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Like almost everything these days, Assassin's Creed Shadowsthe installment of the Ubisoft saga set in Japan, has not been able to avoid controversy. The role of Yasuke, known as the first African samurai, has aroused the anger of a part of the community, something to which the French company itself responded with a statement in which they made it clear that the franchise has always been historical fiction.
Despite this, for those responsible for the video game “it is vital that it be as faithful as possible” to the culture and historical period of Japan. And that is because Assassin's Creed Shadows aims to captivate Japanese audiences like Ghost of Tsushima didIt was producer Karl Onnée himself who referred to the title of Sucker Punch to refer to the intentions of the new Assassin's Creed, which they want to represent an unprecedented boost for the saga in the land of the rising sun.
Will Assassin's Creed Shadows be the new Ghost of Tsushima?
These were Onnée's words on the matter in an interview with the GamesIndustry portal:
“It’s important from an artistic perspective, but also a commercial one. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an opportunity for Ubisoft to grow the series in Japan. It’s unusual for Western-developed action games to sell in large numbers in Japan, but it does happen, and one notable example is Sony’s Ghost of Tsushima, which is also a historical action-adventure game set in Japan and developed in the West (by US studio Sucker Punch). That game sold over a million copies in the country, and Ubisoft will look to it as an indicator of what’s possible here. All of this means it’s vital that Shadows is as faithful as possible.”
Onnée has not denied either that when a game of this size is made, it is about reach a global audiencewhich is why some of the controversial decisions made and discussed above are better understood. But fidelity is the key to the project. This is how he explains it:
“Since we’re making a game in Japan, we hope to attract more Japanese players. So it’s very important that we try to be as faithful as possible. We start from a humble position, that we know nothing and we have to learn everything from scratch. We make sure to respect things, because that’s a very important thing for Japanese people, as it is in many other countries. When you come in, you don’t want to come in as if you know everything. We want to create something that, when they see it and play it, they recognize their own country.”
A Japanese historian sides with Assassin's Creed Shadows and argues that Yasuke was indeed a samurai
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Remember that Assassin's Creed Shadows is coming next November 12th and it will do so as the first game in the series exclusive to the current generation of consoles, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC.