Black myth, Black samurai and gaming nationalism

Cultural authenticity hasn’t always been crucial to video games.

Few Italians complain about Super Mario’s stereotypical accent or Indians about limb-stretching Street Fighter yogi Dhalsim. Yet authenticity — or lack thereof — is becoming increasingly important, at least given the mixed reception of two recent multimillion-dollar titles.

Black Myth: Wukong looks set to be the most surprising gaming success of 2024 and is being hailed as China’s first AAA video game, industry jargon for a tentpole title with the budget and quality of a Hollywood blockbuster. While China has to date enjoyed success in mobile and PC gaming, those lucrative sectors carry relatively little prestige. That makes Wukong’s breakout a landmark event.

The game, set in China and based on the 16th century Chinese epic "Journey to the West," has been helped by an enthusiastic patriotic response by domestic players — as well as gushing coverage from state-controlled media, which has hyped its use of local myths and locations. "The game’s appeal lies in its deep connection to traditional Chinese culture,” said state broadcaster CGTN. "Every ancient building in the game was painstakingly recreated after the development team conducted on-site research across multiple provinces.”

Contrast that with the recent apology issued by France’s Ubisoft Entertainment to gamers in Japan, which is the setting for its latest Assassin’s Creed game. Gamers have been waiting years for a samurai-based installment in the 200 million-selling series, which has spanned locations from ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy since launching in 2007.

But Japan has mostly frowned on what’s been shown so far of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which will go on sale in November. Historical inaccuracies, copyright infringements, a sword lifted from the manga "One Piece" and use of Chinese where there should be Japanese are among the issues that forced Ubisoft’s apology. More than anything, controversy has centered the choice of the real-life historical figure of Yasuke, an African who served in the court of Oda Nobunaga, as one of two playable characters.

Yasuke is described by developers as a "samurai of historical legend.” Some in Japan dispute that characterization, arguing there’s little historical documentation and that he was most likely a more minor figure, possibly a page. Accusations of "cultural appropriation” have followed. "Depicting Yasuke, who may not have been a samurai, as a symbolic representation of a samurai could be seen as taking something away from Japan’s samurai culture,” one historian said; the right-leaning Sankei newspaper even fretted that depictions of Yasuke could trigger another "false history” claim. The French studio has acknowledged the dispute and said it’s taking "creative license” with the character. As video gaming is growing, it seems, verisimilitude is becoming more important.

While Tencent Holdings is a key investor both in Ubisoft and Game Science, the developer and publisher of Wukong, it’s a stretch to draw too many parallels: China’s state media is clearly pushing its game as part of a coordinated strategy to build its soft power. As I wrote two years ago, China is enviously eyeing the sort of soft power that neighbors Japan and South Korea enjoy and recognizes that video gaming in particular can help enhance its influence.

Japan’s complaints about Shadows, meanwhile, are more organic in nature. But some seem rather trite: Is it really that important if Yasuke was really a samurai or not? It’s commonplace to play with historical characters in such settings (Abraham Lincoln, after all, wasn’t a vampire hunter and Winston Churchill not an ally of Doctor Who). For that matter, the other playable character, Naoe, is a kunoichi or female ninja — a class that was invented for mass media in the 1960s. No one seems too upset about that.

Certainly, some of the fuss around Shadows, especially in the English language social media space, stems from racists who don’t want to play as a Black character in a feudal Japanese setting. Others are paranoid that their hobby is under threat from "woke” forces. Nonetheless, I think it’s a mistake to dismiss all complaints about Shadows as racism. What both Wukong’s success and this controversy show is a growing desire for authenticity and for respect for the original culture and setting.

One of the reasons that Walt Disney’s "Shogun" has been so well received, including in Japan, is that it took the setting of James Clavell’s novel and made it feel more authentic than the "white savior” original. Here’s where Wukong, for all the nationalistic gushing, has succeeded, with the development studio able to tell this story from an authentic point of view — though as my colleague Howard Chua-Eoan writes, China won’t be able to control how the world responds to it.

And when it comes to Asian stories, that’s still important — think, for example, of the praise foisted on 2018’s "Crazy Rich Asians" for its local cast and authentic voice. Consider, too, the opposite: the backlash to "Memoirs of a Geisha," the 2005 movie directed by Rob Marshall. Based on a book by American Arthur Golden, it was shot mostly in San Francisco and starred Chinese actresses in the leading Japanese roles. With a for-the-era-typical disdain for the differences in Asian culture, it helped popularize a fictitious portrait of geisha as scheming prostitutes. In failing to put forward Japanese voices among its development staff, Ubisoft leaves itself open to similar accusations of inauthenticity.

This doesn’t mean that only Japanese studios can make games based in Japan, Chinese studios Chinese games and so on. Consider 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima — a Western-developed title that uses feudal Japan as a background but won widespread praise in Japan for its clear love of its inspiration.

But as the internet and artificial intelligence make research easier, as budgets increase and as games become a larger battlefield in culture wars, consideration for this kind of legitimacy will become ever more important. Like a real-life assassin, studios will have to tread carefully.