The Resonant Samurai: Historical Accuracy versus Market Appeal

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https://www.gamegeneration.or.kr/article/953c58c4-a26a-4e46-8aac-48c10227ca8b

Introduction: Yasuke Enters the Franchise

By now, the online backlash against the inclusion of Yasuke as one of two protagonists in the story has become somewhat infamous, if not tired, since outrage first erupted last year. Although the game had teased at the 2022 UbiForward as Codename Red[1], it wasn’t until the full reveal on May 15, 2024, with the cinematic trailer that the inclusion of Yasuke, as a co-protagonist, became clear.[2][3] For over two months, criticism swirled at design choices in both Western and Japanese circles, though the online discontent among segments of the more conservative Western audience specifically focused on the inclusion of Yasuke,[4] leading, among the many heated discussion threads, to harassment of members of the development team. On July 23rd, Ubisoft released a somewhat ambiguous statement about the context, backhandedly addressing global audiences by way of seemingly focusing on the Japanese Community, and reaffirming their commitment to overall authenticity.[5] 

* Figure 1: Yasuke as Protagonist

This statement raises a number of concerns that articulate the controversy surrounding Yasuke, which taken at face value is about historical accuracy, but arguably has more to do with how this segment of the audience has been served by the franchise so far. As discussed by de Wildt and Aupers in a 2021 study focusing on the franchise overall and including dozens of interviews with former Ubisoft game directors and assorted senior developers, Assassin’s Creed overall privileges the marketability of any given setting.[6] That marketability is further contextualized by a audience that is disproportionately  European and American (roughly 79% all of Ubisoft sales).[7] With that market in mind, Ubisoft has put to use a model they term the “marketing-brand-editorial burger,” where the core of the franchise must remain generally similar, while changing the sauce (the cultural setting) in order to draw in new or repeat clientele.[8]

To that end, most of the franchise’s games have generally featured protagonists that are relatively uncomplicated to access for that core audience. For instance, Black Flag’s Edward Kenway presents a European perspective into Nassau and Caribbean colonialism, while Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood engages with Ezio as a cultural insider in Renaissance Italy.

[9] [10] [11] It also uses Ezio as a way to access the comparatively more distant Istanbul setting and culture in Revelations.[12] Even when protagonists are more complicated, as is the case for Connor Kenway in Assassin’s Creed III[13] and Adewale in Freedom Cry,[14] it is nonetheless the dominant European and American perspectives that orient the core structure of the games.[15] [16] So, why is that centering of the Western audience the case, and how does the controversy surrounding indicate breaks or continuities with this design trend? The answer, broadly, comes from a prioritizing of resonance, of expectations, above accuracy.

The Question of Accuracy: Accuracy versus Expectations

The question of historical accuracy in the Assassin’s Creed series, over its 18-year span, has been the subject of thousands of games journalism pieces, not to mention dozens of academic articles and book chapters. In early inroads, historical accuracy appears as a demand, essential for games to be taken seriously, as a pedagogical tool, an archaeological model or an account of events past.[17] This demand is draped over a number of design elements, such as the areas of the game included, in conjunction with the time period covered (along with the key events that the narrative focuses on).  Perhaps most importantly, there is enduring concern and desire for the protagonists at the center of these games to match the historical period which audiences understand as a coherent whole. In other words, the setting, the story and the characters need to work in harmony, but whether that harmony adheres to historical truth is another matter altogether.[18] [19]

When discussing historical accuracy, it would be useful to consider at what point is the media portrayal considered accurate. Is any deviation allowed? As Adam Chapman argues, there is a threshold where the game can be considered historically resonant, and that point is when individual players deem the historical aspects to match their pre-existing knowledge.[20] Evidently players tolerate deviation from historical fact as necessary to game adaptation in general, and especially in the context of Assassin’s Creed, where historical figures are repositioned as actors in secret conspiracies and ancient aliens plotlines.  The fact that the franchise requires a genealogy of assassins and templars, in this case the Kakushiba Ikki (League of the Hidden) and the Shinbakufu (True Shogunate). The distortions necessary to make the armature of the franchise fit with the real persons that the game adapts are in most cases no more or less intensive than the depth provided to Yasuke. This level of adaptation or distortion is also in line with the degree of departure players can find in Odyssey[21], for instance, with the portrayals of Sokrates and Aspasia of Miletus,[22] or Origins’ Cleopatra.[23]

The games are all, to put it bluntly, historical fiction, rather than history, an approach detailed by Ubisoft itself.[24] As they explain in their 2025 open letter, Yasuke presented an “ideal candidate” for the series formula that incorporates “fantasy elements” and that his “unique and mysterious life” is considered by the company to be a match for franchise patterns.[25] The idea of Yasuke as a candidate for cultural representation is in keeping with de Wildt and Aupers mentioned earlier, where marketing dominates broader choices, and where any narrative or representational choice “defers to the market and the largest possible audience.”[26] Franchise lead Jean Guesdon had previously spoken about tapping into popular zeitgeist to buttress franchise sales, so relying on Yasuke, a figure that has become increasingly visible in popular media over the past two decades makes sense.[27]  Unlike Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima,[28] from which Shadows borrows much of its visual language and colour scheme, Assassin’s Creed  provide Yasuke a proxy for audiences, not as a man of colour, but as an outsider to Japan.Yasuke is legitimate enough as a choice, given his historic presence, yet, like players, experience Japan as a foreigner becoming gradually integrated.[29] In other words, the game’s internal structure is positioned to open with, and favor an outsider perspective, over one of the other notable candidates audiences can imagine, including notable samurai like Musashi Miyamoto or Sasaki Kojiro.

* Figure 2: Yasuke Criticized for Use of nanban (European) concepts in the context of Japanese warfare.

This tension, between what a game company considers an ideal candidate, and what serves historical accuracy most, has been the subject of research over the past few years.[30] In my previous work on the subject, I locate this decision space as shaped by the tension between representation and identification. As film scholar Charles Acland notes, with respect to cinema, the work of identification is complicated and requires exiting one’s own reality to inhabit the specific circumstances of another person, in another place and time.[31] Identification, on the other hand, provides protagonists and perspectives ready-made for individuals to absorb into their experiential frame. This form of media production is positioned to produce the “that resonates with me” reaction, and has been the subject of academic critique concerning Assassin’s Creed for the better part of the last decade. So far, installments have been positioned to always provide that kind of easy identification, if not in main protagonists, then at least in circumstances and ideological positions. Yasuke, in that vein, presents a particular issue. His perspective provides an outside-in look at feudal Japan, but it also bucks against the generally empowering positions that series protagonists have enjoyed. Yasuke’s inclusion seems in itself revolutionary and novel, but as scholar Kishonna Gray noted in the case of Adéwalé in Haiti, there is an echo of white European and American social positions within the very framework of the game.[32] Even when the characters are non-white, their social positions in the game privilege the presumed Euro-American audience mentioned above. In Shadows, Yasuke is not gated from spaces any more than the game’s other protagonist, Naoe, is. The game’s fiction smooths out the creases in what would otherwise be a presumably more confronting experience. 

Then, if the game resonating with audiences is the primary goal, the game’s choice to platform Yasuke presents quite logically, with the exception that the audience being favored is not the same audience that has been favored in the past decade. To put it bluntly, the racial intolerance evident in Yasuke’s characterization as a “DEI hire” showcases as barrier in audiences identification with a man of colour, more than a rigorous analysis of whether that character’s story is accurate, which is already difficult to claim for any Assassin’s Creed protagonist in good faith.[33] The backlash, at least in the West, has clearly been centered on race and gender, while the Japanese response has certainly been more tempered, and focused on how players are allowed to damage holy sites. The subsequent question that arises is whether or not this entire outrage, as visible as it has been, represents the whole of the consumer base in the West, or rather a specific subset of consumers.

The Payoff: Yasuke as Commodity

Whether or not reception to Yasuke has been hot or cold is difficult to definitely weigh in on. How do we define success? Is it based on the sentiment of a vocal segment of the audience, or do we prioritize something closer to an international audience reception? Do we look at critical reception, and do we look in a vacuum or in the context of how recent installments have been received? Perhaps the most representative forum for critical and audience reception remains Metacritic, despite concerted efforts to review bomb the title.[34] In fact, when comparing the open-world installments, the pattern is relatively stable. Critics have Shadows at 81, compared to Valhalla’s 80, Odyssey’s 83, and Origins’ 81. Audiences, even keeping in mind a greater proportion of disproportionately negative reviews, have Shadows at 62, compared to Valhalla’s 60, Odyssey’s 68, and Origins’ 73. Critical consensus seems to be that the game is qualitatively in line with previous installments, and for audiences seems a slight improvement over the previous title. Where it does depart is in Shadows’ higher proportion of extremely low scores, which may be indicative of review bombing. Metacritic, like any review aggregator, will overrepresent audiences that are already invested enough to log on and review, but the consistency in scores over time indicates relative stability between titles at a broader level.

* Figure 3: Review Score Aggregates for all Open-World AC Titles (Mirage Omitted).

Surely then, the outrage professed against Yasuke was equally felt in terms of sales, which would at least provide an industrial indication that the game was boycotted or sold less well. In actuality, Shadows boasts the second-highest day one sales for the franchise, behind Valhalla, which Ubisoft attributes to the “perfect storm” of conditions during the pandemic.[35] Longer tail analytics show a “modest” sales record of roughly 1.7M copies sold on Playstation 5 alone (Alinea, 2025).[36] So, the picture is somewhat murky, given that we won’t have the long-tail data for a while yet. Compared to Odyssey’s roughly 2M sales in the first month, as well as keeping in mind the pressures on discretionary expenses in the current economic climate, the game is not the historic success of yore, but it’s certainly still successful.

Conclusion: It was Never about Accuracy

The academic response, as always, will take a longer while to cement, as qualitative studies and criticism goes through the comparatively longer publication cycle. It is my sense, given the title’s consistency within franchise patterns, that academic consensus will broadly settle where it has for the past decade: that Shadows is a relatively safe market bet, with serviceable characters and the core formula unchanged. It is, in many ways, the same Assassin’s Creed we’ve come to know since 2007, and more specifically since the series’ open-world shift in 2017. Within that framework though, the Japanese governmental response to the game is novel, as critiques of desecration of ritual sites has generally been confined to academic critiques, rather than the state.[37] [38] In fact, the homage paid to the series at the Paris Olympics for Ubisoft’s assistance with the Notre Dame reconstruction signals a significant gap in how Western states interact with the company’s cultural products. Likewise, the Yasuke controversy, which seems to have lost steam since last year, has faded away into the series’ tenuous relationship with race and gender across many of its installments. It is nonetheless interesting to consider which way audience sentiment slices. Here, Yasuke was called out as corporate pandering to modern sensibilities and audience demand, yet that was not so much the case when Odyssey’s Alexios was provided as a secondary protagonist for players to enjoy, or when company scandals revealed that Aya was intended as the main character of Origins, despite the release featuring almost exclusively Bayek. The audience’s rigidity regarding accuracy is always one that has been shaped by personal taste, and if the issue was really the accuracy of the character, we’d have had similarly caustic debates about many titles in the series. 

[1] Ubisoft, dir. 2022. Ubisoft Forward: Official Livestream - September 2022 | #UbiForward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvV4ZBx6_bo.

[2] Ubisoft, dir. 2024. Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Official World Premiere Trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vovkzbtYBC8.

[3] Ubisoft. 2024. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows Launches November 15, Features Dual Protagonists in Feudal Japan.”  https://news.ubisoft.com/en-ca/article/2LH4Ael4X1TlNJY3B3aYg5/assassins-creed-shadows-launches-november-15-features-dual-protagonists-in-feudal-japan.

[4] Walker, John. 2024. “Ubisoft Issues Weird Statement On Assassin’s Creed Shadows Controversies.” Kotaku, July 23, 2024. https://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-shadows-ubisoft-statement-yasuke-1851602337.

[5] Ubisoft. 2024. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows - An Update for the Japanese Community.” https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/7dWPCtVQU7udC0KkPFOyXh/assassins-creed-shadows-an-update-for-the-japanese-community.

[6] Wildt, Lars de, and Stef Aupers. 2019. “Playing the Other: Role-Playing Religion in Videogames.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (5–6): 867–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549418790454.

[7] Ibid, 4.

[8] Ibid, 11-12.

[9] Ubisoft. 2013. “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.”

[10] Ubisoft. 2009. “Assassin’s Creed II.” 2009. Ubisoft.

[11] Ubisoft. 2010. “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.”

[12] Ubisoft. 2011. “Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.”

[13] Ubisoft. 2013. “Assassin’s Creed.”

[14] Ubisoft. 2013. “Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry.”

[15] Shaw, Adrienne. 2015. “The Tyranny of Realism: Historical Accuracy and Politics of Representation in Assassin’s Creed III.” Loading... 9 (14). https://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/157.

[16] Zanescu, Andrei. 2023. “Blockbuster Resonance in Games: How Assassin’s Creed and Magic: The Gathering Simulate Classical Antiquity.” Phd, Concordia University. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/992024/.

[17] Ibid, 17-57.

[18] de Wildt and Aupers, 2019.

[19] Westin, Jonathan, and Ragnar Hedlund. 2016. “Polychronia – Negotiating the Popular Representation of a Common Past in Assassin’s Creed.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (March):3–20. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.8.1.3_1.

[20] Chapman, Adam. 2016. Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. 1st ed. New York: Routledge.

[21] Ubisoft. 2018. “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.”

[22] Ubisoft North America, dir. 2017. Assassin’s Creed Origins: Developer Q&A - History & Setting | Ubisoft [NA]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK43sE36rdo.

[23] Ubisoft. 2017. “Assassin’s Creed Origins.”

[24] Ubisoft. 2024. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows - An Update for the Japanese Community.” https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/7dWPCtVQU7udC0KkPFOyXh/assassins-creed-shadows-an-update-for-the-japanese-community.

[25] Ibidem.

[26] De Wildt and Aupers, 13.

[27] Zanescu, 2023.

[28] Fox, Nate. 2020. “Ghost of Tsushima.” Sucker Punch Productions.

[29] DJangi, Parissa. 2025. “The Real History of Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Samurai.” History. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-real-history-of-yasuke-japans-first-black-samurai.

[30] Eklund, Lina, Björn Sjöblom, and Patrick Prax. 2019. “Lost in Translation: Video Games Becoming Cultural Heritage?” Cultural Sociology 13 (4): 444.

[31] Acland, Charles R. 2020. American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder. 1 online resource (xi, 388 pages) : illustrations (black and white) vols. Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012160.

[32] Gray, Kishonna L. 2018. “POWER IN THE VISUAL: EXAMINING NARRATIVES OF CONTROLLING BLACK BODIES IN CONTEMPORARY GAMING.” Velvet Light Trap, no. 81 (March), 62–67.

[33] Mercante, Alyssa. 2024. “This Was Never About Anything Other Than Hate.” Kotaku. July 23, 2024. https://kotaku.com/this-was-never-about-anything-other-than-hate-1851602820.

[34] Wolens, Joshua. 2025. “Ubisoft Says Don’t Compare Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Success to Valhalla: The Latter Launched in Covid’s ‘perfect Storm’ and Feedback on Platforms ‘Less Affected by Review Bombing’ Is Stellar.” PC Gamer, March 25, 2025. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/assassins-creed/ubisoft-says-dont-compare-assassins-creed-shadows-success-to-valhalla-the-latter-launched-in-covids-perfect-storm-and-feedback-on-platforms-less-affected-by-review-bombing-is-stellar/.

[35] Ibidem.

[36] Alinea. 2025. “Xbox Dominated PlayStation’s Top 10 Games by Copies Sold in April, as Forza Horizon 5 Overtakes 1.4 Million Copies on PS5.” Alinea. https://alineaanalytics.com/blog/playstation_april_2025/.

[37] Small, Zachary. 2024. “The Fight Over a Black Samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.” The New York Times, September 11, 2024, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/arts/assassins-creed-shadows-yasuke-samurai-japan.html.

[38] Murray, Conor. n.d. “New ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Releases To Strong Reviews—But Sparks Anti-’Woke’ Backlash And Roils Japanese Government.” Forbes. Accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/03/21/new-assassins-creed-releases-to-strong-reviews-but-sparks-anti-woke-backlash-and-roils-japanese-government/.