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.

[RedSeptember]

Originally posted by Deadly Dan:

Originally posted by Kensei:

Can you show us where you derived those sales numbers?

Still waiting for that 1 million sales announcement...

Ubisoft typically never publishes its sales on any game this early. So continue waiting.

[Kakashi]

Playing as Yasuke is like playing as the final boss. The small japan men don't stand a chance. Lore accurate but does it make the game too easy idk

[Kensei]

Originally posted by RedSeptember:

Originally posted by Deadly Dan:

Still waiting for that 1 million sales announcement...

Ubisoft typically never publishes its sales on any game this early. So continue waiting.

Thats to be expected. I do believe its inevitable it will ship millions over time. But 30k concurrent players in launch week looks abyssmal from my point of view.

[Deadly Dan]

Originally posted by RedSeptember:

Originally posted by Deadly Dan:

Still waiting for that 1 million sales announcement...

Ubisoft typically never publishes its sales on any game this early. So continue waiting.

Oh they would if they could, that's why they keep focusing on "players" or "activations". They didn't reach a million sales yet.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by RedSeptember:

Who cares? Are they also proud of their used underwear vending machines on public streets in Tokyo and Osaka?

Get off your high horse. Modern Japanese are just like the modern West. Easily offended by everything.

It's a game, not a religious book. People will play it, enjoy it. People will play it and hate it. People will never play it and continue to post on here instead of playing games because, you know? They are experts of the gaming industry. lol.

No one mentioned anything about pride.
But why must we downplay the effects of the mistakes Ubisoft made up until the release of the game? How will they ever learn if we just go "who cares" to minor mistakes as mistaking the entire language. Maybe they went too far with the Japanese people. Yeah, some will play, but can we argue that it looks like it turned off a lot of others?

[tshrimp]

Originally posted by 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.

Never made sense to me. Then call anyone "racist" who points it out. For the video, I laughed so hard when he got into the car. That was so funny, and the name of the development company is greatness.

[Kensei]

https://youtu.be/5uE8OsNH6Pk?feature=shared

I watch things like this and veilguard and it feels as if we are in the nadir of video game writing in the triple A space.

Seeing the comments in this thread it appears many of you get more enjoyment from "owning" bigots.

Buddha bless you.

[Roy]

Originally posted by Kensei:

Originally posted by RedSeptember:

Ubisoft typically never publishes its sales on any game this early. So continue waiting.

Thats to be expected. I do believe its inevitable it will ship millions over time. But 30k concurrent players in launch week looks abyssmal from my point of view.

Reached like 68K concurrent and Ubisoft says Steam is 27% of activations for Shadows. Concurrent players are not total players, otherwise they would have sold 184,700 copies. Copies sold by last Saturday was somewhere between 1 and 2 million given the 'activation' of 2 million copies reported by Ubisoft. We'll see where it falls in VGChartz soon enough. There will be less speculation about the game ever seeing profit then.

[Isa]

Originally posted by 女無さん:

Originally posted by Isa:

How many reviews are made in a language doesn't really mean how many people from that country are reviewing it, you know that, right? A lot of people review games in english regardless of where they're from. I don't get how you think this random ass metric is more valuable than a confirmed person's opinion.

Granted, but Japan scores one of the lowest on English profiency rankings, most Japanese people don't and can't speak English, they also don't need to to live comfortable lives in Japan. It is reasonable to say that Japanese people don't write English reviews.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241114/p2a/00m/0na/007000c

My country also scores low on English proficiency rankings, and yet here we are.

[Kensei]

Originally posted by tshrimp:

Originally posted by 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.

Never made sense to me. Then call anyone "racist" who points it out. For the video, I laughed so hard when he got into the car. That was so funny, and the name of the development company is greatness.

I was in tears with the bullet train level and giant enemy crab.

[女無さん]

Originally posted by Isa:

Originally posted by 女無さん:

Granted, but Japan scores one of the lowest on English profiency rankings, most Japanese people don't and can't speak English, they also don't need to to live comfortable lives in Japan. It is reasonable to say that Japanese people don't write English reviews.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241114/p2a/00m/0na/007000c

My country also scores low on English proficiency rankings, and yet here we are.

And your argument being...?

[Isa]

Originally posted by 女無さん:

Originally posted by Isa:

My country also scores low on English proficiency rankings, and yet here we are.

And your argument being...?

Per your flawed logic people from my country would also not write reviews in English?

[Derrame]

What do the japanese think? they like it?

[Deadly Dan]

Originally posted by Isa:

Originally posted by 女無さん:

And your argument being...?

Per your flawed logic people from my country would also not write reviews in English?

As he said most Japanese people can't speak English, I don't really see how your flawed logic applies here.

[RedSeptember]

Originally posted by Deadly Dan:

Originally posted by RedSeptember:

Ubisoft typically never publishes its sales on any game this early. So continue waiting.

Oh they would if they could, that's why they keep focusing on "players" or "activations". They didn't reach a million sales yet.

Most of the players are on consoles and UBI+. I am really enjoying the game, give it a try, you might like it.