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

Naoe looking at the wrist blade in Assassin's Creed Shadows

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

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."

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.