Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin's Creed - Desmond Arc Retrospective

"Do ya want ta be a pirate?" "No, I want to be an assassin." That was my answer to the 2013 trailer for this game.

I have to admit, if I hadn't already paid for this game and Rogue, ACIII would've been the breaking point for me. That game was a mess, and it left me very, very mad. So I'll be going into this game mad. Really, all it has to do to be an improvement is be better than ACIII, but because that's such a low bar, it sets up a lot of potential for Damned by Faint Praise. Let's go into this and see what we've got.

Pros:

• Edward is the Ezio to Connor's Altair. What I mean by that is, an improvement. Ezio was clearly intended to be an improvement over Altair, and while in my case that backfired, I think it worked here. While I do like Connor, I definitely find Edward more interesting most of the time.
• Technical improvements:
  
  • Now that I've had an entire game to work with this control scheme and muscle memory isn't fucking me over, I can note that they fixed the guns. Remember that bullshit in ACIII, where to shoot someone, you had to settle your reticle over them, then draw, then fire? And for some reason it wouldn't let you fire unless exactly that happened and you couldn't fire on anything moving because of it? Both those issues are fixed here. It's now draw, then aim, then fire, and you can fire when you please.
  • Another technical improvement is the weapon and tool wheel. In ACI, there was no wheel--you had four weapons assigned to four d-pad buttons and the short blade shared a button with throwing knives and were context-sensitive. In AC2, there was a button to bring up a wheel that you navigate with the control stick to select weapons and tools and the d-pad was a shortcut. In Revelations, there were two wheels navigated with two control sticks, which made things more complex, but you could assign your own shortcuts. In ACIII, there was a mess--there were two control sticks to navigate two sliders, but they had the appearance of a single wheel, meaning I constantly fucked up which button I needed. AC: Black Flag takes things back to the ACI era, where it's all controlled from the d-pad. The fact that there's way more than two weapons to use is adjusted to by simply giving each d-button its own length of tools and each press moves down its own slider.
    
• While the game still sucks at making you want to do its sidequests, it does at least make you want to play it. To survive the ocean, you'll need to upgrade the Jackdaw. To upgrade the Jackdaw, you'll need a shitload of money and metal. To get that, you'll need to raid warehouses and use the Jackdaw in combat, since piracy is so much more lucrative than any other money-gaining practice that it's pretty much the only option.
• Speaking of Zelda (yeah, more on that later), I'd call this game the Wind Waker of the bunch. Remember the alarm you felt when you stumbled on a Big Octo, denoted by a massive storm appearing? Remember the challenge of firing at each of its eyes to disable it, before you inevitably met your doom? Remember the sheer fucking terror of happening onto a goddamn tornado at sea and getting sucked in? You can experience all of that here. At the same time too, if you stumble across what I've termed "Fort Nightmare", where waterspouts circle a ring of seven mortar turrets. It's incredibly fun and challenging. And utterly terrifying.
• Speaking of incredibly terrifying and nightmarishly challenging, how about those legendary ships? I worked for three days to fully upgrade the Jackdaw to take them all on. I came out from the HMS Prince and the La Dama Negra missing most of my health, but successful. Royal Sovereign and HMS Fearless killed me, but I triumphed the second time. El Impoluto killed me four times before barely I succeeded in sinking her. And each and every time, it was exhilarating and enjoyable. Well done, Assassin's Creed.
• Alright, I admit it. Harpooning is fun as fuck. See, unlike hunting animals (which is largely just a very repetitive game of aiming your pistol at the target before it gets away, and gets old very fast), whaling and shark-hunting is action packed. It's a maritime fight where you're at risk of having your body bitten in half, and you haven no cannons to help you.
• Using the diving bell? 1710s-era scuba diving, swimming with sharks and jellyfish, exploring sunken shipwrecks, and getting to look at Edward's bare tattooed upper body the whole time? Excellent, incredible, 10/10. Very fun.
• The climax of the game provides the first true display since Assassin's Creeds 1 and 2 of just how much damage and harm can be inflicted by a Piece of Eden should it fall into the wrong hands--and those needn't necessarily be Templar hands.
• James Kidd ends up being surprisingly good as a twist. She had a bit of a Naoto thing going on, where I was sure she was voiced by a woman and would end up revealed as one...only for the consistency to eventually settle me into believing that hey, maybe that's just how his voice actor really sounds. And then he ended up being Mary Read. Alright, ya got me ACIV.

Cons:

• Yes, they still want me to craft, no I'm not going to. Or am I, since they actually force you to this time.
• No, they did not change the controls back to the Ezio-era ones, yes I still hate them.
• Yes, they still make you hunt animals, no I still don't appreciate it.
• The greed, which has been a constant companion since ACII, has again spiked post-Desmond. Scrolling through the things I could buy, I found a bunch of "time saver" packs. The logic behind them is the same as that behind the even more evil lootboxes (which finally got a push earlier back this year, thank god): pay your way past this tedious in-game grind we totally could've avoided putting in the game. It's gross.
• Whatever the technical improvements since III, the fact remains that this game's controls, particularly in combat, still need work. The B button parries attacks, but also puts the weapon you're holding away. This means that if the enemy headed straight for you with a sword is a little bit too far away, you'll foolishly disarm yourself instead of parrying and get knocked on your ass. I got killed quite a few times like this.
• While the Wind Waker-esque practice of sailing an incredibly vast ocean and stopping at dozens of islands is indeed fun, it's also a pain in the ass because it's painstakingly created and designed after the real world. Which means there's innumerable mini-islands and sandbars to get in your way. In Wind Waker, all the islands were individual and unique, but also all spaced out pretty far apart, meaning it was pretty easy to sail from one area to the other without any problems. You could go from one and of the map to another in about ten minutes' time of not touching the controller. Here though, I tried sailing to the Yucatan Peninsula mission, which from where I started out took over an hour before I was halfway there. Jesus Fucking Christ.
• Something that reminds me of the Zelda series with this game, and the AC series since II, is that the designers seem to have felt the obsessive need to "characterize" the player character and have him "earn" the iconic hood. It's tedious, really. I don't hate character establishment or complexity, but I do hate waiting. I am longing, really, for the Altair days--when you jumped into the game and were already a master assassin killing people. I'm tired of waiting for half the game to be over before I actually get to do that.
• Edward can make it more than a little difficult to like him at times. At Kingston, you'll come across both story-moving events and Assassin-related Templar hunts. The latter, which I did first, involved freeing slaves, to which Edward dug his heels in and resisted a lot because it's "not his business". Then I went and did the story missions there and the man you're hunting down is a slaver, who Edward sees fit to die because he's barring the way to a white man he needs.
• The actual look of the combat leaves a lot to be desired. I checked, and yes, I had the "blood" option set to "on" when playing this game, which surprises me since there's barely if any blood in it at all, much less in open combat. You would think that, since we're supposedly a fearsome, take-no-shit pirate who spreads fear throughout the West Indies, that maybe some limbsor heads would get lopped off or some serious blood splatter might happen occasionally. Enemies react more like they've been hit with large sticks than slashed with a pair of three-foot-long swords. Altair's game had more blood than this. Although, there is a fair amount of red whenever you're harpooning marine life, or getting attacked by it underwater. Maybe this game just really fucking hates fish.
• And for a game with so little blood in it, I hate to make a genuine complaint about this, but these finishing blows and counterattacks take an awful lot of time compared to ones in the previous games. For gameplay's sake, those few seconds it takes to cut down at an enemy can be a nightmare for any time-sensitive mission, unintentionally turning any "stealth optional" mission into "perfect stealth, or just start over because you took too long killing everything to complete your objective".
• I'd like to know what the goddamn point of fast travel is if I can't use it half the time. There's never a given reason as to why it's "unavailable". Sometimes I can infer that the game doesn't want me weaseling my way out of a bad spot I got myself into. Other times, I can only infer it's because this game is a prankster jerkass that wanted me to sprint my way across the length of Nassau on foot for seven minutes to get to my next mission.
• You can see where the end of the game starts to fall apart. First at the scene of Anne and Mary's trial, the loud judge character's model got stuck, flashing inbetween frames every so often while his gavel floated around and his mouth didn't move. Then at the prison break mission, the requirements are to visit two old friends, but only one ever shows up. Clearly Ubisoft were rushing this game near the end.
• Speaking of the end of the game, it drags on. Sequences 9 through 11 see the death of Blackbeard/Thatch, the swift betrayal and humbling of Jack Rackham, the descent into hostile madness of Charles Vane, the much more successful and dramatic betrayal of Benjamin Hornigold, and the death of Mary Read. All very dramatic, yes. And capped off by an acid trip sequence of Roberts abusing a piece of Eden's power on a poor distraught Edward (or maybe Ed was just drunk). And then...the game just keeps going. Entirely too late in the game, after Edward has finally realized what a fucked up person he is, does he finally join the Assassins and begin the standard hunting routine. The end of this game drags on, and on, and on, much like ACIII did.
• Unlike the last few AC games (and rather like one disappointing aspect of Revelations), it takes forever for a true antagonist to show himself. For much of the game, you're just fighting whoever gets in Edward's way until Bartholomew Roberts finally becomes unabashedly dickish enough to qualify for final boss material.

Really Bad Cons:

• The framing device is still here, it pains me to say. I honestly wish there wasn't one and the game was just Edward the entire way through. In this game, you're a faceless, nameless, voiceless employee for Abstergo using DNA samples taken from Desmond Miles' fucking corpse to play through his ancestral memories. Which will then be made into video games in-universe. 
  • How about you eat my fucking ass, Ubisoft. I can see you back there. I can see you not giving a shit as to the internal story and just taking the excuse plot that allows you to most easily pump out whatever games you like. Fuck you.
  • The chocolate fudge on top of the shit sundae here is when you're introduced to the framing device, and chatty smiling cheery twee little twit Melanie Lemay teaches you how to move your head up and down and side to side. Because apparently exposure to the Animus can now wipe away your basic fucking locomotive functions.
  • And the cherry? The cherry is that time the Abstergo regional boss calls you to his office and tells you to, when playing as Edward, keep an eye out for the observatory they keep mentioning. Which you were obviously going to do because at that point a big deal had already been made out of how both the West Indies Templars and Edward were both looking for it for their own reasons. Pushing the boss-man over that short railing he's leaning on and watching him fall to his death feels like a very appealing idea right then.
  • "Maybe you saw Liberation"? No, I didn't. The Collection that promised it did not actually contain it.
  • Really, the fact that Ubisoft frame this all as how evil and abusive Abstergo is, making video games off of Desmond's corpse, it really isn't done any favors when Ubisoft constantly masks their own practices that way. For example, you can find an email from your boss-man explaining how his higher-ups want him producing a "virtual reality game" once a year--which is exactly how Ubisoft have been doing Assassin's Creed for a while and a while thereafter, until it bit them in the ass with the very poorly-produced Assassin's Creed: Unity. That, on top of a myriad of other ways in which Miss Twee Twit Lemay gushes about how the consumers will love what they're putting together. Yeah, Ubisoft. Keep telling me it's Abstergo in-story, not you out-of-story. I totally believe you.
  • I fully admit to rage-quitting out of any interest in the mythology happening around me. I'm sick of Juno, I'm sick of her Vague Speeches of Vagueness, I'm sick of her swallowing up all the actually interesting shit happening...so no, when she finally pops up near the end of the modern segment, and I'm revealed to have been a pawn who barely escaped being possessed...I don't care. I still have no name, voice, or face. I am still nobody and I am a nobody who doesn't give a shit about anything here.
• The ending can't help but be a disappointment (especially considering the acid trip in chapter 11) considering you just shoot Roberts in the face and he dies. That's what I did. I say final boss loosely, as he isn't the last antagonist to die, but he's the climactic boss. And the sad thing is, he could've been Al Mualim material. He certainly had the abusive mental torment angle down right.
• Speaking of the actual Final Boss, it's another tedious, unnecessarily difficult stealth mission followed by a glorified climbing section. He does employ some deflector shields to keep you from cheating the non-cinematic, bullet-related way (an idea that should've been implemented as early as Rodrigo Borgia) but otherwise, a total disappointment.
• Oh look. The tech guy we thought was an Assassin spy was actually trying to feed our body to Juno. And he's a sage. I don't care. Sudden, out of nowhere, and another blatant twist for the sake of having a twist. But I don't care.
  
  • And in case you're curious, he yammers on a little about how Assassins and Templars are both idiots before trying to kill you. The guy who's trying to reunite with the She-Templar Goddess Bitch From Before Time.

 Final thoughts:

• What's both funny and sad about this game is that the segments where you're taken out of Edward to talk to Abstergo staff, and they talk about how excited they are to make a pirate video game, is that it just underscores Ubisoft's own failure to realize their mistake. Black Flag really should've just been a pirate-based game under its own serial instead of them handing us a pirate game and instead insisting that it's an Assassin's Creed game. Because as much as they want it to be, it's not. Sure, there's an Animus, and there's a white hood, but Edward isn't an Assassin and Edward's story isn't an AC story. If I told you that Edward "isn't an Assassin, he's just a dude who stole some Assassin's clothes", that would not be exaggerated salt, but a literal description of what happens in-game. Edward Kenway is not an Assassin, has no interest in Assassin business, and shows disdain for the Creed presented to him. The fact that he does Leaps of Faith and has Eagle Vision doesn't change the fact that Ubisoft cut the story off at the neck in ACIII and have little interest in continuing it; these elements are only here so that this game can fill 2013's slot in the Assassin's Creed franchise. Admittedly, this game did advertise itself as a pirate game, and does play as a pirate game perfectly well, but that only strengthens the irritation that they decided their pirate game should even be in this franchise. Who knows, maybe had they started another serial starring Edward and not named him Kenway, it might've actually succeeded in giving modern gamers something to appreciate Ubisoft for (and "appreciate" is becoming a more and more untrue word with each game and each year) besides their one ultra-popular franchise that they seem to be slaves to.