Rise of the Ronin release canceled in South Korea after controversial dev comment

Rise of the Ronin, the PS5-exclusive RPG developed by Team Ninja that’s scheduled to launch on March 22, 2024, won’t be available in South Korea after online backlash over a comment made by game director Fumihiko Yasuda. In a behind the scenes video on the title’s development, the developer compared Japanese scholar Yoshida Shoin to ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and said that he wanted to capture his teachings in the game (via Daum.net). Yoshida Shoin lived from 1830 to 1859 and was an intellectual whose ideas contributed much to the Meiji Restoration at the end of the Edo period with many of his students ending up as leaders in Japan’s new government – a government, which quickly acted on imperialist foreign policies such as the occupation and annexation of Korea. Many of his ideas are still present in modern right-wing political thinking in the country. There is still a lot of animosity between South Korea and Japan due to the latter’s history of aggressive and oftentimes exceedingly brutal imperialis