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Ubisoft
Assassin's Creed Shadows keeps collecting hate from people, so much so that their outraged cries reached Satoshi Hamada, a Japanese politician, who decided to investigate the game over cultural appropriation. He wants to bring the issue up in front of the National Diet, a legislative body in Japan.
Replying to an X/Twitter post about how Ubisoft got the architecture, customs, and other details wrong, Hamada asked for people's opinions on the matter and said he'd received a consultation regarding historical inaccuracies in the game.
So far, the (machine-translated) consensus is that Shadows depicts the Japanese as "barbaric, routinely using beheading as entertainment and forcing seppuku" with "a Black samurai violently cutting Japanese people in half." The samurai in question, Yasuke, is depicted as someone more important in Japanese history than he actually was, adding to the already long list of problems Hamada sees.
"In decades, there might be a perception that 'Black people created Japanese history,' as some comments are already suggesting. This is unacceptable for those who love Japan. What can be done about this?" the image of the consultation result says.
While Hamada is working on this question, outraged people are trying to cancel Assassin's Creed Shadows by signing a petition, calling the game a "serious insult to Japanese culture and history." At the moment of writing, it has been signed 82,222 times, 50,000 more than a week ago.
At first, it seems people wanted Ubisoft to simply apologize, but now I doubt they will be satisfied with that.
The fact that new mistakes keep surfacing doesn't help its case: recently, we found that the company used the flag of the historical reenactment group Sekigahara Teppo-tai in Shadows art without permission.
Where do you think Hamada's investigation lead? Assassin's Creed Shadows should be released on November 15.
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