Every Assassin’s Creed Shadows Controversy

Sung Lee

9Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the flagship series’ next major installment and no matter what it does, it cannot seem to catch a break. The only breaks happening are in players’ trust. The game’s negative reception has gotten so bad the game was not delayed once but twice in an effort by the developers to “iron out” the game’s issues that it will probably still have unfixed by the time the game finally releases by its March 2025 release date. Five months is barely enough time in a game’s development cycle and the problems with Shadows are symptomatic of much larger issues at hand besides Ubisoft’s usual slop formula.In preparation and celebration for the game’s eventual launch, here is a timeline for every time Assassin’s Creed Shadows blew up from controversy.

Egregious Pricing

In line with many Ubisoft games that came out around the same time period, Shadows continues the Ubisoft practice of price gouging to encourage customers to purchase the company’s subscription service rather than pay the game’s insane starting price that does not even include the full game. Before the game was released, Ubisoft already advertised day one DLC, an expansion pass, and early access. Customers could either fork over a huge sum or subscribe. This style already left a bad taste in people’s mouths after the fiasco with Star Wars Outlaws, where early access customers lost their progress because of a day one patch. Ubisoft’s “compensation” of their own currencies and discounts was just salt in the wound.The DLC aspect would eventually be rolled back after all the subsequent controversies the game would face prior to launch. But the fact that this business model was repealed shows that it was not a good idea to begin with.

Yasuke the Black Samurai

AC: Shadows was first teased during 2022’s Ubisoft Forward under the codename Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red (creative, I know). It was later fully unveiled with the Shadows moniker in 2024, detailing the game’s story, setting, and characters. It is here we encounter the first major stumbling block Shadows gracefully faceplanted into: Yasuke.This character has spawned MASSIVE vitriolic backlash against Ubisoft for their creative decision in including this historical figure as a main character in the game.It is absolutely necessary to mention that there is a vocal slice of criticism that is rooted in racism and bigotry; there is no denying that. However, because of how loud this side can be, legitimate criticism of Ubisoft’s creative direction has been sidelined in favor of sensationalism.For a series that leans heavily into historical authenticity with its games, Assassin’s Creed suddenly forgoing their previously established “rules” felt very strange. Every single protagonist prior was fictional, if accurate, amalgam of the region the game was exploring. Also, the protagonist was a native of the land and culture the game took place in (and yes, even Black Flag follows this principle despite Edward Kenway not being from the Caribbean). Yasuke is none of those things.A footnote he may be, Yasuke was a historical person who was recorded to be in Japan at the time Shadows is taking place in. Also, he is not a native to Japan, rather a foreigner who ended up in Oda Nobunaga’s retinue after he came into contact with Jesuit priests through trade. With the current culture war as it is, it can come off as hollow diversity to finally have a game set in Japan, a dream setting for many Assassin’s Creed fans, and have one of the protagonists NOT be Japanese. As a matter of fact, it is possible that Ubisoft did this for the SOLE intention of how much publicity Yasuke would generate. Kudos to them, it worked.But it then brought a whole line of other issues.What lends further credence to this hollow representation idea regarding Yasuke was gameplay footage featuring Yasuke’s distinct combat style. However, it was not Yasuke’s swordplay that caught people’s attention—it was his background music. It was a hip-hop/trap-infused mix of the in-game battle theme. So much for all the cultural sensitivity experts Ubisoft hired.Speaking of experts Ubisoft hired, the company consulted historians and their works to ensure historical authenticity. One of the scholars they derived inspiration from was Thomas Lockley, who was the historian responsible for touting Yasuke as a full-fledged samurai. I will not get into the semantics of this issue, but other historians and even the Japanese government got involved to refute Lockley’s claims, revealing that his published work regarding Yasuke was more in-line with historical fiction rather than fact. Yet, Ubisoft refused to budge in the face of this refutation, instead choosing to double down.Franchise boss Marc-Alexis Cote defended Shadows at a BAFTA-organized event, propping up the game as some sort of political statement to outline how “diverse” history is, championing the game as some sort of stand against intolerance and bigotry, a stand against tyranny, censorship, and persecution by oppressive governments. Reminder, Cote is saying this year’s Assassin’s Creed, one of gaming’s premiere examples of bloated, repetitive, and stagnant slop produced by an equally stagnant multibillion dollar company, is a statement against censorship and a stand for the freedom of expression.It is wild how gaming continues to prevail as the market where the CUSTOMER is criticized and berated for not liking the content these studios put out. Is it any wonder why games outspokenly critical of their audience continue to lose goodwill and support?And for all their talk about diversity and representation, I suppose the representation of native Japanese men in a game set in Feudal Japan was a bridge too far, huh?

Stealing Design Assets for Showcase and Artbook

Ubisoft later came under fire after official in-game assets and snippets of the official collector’s edition artbook revealed that the art team used designs owned by entities outside of Ubisoft. Owned by the Sekigahara Teppo-Tai, a Japanese reenactment group who strives to preserve Japanese matchlock guns and the battle of Sekigahara through their work. The flag in question was used by the group for local festivities and events, with the characters of the flag literally saying, “Sekigahara Teppo-Tai.”It was only after eagle-eyed Japanese fans found this and reported it to a lead member of the group did Ubisoft respond. The company officially apologized for using the group’s property and promised to remove it from subsequent promotional material. Of course, they made the addendum that it would be impossible to remove the design from the collector’s artbook because those materials were already published. Who knows what would have happened if nobody found this out?

Errors in Content Creator Gifts

To promote the game further to the Japanese audience, Ubisoft sent special statues as gifts to Japanese streamers featuring the game’s protagonists, Yasuke and Naoe, in dynamic poses. While the statues look alright at first glance, the very same Japanese streamers immediately found that the banners and iconography Yasuke and Naoe were brandishing were all incorrect.The clan symbols and heraldry on the figures showcased a different clan from the one Yasuke belonged to, given that he was a retainer to Oda Nobunaga’s household. The symbol he bore instead was that of the Toyotomi clan. While this is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, getting the most basic things wrong sets a bad precedent for things to come and shows that the Japanese historical consultants Ubisoft hired are not really doing their jobs properly. What would that mean for the rest of the game?Turns out not hiring proper Japanese cultural consultants meant a whole lot of inaccuracies that keen-eyed Japanese players caught onto. Throughout the several showcase and preview videos Ubisoft prepared for Shadows’ initial launch, Japanese viewers pointed out many glaring issues with the creative decisions the game’s design team implemented. From wrong architecture to out of season settings and props, there were a lot of little things that rubbed fans, particularly Japanese ones, the wrong way.Of course, these inaccuracies can be chalked up to developers trying to aim for an amalgam of the Japanese setting rather than a one-to-one recreation of the time period. It is impossible to get every little detail correct and trying to do so would be an exercise in futility, especially for details a majority of players would not pay attention to. However, while certain nitpicks can be overlooked, getting things like architecture, Kanji, and cultural details wrong, especially with how much Ubisoft championed diversity and representation with this game, it feels hollow and inauthentic. If representation matters so much, shouldn’t that representation be done as accurately as possible?

The Broken Torii Gate Incident

This lack of cultural sensitivity and oversight extends past the game and its official material and bleeds into merchandising as well. In a collaboration with PureArts, Ubisoft teased a collectible statue to promote Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It featured chibi versions of the protagonists, Yasuke brandishing his sword and Naoe perched atop a broken Torii gate. While this design may not mean anything to people outside of Japan, Torii gates are a significant cultural symbol to the country and the Shinto religion. These gates usually stand before shrines, acting as doorways that divide regular life from the sacred, and revered throughout the country. It is for this reason several online detractors criticized Shadows further for showing Yasuke riding a horse through these gates in one of the preview videos.However, a broken Torii gate holds a much different weight and significance to the Japanese people. After the bombing of Nagasaki during World War II on August 9, 1945, Sanno Shrine and its Torii gate was caught in the nuclear blast. The explosion ravaged the surrounding area but amidst the destruction, half of the Torii gate remained standing in the aftermath. The force of the bomb was so devastating that it even altered the direction the gate was facing. Since then, the broken gate has become a national symbol to commemorate the lives lost in the Nagasaki bombing and demonstrate the land’s power to recover and regrow. Though there is a non-zero number of broken Torii gates, the Sanno Shrine gate remains unfixed and unmended for those very reasons. That is the symbol used to promote Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Its insensitive use was immediately called out and Ubisoft recalled the collectible’s design, apologizing for their carelessness.That is certainly a word that can be used to summarize everything leading up to Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ launch: carelessness.Very few games have been held to such ruthless scrutiny and criticism by onlookers. Everytime Ubisoft opens its mouth, people find something to lampoon the studio for.For example, most recently, previewers found out that players can go to shrines and destroy artifacts inside, one of these being the mirror housed inside temples and shrines. Of course, the common argument is that the players are in control of what they do and this action is an indictment on the player rather than the game. However, it was a conscious choice by the developers to include this aspect in-game and ALSO have the artifact to be breakable. This is the same series that once had the game desynchronize if the protagonist killed too many innocents.For a game designed to appeal to the Japanese audience and promote representation and diversity, every step Ubisoft takes forward with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, they simultaneously shoot themselves in the same foot.Assassin’s Creed Shadows is slated for March 20, 2025.