“World Trailer,” a new trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows that delivers a mix of gameplay footage and in-game cinematics from the latest installment of Ubisoft’s action RPG series, offering an additional look at its two playable protagonists on PS5 and PC—”legendary samurai” Yasuke and “shinobi assassin” Naoe—has only achieved 255 likes on the Ubisoft Japan channel for reasons that include a moon-walking horse and geography that many say is inspired by China rather than Japan, according to the latest stats and criticisms that can be found on YouTube. The video was released a day after the New York Times published an article titled “The Fight Over a Black Samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” a portion of which includes a quote from a Japanese consultant and translator about how reception of the game has been “mostly positive” in Japan.
Like/dislike ratio as of this writing:
- Ubisoft Japan (YouTube)
- Likes: 255
- Dislikes: 7.2K
- Ubisoft (YouTube)
- Likes: 19K
- Dislikes: 85K
Critics are saying:
- “UBIsoft doesn’t understand the difference between Japan and China”
- “From a Japanese point of view…The natural scenery is very strange…It looks like China in terms of topography.”
- “There are no precipitous cliffs in Japan. Even if there are mountains, the terrain is basically smooth all the way through.”
- “Using Chinese instruments in feudal Japan, both in the video and the soundtrack; I guess Ubisoft aren’t really trying anymore”
- “the horse is walking like michael jackson on stage.”
- “Ubisoft will bring out a ‘historian’ to explain that in feudal Japan, horses used to glide on dirt.”
- “READER BEWARE – Ubisoft is paying for positive comments on this video and paying for likes on those comments to boost them. If you see a comment with barely any replies to it but 3k+ likes, it is a bot.”
- “For those wondering why everyone is talking about Ubisoft using bots in the comments but not seeing any with thousands of likes, it’s because Ubisoft has already deleted most of them. They got caught red-handed.”
The World Trailer, as seen on Ubisoft Japan’s YouTube channel:
From a NYT report:
Kazuma Hashimoto, a Japanese consultant and translator in the video game industry, said the reception of Assassin’s Creed Shadows was mostly positive in Japan. “It was people in the West who were upset with seeing Yasuke as a samurai,” he said, explaining that many of the negative online comments written in Japanese appeared to have been roughly translated from English.
Yu Hirayama, a historian at the Japan University of Health Sciences who specializes in the Sengoku period, said that Yasuke’s samurai status was not in question. “There are very few historical documents about him, but there’s no doubt that he was a ‘samurai’ who served Nobunaga,” Hirayama wrote on social media.