assassin's creed II.
After what must have been two weeks of consistent gameplay, I finally finished Assassin’s Creed 2 today.
I love this game.
Thank you, Ubisoft. I’ve never seen a company take criticism so well. It seems they have listened to every review and every piece of advice players and critics gave, fixed every problem, and expanded on them even more.
Characters
Assassin’s Creed 2 takes place in the Italian Renaissance period and follows Ezio Auditore of Florence, who at the start of the game is a 17-year-old aristocratic womanizer with a what appears to be a genetic penchant for running races on rooftops. Personally I was almost surprised by the fact that Ubisoft decided to give Ezio a personality, given that Altaïr, the previous protagonist, basically had none until the end of the game. Ubisoft has done a very good job with Ezio that I must admit exceeded my expectations; for example, after the deaths of his father and brothers, I was half-expecting him to whine at least a little bit about his family being dead. He didn’t, though: he held his chin up, ran away, and came back with a vengeance, ready to shank some bitches.
The game follows a 23-year time period in which Ezio actually ages, and it is really beautiful to watch. There is actual character development! You really feel it as he goes from a brash young man and matures into something more. Leading quite the messed-up life, Ezio gives the impression of a man who still manages to stay stable, even as he is hounded by a drive for vengeance and the seemingly endless mission it gives him. He grows pale underneath his hood after years of hiding under it, and it almost feels as if he walks differently as he grows older.
Also, it’s hard to put fannish glee aside: he’s also an undeniably attractive bunch of pixels, and he vocalizes the phrase requiescat in pace so sexily that I would very readily jump him given the chance! That being said, there is no end to the amount of pussy Ezio gets during the course of the game. That’s also mentionable.
Then there’s Leonardo-Leonardo da Vinci. In the game, he is depicted as an adorable young man who hasn’t yet painted the Mona Lisa but whose inventor side Ezio should thank a hundred times over. He does a lot of stuff for Ezio, such as designing his weapons and translating Altaïr’s writings for him. His relationship with Ezio feels very warm and friendly, and they’re such bros it’s too cute to watch. Leo is cute to watch-there’s a point in the game where he tells Ezio about his flying machine design, and you can basically see his eyes sparkling with delight about it. There’s also a quicktime event in which he wants to hug Ezio, and if you miss it I’m betting you’ll feel as shit as I did and be tempted to start the game over.
Also, if you follow fandom, you’ll find that Leonardo is very often paired with Ezio. I don’t know if Ubisoft did this to bait fans, but there is an unnecessary amount of attention given to Leonardo’s alleged homosexuality in his character file. If they did this knowingly-then they are truly clever. Is Jade still at the helm of this? Naughty girl...
There’s a good number of likeable characters around Ezio (that I will not go into detail about seeing as I blather too much as it is). Poor Altaïr had only Malik to run to, and he was pretty sick and tired of Altaïr last time I saw him.
Speaking of Altaïr, Ubisoft seems to have realized the mistake they made with his character-or, to put it better, the lack of it. Every Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played after AC1 has attempted to fix it somewhat. In AC2 we have access to his journal, and he comes off as exactly the way I imagined him to be after the conclusion of the first game. An atheist and a science worshipper, he asks so many questions and thinks so deep he might have been a twelfth-century Dawkins. His writings really reflect the mentality of the wise at that time... or the mentally inebriated. I can’t help visualizing him smoking hashish while staring at the Apple, going on about wisdom and telling it to reveal its secrets.
And we know who he banged, too.
Plot
It’s a conspiracy! A conspiracy that starts with Ezio having street fights with his rival... and goes on to become something... a lot... bigger. I don’t know how I can talk about the plot of this game without spoiling it all, perhaps because I don’t have that good a grasp on the plot myself: one complaint is that the story gets very hard to follow after some point and you’re left wondering just what the fuck is going on. It’s not necessarily just a revenge story, but on my first playthrough the revenge plot was all I could make out of the mess.
I’m at least glad to see that Ubisoft is taking Assassin’s Creed very seriously now, and are making short movies like the Lineage series (which follows Giovanni Auditore, Ezio’s father, and explains the game a lot better if you both play and watch). There’s a NDS spinoff, also dreaded downloadable content that I haven’t yet played. Also, there’s an upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which seems to follow AC2’s story directly (and old!Ezio makes me happy indeed).
Gameplay
Assassin’s Creed 2 is not a short game, which truly gives it another bonus over its predecessor. There is simply a lot of stuff to do, and of course, most of it is the act of murder. A problem with the first game was that there were about as many assassinations in the game as Altaïr had intact fingers. This seems to have been fixed; there are loads of bad guys you need to kill in the main story as it is, and if you’re not satisfied with their deaths, you can always pick up more assassination missions. And there really is a shitload of them, so much that I stopped doing them after a while (being forty fucking years old, dressed in heirloom armor, and still Lorenzo de Medici’s errand boy ticked me off somewhat). You basically can’t complain about not having killed anyone (as I did in the first game), because you will, and you have the opportunity to kill MORE!
The only problem-the one, single problem with the gameplay-is the ‘fighting’ element in it (not the assassinations, direct, face-to-face fighting, as in with guards) and the relevant AI. There’s still the problem with one lone dude with a knife being able to take on twenty heavily armored guys at once, since they still come at you one at a time. Most of the time you spend the swordfighting standing there, circling whatever enemy you’re locked on to, waiting for one of the twenty guys to decide to swing at you so you can counter him and watch the deliciously brutal counter kill scenes.
While taking down the said twenty guys at once seems at first a good premise, it makes you feel like a gay Chuck Norris, effectively killing what stealth gameplay you were aiming for. An assassin uncovered must decide between fight or flight, and ‘fight’ should never really even be an option: Ezio should just fucking die if he decides to hold his ground and fight off three guards.
The missions where you must ‘remain undetected’ and simply not get into a fight try to manage this somewhat, and are practically the most fun I had. There’s loads of weapons to use, like the hilarious poison injection, which you will never feel like using if you’re slashing away at people with Altaïr’s sword, which having the name ‘Altaïr’ slapped on it naturally does a sick ton of damage. I also bought it cheap from the weapons store, despite having busted my ass to get his armor, which is quite the long side quest.
There’s a lot of side quests you can do, ranging from “hit my husband”, “be my courier”, “race me”, and of course “kill this man”. There’s stuff to do obsessively, such as collect feathers, open viewpoints, collect treasures... basically everything the first game offered as a free-roaming platformer. There’s a lot of platforming to do to get the best armor, going through assassin tombs, but it’s not really enough to complain about (I fucking hate platform games).
There’s also the side game of “The Truth” and it offers really interesting, if hard, puzzles. It’s good, and it will give conspiracy theorists boners, though I am not one and don’t like it much since it runs on the sci-fi (!) sideplot the Assassin’s Creed franchise actually fuels itself on.
One other thing is that Ubisoft decided it might be a good idea to implement the God of War style quicktime events into the game, “press X now to not die”, and I’m completely neutral against it, though normally I hate quicktime events as well. The good part of it is that these quicktime events are placed in cutscenes and nothing bad happens if you miss your button press, but you miss some stuff from the cutscene, like taking off some woman’s clothes (that you better not miss, or you’re cramping Ezio’s style) or the aforementioned hugging of Leonardo da Vinci, which upon missing seriously makes you feel like poop and makes Ezio stand there like an insensitive asshole.
tl;dr I have to go hug him now.
All right. Now that this is out of my system, I’m going to be playing this game over.
Because not to sound like a fan... it’s that beautiful.
For this next playthrough I have a few rules though: no HUD (as usual, the HUD sucks ass, and without it the game plays like a movie), no missing the fucking quicktime events (leonardo ♥), stealth gameplay (no butchering dozens of guards with swords, Ezio isn’t Kratos, get the fuck onto a rooftop and run like hell), no killing innocents (that includes the occasional guard, they have wives and children. Of course, punching bards is optional).
All right, I’m off. I leave you with this. God, even the music got better.
I love this game.
Thank you, Ubisoft. I’ve never seen a company take criticism so well. It seems they have listened to every review and every piece of advice players and critics gave, fixed every problem, and expanded on them even more.
Characters
Assassin’s Creed 2 takes place in the Italian Renaissance period and follows Ezio Auditore of Florence, who at the start of the game is a 17-year-old aristocratic womanizer with a what appears to be a genetic penchant for running races on rooftops. Personally I was almost surprised by the fact that Ubisoft decided to give Ezio a personality, given that Altaïr, the previous protagonist, basically had none until the end of the game. Ubisoft has done a very good job with Ezio that I must admit exceeded my expectations; for example, after the deaths of his father and brothers, I was half-expecting him to whine at least a little bit about his family being dead. He didn’t, though: he held his chin up, ran away, and came back with a vengeance, ready to shank some bitches.
The game follows a 23-year time period in which Ezio actually ages, and it is really beautiful to watch. There is actual character development! You really feel it as he goes from a brash young man and matures into something more. Leading quite the messed-up life, Ezio gives the impression of a man who still manages to stay stable, even as he is hounded by a drive for vengeance and the seemingly endless mission it gives him. He grows pale underneath his hood after years of hiding under it, and it almost feels as if he walks differently as he grows older.
Also, it’s hard to put fannish glee aside: he’s also an undeniably attractive bunch of pixels, and he vocalizes the phrase requiescat in pace so sexily that I would very readily jump him given the chance! That being said, there is no end to the amount of pussy Ezio gets during the course of the game. That’s also mentionable.
Then there’s Leonardo-Leonardo da Vinci. In the game, he is depicted as an adorable young man who hasn’t yet painted the Mona Lisa but whose inventor side Ezio should thank a hundred times over. He does a lot of stuff for Ezio, such as designing his weapons and translating Altaïr’s writings for him. His relationship with Ezio feels very warm and friendly, and they’re such bros it’s too cute to watch. Leo is cute to watch-there’s a point in the game where he tells Ezio about his flying machine design, and you can basically see his eyes sparkling with delight about it. There’s also a quicktime event in which he wants to hug Ezio, and if you miss it I’m betting you’ll feel as shit as I did and be tempted to start the game over.
Also, if you follow fandom, you’ll find that Leonardo is very often paired with Ezio. I don’t know if Ubisoft did this to bait fans, but there is an unnecessary amount of attention given to Leonardo’s alleged homosexuality in his character file. If they did this knowingly-then they are truly clever. Is Jade still at the helm of this? Naughty girl...
There’s a good number of likeable characters around Ezio (that I will not go into detail about seeing as I blather too much as it is). Poor Altaïr had only Malik to run to, and he was pretty sick and tired of Altaïr last time I saw him.
Speaking of Altaïr, Ubisoft seems to have realized the mistake they made with his character-or, to put it better, the lack of it. Every Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played after AC1 has attempted to fix it somewhat. In AC2 we have access to his journal, and he comes off as exactly the way I imagined him to be after the conclusion of the first game. An atheist and a science worshipper, he asks so many questions and thinks so deep he might have been a twelfth-century Dawkins. His writings really reflect the mentality of the wise at that time... or the mentally inebriated. I can’t help visualizing him smoking hashish while staring at the Apple, going on about wisdom and telling it to reveal its secrets.
And we know who he banged, too.
Plot
It’s a conspiracy! A conspiracy that starts with Ezio having street fights with his rival... and goes on to become something... a lot... bigger. I don’t know how I can talk about the plot of this game without spoiling it all, perhaps because I don’t have that good a grasp on the plot myself: one complaint is that the story gets very hard to follow after some point and you’re left wondering just what the fuck is going on. It’s not necessarily just a revenge story, but on my first playthrough the revenge plot was all I could make out of the mess.
I’m at least glad to see that Ubisoft is taking Assassin’s Creed very seriously now, and are making short movies like the Lineage series (which follows Giovanni Auditore, Ezio’s father, and explains the game a lot better if you both play and watch). There’s a NDS spinoff, also dreaded downloadable content that I haven’t yet played. Also, there’s an upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which seems to follow AC2’s story directly (and old!Ezio makes me happy indeed).
Gameplay
Assassin’s Creed 2 is not a short game, which truly gives it another bonus over its predecessor. There is simply a lot of stuff to do, and of course, most of it is the act of murder. A problem with the first game was that there were about as many assassinations in the game as Altaïr had intact fingers. This seems to have been fixed; there are loads of bad guys you need to kill in the main story as it is, and if you’re not satisfied with their deaths, you can always pick up more assassination missions. And there really is a shitload of them, so much that I stopped doing them after a while (being forty fucking years old, dressed in heirloom armor, and still Lorenzo de Medici’s errand boy ticked me off somewhat). You basically can’t complain about not having killed anyone (as I did in the first game), because you will, and you have the opportunity to kill MORE!
The only problem-the one, single problem with the gameplay-is the ‘fighting’ element in it (not the assassinations, direct, face-to-face fighting, as in with guards) and the relevant AI. There’s still the problem with one lone dude with a knife being able to take on twenty heavily armored guys at once, since they still come at you one at a time. Most of the time you spend the swordfighting standing there, circling whatever enemy you’re locked on to, waiting for one of the twenty guys to decide to swing at you so you can counter him and watch the deliciously brutal counter kill scenes.
While taking down the said twenty guys at once seems at first a good premise, it makes you feel like a gay Chuck Norris, effectively killing what stealth gameplay you were aiming for. An assassin uncovered must decide between fight or flight, and ‘fight’ should never really even be an option: Ezio should just fucking die if he decides to hold his ground and fight off three guards.
The missions where you must ‘remain undetected’ and simply not get into a fight try to manage this somewhat, and are practically the most fun I had. There’s loads of weapons to use, like the hilarious poison injection, which you will never feel like using if you’re slashing away at people with Altaïr’s sword, which having the name ‘Altaïr’ slapped on it naturally does a sick ton of damage. I also bought it cheap from the weapons store, despite having busted my ass to get his armor, which is quite the long side quest.
There’s a lot of side quests you can do, ranging from “hit my husband”, “be my courier”, “race me”, and of course “kill this man”. There’s stuff to do obsessively, such as collect feathers, open viewpoints, collect treasures... basically everything the first game offered as a free-roaming platformer. There’s a lot of platforming to do to get the best armor, going through assassin tombs, but it’s not really enough to complain about (I fucking hate platform games).
There’s also the side game of “The Truth” and it offers really interesting, if hard, puzzles. It’s good, and it will give conspiracy theorists boners, though I am not one and don’t like it much since it runs on the sci-fi (!) sideplot the Assassin’s Creed franchise actually fuels itself on.
One other thing is that Ubisoft decided it might be a good idea to implement the God of War style quicktime events into the game, “press X now to not die”, and I’m completely neutral against it, though normally I hate quicktime events as well. The good part of it is that these quicktime events are placed in cutscenes and nothing bad happens if you miss your button press, but you miss some stuff from the cutscene, like taking off some woman’s clothes (that you better not miss, or you’re cramping Ezio’s style) or the aforementioned hugging of Leonardo da Vinci, which upon missing seriously makes you feel like poop and makes Ezio stand there like an insensitive asshole.
tl;dr I have to go hug him now.
All right. Now that this is out of my system, I’m going to be playing this game over.
Because not to sound like a fan... it’s that beautiful.
For this next playthrough I have a few rules though: no HUD (as usual, the HUD sucks ass, and without it the game plays like a movie), no missing the fucking quicktime events (leonardo ♥), stealth gameplay (no butchering dozens of guards with swords, Ezio isn’t Kratos, get the fuck onto a rooftop and run like hell), no killing innocents (that includes the occasional guard, they have wives and children. Of course, punching bards is optional).
All right, I’m off. I leave you with this. God, even the music got better.