Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be censored in Japan to remove dismemberment and decapitations

Ubisoft says it will make changes to the Japanese version of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to accommodate requirements of that country’s CERO videogame rating agency.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is rated CERO Z in Japan, meaning its content is “suitable only to 18-year-olds and above.” But even for legal adults, Shadows apparently goes too far for the agency, as a translated version of a message posted to X indicates that dismemberment—”cutting off the neck and limbs of enemies” is how Google worked it out—will not be possible in the Japanese release. In other regions, the option can apparently be turned on or off, depending on your taste for such things. Depictions of wounds on bodies will also be changed.

Depictions of graphic violence in videogames has been a hot-button issue for pretty much as long as videogames have existed, and this isn’t the first time CERO has given a thumbs-down to traumatic limb removal. In 2021, Capcom removed decapitations from Resident Evil Village and cut down on some bloodshed in order to meet with the agency’s requirements, and a year later Krafton opted to halt the Japanese release of The Callisto Protocol entirely rather than cut back on its gory content.

Some of the audio in the Japanese edition of the game has also been changed. Exactly what’s been altered—dialog, music, screams and cries of not-dismembered-but-still-brutally-hacked-up enemies—wasn’t shared, but this seems more interesting to me: Cutting back on guts and gore is one thing, but swapping out audio is more typically something that happens years after a game’s release, when the license rights for musical bits have expired.

But along with sex, violence, and “anti-social acts”—crime, gambling, drug use, that sort of thing—CERO ratings also cover “language and ideology,” and it’s possible that something in Assassin’s Creed Shadows tripped an alarm. It may be completely unrelated but I think it’s also notable in that context that the Japanese-language Steam page for the game was reportedly recently changed to remove references to Yasuke as a samurai: Instead, he is described (via Google Translate) as “a warrior worth a thousand men.”

The character of Yasuke has been criticized by some “anti-woke” gamers who claim the historical figure he’s based on wasn’t really a samurai, which is apparently a big point of contention in a game series that’s previously told stories about traveling back in time through the magic of the Animus to off the Pope or do some wet work for Queen Victoria; Ubisoft’s creative team has defended the decision but company executives have been somewhat mushier on the whole thing, promising that their goal “is not to push any specific agenda.”

I’ve reached out to Ubisoft for clarification on the audio replies and will update if I receive a reply. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set to come out on March 20.