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.
The problem I have with having Yasuke as a main character is as follows:
Assassins Creed at its core has always been about exploring cultures through their most iconic time period, from the perspective of a person from that culture, with an exception of AC3, where the main character’s mother was Native American and father was white, but done so to explore the history around colonialism.
I welcome the idea of an Assassins Creed game within central Africa with an African man/woman as its lead, but I think we can all intuitively understand how wrong it would be to give one of the leading roles to a white character.
I like how we aren’t allowed to be bummed that we dont get to pick someone more representative of that culture. Thats racism right? Or reverse-racism?
Literally my first reaction seeing that picture is, “well thats an odd choice”.
Then pick the Japanese woman…?
Japanese women aren’t capable of representing their culture or what?
I’m sure men and women were treated exactly the same in that period of time in Japan, so surely you have made an excellent point.
But what if I want to play a Japanese man in the Japanese Assassins Creed game?
Japanese women aren’t treated the same as men today, let alone in that time period which is the 15th century …
Yasuke is a questionable choice for a protagonist. It breaks with the pattern of inserting a fictional character into the world, you’ll never convince me that his race was not a calculated factor in choosing him, and his status as a samurai (and portrayal in western media) is largely based on a single historian’s work with questionable credibility. Ubisoft has used the Oda family crest without permission (the family still exists today), used imagery of the Buddha without permission (retracted, may have been the Budai), used a destroyed torii gate as advertising material; and for how much they bleat about historical accuracy, their trailers are chock full of inaccuracies.
I do not believe that a character is enhanced or ruined based on their race, but Ubisoft is definitely exploiting it.
Still can’t believe they put Socrates in AC Odyssey just because he was a popular figure from history. They didn’t even portray him realistically in their video game about solo killing hundreds of enemies.
/s
I’m not touching the rest of your comment but the Buddhism thing really shows you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You don’t need “permission” to use imagery of the Buddha, that’s not how it works.
Who do you think can even “give permission” to use imagery of the Buddha anyway, the Siddhartha family? The Dalai Lama? Does he need to phone up the leaders of the other schools for consensus?
The rest of the comment is also barely touching on the subjects. Yasuke was not a samurai, more than likely just a retainer that Oda kept as a sort of trophy or show of wealth. The main issue Japanese people have is the portrayal of Samurai themselves, saying the way Yasuke fights is not right. They also gave Yasuke the family seal, which is a major legal issue even today since the design is copyrighted. The Buddha issue is not the yse itself, but the fact Ubisoft used Chinese depictions of Buddha and not Japanese depictions. They also showed the destroyed torri gate in artwork, based on the Nagasaki gate destroyed by the atom bomb and is also a protected piece. They also showed supposedly Japanese farmworkers in Thai and Myanmar clothing, and others in clothing not seen until the 17th century.
I’ve come to realize I don’t enjoy games that I can’t rp as the character. I just can’t get invested in a story where my character doesn’t look like me. Perfect example is Horizon zero dawn. I loved that game so much. Mechanics and gameplay were great. Visually stunning. And yet I had no problem dropping it for something else. I didn’t even finish it.
It’s not hard to comprehend that as a Hispanic man, I would want to play games with characters that look like me. A simple character creation screen is not hard to make for every game. Let anyone play as any character they want.
An inability to empathize is not an artistic preference, it’s a medical condition.
That’s a you problem.
Personally, I don’t want to play a game with a character creator because it means the story can’t reference the character in any meaningful way.
Yeah I understand. Still the reason I can’t play Sonic to this day. I’m a yellow hedgehog. Immersion is ruined, everytime.
I know you’re trying to be cute but you gave a terrible example. Sonic is a male character so it works. You can make outlandish comparisons all you want but the majority of Americans feel the same and it’s not going to change my personal opinions on my game choices.
Mate, cmon you can’t have personal opinions that don’t align with the hive mind or your a bigot.
/s for all the brain dead cunts around here
What games do you play? I don’t know of many games with a male Hispanic lead character and you apparently need to identify with the lead character through ethic and gender based connections, but not species based connections.
Americans aren’t representative of the entire world and to be perfectly frank, I don’t trust the judgement of a majority of Americans anymore, y’all make dumb decisions that fuck up the world.
the majority of Americans feel the same
I don’t believe you. You got a source for that?
Anyway, so you’re saying that gender is a bigger gap for you to cross than species? You, a human, are better able to roleplay as a fucking bipedal hedgehog than a human woman? Maybe you should take a step back and try to figure out why that is.
A simple character creation screen is not hard to make for every game.
That only works if your character is basically a blank slate story-wise, which just doesn’t work with all stories. That’s fine though, there’s plenty of games out there and not everything is for everyone.
Tbh, even if I live character customization I don’t think it’s easy and affordable at all for a small dev. You have to make sure all aspects of the game adapt to the choice (models, textures, items, SE, writing and so on). Actually, I suppose it can significantly increase the cost of the project.
The conservative idiots are really going to make me hate buy this game aren’t they?
I’m more thinking that the black dude would look so “pretend” doing all of the acrobatics that AC is known for. Why is he 300 pounds?
And goku could destroy a universe with less effort than you put into a sneeze.
I expect certain amounts of realism within certain fantasies, and AC has generally been a bit grounded in realism with the protagonists strengths and abilities being kind of close to humanly possible. AC is like a history lesson with a free runner who can fight. This guy here gonna jump to a rooftop and fall through.
