Yasuke is actually a fantastic choice as far as history/narrative goes.
A shame the game looks like more generic Assassin’s Creed Mapfucking+Crowd Supermurder.
Which is fine if that’s your thing, but I haven’t been thrilled by an AC game since… well, AC1.
I’d argue Yasuke was kind of a poor choice. AC’s have traditionally been about stealth, blending in to crowds, and being famous person adjacent (e.g. You meet Da Vinci, but you aren’t him.). Yasuke being known for being the only black dude in Japan at the time kinda screws the pooch on all three. Of course more recent AC’s have leaned more into arpg stuff but still.
Had Yasuke been a key supporting character I think those guys still would have bitched about woke dei whatever, but it would have held a lot less sway.
I mean, you were a super flamboyant Renaissance guy with dual wrist blades murdering dozens of mooks per encounter as early as AC2, and by Brotherhood and 3 it only got more overt.
I have 2 kinda conflicting opinions about the whole thing
- Annoying the anti-dei crowd is always a big plus
- Is including Yasuke (who looks like a modern American in the game) racist in of itself because the publisher thought Americans will be unable to identify with a Japanese character.
The last AC game I’ve played is Brotherhood so it might all perfectly fit into the current AC universe idk.
I mean, I have trouble with the racism angle just because Yasuke is a famous historical figure who has shown up in media going back decades, if not centuries, who has very little known about him but was a part of some the biggest events to shape Japan. Nobunaga, his boss, is both one of the most famous and infamous people of Japanese history and constantly appears in Japanese media as either a hero or a villain. This makes Yasuke a perfect character for media set in the period, as he’s largely a blank slate outside of where he shows up in events around Nobunaga’s conquest of Japan.
I think around the time that they announced this game, there was also a movie being filmed about Yasuke, as well as a Netflix anime. I think the movie got canceled and the Netflix series turned into some Afro Samurai style thing, but that’s beside the point.
I haven’t played an AC game since the 5 hours I spent with Odyssey, but my understanding is that they threw away the larger narrative about the present day and now basically just use the tech from that plot as an excuse to let you play as historical or famous-adjacent figures in whatever time period setpiece that they want to use. One of my favorite Souls-like series, Nioh and Nioh 2, did something similar in the same time period, where in the first game you play as the British/Dutch sailor turned samurai, Anjin-san (literally Mr Pilot) in the first game, and a bastardized version of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, another famous samurai. Yasuke also shows up as a side character in both games.
Yasuke wasnt a samurai, and he was only documented in Japan for 3 years. Most of the myth behind him is unfounded. He was a kosho which is a servant. It is notable he was allowed to carry a short sword if he needed to defend his master, but he held no privileges that samurai did.
Its not known if he died in Japan or left, as his master was forced to commit seppeku and he then was captured. Its noted that he was not killed because he was deemed to be a “beast”, and in Japanese society back then it was considered shameful to kill a weaker enemy after capturing them.
I’m not sure where you got all of that stuff you wrote.
Yeah, I have the exact conflict about it.
I hate the pandering too but when I hear a breakdown from it and I hear “woke” and “DEI” and it makes me want to strangle that YT personality.
Can I interest you in a calm and respectful disembowelment of Ubisoft?
(edit) The video is nine minutes long. You Someone downvoted me two minutes after I posted the link. You really only care about pushing the message, don’t you?
That makes me wonder if the gameplay is more segmented, so Yasuke gets the upfront battles that became popular in AC Oranges, while the other lady gets the covert social stealth.
Odyssey and Valhalla were both more on the RPG side, Mirage went somewhat back to form, though not fully. Could be they split between the two types, but based on Valhalla and Odyssey it’s more likely to me that Yasuke and Naoe’s gameplay loops aren’t super different, maybe some techniques (e.g. he throws a knife that does x damage, she throws a kunai that does x-5 damage + poison, or something like that.) and a couple story elements relevant to them.
They showed some gameplay that had one character collect information, and then you get a checkpoint of sorts before the actual mission where you choose which character to use. Yasuke can bust up the front door and whack everyone, or Naoe can climb the walls and crawl underwater. It’s suggested that this is most of the game, but it’s safe to presume there will be some missions here and there that require a specific character.
I dont understand why ubisoft won’t just go back to the style of game AC 1-3 was. Or even just stop doing AC altogether and do a whole spinoff series like black flag.
They keep trying to reinvent things, and all anyone wants is the same old assassins creed but in a new locale.
The answer is simple even if it isn’t a good answer. With so much money involved in the development of AAA games now, a committee has to agree on what ventures are “safe”. These games won’t commit to new ideas or challenge players with a particular expected flow. They’ll basically let you do everything and play however you want.
I have wanted to parody that if I ever find myself running an E3 demo. “This game lets you play however you’d like. You can sneak in, with nobody ever seeing you, or you can run in guns blazing - and die instantly.”