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What the hell is the problem with a black samurai ? Y'all just need something to hate on.
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My only issue with Yasuke is us playing as an actual historic character is weird.
He is basically a blank slate anyway because there isn't exactly much known.
So why him?
Director said because they want to show Japan from the eyes of a stranger.
That’s weird that that’s always what happens with a Japan story. Shogun and last samurai too. They didn’t feel the need to show the crusades or Egypt or renaissance Italy or Greece from the eyes of the stranger. But Japan very often needs to be a fish out of water story it seems. Not sure why
But, why male models?
All we know about him is that he sucked and failed at his one job. Why not do a blank slate instead?
I mean they let us play as Jack The Ripper in Syndicate
Yeah, we know how his story ends (with his lord killed and him sent into exile) because of this. There's a reason other games used fictional characters.
tbf we've played Leonidas' daughter now so honestly we were only one small step removed from an actual historical protagonist at this point
Actually, it's Pythagoras' daughter and Leonidas' granddaughter but yeah
Why? You played any samurai games? Nioh has William Adams. Actually foreigner in Japan too. Most other games have either historical characters (anything with Sengoku in the name) or heavily fictionalized guys based on reality i.e. Samanosuke Akechi from Onimusha was was a minor player related to Mitsuhide, most famous general who betrayed Oda Nobunaga.
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AHAHAHHAHAHAHAH no no he's got a point
Yasuke's gameplay is more combat focused apprently. Stealth will be naoe's department.
So the maxim applies: no one will notice if there is no one alive to notice it
Exactly... I have no quarells with ethnic representation in games/media and even support it as long as it's done right; this isn't. Telling a story in feudal Japan, where 99.999% of people (specially among the samurai class) would look like the people who actually lived there, and considering that Japanese people are also one of the underrepresented minorities in media, they would pick the ONE samurai (supposedly) who didn't look japanese to be the PROTAGONIST? No, that's wrong, no matter how you put it, the black samurai should've been an NPC/companion and that would've been nice and all but NOT the protagonist.
When representation is pushed in a highly controversial manner just for marketing purposes (because people WILL have heated discussions about it, and that's good publicity for the game), just because some CEO will get more money, it only makes it so representation has even more reason to be criticized and ridiculed. This is akin to that black Aragorn controversy in Magic (the card game), an obvious publicity move not someone who genuinely cares about black people representation (they're doing more harm than good to them anyway).
This is it. I don't care that he is Black. I don't care if Yasuke was or wasn't a Samurai. To side-step a Japanese protagonist as a warrior culturally of the land of Japan feels wrong. Especially when you consider it's going to be a game full of killing Japanese people. Would it not be more sensitive to have the "good guy" be Japanese? Unless Yasuke is as a morally grey character I just think it was a bad choice and, as stated, it happened when we finally get a game set in Japan.
Exactly, Ubisoft knows what they’re doing. They’re afraid of strong Asian male protagonists
My boy Ajay stands alone
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I feel like Yasuke In American Japanese media is to what Jack the Ripper is to Japanese media. A real guy whose not very interesting in the grand scheme of things and overrepresented for their relevant historical worth. Shoulda made him a vampire like Nagoriyuki from guilty gear double down be a man.
In all of this Asian voices are predictably ignored. I understand a lot of you think we're invisible (what else is new) but we shit on this 'exceptional foreigner' in a native land (usually Japan/Asia) pretty regularly too, stuff like NiOh, Shogun, TLS - you just ignore it cause you dgaf. I get for a certain subset of of non-Asian weebs this is cool - and I'm excited for Naoe but I also know that western media loooooove to center stories around Asian women (big side-eye but that's another conversation lol) and forget Asian men exist other than to be side characters as opposed to being co-heroes in their own stories.
I hear you man. I'm not Asian myself but that's been my main point about this topic. It's not that he's Black and it's not that he may or may not be Samurai. It's simply that he's not Japanese.
In a game where you will spend time as that character killing a bunch of Japanese I think it's insensitive for the character playing a warrior culturally of the land of Japan not to be Japanese. If I play this game I will be playing as Naoe as much as possible.
This is my thing about it. I was just really excited to play as a Japanese male assasian in an AC game. I've thought it would be amazing and wanted to play it since the first AC game. We will potentially see it with some DLC.
Imo its because fans have asked for years about a Samurai game, and they chose the most obscure and uncommon person to be represented as a Samurai. On one hand it makes sense; Yasuke is a historical character with barely any documented evidence about him, which gives him a blank slate. On the other hand it could be seen as disrespectful to Japanese people to misrepresent a historical person.
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Assassins Creed Congo during the brutality of the belgium colony would be a fantastic african game based around liberation and freeing the people. 1880-1910 would be fabulous.
Ubisoft rep "Cool, cool, just make sure one of the protagonists is a viking."
He should’ve been a DLC protagonist. Would’ve been interesting
or just a main character in the story. He didn't need to be playable.
He’s an interesting concept and great as a cast member but not the protagonist in the main game. Imagine if there’s an African AC game and the main character is an Asian dude
That's what I was saying. He'd be great as just a person in the story.
Completely agree with your edit. having him in cinematics as someone that introduce us with the Oda court would be much better than a fake playable samurai
I think not having the samurai character be a japanese man has more to do with the fact that Ghost of Tsushima exists and the sequel is most likely being announced this year, makes no sense for Ubisoft to make a character that would draw even more comparison to Ghost of Tsushima than the game already is going to. With Yasuke they can make a samurai game in Japan and the character be totally unique narrative wise and appearance wise. The assassin character is literally Japanese too so I don't really understand people being angry tbh. Also if you were waiting for a Assassins creed game based in Japan and was thinking samurai and not shinobi for the main character then I don't know what to say
Of all the comparisons to Ghost of Tsushima to worry about I don’t think having a Japanese protagonist in a Japanese game would be something to avoid lol.
Personally I just wish Yasuke was a side character and Naoe was the main protagonist. She looks really cool
Honestly, even if it were in Kenya these people would still find some way to complain and say “they only made the setting Kenya because they’re WoKe”.
pure nonsense, there wasn't critics about egytian character for Origins ...
I do believe there were arguments about Bayek's skin colour back then, but these sorts of social-political debates are even more pronounced now than they were in 2017.
You play as an Arab in AC1/Mirage, a Egyptian in Origins, a Greek in Odyssey, a Native Americans in AC3 etc.
Do you think people complained?. People love it when you play the relevant ethnicity for the geographical setting.
What’s annoying is that any dislike of the main character choices means people will paint you as a racist, which is ridiculous.
Which is interesting considering not 2 years ago social media was rallying behind Asian/Pacific Islander representation.
This is exactly why this choice was made. If the game knocks it out of the park and is amazing, it’s irrelevant. If it sucks, any critics can be deemed racist and ignored.
They are taking from one unrepresented group and giving it to another. Asian men, outside of eastern media, tend to not get a lot of representation. Asian women are a lot more popular in the west than men. The problem isn't that the samurai is specifically black, its that he's not asian. It just feels like they are going as far as they can to not let a Japanese dude get the spotlight in a game set in Japan.
Also the term white is used to refer to caucasians. Not asians. Calling them white is like calling middle easterners black. Similar skin tones but very different ethnicities.
Least brain rotted leftist.
They love Asian culture, but won’t give them representation in their own media.
Lowkey racist and they know it
These companies love diversity, but when it comes time to put an Asian man, they all look the other way
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A japanese woman doesn't count as a traditional japanese figure? I get if you wanted to remove Yasuke from the game but what's wrong with having a female protagonist?
I think people wanted a cool male Japanese samurai and they were robbed of it
There is a character that is quintessential to the culture - Naone. She seems like the main focus of the game anyway and for sure my choice when playing.
And yeah I would have played a Viking game with a Spaniard as the main character, could be interesting. Hell, I wish we played as Basim in Valhalla to be an outside observer to both warring factions.
Than play the Woman.
Why does it really matter? Ezio was Italian, not Byzantine in Revelations. Ratonhnhaké:ton was Kanien’kehá:ka, not American in AC3. Edward was Welsh, not from the Caribbean in AC4. Shay was an Irish in North America,Portugal and France in Rogue. Did you mind then? Most likely no. Authenticity doesn't matter, they're not saying Yasuke is a native Japanese man.
I would certainly like to play a game with a protagonist that's not native to the setting, someone who's not a local or ingrained in that place. It makes me relate to them more, as I get to discover that new, strange place just like them.
Do you care when the protagonist of a game set anywhere in the world but the US is American? I bet you don't.
Ezio was a character we already played as so following his story into another country makes sense. If they had a whole new game in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and picked a random italian main character, people would have complained then too. Connor was literally native american lol, it fit the period perfectly. The British Empire had people from all over in the Carribean. All the examples you give are authentic examples so it does matter.
It's like if you had to pick a character at random in a specific setting, the odds of picking an Italian guy during the Italian Renaissance makes sense. You can do this for all the settings you mentioned and it'd work. Picking the 1 black guy in 16th century Japan does not though. The "fish out of water" story is a choice and is not a requirement, and they could still have that with someone from Japan who never left his small village or something, like they did with Bayek in Origins. It just shows how Ubisoft absolutely wanted their diverse protagonist first and thought about the story later. It's a very Western-central choice, for Western audiences, as if they couldn't relate to a Japanese male. I personally would have preferred if the only playable character was Naone.
Her name is Naoe, at least get her name right lol. And Yasuke was African, not American (ergo, not Western). His inclusion makes sense considering we don't know what happened to him after Oda's death and his disappearance allows for a lot of creative liberty, in this case, it's explained as him becoming an Assassin. It's a clever choice that hasn't been done before, it's original. I'm not denying it could also be because of diversity points, but considering we have Liberation, Freedom Cry and Origins with darker-skinned protagonists, I doubt that's what Ubi mainly wanted. It's just original, and interesting. Haven't you seen the multiple Facebook and Reddit posts about the mysterious "black samurai" that have been reposted over the years? It's not something they came out with out of the blue. There just haven't been any game about it. But there have been games set in Japan with a male Japanese protagonist.
It works, but what the person I replied to said was "it doesn't feel as authentic to experience a culture with someone's who's not a local and ingrained in that time and place". So by their definition, Ezio doesn't feel authentic, because he's not a local, he's experiencing a culture that's not his own, and he's not exactly ingrained in that place. The same goes for the other people I mentioned.
If the "random Italian main character" had the same backstory of Ezio (and Ezio didn't exist), I think people would've been okay with it? It's a story that makes sense, him being an Assassin that arrives to Constantinople for a specific reason. Yasuke wasn't an Assassin yet, but his arrival to Japan still makes sense, because he was a servant (as far as we know).
Backstory is all that matters and the game hasn't even been released yet, so we don't know his canon backstory. But what we do know of his real counterpart makes sense, and the same goes for Ezio, Ratonhnhaké:ton, Edward and Shay. It's authentic. Is an actual person, who actually existed, not authentic?
Some people thought Jason Brody in FC3 was bad and said that Vaas should've been the protagonist because he was native to the islands, those people are dumb. They just saw Jason's skin color and thought: that's bad! And the same thing happens here.
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exactly, people don’t even realize how much asian men are sidelined in media. Thats not to say there isn’t games with asian men like GOT, but still.
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"Would it feel strange if the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption 2 were Japanese?" No, that sounds pretty sick tbh
Not really, there were immigrants at the time
Even that is more imaginable compared to this. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants vs one missionary’s servant who ended up a resident
personally I think the samurai genre is way over saturedated. Should it have been an Asian man? Sure. But maybe Ubisoft wanted to try something different here. There still is an Asian protagonist at least
A black samurai is one protagonist, Naone is the other. She seems fucking awesome and will be my character of choice, but Yasuke will offer some interesting opportunities for storytelling provided Ubi don't shy away from it.
And yeah, I would totally play a Japanese cowboy in RDR2. There were already Japanese people in the US by that time (1860s I believe, there were quite a few Japanese immigrants and migrant workers). A lot of them were working sugar cane fields and it would be cool to see a Japanese character who broke out of that life, came across Dutch's gang, and you have to earn their trust as an outsider and eventually become a high profile member of the gang. Would've been sick - why is that a problem to you?
I agree with you completely but I'm pretty sure they worked on the railroads with the Chinese in the old West. Many Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Filipinos) worked in the sugar cane fields in Hawaii but idk about mainland America.
Fair enough you're right and I am likely not remembering things very well. They definitely did work on railroads as well, and I think that fits just as well. Probably were often mistreated and overworked at those jobs. Cool to see someone rebel and join a gang instead.
Point at the end of the day is it would be a cool and unique perspective. I would be 100% down for it.
I agree completely! Just saying sugar cane implies old Hawaii not old West. Which honestly sounds cool as well. But regardless seeing a game about a mistreated Asian worker becoming a badass outlaw is a great premise. Gives me Django Unchained vibes.
A white guy telling an Asian not to be offended for cultural appropriation. Crazy
Dawg i would love it, it would remind me of some films of Jackie Chan (I know he's not Japanese but you know what I'm referring to). But I do kinda see what's is your issue, I don't second it but I understand you.
Shanghai noon!
It’s because the West repeatedly erases strong, masculine Asian men from any media, which is pretty obvious here
Totally agree. If you haven't already, be sure to watch Warrior on Netflix.
Main problem for these people is that we got a female Japanese character but "oh how can we not have a male strong Japanese character"
It’s rare we get an organic female character in AC. In fact with the release of this game this will only be the 3 time we can play as a set female character in the mainline games which are syndicate and Odyssey I don’t count evoir because the game doesn’t change depending on your gender and it gives you both options making it ambiguous who the canon choice. I also don’t count the chronicle games or liberation because they aren’t mainline entries. Anyway my point is that I’m happy they are just giving us something new instead of just another male assasin.
That's exactly how I feel. Plus she looked really badass in the trailer.
It was never ambiguous with Eivor. There's an option called 'let Animus decides', which is the default and canon option. The male DNA is Odin, the female DNA is Eivor.
Her name is Eivor Varinsdottir. Eivor is a female given name, and Varinsdottir means 'daughter of Varin'.