating the entire world for their benefit.
There are legitimate criticisms about the franchise such as the overarching direction of the story, the connections between certain ancestors, some redconning of story elements from the first few games and finally gameplay changes and inclusion of Norse gods and such.
These are legitimate criticisms about the games as the franchise has deviated so much from the first few that it feels like the AC games of recent times are of a different genre than AC:I, AC:II and AC:Brotherhood but “historical inaccuracy” is not a criticism.The bottom line is this game is going to get released in November, this petition isn’t going to stop it.