The Assassin’s Creed series of video games is adored for painstaking historic accuracy, but also sparks controversy with heavy use of artistic license — most recently with a black samurai in the latest instalment, Shadows.
Released on Thursday, Shadows takes place in 16th-century feudal Japan, replete with imposing fortified cities and tranquil temples crafted by developers.
“They’ve done a really fantastic job with very accurate recreations,” said Pierre-Francois Souyri, a historian among a dozen French and Japanese experts consulted for the game in a bid to weed out cliches and anachronisms.
Photo: AFP
Since being tapped in late 2021, Souyri says he has answered “a hundred or more questions” from the development team, ranging from how salt was produced to how puppet shows were staged.
Souyri adds that within the carefully crafted setting, “it’s not too hard to come up with characters who find themselves having adventures” in “a very eventful period” marked by intense conflicts.
BLACK SAMURAI
But one foundational choice by the creative team has provoked fierce debate online and beyond: casting a black samurai, Yasuke, as one of the two playable protagonists. The other is a young female ninja, Fujibayashi Naoe.
Irritation that an African character was depicted with the rank of samurai prompted a Japanese petition against the move, receiving more than 100,000 signatures.
The text blasted “lack of historical accuracy and cultural respect” by game developers.
Souyri was unimpressed by the criticism.
“It’s the game’s conceit to call him a samurai, it’s not a doctoral thesis,” he said.
Like other historians who have weighed in, he pointed out that Yasuke “is a person who really existed” — although the historic evidence on his status “can be difficult to interpret.”
Yuichi Goza, assistant professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, disagreed.
“Nothing proves that Yasuke had such qualifications” making him a samurai, medieval history specialist Goza said.
In surviving documents, “Yasuke stood out above all for the color of his skin and his physical strength.”
His patron, warlord Oda Nobunaga, likely “kept Yasuke by his side to show him off,” Goza believes.
Erupting even before Shadows had been released, the controversy over the black character’s inclusion has been the fiercest surrounding any Assassin’s Creed game.
The series has been attacked in the past, including by hard-left French politician Jean-Luc Melenchon for how firebrand Robespierre was depicted in Assassin’s Creed Unity, set during the French Revolution.
CULTURE WAR BATTLEGROUND
In a report last month, the European Video Game Observatory noted that Ubisoft’s announcement of Yasuke immediately “sparked a heated controversy amplified by social media.”
The outfit blamed most of the uproar on “an American conservative moral crusade” waged by a hard core of “at least 728 interconnected accounts.”
That group made up “only 0.8 percent of speakers on the topic of Assassin’s Creed Shadows in the US (but) account for 22.1 percent of all related coverage,” the Observatory added.
The researchers said the behavior “suggests an astroturfing campaign” that piggybacked on the broader culture-war battles going on during the US presidential election campaign.
“Our use of Yasuke has been instrumentalized by certain people to get their own message across... but that’s not the message of the game,” said Marc-Alexis Cote, executive producer of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
Nevertheless, within Japan depictions of the country’s history remain a sensitive issue — as shown by reactions to images showing a Shadows player damaging the interior of a temple.
“I understand France’s secularist principles, but it’s important to acknowledge that ill-considered insults about religion can spark strong reactions,” Goza said. “This risk should have been foreseen.”
Ubisoft itself had resisted for some time fans’ demands to see an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan.
But recent successful games set in the feudal period, such as 2019’s Sekiro or 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima, may have helped overcome the publisher’s reticence.
“There’s a combined effect of exoticism and familiarity which fascinates Westerners,” historian Souyri said.
Many young people, especially in Western countries such as France and the US, devour Japanese mangas and anime series.
But Goza argues that “these depictions become counterproductive if they reinforce discrimination and prejudice towards Japan.”
He calls Shadows a “clear example of these concerns being realized.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS