Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Retrospective

[surgeworks]

See my thoughts on the first game here, and my thoughts on the second here.

Pros:

• The game is mercifully shorter than the last one, containing only 9 memory sequences. At least, so far. Still have to check for any DLC they might've ripped out.
• There is more Desmond content than ever. I pointed out that in Assassin's Creed II, you could do more as Desmond inbetween the memory sections as Ezio. However, those were maybe three segments twenty-minute inbetween several days' worth of Ezio gameplay. Here, not only are there more scripted Desmond events inbetween the more manageable Ezio time, but you can actually leave the Animus any time you like. Desmond can go stretch and take a walk around Monterriiggiioonnii literally any time he likes. It's refreshing.
• There are only ten glyphs clusters this time around. Half the ridiculous puzzle-solving. And the puzzle-solving itself at least got more expansive and varied.
  
  • And unlike a simple movie clip, this time completing them all leads to its own free-running level that you can complete. Very fun!
• Unlike in the last game, this one takes place in one (enormous) city rather than five large ones. Said city is so big you can even ride the horse through it, which is a huge improvement to getting places quickly. The singular location also allows for more "renovation" to happen, and you'll want to do so, because the goal of the game is to crumble the power base the Borgia have established there and liberate the people.
• The game introduces yet another way to kill your opponents if you so choose: Assassin recruits. At first I was skeptical of this, but it actually turned out to be pretty fun, saving citizens, recruiting them to the brotherhood, and calling on them in times of need to kill a few extra guards or open a path my target just walked through. It gives the feeling that you're contributing to the Brotherhood (more on that later).
• There are actual stealth missions in this game, and completing them will require actually being good at stealth, and I felt good after completing those challenges--they balanced out the military-focused parts nicely.
• In the last post, I complained that the antagonists of the last game were portrayed as black-and-white evil tyrants who wanted power. That's still the case in this game, but it takes the best approach to it because this time you're not just fighting the Templars, you're fighting the Borgia, and the two aren't necessarily the same thing or after the same thing. Cesare is a delightful antagonist who's easy to hate, being essentially a mad manchild with dreams of power and no self-control and thus easy to hate.
• Shaun and Rebecca are much more enjoyable in this game. Shaun has been toned down from "rude asshole at every opportunity for no reason" to "personable and occasionally snarky when occasion permits", and Rebecca has similarly been toned down from her one note-ness of the last game. Getting to spend more time with them helps.

Cons:

• While this game gives you even more freedom of how you pursue your goals, it's also restricting it. A new mechanic, synchronization percentage, demands you complete your objective in a specific way and/or fulfill a certain condition for 100%. For those of us who enjoyed that freedom a lot, it's incredibly aggravating to end every. Single. Fucking. Mission. With a big red sticker declaring that you failed 100% sync because you didn't do XYZ. 
• Look, I know I said in my AC1 post that one of AC's strengths as a franchise is doing the same thing in different ways as that thing evolves. But I didn't necessarily mean this. The first half of the game goes out of its way to give you things to do that are virtually identical to the ones that took up time in ACII.
  
  • There are six seals "keys" or treasures of Romulus hidden throughout "lairs", aka Assassin tombs, and collecting them all will open the Armor of Brutus, the best armor in the game. Altair's Armor can go fuck itself, I guess.
  • And there are also a bunch of encoded letters to solve, aka encrypted codexes, that will also help you in the quest.
  • Yes, you can still renovate Rome, just like the Villa Auditore.
  • Even feathers and flags have been brought back, though mercifully there's only 10 feathers now.
  • The coordinates on the final glyph's puzzle in the last game pinpoint buildings in Rome, on which you'll find....more fucking glyph puzzles.
• The glyphs clusters are still absolutely myths and still require a guide, in some cases not even giving you hints at all. And that does get old very quickly.
• And speaking of, what happens when you solve them all? The same thing that happened in the last game when you solved all the glyphs, and the end of that game period: you get a bunch of questions thrown at you. No answers, just vaguely apocalyptic and ominous babble from computer!Subject 16, all in the same useless style of "here's some vague shit that'll make sense later! Maybe!". All that work, and just for shitty riddles. Thing is, Assassin's Creed knows how to get you the initial want to solve the puzzles, but not how to actually deliver on it. It's been three games now, and I still have no fucking clue was 16 was up to or trying to figure out, despite it being repeatedly discussed and me putting in every effort to dig it up. They're so obsessed with building cliffhangers that they don't want to actually give me any new information, making this a thankless and fruitless chore. I'm not looking forward to continuing this chore next game because I know by now better than to expect results. In other words, this series is good at foreshadowing, but incredibly bad at building its myth arc.
• The heteronormativity I listed as "miscellaneous" in the last post is bad enough now to warrant severe annoyance here in this game. Not only do Desmond and Lucy get an early-game segment chock-full of "haha" quips and jabs at each other, dripping with "look how compatible this male and female lead are", but they just. Don't. Shut. Up. They say something to this effect every single goddamn motherfucking time you make a successful leap, and there are a lot of those to make. I could physically feel the forced straight chemistry angle bearing down on my shoulders with each word out of their mouths.
• Assassin's Creed is still very, very bad at incentivizing you to get 100%. On top of the glyphs still being the only things that really matter, do you know how much of Rome I had rebuilt by the end of the game? 13%. And that much only because fixing up the tunnels made it easier to get around, and because I needed to upgrade the blacksmith shops to keep myself stocked for hard battles. That's the thing though--there's incentive to get good armor and weapons, but never the best armor and weapons. Because this franchise is largely about killing and there's not really bosses so much as targets that require a little more effort to kill, I'm never gonna be worried enough to go out of my way to get the rewards for completing sidequests, even if the franchise took the smart route by giving good rewards for those sidequests in the first place.

Really bad cons:

• Ezio is unlikeable in this game. He is insufferable. Behold my list of receipts on Mr. Auditore:
  
  • Early in the game, Machiavelli and company are rightfully outraged to find out that Ezio didn't kill Rodrigo Borgia at the end of the last game. Ezio stands his ground, and later continues to defend his actions even as they cause him to butt heads with Niccolo. A little later, Ezio's hot-headed about stopping the Borgia, and Machiavelli criticizes his approach as brash and something they're not ready for. Later, still, when they've met with an actual military commander, Machiavelli then thinks they're ready for such--only for Ezio to raise an eyebrow and condescend to him, asking him if he thinks they're really ready--repeating Machiavelli's earlier criticisms. He continues "shaming" Machiavelli by asking if he knew Caterina Sforza and the Apple of Eden are both in Borgia hands, which he didn't, and which he looks like a fool for. Except that both of these are Ezio's fault, and they had met multiple times in which Ezio could've informed him of this. Not only is the situation only as bad as it is because of Ezio's failures, but he has the nerve to use them to make Machiavelli look bad after withholding that information for no reason.
  • Early in the game, when the attitude is still cheery, a minor subplot is mentioned in which it's pointed out that Claudia, Ezio's sister, hasn't taken well to being given the ignore-able NPC treatment for 20+ years of game time previously, and that she rather resents Ezio not visiting or talking to her much. So what happens between them thereafter? Ezio continues treating her and Maria like informants and worker bees, never giving them the time of day, and Claudia's attitude worsens towards him as a result. Ezio never gets called out or gets any real humbling for treating his remaining family like garbage, but instead acts mildly impressed when Claudia takes out four Borgia guards by herself so that Maria can walk in and act motherly and pleasant that the two are getting along again. That's literally what happened, not shorthand or paraphrased. For all that Ezio's family supposedly matters to him and drives his story, he sure doesn't seem to act like it.
  • Last game, I mentioned how Ezio was generally being showered with everything Altair got, and that continues in the worst way here when, after stopping a mistaken killing of an ally, Ezio is awarded Mentor status over the Florentine Assassin cell. You know, the same position Al Mualim had that Altair took over? And I have to ask: why? Why is the the choice? Ezio's failures last game and this one caused nearly the entirety of Brotherhood's troubles, and he doesn't make up for them until the very end. Ezio's lacking in judgement, poor treatment of his allies and family, and overall brashness do not suit him being the Mentor. Not ten missions earlier in fact, Ezio let a contract killer for hire working directly for Cesare all his life walk free because "[I] did not come here to kill you" even though that later bites them in the ass and, like Rodrigo, Micheletto was incredibly dangerous and should have been put down!
    
    • Look dude, I realize that Altair also caused a lot of damage to the Brotherhood in his time, but that was at the beginning before Altair went under his character development, and by the time the game was over he had uncovered and deposed a traitorous Templar acting as the Mentor of the Levantine Assassin cell. Ezio is not only acting unprofessionally and in poor judgement recently, but he also doesn't depose any Al Mualims--which is sad, because the game tries to build one up. There's a subplot for two thirds of the game about an ally, La Volpe, being convinced Machiavelli has turned traitor with mounting evidence against him. At the conclusion of the subplot, it is solved by killing the real traitor, a bit character with no name who you only saw once and Machiavelli is cleared of all wrongdoing. The scales are much lower and Ezio didn't have to carry his fued with Machiavelli to its natural conclusion. Ezio has not earned Mentor status, in-story or out of it.
• This game did not need to exist. It feels like an afterthought to Assassin's Creed II rather than a true continuation of its story. Never is this more apparent than with the Cristina missions. Early in ACII, there was a character called Cristina Vespucci who Ezio fucked and then who was never mentioned again because Ubisoft needed to establish Ezio's desire for sex. In this game, you can run across Christina (despite it being Rome, not Firenze, and being 25+ years later). You can't actually talk to her and she doesn't do anything, but rather, interacting with her just leads to mini-missions which take you back to the time of early ACII, apparently telling parts of ACII's story that didn't make it in--and God only knows why, because there are a total of only five Cristina missions. I didn't even get to all of them because it demanded sync I wasn't willing to run through the game again to achieve.

Miscellaneous:

• This game tricked me into thinking Altair might be important. The opening montage featured him as prominently as Ezio, and the title screen flashes back and forth between the Animus' empty field and the Animus 2.0's empty field. I feel cheated. He never comes up. He comes up less than in ACII, in fact.