Yeah, we’ve seen all the online rage. Why is there a black samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Why can’t we just be a regular Japanese samurai? Why should history be rewritten like that? Let’s be honest, all sorts of clickbait content creators and ragebait articles have spawned off the back of this, but I figured it’s time to clear the room a bit, as Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to release. So that’s our question for this article: is Assassin’s Creed Shadows historically accurate? Let’s find out!
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the fourteenth mainline installment in Ubisoft’s massive franchise, which has placed players into all sorts of historic settings – Renaissaince Italy, Ancient Egypt, the industrial revolution in Britain and so forth. This time, we get to explore a time and place that fans have been craving for a long time: Feudal Japan. It’s set in the 1500’s, near the end of the Sengoku era, and the beginning of the game catapults players into the an era captained by leader Oda Nobunaga. The game does a wonderful job to explore the culture, the cuisine, the traditions, the religious imagery and much more. You’ll learn about tea ceremony, the code of samurai, the symbology of animals, the music, the painting of the era – it’s a gorgeous deep dive into a specific culture first and foremost.
The series has often brought real historic figures into its games. Fans of the OG games will surely remember the memorable encounters with Leonardo Da Vinci, George Washington and so forth, in times and places that made a lot of sense for them to be there. Of course, Asssassin’s Creed is a work of fiction, so it creates characters, conflicts, narratives, encounters and events that did not actually occur in real life. This is normal, and this is how romances set in historical times usually work. They play with the rulesets of the epoque, giving us a real backdrop in time and space, but then going for their own stories and lore, in a way that seems believeable for the era hopefully.
Is that what Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going for? Not really, I would say. While, for the most part, these games are about exploring a believeable historical setting, they mix in all sorts of science-fiction and fantasy elements too. The whole concept of the Animus “sending us back” to relieve the memories of our ancestors, the alien race Isu, the ancient prophecies of world-ending events. One could argue these are just extra details added to a setting that, otherwise, should aim for absolute realism though. So is Assassin’s Creed Shadows historically accurate, aside from these sci-fi elements?
In terms of worldbuilding, visuals and so forth, just like other games in the franchise, Shadows tries to go for as much realism as possible. The landscapes, the biomes, the buildings, the costumes, the fauna, the wildlife – it’s trying to be as close to the real thing as possible, even though there’s a few videogame-y concessions. Naoe, one of the protagonists, is a completely fictional character, while Yasuke was actually a real black samurai, originally from Portugal, historically known to be the first non-Asian samurai – black or otherwise. His character is real, and the game explores much of the hardship he faced for his evident physical differences with the locals. Most of the stories he encounters in the game, however, are the work of fiction, so his story is not at all accurate. The same can be said for the warlord Oda Nobunaga and other, real history “cameos” like Hattori Hanzo.
So there you have it. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set in an existing time in our history, using various real locations, historic characters and more to tell a more or less believeable plot for when and where it’s set – 16th century Japan. While it features various characters that actually existed in real life, their traits, stories and appearances do not necessarily reflect how they are usually represented, on top of mixing in various elements of fantasy and sci-fi that make the whole game very obviously fictional. This has been the case for every Assassin’s Creed game, since the very first one in 2007. Shadows isn’t any different, and Yasuke being one of the playable characters isn’t a paradigm shift for the franchise at all. His story isn’t any more “wrong” than the one of, say, Sokrates in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
If you want historical accuracy, Assassin’s Creed is not the franchise for you, and frankly it’s never been. What is superficially a believeable depiction of the times and places it explores, actually hides a lot of fictional plots, historical concessions and various added sci-fi elements that very evidently remove it from plausible historic narrations. It’s only trying to be historically accurate in its visuals and worldbuilding, so you shouldn’t be worried about whether it succeeds in properly representing history itself. Play Assassin’s Creed Shadows for what it is – and find out in Jesse’s review why you really should do so!
