The video game franchise Assassin’s Creed, long popular among gamers for its vivid recreations of different societies and time periods, now finds itself at the center of an acrimonious culture war over racial representation and historical accuracy.
In September 2022, Ubisoft, the French publisher of the franchise, announced that the next installment of the game would take place in 16th-century Japan, toward the end of the Sengoku period. Fans of the series, who had asked for a game set in feudal Japan for more than a decade, were initially excited. But for some, that enthusiasm would quickly turn to dismay once the company announced the identity of the game’s lead character.
The first Assassin’s Creed games — set during the Crusades, Italian Renaissance, American Revolution and French Revolution, respectively — featured a single, male protagonist. Starting with 2015’s Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, which takes place in London in 1868, Ubisoft began experimenting with dual protagonists, giving players the option to play as either a male or female character. Its latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, scheduled to release on Feb. 14, 2025, continues this trend, dividing gameplay between a Japanese shinobi — a ninja named Naoe — and, fatefully, a Black samurai called Yasuke.
If you type the name “Yasuke” into a search engine today, you will find no shortage of posts, discussion forums and YouTube videos criticizing Ubisoft for giving this character such a prominent role in the game. Some take issue with the fact that, unlike Naoe or any of the series’ previous protagonists, he isn’t a fictional character but a real-life historical figure: an African slave, who, after traveling to Japan alongside Jesuit missionaries, became a retainer of the powerful daimyo (feudal lord) Oda Nobunaga. Others go a step further, discrediting academic research on Yasuke’s extraordinary life and insisting his inclusion in the game is an insult to Japanese players, an example of historical revisionism and, above all, yet another sign of diversity initiatives ruining their favorite pastime.
The consequences of these accusations have been far-reaching. Due to the controversy, which follows underperforming releases like 2024’s Star Wars: Outlaws and the arrest of several top-level executives over sexual harassment investigations in late 2023, Ubisoft’s stock has dropped sharply in recent years, reaching prices not seen since the early 2000s — before the first, hugely successful Assassin’s Creed game put the company on the map. The company’s PR team issued a four-page apology addressed to its “Japanese community” while headlines have asked whether the franchise — which has struggled critically and commercially for years — will finally be put to rest following the backlash. One influential historian of Yasuke, Nihon University’s Thomas Lockley, received so many unsolicited inquiries from angry gamers that he deleted his entire online presence.
Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is far from the only video game in recent memory to become the inadvertent subject of controversy, and public discourse surrounding it is indicative of broader trends reshaping the industry. While fans of the franchise are right to bemoan its dwindling quality, well documented by gaming journalists, most of their outrage is focused on something else entirely: the fact that gaming, like film, television and other types of media, is rapidly becoming more diverse, with many games that used to cater to a primarily white, male player base now seeking to appeal to a wider audience at the perceived expense of their original fans.
Some recent examples of this trend include Bethesda’s 2023 action role-playing game Starfield, which, in contrast to earlier titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), offered players the option to select their character pronouns and engage in LGBTQ+ romance (something the Assassin’s Creed franchise has also been experimenting with); Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us: Part II (2020), which replaced the male protagonist of its predecessor with a young female, lesbian one; and even the 2018 God of War reboot by Sony’s Santa Monica Studio, which, though well received, met considerable backlash for turning its long-standing protagonist, Kratos, from a rage-filled, testosterone-spewing godslayer into a caring, internally conflicted and, according to some vocal fans, “beta male” father figure.
Although critics of Yasuke’s inclusion in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows insist they are not motivated by racist prejudice, the justifications they provide do not hold up to scrutiny. Those who take issue with Yasuke being a historical figure, not a fictional character — requiring imaginative rewriting of his story to fit the plotline of the game — fail to recognize that the franchise, though inspired by history and letting players interact with well-known historical figures like Julius Caesar and George Washington, is itself a work of fiction.
The franchise’s developers worked closely with members of the Kahnawake community for a previous game that had a Native American protagonist, and recreated the city of Paris with such accuracy that they offered to help reconstruct the Notre Dame Cathedral after it caught fire in 2019. Yet despite being diligent about historical details, the games are based on a fantastical narrative in which Illuminati-like organizations steer the course of history from the shadows, guided by the leftover technologies of an ancient civilization related to Christianity’s Adam and Eve.
“Inspired by historical events and characters,” a disclaimer at the beginning of each Assassin’s Creed game reads: “This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.” If players were able to suspend their disbelief when soaring above the rooftops of Venice with Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine, or causing the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake by meddling with one of those aforementioned ancient technologies, why would they draw the line at playing as someone who is known to have resided in the very time and place their game is set?
Confronted with this counterargument, some online critics of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows have attempted to reinvent themselves as experts on the history of feudal Japan, proclaiming that many of the books and articles written about Yasuke’s life are not only inaccurate but part of a calculated attempt by left-leaning academics to rewrite the past in their own image. Yasuke, they asserted, wasn’t really a samurai, but has been retroactively turned into one by people who want others to remember him that way.
Evidence for these assertions has been heavily cherry-picked. Instead of reading all or at least a large part of the already limited information available on the subject, the critics have honed in on one particular text, Lockley’s 2017 bestseller, “African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan.” Written with fiction author Geoffrey Girard, it was based on Lockley’s prior research, but packaged in a more dramatic, approachable format with the overall goal not of providing a precise account of Yasuke’s life, but of making an educated guess about how this African migrant would have interacted with feudal Japanese and vice versa.
Rather than cross-examining “African Samurai” with the primary sources listed in its bibliography, criticisms of Lockley mainly focused on attacking him as opposed to his scholarship, with YouTube videos and posts on X and Reddit identifying concerning comments from his interviews and public talks. One criticism is that Lockley told a BBC reporter that there was “no record” of Yasuke decapitating Nobunaga at his request after being betrayed by his subordinates during the 1582 Honno-ji Incident. Another is that he also told the Japan Times that his book was fact-checked by Sakujin Kirino, only for the esteemed Japanese historian to post on social media that he “gave a few comments, but it was nothing as grand as a fact-check.” However sloppy and misleading, Lockley’s missteps don’t discredit the broader academic consensus on Yasuke’s existence. As critics of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows strawman their way into erasing Yasuke’s historical record — and, by extension, accusing Ubisoft of, as one YouTuber put it, using Yasuke “as a vehicle to forcefully insert racial diversity” — they conveniently gloss over the fact that many other scholars of feudal Japan agree that Yasuke was indeed a samurai, that he was close to Nobunaga and that he was involved in the concluding events of the Sengoku period of turbulence and civil war in the 16th century.
“We know he arrived in Japan with Jesuit visitor Alessandro Valignano in 1579, after joining his party in Mozambique as a slave,” Jonathan Lopez Vera, a historian and researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, wrote on “Yasuke – Separating Fact from Fiction,” an academic forum to address the misinformation spread by the controversy. “We know they went to Kyoto in 1581, “and we know his presence caused such a commotion that Oda Nobunaga, as always, full of curiosity for anything new and different, asked the Jesuits to pay him a visit and bring this strange person with them.” Intrigued by the color of his skin, and impressed with his size and strength — the “Chronicle of Nobunaga” (“Shincho Koki”), a 1598 document written by one of the daimyo’s own vassals, describes the African as “stronger than 10 powerful men” — Nobunaga offered him a sword, stipend and mansion, keeping him in his court until the Honno-ji Incident.
“Esteemed historians who actually read the sources related to Yasuke have asserted that he is indeed a samurai,” Christina Laffin, an associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, told New Lines via email, adding that “the term ‘samurai’ is not as straightforward as one might assume.” Far from a clearly defined class or profession — as contemporary pop culture often presents it — to be a samurai was to receive the very privileges Yasuke received from Nobunaga. Instead of questioning whether Yasuke was a samurai or not, Laffin concludes, “We should be asking what motivates the questioning of his status.”
“As usual,” Lopez Vera wrote on the “Yasuke – Separating Fact from Fiction” forum, “it’s been all about racism” among gamers:
They say they are just angry because of the lack of historical accuracy, but it’s just racism. If you have played some AC games, you know they have never cared about historical accuracy … and they shouldn’t, because it’s a video game, not a history book. But this time, all of a sudden, there are thousands of angry defenders of historical accuracy.
In this sense, polemics against Yasuke, “African Samurai” and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows aren’t dissimilar from other right-wing efforts to discredit research — like Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning” or Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” — that unearths the previously overlooked histories of minority groups. In each of these cases, detractors of such research claim to be combating historical revisionism while their critics say they are the real revisionists.
Moving beyond the historicity of Yasuke, it’s important to consider the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows controversy in the broader context of gaming discourse. The industry has developed into an unlikely battleground of political beliefs, with right-wing gamers rallying against what they perceive as progressives encroaching on “their” turf.
Although this rift had been decades in the making, it truly solidified during Gamergate, a harassment campaign that began in 2014 and saw members of anonymous message boards like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit target various queer and feminist game developers and media critics, publishing their private information and intimidating them with rape and death threats.
Coordinated attacks against individuals with different backgrounds and viewpoints have only become more frequent and intense. Earlier this year, a journalist from the review site ScreenRant was harassed for expressing the wish that the Chinese video game Black Myth: Wukong included more female characters. The campaign caused her, like Lockley, to drastically reduce her online presence. Harassment has even become an unavoidable part of the gaming experience itself, with five out of six adult gamers encountering hate speech, including racism and Holocaust denialism, according to a 2021 survey from the Anti-Defamation League.
The rise of right-wing rhetoric in the gaming landscape can be attributed to several causes. As studies of the 2016 U.S. presidential election showed, extremist groups are particularly adept at using novel technologies and social media platforms to spread their beliefs, recruit new members and build communities. Gamers have proven particularly susceptible to such tactics. This is not because there is anything inherently radicalizing about gaming itself but because the industry, like film and television, is rapidly becoming more diverse. As a result, as game journalist Laura Hudson told WIRED back in 2014, many white, male players see “the growing visibility of women, not to mention their incomprehensible insistence that games cater to their perspectives as well, as an unwelcome intrusion in a space that does not belong to them.”
Many conservative gamers insist they have no issue with representation in games but feel that developers have gone too far in their pursuit of inclusivity, shoehorning contemporary norms and values into their projects in ways that feel inorganic and detract from the overall gaming experience. Just as Netflix’s 2023 miniseries “Cleopatra” was criticized for casting a Black actress to portray a historical figure who, historians agree, had Persian and Macedonian roots, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Shadows has been criticized for featuring a Black, as opposed to Japanese, main character. That choice was as ill-received in Japan as it was in the U.S. (hence the company’s apology to the Japanese community), in part because every previous game in the franchise featured a protagonist native to its setting.
That game developers have become more diverse and politically correct in recent years is undeniable. Why this development has taken place, and why it occurred to the extent that it did, is up for debate. Maybe companies are making more inclusive games because the gaming industry itself has grown, causing player bases to spread across countries, cultures and demographics. Or maybe, as more conspiratorial enclaves of the gaming community would have you believe, it’s because executives are secretly trying to make up for the various abuse and harassment scandals that have emerged from their offices in recent years. Nefarious, but not impossible.
Whatever its causes, though, one thing about the controversy surrounding Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is certain: Despite the minor points of valid criticism it has produced, it is not about whether the game’s protagonist was indeed a samurai. Rather, it is about the reality that today’s games are made and played by a much broader group of people than they were in the past. As the face of gaming continues to transform, the inescapable tide of cultural change is almost certain to trigger more controversies in the future.
In the meantime, fans of the Assassin’s Creed franchise can only hope that the gaming experience that they enjoy playing as Yasuke will do justice to a franchise that has won the emotional investment of countless gamers from around the world and from all backgrounds.
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