Time to keep this train rolling. Today I'm gonna Hot Take(Is it a verb? Can it be a verb?) Assasins Creed(the first one). Bear in mind I haven't played the game since it first came out and watched a Story LP a couple years back to remind myself of the major plot points so I might be missing something really obvious or getting some details wrong.
Assasins Creed is a good idea hampered by somewhat clumsy execution in actual gameplay. Altair is kinda bleh and strangely lifeless as an actual character. Placing it during the Crusades in the Holy Land is fine, but there's not much to actually do there other then take out each of your targets of Notable Templars, and before that you need to do some fucking busywork before the game lets you actually approach the targets, which IIRC wasn't particularly interesting.
Yeah, there's some flag collecting and a bunch of extra templars to find and murder around the cities but those don't actually do anything but give the completionists something to do outside the main story.
The modern day bits of the story involve desmond, newly introduced, stuck in a big white room to either look around, go to bed and get stuck into the animus sections. Also, you can occasionally play with the nearby computer to find out that the outside world sucks a lot(Apparently the Brazilian Rainforest is gone, Mexico is shutting the borders to keep American Immigrants out and Hurricane season has ceased to a thing because hurricanes constantly bombard the east coast). Later games would retcon this into disinformation from a hacker group who occasionally get mentioned in the lore materials but it felt very sincere at the time(and since you couldn't leave the room and nobody mentions it, you assume it's correct). Near the end, you see a big projected map of the earth from the apple of eden and Vidic mentions "Some of those landmasses no long exist" or something to that effect, which is disturbing considering it's an accurate projection from our POV. This is never mentioned again, BTW, even when we see that map in later games and makes it feel like that plot point got changed along the way somwhere.
Anyway, these bits get a bit awkward, mostly because it's a way to exposit to desmond(and the player) how all of this shit is supposed to work about the animus and the templars and such. Interestingly, it allows the devs to shoehorn in a big handwave about all the historical inaccuracies in the series that the animus is always right(except in places where it's clearly noted to be wrong, glitchy or things have been purposefully altered). And oh man will this series abuse the shit out of that conceit as it goes on.
Of course the big issue with this is that Desmond, like Altair, is very flat and uninteresting, which maybe was supposed to draw more attention to the historical meat of the game but since we have to keep coming to desmond every so often it basically makes these parts feel boring. And it so doesn't help that when the main game is done, you get left alone with the room with little to do but look at the big mural of cryptic symbols in your bedroom(yeah, try explaining just how that was made with such detail), a grand majority of which never ended up meaning anything to the series as a whole but hey it looked cool at the time and surely the writers for later games could figure out SOMETHING to do with it.
Desmond eventually does get a fair bit of actual character development in Revelations and 3, but that's 3 and 4 games down the line respectively and that's way too fucking late to be giving your main character a backstory. And worse then that, his backstory in Revelations is locked behind doing the 1st person platforming missions that you have to collect animus dodads or whatever to access and that's just BS. Its a damn shame, because his backstory isn't bad at all, but ubisoft didn't think it was fucking important for you to empathize with desmond or something like that.
And in case anyone is wondering, I'm not gonna do every game in the series one by one. I'm mostly gonna do them in chunks from now on, since most of them can be neatly divided into themes(the Ezio games, the Kenway games, etc).
forums.escapistmagazine.com
