The African samurai that is video gaming’s latest cultural flashpoint

SINGAPORE – In 16th-century Japan, an African man arrived at the nation’s shores alongside Jesuit missionaries. 

He would go on to serve as a samurai under the legendary feudal lord Oda Nobunaga, taking up the name Yasuke and witnessing one of the most pivotal moments in Japanese history during the twilight of its Sengoku (warring states) period.

Five centuries later, his story is at the centre of a controversy around cultural representation and historical authenticity in video games, because of his inclusion in the upcoming video game Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

French video game developer Ubisoft is releasing Shadows in March as the 14th entry in its blockbuster series of historical action adventure games. First released in 2007, the Assassin’s Creed titles had sold more than 200 million copies by 2022.   

While past instalments have taken players to Viking-era England and Renaissance Italy, Shadows immerses players in feudal Japan.

Teams at Ubisoft Singapore, the developer’s local outpost, have spent the last two years developing the narrative arc of Yasuke, along with two major in-game zones inspired by their real-world counterparts, Omi and Wakasa.

Though Japan is a setting that has been long requested by fans, the game has drawn backlash for featuring Yasuke as one of its two playable protagonists alongside Naoe, a fictional Japanese shinobi or ninja.

Backlash over Yasuke’s inclusion in the game prompted Ubisoft to release a statement in 2024 clarifying that the game is a work of historical fiction.

“We have put significant effort into ensuring an immersive and respectful representation of feudal Japan,” says the statement. “However, our intention has never been to present any of our Assassin’s Creed games, including Assassin’s Creed Shadows, as factual representations of history, or historical characters.”

The company also called for players to avoid harassing staff working on the game, echoing remarks by Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot condemning such behaviour.

A tale of two warriors

At a recent media preview, The Straits Times experienced both the game’s prologue, which introduces the two protagonists, and a mid-game segment. 

Yasuke’s journey begins as part of a delegation of Portuguese missionaries, when a fateful encounter with daimyo Oda Nobunaga changes his life. Meanwhile, Naoe’s story unfolds as a classic tale of revenge.

The contrast between these characters, Yasuke the African samurai and Naoe the Japanese ninja, extends beyond their backgrounds to their gameplay. While playing as Yasuke emphasises direct combat and swordplay, Naoe is better suited to stealth and assassination.

When asked about the controversy around Yasuke, Ubisoft Singapore associate game producer Cassandra Poon says: “Before all that happened, Yasuke came to us as a strong character to look at Japan through his eyes. And that, to us, is interesting. That’s something we want to focus on bringing to players.”

She points out that the game gives equal weight to Naoe’s insider perspective and Yasuke’s view as an outsider.

In Shadows’ rendition of Sengoku-era Japan, it showcases the series’ trademark attention to detail in how it borrows heavily from a variety of historical source materials.

For instance, the mid-game segment this reporter experienced involved looking for a kidnapped child, Ukita Hideie. The real-life figure was a political hostage and future daimyo.

“At the time, it was common for key clans to exchange hostages,” says Ubisoft Quebec art director Luc Plante. “So, if you betrayed another clan, they would kill someone significant to you. We use all these historical elements to make this experience more believable and incredible.”

Unravelling this mystery takes players through Assassin’s Creed’s bread and butter: exploring beautiful landscapes and lining up kills on targets.

The game transforms Japanese architecture into a playground for creative traversal. Horizontal beams and slanted roofs that were characteristic of buildings of the time become pathways for entry and escape in castle settings based on real-world equivalents.

Mr Plante adds that working on Assassin’s Creed, and its many time periods and settings, creates an ever-changing set of challenges and possibilities.

For instance, taking the series to Japan means including one prominent feature of traditional Japanese interiors: shoji doors, or paper doors.

In-game, these doors are destructible elements that a player can slice through to enter a room.

 “How do you get up there? What’s the best way to get through? With all of these elements, Japanese architecture is providing us with such a rich tapestry to work on,” says Ms Poon.

The game comes with another series staple: the occasional stack of hay to cushion protagonists’ falls when they leap from an improbable height.

Beyond historical accuracy

With the game having so many of the franchise’s core pillars, what is behind the online backlash towards Yasuke?

With Assassin’s Creed Shadows, criticism over Yasuke’s inclusion takes different forms, including some online users questioning whether Yasuke can truly be considered a samurai, due to how the role was traditionally derived from one’s family background. 

However, multiple historians have argued that Yasuke was treated as one.

The most persistent criticism is one that claims Yasuke should not be a playable protagonist because he is not ethnically Japanese.

Dr Cameron Kunzelman, an assistant professor of communication studies at Mercer University in the United States who is working on a book about the Assassin’s Creed franchise, tells ST that such backlash is unprecedented for the series.

“The historical accuracy is being attacked before anyone has a chance to play the game,” he says. “Which suggests it is not about the portrayal of specific events, but rather the choice to portray these characters in this time period at all.

“As far as I can think of, that hasn’t really happened before.”

Backlash to Yasuke’s inclusion is made more unusual by the fact that this is not the first time that Japanese or Japan-inspired media has adapted his story.

As a samurai of African origin, Yasuke has a larger-than-life presence in Japanese history. He appears as a character in the strategy video game series Nobunaga’s Ambition (1983 to 2022), the Japanese historical drama film Kubi (2023) and the Netflix anime series Yasuke (2021).

University student Rachel Seraphina, 20, a long-time fan of the franchise, says a core appeal of Assassin’s Creed is its historical inspirations, which makes the backlash to Yasuke all the more puzzling.

She recalls how an in-game encounter with the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Assassin’s Creed II (2009) inspired her to look up the building’s real-life counterpart in Florence, Italy.

“It was almost a mirror image,” she says. “There is always some semblance of historical accuracy (when it comes to things) like buildings, events and historical figures that make me interested in how things went down in that period, and learning that through a video game is so fun to me.”

The series has made headlines over its 18-year run for attention to detail with its architectural recreations of real-world places.

But Ms Seraphina points out: “It’s just a game, not a history lesson.”

In her view, the response to Yasuke’s presence in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is more about representation than accuracy.

Recent debates about racial representation in media include the audience backlash to casting African-American actresses Halle Bailey as the title character in The Little Mermaid (2023) and Amandla Stenberg in the twin leading roles in The Acolyte (2024).

With The Acolyte, this took the shape of a “review bombing” campaign and reams of online abuse written over the prominence of women and people of colour. This, at times, overshadowed the show itself.

Ms Amanda Lim, 21, an information technology student and fan of the series, says she understands why some Japanese fans of the series might be offended. “The first time your culture is shown in the series features someone who’s probably not authentically Japanese, when feudal Japan was highly homogenous.”

The “Tiffany problem” of historical fiction

The debate around Shadows highlights a perpetual challenge in historical fiction: balancing storytelling against evolving audience sensibilities, which sometimes reflect today’s cultural debates more than actual history.

The “Tiffany problem” was coined by fiction authors to refer to how historical facts can seem unrealistic or anachronistic to modern audiences, despite being accurate.

For instance, while the name Tiffany was in use as early as the 17th century, modern audiences often scoff at its inclusion in a story set in that time, as many believe the name has a more contemporary origin.

For its Assassin’s Creed games, Ubisoft works with an in-house historian to develop a network of key experts to provide research for developers to use.

However, Mr Plante says it is more than just about converting historical events into gameplay, noting that when developers insert a historical detail for its own sake, it often feels wrong.

“It needs to serve a gameplay purpose to make sure we have an immersive experience, and not just a display of fact-checking, so that it propels the story forward,” he adds.

Previous Assassin’s Creed games have also grappled with trading fidelity for better storytelling.

For ancient settings like those in Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017), which is set in Egypt from 49 to 38 BC, the team prioritises “authenticity over accuracy” due to the guesswork inherent in mapping places of that era, according to past developer commentary.

For instance, scant archaeological information remains for the ancient city of Memphis, one of the game’s settings, so the developers chose to envision a believable view of the past instead of relying on researchers to invent details.

Even entries set in more recent periods – like Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014) in late 18th-century revolutionary France – must navigate minefields.

In The Making Of Assassin’s Creed, a book released by the company to celebrate the franchise’s 15th anniversary in 2022, Ubisoft’s world design director Maxime Durand says that while most Americans might agree on their nation’s founding narrative, modern France has drastically different interpretations of its foundational political event, depending on where one falls on the political spectrum.

In the same book, business development director Aymar Azaizia adds: “We ended up showcasing figures like Robespierre. In France, he is still heavily debated. Robespierre was a revolutionary but, at the same time, he had a pretty rough history.

“He had people – including scientists, like Lavoisier, and journalists – executed because he felt they were too moderate. That’s quite hardcore and intense. Thus, we depicted him as not being a very nice guy, which of course led to a lot of discussion in France.”

In the case of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, featuring Yasuke as a primary protagonist made sense, as he offers unique narrative possibilities.

“Yasuke is a fantastic character for us to begin with because he is a known figure in that time period. However, there is not a lot written about him in the literature,” says Ms Poon.

“That sets up a very interesting premise for the team to be creative. Knowing that he is an outsider in a foreign land, how would he see the space he is in? How does his character build up towards his own success in such a unique space?

“It gives us so much creativity to inject, and to be very thoughtful about what kind of personality and character he needs to be in order to thrive and survive,” she adds.

Some fans say backlash is overblown

For the fans who spoke to ST, the controversy has been overblown by bad-faith critics who have discounted the game without waiting for initial reviews.

Franchise fan Melvyn Lee says the controversy has not changed his mind about buying the game when it releases in March. “I’m just concerned about whether it’s going to be a good game,” says the 39-year-old compliance manager.

“People were just as quick to complain about a half-human, half-fish mythical creature being black,” he adds, referring to the casting of the live-action The Little Mermaid.

Fellow fan Atiqah Rosle, a 34-year-old copywriter, does not mind the developers’ decision to go with Yasuke as a playable protagonist. 

“I know a lot of people were up in arms about Yasuke being an African samurai, but it’s not like this was someone’s idea just plucked out of thin air. The character is based on a real historical person,” she says. “If anything, it might even give the game a unique perspective.”