Assassin's Creed I Retrospective

[surgeworks]

I'm currently playing Assassin's Creed games 1-3, and have decided to write down my thoughts thusly. This includes the first game, II, Brotherhood, Revelations, and III. At the time of this writing, I've just finished Brotherhood. This post will cover the first game. All posts will contain spoilers.

Pros:

• Altair is a fantastic protagonist. He is one of the clearest cases of raw, visible development over the course of a single game in recent memory, and while a lot of it is done through dialogue (typically thought to be detrimental to development as it violates "show don't tell"), it's still cool because he's changing as he's exposed to other characters--who are flawed, real, and important even in the little time they're given. And it visibly affects his behavior over the course of the game. It isn't a case of a lot of recent protagonists, who are simply different at the start and the end and this ends up called "character development" even though it doesn't work like that. Altair at the  beginning was someone I couldn't respect, and that had fully changed by the end.
• The game's style and presentation of its framing device (that is, viewing an ancestor's memories through DNA and the Animus), must be applauded, as it founded these concepts. If any game is going to get the credit for them, it's the first one. It keeps things interesting, and in another game, being jerked out of the story I'm playing every so often would be annoying--but it isn't here because the story itself is another piece of a larger, present-day story.
• The game has one of the coolest climaxes and final bosses I can remember. As of now, having finished the first three games, it still hasn't been topped by the next two. You sprint on foot down a valley trail full of knights waiting to kill you until you march up to King Richard, and tell him with a straight face that the dude standing next to him is a traitor and break down the villains' evil plans...You travel up through a zombified, brainwashed Masyaf who walk towards you, sinister and silent except for the occasional shout of Al Mualim as a savior, and face the full power of the Apple of Eden in the hands of someone who knows what it is and how to use it. And you win. Altair is so damn skilled that Al Mualim's own skill, honed after many more years of experience than yours, and combined with the nigh-unstoppable effects of the Apple's strength and mental trickery, isn't enough to stop you. In the end, you get a cliffhanger regarding both Altair's use of the Apple, and Desmond's discovery of his own Eagle Vision.
• The villains of the game are the Templars, and in this iteration, they hit the sweet spot between a basic "black evil, white good" narrative and a tired, faux-deep "what if??? both sides have a point??? #thinkaboutit" narrative that we see so much these days. They're the villains for a reason. What they want is good, yes, but the way they go about achieving it, and the full details of what it would mean for the world, are unacceptable, no matter how well-intentioned. These men are awful and have to be put down, even if their goal is noble; this opposed to, say, more bullshit "tragic villain" angles that were cropping up around the time this game came out. The one exception is perhaps Abul Nuqoud, who reflects a lot of issues the modern-day left struggles with and had the closest thing to both a noble goal and a kind heart.
• There is very little music in the game for its production, but the music it does have is utterly amazing, and you can tell they were particularly proud of Jesper Kyd's "chase theme".

Cons:

• The game does not at all incentivize you to get 100% completion. I have no real desire to collect 100 of anything, much less the flags hiding out in each area (and especially in a world as vertical and pocketed as this) for no real reward. The one thing I did try to 100% was the Templar kills, which I couldn't even complete because one glitches out and never appears, keeping me at 59/60. Future games wouldn't get much better about this.
• Masyaf as an area is largely useless for 90% of the game; it's important at the beginning and the end--and while it is fantastic in displaying the beginnings and climaxes of the game (that run up the hills of the brainwashed, enslaved Masyaf is still terrifying to this day), that doesn't change the fact that, nine different times, before I want to do anything of importance I have to spend three minutes sprinting down one large fucking hill and riding a horse for another minute at the end. And that's before you get to the part where you can actually skip travel.

Miscellaneous:

• There are those who've called the game repetitive, and while I will admit that this is true, I won't put it in the "flaw" category. What Altair does in the game as he goes through the missions is fairly similar each time, but it's seeing how the climax and results change as you do it that makes it interesting. And this, after all, is what would go on to become the biggest strength of the Assassin's Creed franchise as a whole--seeing how doing the same thing (killing for the greater good) and the organization and heroes doing it (the Assassins) change over time. So I won't hold that against Assassin's Creed I.