Talk:Samurai (Age of Empires II)/@comment-189.216.189.162-20190106052314/@comment-26842175-20190106082829

My uneducated guess would be the following: I think this is a result of the fact that there was little contact with Japan when Europe was in its middle ages. Even if there was contact, European sources did not witness their tactics on the battlefield, which might also give a wrong impression of the samurai, much like the European knight being displayed with a sword. Furthermore, Samurai were honarable and in European views using archery was not very honourable and probably mounted archery even less so. Probably the most notable which Europeans noticed about samurai, were their swords. As swords were a status symbol in Europe, Samurai would probably be linked with their swords.

I also think that the unhistorical stories about Samurai created a kind of myth about them which constantly gets repeated. If this myth gets repeated sufficiently often, the common people will believe it was that way and they expect writers/artist/game developpers to display Samurai in this way.