Assassin’s Creed Shadowsbegan getting crap for “historical inaccuracies” before it was even out. Back then, I remember chuckling at the notion that the series about reliving genetic memories via a sci-fi contraption was getting that kind of scrutiny, and I can’t help but laugh at it now.
Regardless of what it gets right and what it portrays with a completely acceptable — and welcome — degree of artistic license,Shadowsdefinitely got one detail correct, and that’s the usage of the Portuguese language. I marveled right at the start of the game when Yasuke — then still going by the name of Diogo — and his masters began not only speaking Portuguese but the period-accurate continental version to boot.
Even better, the Jesuit priests accompanying Yasuke show way more fluency, whereas the actor playing Yasuke displays a nuanced unease with his words. This is caused not by his lack of knowledge but by his decision to seem uneducated to his captors.
In comparison, last year’s otherwise excellent show,Shogun, merely has characters say that they’re speaking fluent Portuguese — in English.
That’s Ubisoft clearly taking the time and putting money into historical accuracy — in a way that’ll fly over the heads of 99.5% of the people playing the game — but you cannot deny that it’s there. I only caught this because I’m Portuguese and because I’m not used to my language getting this kind of treatment in media, so it’s guaranteed I’ll miss so many other brilliant examples of attention to detail in the game.
I don’t rememberShoguncatching crap for not having their Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking characters speak the actual language, and I won’t pretend to wonder I don’t know why.
Why are people hating on Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
Right at the start of the controversy, we quickly learned from an actual Japanese historian from Japan — not from the country of Twitch or YouTube — that Yasuke, the black man that the Portuguese brought from Africa, was, indeed, a samurai. It shouldn’t have even gotten to it, but it did, so that should’ve been it.
Still, the complaints continued in a way that would lead anyone to believe they’re less about video game fans’ historically low thirst for historical accuracy and more of a dog whistle some grifters have been using to convey a combo of racist and misogynistic talking points. Now that the game is out, we can assert that these voices were even more wrong than we’d thought.
