What The Japanese Really Think.

[女無さん]

I've seen some people argue about the reception of this game from the Japanese, are they offended or not? Do they like the game? etc. I don't have anything conclusive to say, but I do have data I haven't seen being brought up in any discussion thus far.

Yasuke Simulator; the parody game, at the time of writing this post has 209 reviews written in Japanese, and a score of "very positive".
Assassin's Creed Shadows has 82 reviews, at the score of "somewhat positive".

Full disclaimer: I speak Japanese. And I can comfortably say that when I skimmed the reviews, they do not appear to be machine translated. It's easy to tell because machine translation don't use colloquial expressions, slang, and is over reliant on pronouns, which are omitted in Japanese because it's usually understood from context.

I'd also like to point out that the YouTuber famous for the "yasuke ya naika" song, did a playthrough of the parody game 4 days ago. In the beginning of that video, he also notices the ratio of reviews written in Japanese between the two games, he however concurred that it might change during the weekend. It did, only it got bigger as we can see from the final numbers.
Time stamp here: https://youtu.be/gO_BxbbjVI0?feature=shared&t=129

It appears that the Japanese are well aware of what is happening in the west, and it is being talked about on their respective channels as well. Especially the history revisionism and lack of attention to detail.

EDIT 1:
I'd just like to share some banger music videos that echo a Japanese sentiment as it was 8 months ago, the comment section is also worth a read if you want to understand why some Japanese are/were angry with Ubisoft.

Yasuke is aight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRNSOOyfOwU

Why Yasuke?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLxQJPq8OJI

EDIT 2:
Famitsu just released their sale ranking for the month, so we have more numbers to talk about.

https://www.gematsu.com/2025/03/famitsu-sales-3-17-25-3-23-25

Assassin's Creed: Shadows hit the number #5 spot for physical copies sold (17,701) total. That's a 60% drop off from their previous games Valhalla and Odyssey, which managed to sell around 45,000 copies.

[Kensei]

DEI is supposedly about making room for non-Eurocentric perspectives. And then these same people tell non-Europeans to shut up.

Perhaps it was always a grift? :3

I see things like Lady Oichii being depicted as a common strumpet as a test of resolve for the Japanese audience. Will they tolerate what we tolerate in the West?

None of this is to say the game is actually good or not. I haven't played it. Not going to. I'm not the target audience.

[Roy]

Looking at the Japanese steam reviews and.. 60 positive, 23 negative. Am I missing more?

[Isa]

Originally posted by 女無さん:

they do not appear to be machine translated. It's easy to tell because machine translation don't use colloquial expressions, slang, and is over reliant on pronouns, which are omitted in Japanese because it's usually understood from context.

LLMs are very capable of taking that into consideration when they either translate or generate text.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by Roy:

Looking at the Japanese steam reviews and.. 60 positive, 23 negative. Am I missing more?

No, that adds up perfectly to 83, and I said 82. So there must have been one more since I last looked. The parody game has 209 reviews, 1 negative. Which was my point.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by Isa:

Originally posted by 女無さん:

they do not appear to be machine translated. It's easy to tell because machine translation don't use colloquial expressions, slang, and is over reliant on pronouns, which are omitted in Japanese because it's usually understood from context.

LLMs are very capable of doing that when they either translate or generate text.

I use LLMs daily, mine is certainly not able to convey the same freedom of expression.
Maybe my model is bad? I use the LIama 3.1 405B.

[Roy]

I'm reading the reviews and hardly anyone mentions Yasuke poorly though. That's the rage bait I've been watching in this part of the forum. One negative review even says this

"First off, let me say that the only positive thing about this game is the graphics. As a person of Japanese descent, I can say that Mori Ranmaru was not a retainer of Nobunaga as the game claims. Yes, Yasuke (the black samurai) was real."

In what context this person means this, I don't know. But it has 400+ helpful votes. They don't seem as outraged as the repeat customers here want people to believe.

[CzUSMC]

Thank you for speaking the truth on this. Yes the Japanese people dislike AC Shadows in massive numbers. It really tells a story here especially considering AC Shadows is their Japanese history that Ubisoft took as motivation for the game.

You can really see the dislike AC Shadows customers have towards the Japanese people and their culture.

AC shadows trailer on Ubisoft Japan has over 50,000 dislikes it is a 10 to 1 ratio for japanese dislikes to likes on AC shadows. The top youtube Japanese comments are all negative on AC Shadows.

here is a Youtube video on AC Shadows Ubisoft Japan that has over 25,000 dislikes and only 900 likes. Clearly it shows a consensus of how the japanese people feel about this game.

https://youtu.be/n4eNqdf2HZw?si=fpzUKDizuc6GkjpI

[Roy]

Originally posted by MythicRocfordson:

Originally posted by Roy:

A few hundred people playing both games and no reviews showing outrage for anything brought up here seems to downplay your own pettiness.

No that's my point-OP isn't actually making a point lmao

Its a parody game essentially taking advantage of having a black samurai, but ultimately provides less than a tenth of the content comparatively. That makes it objectively a far worse product for someone to spend their money on, lover or hater of Shadows.

My point is that no one cares, essentially

I reread that and made an edit to it.. My bad.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by Door:

The Japanese will never be direct. We all know what they think behind closed doors :)

That's a big part of the culture and is heavily ingrained in the language too. Though netizens have no problem saying what they think most of the time.

[MythicRocfordson]

Originally posted by Roy:

Originally posted by MythicRocfordson:

No that's my point-OP isn't actually making a point lmao

Its a parody game essentially taking advantage of having a black samurai, but ultimately provides less than a tenth of the content comparatively. That makes it objectively a far worse product for someone to spend their money on, lover or hater of Shadows.

My point is that no one cares, essentially

I reread that and made an edit to it.. My bad.

Youre good dude

[JKDos]

ChatGPT is trained on Japanese books and user internet posts, it's likely going to ace translations.

[Deadly Dan]

Originally posted by CzUSMC:

Thank you for speaking the truth on this. Yes the Japanese people dislike AC Shadows in massive numbers.

Yup, taking review scores where you have to buy the game full price first are not a reliable source for the sentiment of Japanese players. We would need something like metacritic for Japanese people only, I think it would be significantly lower than the general MC score of 5.9

[女無さん]

Originally posted by MythicRocfordson:

Originally posted by 女無さん:

Context matters, people understand it's a parody game, people understand what Ubisoft is doing and why they did it. I think these numbers are interesting, 82 reviews in total for your AAA game set in that very country.

If context matters, why has the concept eluded you in regard to Yasuke?

You can display nuance on your own principles, but you can't be bothered to understand others?

What context am I missing aside from the fact it's a parody and is taken as such? That in shadows Yasuke's portrayal is ultimately fiction?

[Marmo]

They don't care. Hideki Kamyia (creator of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta) is enjoying the game and making fun of bigots on X. Its so funny.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by Marmo:

They don't care. Hideki Kamyia (creator of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta) is enjoying the game and making fun of bigots on x

Good for him? Is Hideki Kamyia the voice of the people? "They don't care" seems to be apt though, since it doesn't seem talked about much in any positive sense.