Faced with limited avenues with which to express their discontent, fans unhappy with Ubisoft’s decision to focus Assassin’s Creed Shadow on a pop-culture interpretation of the historical Yasuke rather than any sort of native Japanese samurai have left every major YouTube upload of the game’s debut trailer with a negative like-to-dislike ratio.
RELATED: ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Trailer Confirms Feudal Japan-Set Title To Feature Black Protagonist
Debuting to the world on May 15th, the trailer in question revealed that not only would the latest entry in the long-running action-adventure series be set in Feudal Japan, but it would feature, as noted above, the African-servant-to-a-Jesuit-missionary-turned-eventual-retainer-to-Oda-Nobunaga as one its resident samurai protagonist.
Unhappy with Ubisoft’s blatant attempt at pandering – that the first East Asian entry in the franchise is, unlike its predecessors outside of Revelations and Black Flag, not allowed to wholly center its story on native heroes certainly is eye-brow raising, to say the least – fans responded to the trailer’s reveal by smashing the dislike button on whichever respective upload of the trailer they were viewing.
As revealed courtesy of the ‘Return YouTube Dislikes’ extension for Mozilla Firefox, at IGN, the trailer’s standard upload currently sits at 8.4K likes to 38K dislikes, with its 4K version following suit at 5K likes to 19K dislikes.
Likewise, PlayStation‘s official upload holds 15K likes to 26K dislikes, Xbox‘s has 6.7K likes to 8.9K dislikes, and TheGameAwards‘ version follows suit with 1.2K likes to 2K dislikes.
Unsurprisingly, the bloodbath is even worse on Ubisoft’s own official channels, with Ubisoft Latinoamérica‘s upload facing 2.9K likes to 25K dislikes, Ubisoft Brasil‘s seeing 285 likes to 1.8K dislikes, and Ubisoft Japan‘s on the receiving end of a massive ratio of 3.9K likes to 40K dislikes.
And in truly driving the point home, the upload of the Assassin’s Creed Shadow trailer made to Ubisoft’s main English-language channel is, at the time of writing, sitting on an astonishingly terrible and franchise-low ratio of 267K likes to 606K dislikes – and rest assured, that number is continually climbing.
Notably, not only do these ratios come in the wake of Yasuke’s revelation as the game’s main protagonist, but they also follow the revelation that Ubisoft had previously received and passed on a more historically-accurate Assassin’s Creed entry set in Feudal Japan.
According to a former company contractor who worked on the pitch, the game would have “focused on the young monk, Yamauchi Taka” as he fought to keep the Sword of Eden, which had been lost following the assassination of Oda Nobunaga, out of the hands of the Templars.
Alas, rather than Taka, it will instead be Yasuke and his female shinobi partner, Naoe, who grace players’ screens when Assassin’s Creed Shadows emerges from the shadows for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S platforms on November 15th.