Assassin's Creed II Retrospective

[surgeworks]

See my thoughts on the first game here.


Pros:

• Assassin's Creed II has style, and a lot of it. It overflows out of everything, the from the title screen to the end credits. This game was made to impress.
  
• The soundtrack is amazing. While none of the tracks knocked me on my ass, a fair few stood out and impressed me.
  
• Being able to actually do things as Desmond is so damn refreshing. You were allowed to stop the gameplay every once in a while in AC1, but you didn't get to do much except talk to Lucy and go to bed. Here, you can talk to three people and you can train as an Assassin.
  
  • Going on that, there's a lot more to do as Ezio too. You can now do races, beat-up events, take assassination contracts, do courier missions, and there's new armor and weapons you can customize yourself with. There's also plenty of free-running challenges and puzzles.
    
• This game goes for a much more character-driven story than AC1 did, showcasing interactions and how various members of a very large cast felt about one another.
  
• You get to use a lot more tools and weapons and thus have a lot more creativity with how you kill your targets. Using the hidden pistol is wonderful. The freedom of how to eliminate your target was one of the hidden strengths of Assassin's Creed I (being able to go for a stealth approach, a full-on assault approach, or a distance approach), but stealth didn't work so well back then when you had to find a way to sneak right up to a target's buttocks to deliver the kill without them getting suspicious. Here, you have various options for assassinating from cover, from ledges, and hidden blades can be used in battle should a stealth approach fail, so overall things are much more forgiving.
  
• Other technical improvements keep the game feeling good as well. The first game could be rather frustrating because despite having a map, that little thing in the lower right corner is a radar, not a map--you have to actually pause the game to check if you're going the right direction for anything not of utmost importance. This is fixed in this game, with Ezio having an actual mini-map. Another example is the Eagle Vision now being a 3D world shift rather than a shove into first person point of view, allowing you to walk while using it and still use the camera properly. You can also throw money to appease beggars and minstrels now.
  
• Abundant amounts of data and research went into this game, and it is made abundantly clear at every point. Every building of note is made with impressive detail to the real-life examples, and so are the set pieces, with account for how they'd have looked in the late 1400s rather than how they look now. Virtually every building or town you can go to and every person you can interact with has a data file where you can read just how much research the developers actually did. It's a thing of beauty.
  
• The game, while still not very good at making me hunt down feathers, does at least make me want to go collect the glyphs, with the promise of extra information and content if we do.
  
• This is one game in which, despite the presence of escort missions, I am not annoyed by escort missions. The pathfinding is good and 9/10 times, you won't have to restart because someone threw themselves in harm's way.
  

Cons:

• For all its style, this game did not age well. It is full of a lot of 2009-era "-isms" that were common symptoms of game developers trying to impress the modern gaming crowd by appearing to be daring and edgy. These include common, painfully stilted uses of the word "fuck" and a protagonist with a shameless, sometimes rather absurd sex drive. While these were impressive to 2009 audiences (obviously, since it blew the roof off of what AC1 had been building as a fanbase), it is a lot less impressive and at times cringey in 2015 and onward.
  
• For all its style, both Ezio and his debut game are all style, no substance. While Altair was admittedly of very little style, he had all the substance in the world. Ezio is a completely static character--despite his actions in the game's climax being worthy of a ragequit, he is pretty much the same dude from start to finish, never really changing or developing. Don't get me wrong, static characters can still be enjoyable if they as characters are decent creations, but development is always preferable.
  
• As much emphasis is put on Ezio's family, very little is done with anyone not named Mario. Papa Auditore and brothers Francesco and Petruccio serve the story via their deaths igniting it, but as much as Ezio's interactions with surviving family Claudia and Maria tug the heart early on, they quickly peter out. By the time the first half of the Pazzi half of the game is done with, Claudia and Maria have both been relegated to NPCs whose singular lines of dialogue and clothing never change, even in intonation or coloration. Which is a failing considering the game spans twenty-three fucking years.
  
• This game is fucking long. There are twelve main sequences, fourteen counting DLC and, as previously mentioned, it spans twenty-three fucking years. I was exhausted by the time I was done with it and the thought of playing two more games of Ezio's story was giving me an ulcer.
  
  • Going on that, this game is terrible with its time management. The trip from Firenze/Florence to Monterrigioni (did I spell that right?), then setting up house with Mario and hunting down Vieri de Pazzi? You would think, the way it's presented, that it all happened over a day or two, or a week if you get generous. Nope. The trip to Monteriggioni took months, and Vieri's assassination didn't happen until a fucking year later. What, did they just sit around in Mario's villa doing nothing before even settling down to get Claudia to work? It's similarly bad every other time there's a skip. Two years, four years. You'll never know until the game hands you a sticker on the next load-up announcing the year. And after twenty-three years, why should Rodrigo Borgia even remember or care about Ezio?
    
• For all the new characters you can interact with, maybe half of them are actually fleshed-out characters. Mario, Antonio, and Leonardo are the good examples, while Paola scrapes by having taught Ezio his survival skills. Niccolo, Rosa, Teodora, and Lorenzo are not so lucky. Teodora is a particularly painful example, as she seems to exist to ass-pull one bit of important information any other character could've given and her only other contribution is announcing that the church can't tell her what to do with her body (she runs a bordello). This little #girlpower snippet was obviously designed as a hook for modern audiences despite the fact that the era wasn't modern and the church absolutely could tell her what to do with her body, and likely would've executed her for saying that.
  
• Regrettably, Shaun and Rebecca are among the characters introduced in this game that aren't very enjoyable. In fact, they're the worst examples--they both sound like they had their personalities drawn out of a bag of scraps of paper containing generic personality traits on them, i.e "angry british nerd who's rude to people for no reason" and "perky science girl who geeks out over tech and names her favorites".
  
• Another of the character problems are the Templars. In the last game, they were understood to be people who thought they were doing the right thing, and did evil things for noble purposes. There is no such subtlety here--even the nicest of the Templars is blatantly abusive and the norm for them is simply power-hungry, poverty-hating, awful assholes who want to rule. Rodrigo Borgia is a prime example--no dreams of a better world, just his world.
• I previously mentioned that Assassin's Creed now had at least a little incentive in looking for some of its content, a.k.a. the glyphs. The problem is, in order to get the content hidden behind them, you have to go through agonizing puzzles. And when I say agonizing, I mean "the Shakespeare puzzle in Silent Hill 3 is a fucking cakewalk" agonizing. Listen dudes, I don't give up on puzzles. I keep at it and keep at it until I ragequit, and then I pick it up and try again, rinse and repeat. So when I give up and go to a guide, you know that shit is unreasonably complex. It doesn't help that the "hints" are so tiny and miss-able that, on my TV which doesn't do well with Ubisoft's small text and blurry resolution, are completely illegible and more often than not impossible to see--and I've got a giant TV screen and glasses on. This makes the one thing in the game most tantalizing also the most torturous, and there are 20 of these fucking things.
  
  • Worse still, the reveal at the end once you finish them all is just a video revealing that humans, starting with Adam and Eve, were part of a high-tech civilization which somehow vanished...a reveal the game gives you at the end anyway, via Minerva! Collecting those glyphs is virtually pointless!!!
    

Really bad cons:

• The game is fucking incomplete. For all its exhausting length, there's two entire memory sequences of story (covering thirteen years! The main section of story before that only covers ten!) stripped out and sold to you as DLC. This isn't like they had extra content they couldn't get into the game for time restraints--they literally completed the game, then took parts of it out and made you pay extra for it. That's utterly appalling and this is the same franchise who, one installment later, would go on to berate capitalism as a Templar invention. As of now, I haven't paid and played them. I intend to, but maybe when I have more money, and when I do, I'll review them here.
• This may be the worst final boss I've ever played against. Seriously dude--the final boss is the freaking Pope, and they somehow made it boring and unimpressive. In a big parallel to the Al Mualim fight, it's you who has the Apple of Eden now, and you use it to make four clones of yourself to take on Rodrigo Borgia with. Somehow it went over Ubisoft's head that putting you in the position of the final boss makes the actual final boss a bit dull. Not only that, but all of your clones are basic AI with low health and not much attack directive, so they get taken out easily anyway. But even then, there's just no challenge. Rodrigo isn't even the toughest enemy the game can throw at you--for example, he's hesitant to attack, easy to stumble, and doesn't break your guard much if at all. Contrast that with Al Mualim, whose nine freaking clones' AIs all worked at the level of the game's hardest enemies and were absolutely merciless about it. All Rodrigo has going for him is high health, which is boring as fuck.
  
• You don't even kill the fucking final boss. Ezio sweetie, I am so sorry. I am so sorry those ugly ass bitches at Ubisoft did this to you. You're a victim too. Ezio's entire story revolves around one thing: revenge. That's his motivation and driving purpose behind killing every single dude that had the slightest thing to do with the death of his family members or who remotely got inbetween him and his eventual final target, Rodrigo Borgia. And what happens at the end? He fucking lets him live, and for what? For a tired, irritating "killing you won't bring back what I've lost" lesson? Am I expected to swallow that? He's dangerous! He's a power-hungry monster and a murderer and he doesn't just deserve to die, he needs to die!
  
  • "But Chris", you may say, "they had to keep in line with history, and the real Rodrigo Borgia wouldn't die until 1503". And to that I say, what does it even matter? The game ends in 1499! They already skipped +10 years to get to that part anyway, why not skip a few more and just place the final boss fight in 1503? Doing it the way they did just drags down Ezio and the entire game!
    

Oh, I'm pissed off with this.


Miscellaneous:

• I'm not all that interested in Ezio here. Not in a bad way, like he's boring or just uninteresting--I'm sure a lot of people liked him and found him fun to play as and watch in action. I just personally am not enamored with him. 
• I'm really not pleased with how this game fucked with Altair. Sure, it'll suck him off a lot in the lore, but only long enough for the glittery Arabian jizz to rain down on Ezio and shower him with all of the things Altair got, did, and created--all of his inventions and armor.
• Heteronormativity is on the rise, with the sole female character introduced in Assassin's Creed I obviously becoming Altair's lover, wife, and the mother of his children.