Where was that “historically accurate” crowd when Keanu starred in 47 Ronin?!
Or Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia. Or Finn Jones as Iron Fist.
Or Ben Affleck as Antonio J. Mendez in Argo, ffs. A role practically made for your Pedro Pascal type actor.
Hell, Tom Cruise pretending to be Irish in Far and Away was awful enough just because of the bad accent.
Keanu is half Japanese. Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai though…
Uhm Tom’s character was never the last samurai. Did you watch it?
I’ve seen it, I’m just making a point that Keanu is actually half Japanese so he should be able to play a character of somewhat Asian descent without complaint, especially when the character he played in 47 Ronin was only half Japanese and all the characters shit on his character because of that. It wasn’t a ground breaking movie and there are plenty of reasons to shit on it, but the race card isn’t one of them.
But tom played an American soldier stationed in Japan.
He was already retired from the military in the movie, he went over as a mercenary to train the Japanese how to use guns more effectively.
We are getting off track.
Everyone’s arguing about whether or not the main character should be black while forgetting the more important point: Ubisoft is trash, and we shouldn’t be buying their uninspired shovelware anyway.
The other commenters don’t seem to understand the difference between boycotting and gatekeeping…
I’m with you man, I haven’t bought any Ubisoft stuff for over 10 years now. And the more I learned the more I got surprised by how shovelware can be made even worse.
I don’t understand the gatekeeping here, do you get mad that people enjoy the fast and furious movies? It’s not like these are funneling resources away from the tons of great indie games that are literally constantly coming out these days.
Movies don’t demand an unreasonable amount of money and time out of you the viewer, you buy your ticket and watch the film, maybe you buy the DVD, done end of story.
Ubisoft games demand a minimum of 70 dollars out of you and upwards of 60 hours all while blocking your progress with arbitrary experience checkpoints and pestering you about spending even more money for weapons, gear, mounts, etc. as if it were a free to play MMO like Fortnite, except you already dumped 70 dollars to play the damn thing.
Not sure where indie games have anything to do with Ubisoft.
Technically, they’re only “Samurai” if they’re produced in Nippon within the duration of the Kamakura Period through the Meiji Restoration. Otherwise they’re just sparkling warrior-nobles.
You are thinking of 51% min of corn. And produced in Kentucky. Fuck, thats whiskey. I mean Whisky!
Bourbon, I was talking about bourbon.
Bourbon doesn’t even have to be made in Kentucky, they just can’t call it “Kentucky Straight Bourbon” otherwise.
That is an inside joke for people that know whiskey.
I beat an ancient Egyptian god to death with a Q-tip. Any claim Assassin’s Creed might have had to approximating historical accuracy died several games ago even if we ignore the Ancient Aliens bullshit that’s been around since the begining.
Wasn’t the original premise that you were a dude in the present using a time machine to explore “genetic memory” in a real time simulation in order to find the ark of the covenant or spear of destiny or someshit for the Illuminati?
Yeah, I think they crammed “becuz aliens” in there a few games later to explain away all the magic.
They did that in the first game, actually. The apple and other artifacts were always tech left behind by an extinct “first civilization,” later named the Isu. Part of the series’ problem is that the actually interesting ideological conflict between the Assassins and the Templars was put on hold to explore increasingly elaborate Isu junk after Desmond was killed off.
I haven’t played any AC games in a long time but why would a game series that’s all about playing as stealth assassins have you play as samurai instead of ninjas? Seems like a really big missed opportunity for something like Tenchu
They have strayed far from the original series. It’s large open world combat not hidden in the shadows at all now. Even the ninja you play as in this game is operating in the middle of the day in the streets.
I thought it was common knowledge that “retainer” was literally the job description of all samurai… but I guess I should have known that the Weaboo Gamergate Brigade would conveniently ignore actual history.
There’s a lot of nuance and hair-splitting involved; it’s unlikely Yasuke would have been granted the title of samurai, but he was referred to as kosho. He was given a short sword, but not a long sword to pair with it. Samurai were required by law to wear the paired swords, known as daisho, and anyone else was forbidden.
Almost all samurai were indeed retainers, with the exception of ronin. But bushi who were not samurai could still be retainers. It’s all kind of a huge classist mess. Thanks feudalism!
If you throw out the hierarchical nonsense, Yasuke fit the role of what most people today would think of as a samurai. It’s kind of weird for anyone to argue against that in the fast and loose setting of an Assassin’s Creed game. Ubisoft aren’t known for churning out painstakingly accurate historical reference works. It’s a game with a character roughly based on a distinct historical figure.
This is some of the worst discourse I’ve seen. I went to the latest Asmongold video about this topic and asked as many people as I could to explain how a black protagonist is pushing an agenda. Not replies. Guess it is hard to explain without claiming “not historically accurate” or just sounding like a white supremacist.
Shame, I love the first few AC’s ☺️ It was so immersive with good stories. This franchise is dead to me.
I’m sure they’ll be crying themselves to sleep.
They never care until stocks plummet and long time fans avoid the game until sales come along. Think the cheapest package will be 70$ while the highest is subscription based.
Stocks won’t plummet because they had a black character. Grow up.
i miss the days when people made video games, and they were good.
I’m not sure why people are expecting the character of the video game to make or break the entire video game.
It’s a new assassins creed game, it’s probably going to be ass, like the rest of them.
animal well.
The medium is alive and well.
I genuinely do not get why people get so angry about the color of a character’s skin in a work of historical FICTION. I dgaf about things being historical accurate in my video games. Does the guy look cool? Yup he sure do. Is the game gonna be good? It’s Ubisoft so probably not. But let’s assume that it will be for arguments sake.
Why is it so important to you that the character not be black? Assassin’s creed as a franchise has been around for like what? Almost two decades now? And in all that time we’ve basically played as only white characters (with some exceptions). I don’t see anything wrong with increased representation in works of art or entertainment. The more representation we see in media for any minority group the less likely it will be for the kids that grow up playing these games to grow up as racist assholes. And if you belong to a minority group, seeing someone with your skin tone represented in media will make you less likely to grow up with internalized self loathing. Like you might if all you see in media is the white dude saving the day.
At the end of the day these are works of entertainment. Their purpose isn’t historically accuracy. It’s entertainment and escapism. If we can’t escape racism in a fucking video game how tf are we supposed to prevent it in real life?
Dude, these same folks flipped their shit when the default main character in Crackdown was black, way back in 2007. These idiots don’t quit. I mean, we’re talking about a game where you’re a genetically engineered super-cop and had multiple choices of character race but their fragile egos were shattered because the default choice wasn’t the white guy.
It’s pathetic.
Mind you, I’m sure they were all fine and nodding their heads when Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.
Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.
Did you actually watch the movie?
Spoilers: The Samurai all die in the end. White guy does NOT save the Samurai. In fact the he is the one saved by the Samurai, in a mental health kind of way.
It’s not at all a white savior movie. Tom Cruise is more of an audience surrogate character. When they explain Japanese culture to Tom Cruise, the audience also learns about Japanese culture. It wouldn’t make any sense for Japanese people to be explaining Japanese culture to each other so there needs to be an outsider in the story for it to work.
You should watch the movie instead of judging it from the movie poster. It really pays a lot of respect to Japanese culture and portrays a sense of loss that happened in the rush to modernize during the Meiji era.
It was also a huge boost to Ken Watanabe’s career. He was actually the star of the movie, just that he was an unknown in the west at the time. So they put Tom Cruise on the poster to bring in an audience, but it’s really Ken Watanabe’s movie. You’re missing out if you can’t get over the movie poster.
I’ve seen the movie multiple times. Despite my comment, it’s a decent enough movie. But the entire situation that led to Cruise’s character not dying initially (where he’s taken prisoner instead of executed) was kind of absurd, and then for him to actually be allowed to meet with the emperor at the end, after essentially engaging in a rebellion and convincing Katsumoto of the same instead of committing sepukku (and then him doing it anyway???)… The whole thing would have been considered shameful, and just stretches belief generally. And Algren (Cruise) was basically the pivot point for the whole thing.
When I refer to the “white savior” thing, he didn’t save an individual, he saved “Japan’s honor.” It’s kind of bad in that regard.
Oh, and he wins the heart of the widow who’s husband he killed in that first battle. Woo.
From the trailer he just seems so terribly out of place. Also, it’s bullshit to have a samurai in Japan in a game about assassins when they had fucking ninjas, the Japanese equivalent of assassins.
The argument is always the same. The CHUDS don’t want to see black people, women, the gays, etc.
Actually was expecting a Japanese man and woman to choose from.
There’s a playable Japanese woman in parallel to the Black man but I guess women don’t count because gAmErS.
Wait the black character is optional??? That would make this extra petty.
So far it looks like they both take part in the story, with their own sections to play through. The character introduction video seems to say you might have sections where you chose between offensive or stealth approach so you’ll switch characters, but they want you to experience both so there will most likely be sections that force the use of one or the other.
People who still complain are just saying they refuse to play a Black man at all, so that’s still a trash take.
Why does the black man have to be the offensive fighter? Is Ubisoft implying black people are violent and can’t be sneaky?
The black guy is Yasuke, a historical figure who fought as a samurai for Oda Nobunaga. While it’s pretty stereotypical, it’s also accurate to have Yasuke as the combat character if they’re splitting combat and stealth. I mean, it’s also pretty stereotypical to have a woman as the stealth character, which they’ve basically already done twice. Elise in Unity, while non-playable, was decidedly less combat focused and more stealthy and diplomatic while Arno fought. In Syndicate, Elise was the stealth character and Jacob was the combat character.
In short, it’s probably less that he’s black and more that the formula has the man be the combat character and the woman be the stealth character.
Well then they are sexist. Why does the man have to be the offensive fighter? Is Ubisoft implying men are violent and can’t be sneaky? They also seem to be implying women can’t be strong and defend themselves.
Wait there was a Black samurai? That’s fucking awesome! I need to see more media about this
Thank you!
We already have afro samurai games
Having the main character be from the minority of the game playerbase, unless it serves no major place in the storyline, is undemocratic.
Kerbal Space Program, most undemocratic game ever.
I’m not a green alien… who is this game even for?
I can’t play a black character in a game! It threatens my whiteness (somehow)!
I cannot imagine being so fragile that it would be upsetting to see a black character in a game. What’s it like?
