Cultural appropriation, revision of history or just appreciation of the culture. What are your thoughts on Yasuke in the new Assassin's Creed.

[Gamernyc78]

Just interested on ppls views as this is a major debate online in the last few days. Some are interested and welcoming, others feel Ubisoft is just following DEI trends and changing the history of Yasuke and shoe hirning it in. *Let's be respectful while sharing our views.






But also positives...

 

[Nhomnhom]

I only wonder how people still play this series, I was done with Assassin's Creed 2.

 

[Gamernyc78]

I just want to say that from my recollection in Nioh games there was Yasuke samurai and I didn't think twice about it in tht game and he was pretty cool so this won't be the first time a company does this. Movies and companies stretch and change historical. Characters all the time to dramatize and add flair to movies.

 

[Gamernyc78]

I only wonder how people still play this series, I was done with Assassin's Creed 2.

Yeah I stopped buying a long time ago.

 

[Johnic]

It's a historical character. He did exist and was a retainer to Nobunaga, just like in the game. He was given property and had rights. It's unclear if he ever really fought and it's a known fact that Nobunaga used him to entertain his guests, such as daring them to try and wash his color off.

 

[Gamernyc78]

It's a historical character. He did exist and was a retainer to Nobunaga, just like in the game. He was given property and had rights. It's unclear if he ever really fought and it's a known fact that Nobunaga used him to entertain his guests, such as daring them to try and wash his color off.

Yes most are aware of this so thts not the issue. Most are pointing to inaccuracies and no evidence he was a Samurai but just a vassal. Either way this is what companies do just like the dozen of female warriors in "Vikings" series and making the ruler of Kattakat black which never existed.

 

[quest4441]

Twitter and reddit will be full of astroturfing for the game till the reviews which as usual will be 7/10 + you can add 1 more point for the scores, lets call it the yasuke factor, from moral crusaders like the gaymer and pcgaymer,

 

[Swolf712]

"I wanted to slay as a Japanese ninja"
My guy, who do they think this is?

 

[Yurinka]

I think anybody that accuses someone else about "culture appropiation" deverves to be thrown through a cliff.

Regarding wokism yes, you have a black and woman main characters because of wokism. In this case to place a black guy in feudal Japan may be weird, but it's true that in this century Portuguese and Spanish brought there black slaves and servants. They were a very small part of the population, but there were many of them.

Yasuke was a real black guy brought there as a Portuguese Jesuist priest bodyguard, a very tall (188cm when average people were around 150cm) and muscular guy. Nobonaga Oda, one of the big lords of the time, got very impressed because he was the first black guy he saw and made him bath in front of him to see if he really was black. Bathing him shown him even more black.

He liked Yasuke, and claimed he had the strength of ten (Japanese) men, so "adopted" him, trained him as his personal bodyguard and also as the guy who carries his weapons -so pretty likely a samurai-, and gave him a personal house, and also allowed him to live in his castle and he also supposedly got his own personal weapons. So maybe wasn't a real/proper samurai, but did put him in his close circle, Nobunaga for sure didn't consider him a random slave or servant: respected him and was confident with him, making him part of his inner circle in a warring period where there were a ton of spies/ninjas waiting to kill or poison these lords everywhere.

Yasuke fought in different battles under Nobunaga's orders until Nobunaga got killed by other lord, they got defeated and had to surrender. That other lord decided to don't kill Yasuke because "he's an animal and knows nothing", so Yasuke got free and nothing is known from him in historical records, even if it's assumed that he travelled back to his home African country.

Most of these things obviously aren't confirmed historically, but there are many hints that lead to think he wasn't a random guy, and for sure he got in the inner circle of Nobunaga, which today would be the equivalent of being a SVP of Sony or Blackrock.

I think yes, they forced to put there a black guy because of wokism, but also think that the story of Yasuke is interesting and could be a cool character, as happened in Afro Samurai.

"I wanted to slay as a Japanese ninja"
My guy, who do they think this is?

She is a kunoichi, a female shinobi/ninja. Who were normally used as spies or honey traps to seduce, poison and kill targets, who sometimes even fucked or even married.

So their role was a different from the traditional (male) ninja, who often were also spies and sometimes also assassins.

 

[Swolf712]

Yes most are aware of this so thts not the issue. Most are pointing to inaccuracies and no evidence he was a Samurai but just a vassal. Either way this is what companies do just like the dozen of female warriors in "Vikings" series and making the ruler of Kattakat black which never existed.

Samurai were vassals to their Lords. Yasuke was part of Nobunaga's inner circle, was consulted by Nobunaga. That's a pretty big deal for anyone.

Further, plenty of evidence suggests Yasuke was promoted to samurai after his initial acceptance by Nobunaga. , For example, he was given a stipend, a sword, a house, and a servant. While not the estate often gifted to samurai, that's not something someone low-level was gifted by their lords, and Yasuke being a foreigner may have played into that. Unfortunately, due to much of the mention of him being from Jesuit missionary sources, we don't know too much beyond what they were there to witness or record.

Scholarly consensus is that the data is inconclusive, but I'd say there's honestly a better case to be made that he was than that he wasn't, and he was certainly more than some low-level page or "pet' as I've seen some suggest.

For further research, if anyone is interested: a lecture from a professor at Nihon University in Tokyo who has studied Yasuke pretty extensively. Gives a pretty good idea of what we know for sure, what we don't, and what the evidence suggests.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

Yes most are aware of this so thts not the issue. Most are pointing to inaccuracies and no evidence he was a Samurai but just a vassal. Either way this is what companies do just like the dozen of female warriors in "Vikings" series and making the ruler of Kattakat black which never existed.

A retainer/vassal of a Feudal lord is a Samurai though, just not from a hereditary Samurai clan.
It doesn't matter if he never fought or not, it's not just a title.
In Feudal Japan which part of the caste system was very important in terms of what your position was in society.
We all have to remember that Daimyos were literal local tyrants who could do whatever the fuck they wanted in their own provinces.

Heck the fact he's even recorded in history, albeit briefly, is a pretty good indicator in itself.
We've got wives of lords around that time that we know less because they were pretty invisible in that time period(it was all arranged marriages and shit).

This is why when you're glancing at those complaints in the tweets in Japanese nobody is saying Yasuke is not important or not a "real one". They're mostly talking about how he won't be sneaky as a black man to be an assassin and talking about architecture and talking character design and whatnot.


My thoughts are that it's mostly fine, although I cannot really critic any East Asian or Japanese guy who would want to play as a sort of avatar of themselves.

"I wanted to slay as a Japanese ninja"
My guy, who do they think this is?

But you see, it's not a guy. So that's no bueno.
The canon Odyssey protagonist is Kassandra even though they pushed her hard and the game director came in and said 2/3 of people played as Alexios. Even though he was a forced at the last second(you can tell by how bad his performance is as the MC compared to Kassandra's).

The whole reason dual gender avatars are a thing in AC is due to Ubisoft higher ups believing a female lead would hurt sales because dudes would not buy the game and play as a woman.

 

[JAHGamer]

Dumb fake outrage by racists. Yasuke has been portrayed as a samurai for decades, even in Japanese works. Both Nioh and Samurai Warriors, games made by Japanese studios, depict him as a samurai. People just love to be angry and label anything and everything as woke now.

 

[John Elden Ring]

 

[quest4441]

The point is there is no advantage for choosing yasuke as an MC, they will lose more sales than whatever they thought they will gain with this move, the game is already dead on PC with no steam release.

 

[Swolf712]

The point is there is no advantage for choosing yasuke as an MC, they will lose more sales than whatever they thought they will gain with this move

According to whom?

 

[Johnic]

Yes most are aware of this so thts not the issue. Most are pointing to inaccuracies and no evidence he was a Samurai but just a vassal. Either way this is what companies do just like the dozen of female warriors in "Vikings" series and making the ruler of Kattakat black which never existed.

This is actually true. We have no definitive answer and several conflicting statements. He wasn't a slave or a peasant and had rights and property but in some accounts he's referred to as a weapons bearer, meaning a servant. In others he's called samurai but the two aren't mutually exclusive, as a samurai is a class more than anything else.

It's AC. A series where the Pope curses the Bible and uses alien junk to fight an Italian assassin. I don't mind this as it's somewhat rooted in fact but I don;t really care about the new AC games so there's that.

 

[John Elden Ring]

The lead writer of this game works for Sweet Baby Inc

That's all you need to know

 

[Johnic]

The lead writer of this game works fo Sweet Baby Inc

That's all you need to know

Ahh, there it is. If I had any interest in the game, I'd be getting it used. This'll flop hard.

 

[Swolf712]

The lead writer of this game works for Sweet Baby Inc

That's all you need to know

 

[quest4441]

According to whom?

According to the yearly trash ubisoft puts out and them posting losses majority of the years, the reveal video has more dislikes than likes and has the garbage of canada SBI involved in it.