Assassin's Creed Shadows accused of stealing from iconic anime

When it rains it pours, and it looks like things are going from bad to worse for the latest Assassin's Creed.

Ubisoft's PR team are currently batting two-for-two in Assassin's Creed Shadows related disasters.

Hot off the back of getting in trouble for using a Japanese historical re-enactment group's flag in two pieces of their concept art, Ubisoft are now in deep water for stealing Zoro's (of One Piece fame) sword for a pop-up display in at France's Japan Expo event.

To clarify, Ubisoft aren't getting in trouble for using the likeness of Zoro's Sandai Kitetsu blade - they're getting in trouble for using an exact replica of it. Worse still, Twitter investigators (including the community notes team) seem to have unearthed the specific Amazon page the replica may have been purchased from.

The post from Assassin's Creed FR's Twitter account specifically states that the sword belongs to that of Yasuke, one of Assassin's Creed: Shadows' protagonists, which has led some to theorise that the replica was chosen by a mistake born from an association between the names Eiichiro Oda (the author of One Piece) and Oda Nobunaga (the feudal lord who Yusuke served under).

And just in case you didn't think things could get even more dire, the stand that the blade sits on (which comes packaged with the replica on Amazon) features the Kanji for the words "earth", "fire", "water", "air", and "space". These mirror the Buddhist interpretation of the mahābhūta, which is the Sanskrit for "great element".

This association with Buddhism makes sense for Zoro, as he often names his attacks after Buddhist mantras, but not so much for Yasuke. Although historical accounts of the real life Yasuke differ, it's believed that he was either Catholic or Muslim - and likely not Buddhist.

Ubisoft haven't commented on the matter yet, but it's more than likely this mistake is specific to the French branch of their PR team and not the development team behind the game as (thankfully) there haven't been any screenshots of Yasuke wielding the blade in-game.