Ubisoft’s issued a lengthy statement about Assassin’s Creed Shadows which sees it, among other things, apologise for some elements in the game’s promotional materials which have “caused concern within the Japanese community” and remind people that, you know, Assassin’s Creed games are designed to take some creative license with history.
You can read the statement — which was put out via the official Assassin’s Creed account and is attributed to Shadows’ development team — in full via the tweet below. If you’re wondering whether this is another chapter in the fairly bull***t-filled discourse about whether Yasuke was actually a samurai in real life, which has suddenly become an incredibly important issue to a lot of white guys who’ve attended one jiu-jitsu class and now think they’re experts on Japanese culture since he was revealed as Shadows’ protagonist, the answer is — at least in part — yeah.
First of all, Ubisoft reminded anyone who thinks that if you somehow brought Blackbeard back to life, he’d tell you how swell it was hanging out with Edward Kenway that Shadows, like all Assassin’s Creed games, is “first and foremost” designed to be an “entertaining video game”, one “that tells a compelling, historical fiction set in Feudal Japan” in this case.