In a prime example of the incestuous nature of the modern day video game development and video game journalism industries, an industry consultant whose anecdotal experiences were cited by the New York Times as proof positive that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is being well received by Japanese audiences has been found to be a former employee of Sweet Baby Inc.
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Published by the outlet on September 11th, The Fight Over a Black Samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows saw staff writer Zachary Small speak with a number of individuals, including the game’s creative director Jonathan Dumont, art director Thierry Dansereau, and franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté, in service of countering the very noted backlash to Shadows‘ ahistorical treatment of its setting.
“The backlash over Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” explained the New York Times staffer, “compelled the French company Ubisoft to remind players that its games were ultimately works of fiction. Although grounded in history — experts say that Yasuke was possibly enslaved as a child before arriving in Japan and later ascended into the samurai class during the Sengoku period — Assassin’s Creed games also include fantastical elements like deft spies, godlike aliens and mythological weapons.”
In addition to allowing the aforementioned members of the Shadows dev team a platform to defend their creative choices, Small also spoke to Kazuma Hashimoto, a Japanese consultant and translator who purportedly works with the Western video game industry.
Asked for his thoughts on the discourse, Hashimoto briefly asserted, “It was people in the West who were upset with seeing Yasuke as a samurai.”
While to the casual reader Hashimoto’s insight, as provided, may appear as coming from a neutral standpoint, a deeper dig into his background reveals that the ‘consultant’ actually may be arguing from a very ideological basis.
Per the consultant’s own LinkedIn page, between February 2020 and April 2023, Hashimoto served as a Freelance Narrative Design Consultant for none other than diversity-based video game consultancy company Sweet Baby Inc.
While there, Hashimoto “Provide[d] consultation on various AA and AAA titles under Sweet Baby Inc. Includes work on unannounced Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Insomniac titles, alongside researching and crafting characters for upcoming titles for both new and existing IPs,” “Assisted in foundational worldbuilding and character creation for new IPs,” “This has included writing lore for gameplay maps and backgrounds for major characters,” “Worked collaboratively with teams to create authentic representations of marginalized individuals with constructive criticism, offering suggestions for teams to implement through various brainstorming sessions and sensitivity reading,” “Helped localize game scripts to not only make sure the original intention of character dialogue stayed intact, but was also grammatically correct in English.”
Additionally, following their tenure at Sweet Baby Inc., Hashimoto then became a freelance Features & Review Writer for Polygon, where they still currently contribute.
Notably, this particular bit of Hashimoto’s employment history calls into the question the entire veracity of his assertion, as the well-documented histories of both the consultant agency and video game journalism outlet provide reasonable doubt that he would have publicly detailed any supposed reaction to Shadows that wasn’t outright supportive of its ‘diverse’ content.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows heads out across the (less-than-accurately-recreated) Japanese countryside on November 15th for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Mac, and PC platforms.