Since @
Xprimentyl suggested it, I'm gonna Hot take the Assasins Creed series, or at least the games I've played. This will likely take a couple posts.
Unmarked spoilers for the Assassins'
Creed Series.
So the hottest take of all, this series started strong with a great premise(though the first game was a bit overlong and clunkly at times) and basically lost it's way. It looked like it might have fixed itself a couple years ago but nope, it's lost in the wilderness again and I have no faith it'll ever figure out how to make it compelling at this point without a full reboot.
The inherent problem of course is that the series started with the idea the Templars rule the world secretly, the assasins, who act as "Organized" resistance to them, are scattered and in hiding and the Templars are trying to use Desmond, an apparent nobody, to delve into his ancestries using a time machine but not really, to find magical mcguffins hidden throughout the world and basically the cornerstones of our myths and legends so they can...rule the world more. With Mind Control, even though they don't need it. In the meantime, the Assassins' want to use the animus to find those McGuffins before the templars do so they can, well, stop them from having them and also train Desmond to be an assassin by giving him years of training in days.
And that's a great fucking premise. The problem is ,they pretty much lost track of that premise after like 2 fucking games. By AC Brotherhood, the story is "Use animus to find magical thingy #5". There's the threat of a Templar Satellite launch in the background and this never goes anywhere. Even up to AC3 they're still talking about it and then you find out in an e-mail that the launch was scrubbed. I imagined at some point Desmond was actually going to use his super assasin skills to scale the rocket under a time limit in order to prevent the apple being launched into orbit in AC3 because it felt like that's where this was supposed to be leading, but nope, you get an email and that's that.
And here you run into a number of other problems. They introduce the solar flare in AC2 or AC Brotherhood(I forget which off the top of my head) and tie it to the 2012 date, because of course they do. Yes, this was hinted in the first game when you see the blood stains at the end but it's very vague until like a couple games down the line. Then you start getting this background on the ISU(the ones who came before) which shows them as being hyper advanced to the point of absurdity but also incredibly fucking dumb and incapable of saving their own skins. AC3 gives you a bunch of little movies about how they tried to save their asses and all of them are basically magic but also completely ineffective because...of course they are. "We could build an energy shield ,but it wouldn't be finished in time. We can't even protect a single city with it" "We can upload ourselves to information storage but then we have to wait for someone else to get us out and need an internet to transfer over to and.....then someone needs to build us a body to download back into and..." And "We could mind control humans to make them magic shit into existence by wishing the same thing all at once so we told them "SAVE US" and......seriously, this this is fucking bananas and smacks of the writing of a 10 year old who read their first Sci-fi book. There's also the Sage thing that I'm not even gonna go into here because it's dumb but is the longest lived dumb plot thread.
Oh, and to make it better, the Templars apparently never get a fucking hint the world is going to be melted to fucking glass by a solar flare, because there's no evidence of them ever talking about it beforehand or that they expected it, despite doing far and way the most research into the ISU stuff. And considering they control the world, you'd think THAT would be far more important to them then anything else and they'd do everything in their damn power to prevent it, because you don't want to break what you control. Nope, never fucking addressed. After 3, the Templars showed up and collected Desmonds corpse to mine for memory material and even in later games STILL don't mention "Oh, the assassins' saved our buts and were right all along on this, at this on this topic"
Here's where I get to talk about Juno. At the end of AC3, Desmond gets the choice to A.) let the solar flare hit and wipe out 90% of the world, creating a free but primitives blank state but one which eventually use him as a legendary figure for violence and oppression in his name or B.) Stop the flare, sacrifice his life and let Juno out of the ancient computer onto the Internet. Of course Desmond chooses B, and Juno is set up as the Arc Villian of the next few games, trying to get a body with help of a cult following her and some parts of Abstergo helping her. And the games following AC3 seem to be setting up her return. Except it doesn't end up mattering because Ubisoft resolved her return in a comic. She gets a new body(courtesy of one of the magical bits and some ISU DNA that they found) and then Desmonds Son(who he had with a hooker or something) shows up and stabs her because, sure why not? Who cares?
Ubisoft didn't because they never really mention it again in the games(so if you didn't read the comics that whole thing is left fucking hanging forever) and then they started making games about Layla and building up to another Calamity(because the big shield they turned on in AC3 to save the earth from the solar flare never turned off and that's bad apparently).
It all smacks of "We make these games yearly to make more money" and give no shits about where if anywhere this is going. Which is why the historical bits can work as their own stories but the overarching plot just never seems to fucking matter because ubisoft can't seem to bring themselves to properly construct plot arcs across multiple games that actually conclude and then a new plot arc follows from that. Or find a way to make the link between the history stuff tie into the present stuff in a compelling and interesting way besides "Find magical ISU doohicky #17 for reasons". There's creative sterility here where any hope of making compelling or interesting fiction takes a backseat to annual earnings and even though they'll be making this shit forever, god forbid we use that freedom from the threat of cancelation to build something compelling.
I mean, I could go on forever but I'll stop here. On my next post, I'll actually dive into individual games and pick them apart for your reading pleasure.
