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Assassin's Creed I
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Assassin's Creed III
Having played all five games of Desmond's part of the story (and quite bitter about it), what do I have to say on the series as a whole up to this point?
Pros:
- The games’ story is convoluted, yes, but its good use of framing devices and conspiracy elements keeps it intriguing enough to keep playing, even if at times it gets annoying.
- Every ounce of effort went into researching the time periods, locations, and settings that these games took place in. In a world where people rarely do the research and it shows, this is wonderfully refreshing.
- Each game has its own unique style of presenting itself. The change is perhaps least apparent from II to Brotherhood, but still there. Just a little bit of extra freshness.
Cons:
- At the end of Assassin’s Creed II, I originally thought that the whole “precursors moving people like chess pieces to get to Desmond” thing was because they foresaw Desmond being the important piece. But no, what really happened as of ACIII is that they made him the important piece. That slight little change takes the story from “we need you to save the world because only you can” to “you were born and your entire life went the way it did so that we could make someone who can save the world”. Which is decidedly less enjoyable especially as it takes all the agency away from Desmond.
- The series just seems incredibly unwilling to actually get up and out of the Animus and explore the modern day. As stated in the ACIII retrospective, fans thought Ubisoft were building up to a modern-day assassin experience to take down Abstergo, and they weren’t willing to. So much focus is on the historical sections rather than grabbing at the potential that was there for the modern sections. As a result, our protagonist ends up looking very ineffectual since most of what he does is lay back in a chair and watch live-action memories.
- The games from 1 onward are simply packed with quite a bit of extraneous things to do that I never felt one ounce of compulsion to do. There’s “here are some fun sidequests” and then there’s “here are a million sidequests”. This is particularly brutal in II and III, the longest games of this arc.
Really Bad Cons:
- Two very heavy plot threads start in the first game and continue through to the beginning of the Connor era: Subject 16 and what happened to him, and Doomsday 2012
- The first of these was infuriating because it never led anywhere. The cliffhanger for the first game was brilliantly done, but in the second game, he’s more heavily involved...only to not tell us anything we couldn’t have figured out. Once we got to Brotherhood, he continued being mysterious and vague, and only when we got to Revelations did he finally come to the fore. Finally a character in his own right, 16 was involved in pretty much nothing except keeping Desmond alive offscreen. He does this just long enough to die at the end, giving up his life for Desmond’s. What a colossal waste.
- The Doomsday 2012 arc really should’ve been cut from the entire arc. With 16, more could’ve been done, but this one is just a bad idea to begin with. It was enough to bring into account the precursor civilization, but the main focus should’ve just been Assassins vs. Templars, because that’s 95% of what we were playing—and enjoying—throughout the games. Assassin’s Creed didn’t need this arc bogging things down. It consumed the entire narrative by the time of III, and culminated in one of the worst decisions to kill off a protagonist I’ve ever seen. I'm not impressed.
