assassin's creed shadows yasuke striking an enemy

Ubisoft Remove Key Assassin’s Creed Shadows Gameplay Feature in the 11th Hour After Japan Force Hand

Ubisoft is going through something of a difficult time right now, with stock prices plummeting, games not selling, and of course the much-publicized Assassin’s Creed Shadows controversy surrounding Yasuke. It seemed for a time that things were looking up after fans reacted positively to the new look cover art and story trailer recently released, but that’s temporary, apparently, as things seem to be turning back around on the French company.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Will Be Censored in Some Territories

After multiple delays, we’re drawing closer to the final release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and that means Ubisoft is having to cross the Ts and dot the Is, but it seems they’ve hit a slight snag. Unlike in Europe and North America, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be censored in Japan, thanks to the Japanese rating board CERO demanding Ubisoft amend/remove one setting in the game.

Assassin's Creed Shadows protagonists, Naoe and Yasuke.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features both Naoe and Yasuke. Image Credit: Ubisoft.

It’s important to state at this stage, that this isn’t out of the blue, with multiple other games featuring similar fates, including Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Mortal Kombat, and The Witcher, all related to or including theme/representations of violence. Unsurprisingly, for a game like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, there is an abundance of violence, and despite CERO giving the release a Z rating, the equivalent to our M/18+ ratings, they still demanded that Ubisoft remove the toggle setting to allow/disallow decapitations and amputations.

What does this mean? Well, no matter how badly players in Japan want to, they can’t cut a swath of limbs off their enemies when playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and according to Ubisoft’s official statement, this can’t be changed.

The most relevant part translates to:

“The option to switch amputation on/off from the game settings has been removed, and amputating the neck and limbs of enemies during gameplay is now always impossible.”

More bizarrely than all of this, Ubisoft added an unexplained sentence in the same statement regarding a few changes vocal-performance-wise:

“The representation of some Japanese voices played in the overseas version (North America and Europe) has been changed” 

Whether we’re ever told specifically what was changed regarding the Japanese voices is unknown, but it would be interesting to know why and what performances CERO had a problem within Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

Censorship and missing limbs aside, the reactions to the most recently released trailer seem to point to a change of attitude towards the upcoming sequel, and with previews hitting the right chords for nearly everyone who played it, it seems Ubisoft could finally be onto a winner. One thing is for certain, the studio will hope future releases end up being less chaotic and troublesome.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows releases on March 20th, 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Mac.

For more Thumb Wars Gaming coverage, see why The Last of Us Part 3 has a familiar problem to Elder Scrolls 6 fans, or why Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian isn’t happy with Sony.

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