Ubisoft has certainly had a tumultuous time marketing and promoting Assassin’s Creed Shadows. One might even wonder if they could find a way to make some irresistible positive press around it, as every new post of gameplay mechanics seems to have a critic ready to scrutinize every single frame.
God bless them, Ubisoft’s Brazil team found a way.
As explained by Polygon, Shadow Warriors, AKA Guerreiros das Sombras, is a faux tokusatsu style trailer featuring our newest Assassin protagonists, Yasuke and Naoe. Much like any good tokusatsu show, Yasuke and Naoe have civilian identities, as schoolteachers, or librarians, or museum curators or archivists, it isn’t actually clear. Are they archaeologists?
Anyway, when the forces of evil ninjas attack, Yasuke and Naoe dispense of those disguises to reveal who they really are: Assassins. The two are played by Brazilian social media personalities Ruan “jogazulu” Silva and Thais Matsufugi, but we think there’s an extra layer to this that most fans aren’t really noticing.
This may look like it’s just a parody of a tokusatsu show, but we think Ubisoft Brazil took the meta joke to another layer. See, this is actually a parody of what a Japanese tokusatsu show is, after it gets localized in Brazil. Because decades before Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, tokusatsu shows like Super Sentai, and also including the likes of Ultraman and Kamen Rider, were already making it outside Japan. In other parts of the world, they were adapted to different languages, and they had their own unique versions of those shows that would come to America years later, if at all.
See, even the most low budget tokusatsu shows in Japan still had really good budgets, because the tokusatsu – which means flash photography – SFX itself wasn’t really that expensive. If you pick up a Blu-Ray set of a series unknown in the US, like, say, Space Sheriff Gavan, you’ll find that they are of pristine quality and made from well preserved masters. But the adaptations of those Japanese shows made in different parts of the world, a lot of those are actual lost media.
So the faux cheap FX of Guerreiros das Sombras doesn’t just reflect the lo-fidelity of CRT television. The backdrops Brazilian Yasuke and Naoe are fighting on, which is visibly some ruins of an abandoned building, that’s the remnant of a lower budget local adaptation. Which is the encapsulation of the pre-Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Japanese kids show adaptation experience.
And does this have anything to do with the actual game at all? You don’t need us to tell you that, but if you’ve read this far, you’re going to watch the trailer anyway. You can just click on it below.
