Orange Observations: Assassin's Creed II

"There is no book or teacher to give you the answers, to show you the path. Choose your own way! 

Do not follow me, or anyone else." -Ezio Auditore da Firenze

    Here we are, the beginning. The beginning of a trilogy that not only defines the story of one of the most beloved characters of one of the most popular gaming franchises in history, but also defines the beginning of this project. Perhaps it was my mistake for me to choose the Ezio Collection as one of my first "games" for this project. Given the fact that I have finished one game, I still have two more after this, AND another one entirely separated from Assassin's Creed altogether. But, are you here to witness me bitch and moan about my tasks? No. You're here to see what I thought of this game. Let's get right into it.

Edward's History with the Creed

    I have always been a fan of the series. My first Assassin's Creed was Unity, along with Black Flag shortly after that. I got the Xbox One bundle way back when it first came out that contained both of those games on them. From what Bryan tells me, he had a similar experience when he got his Xbox for the first time as well. I was never really permitted to play violent games growing up. While all of my friends spent their days playing M rated games, my parents were never really admissible when it came to stuff like that. That lack of admissibility led me to form a petition with my friends, where I got out a piece of paper in our high school's cafeteria and told them to give me their signature and a reason why my parents should allow me to play M rated titles while still being under the "recommended age group" for M games. All my friends at the time signed it, including Austyn, and I brought it to my parents along with some articles detailing why they should let me play games with my friends.

    At that time, I was still playing games, sure, stuff like the Arkham games and a lot of the first Halo Wars, but I was never able to really able to dive deep into M games unless I went over to my cousin's house where we played Halo 3 splitscreen and I spent all my time shooting a SPNKR rocket at my feet. Hilarious. Impressed by my dedication (I think) to get the permission to play M games, my career began from there. This all goes back to when I got Assassin's Creed for the first time. Who wouldn't be interested in a concept like that? Loosely historical games where you play as a stealthy badass with a hidden blade to kill your enemies?

    With Unity being my first game, it was a very different experience to play, since all I had played since then was Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Star Wars the Clone Wars about a few thousand times... each. Obviously the gameplay was a little shaky, considering how this was Assassin's Creed Unity before Ubisoft patched some stuff back in 2014. Given all the technical problems, I still loved the story, which remains to be my favorite Assassin's Creed to this day. Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking, but Arno is a king. Black Flag was just as enjoyable, albeit jarring to go from something like Unity to Black Flag. I remember thinking that the graphics in Black Flag sort of made it look like an old 360 game from 2005, whereas Unity looked truly current gen. Over time, I realized that I'd like to get the whole story of Assassin's Creed. The lore of the series goes very in-depth, and I figured I'd start at the beginning. I remember going to GameStop and buying Assassin's Creed, looking at Altaïr on the cover and thinking, "I'm so excited to play this!"

    While the game was enjoyable, the jump from Unity to the first game in the series was, unsurprisingly, SUPER jarring. All the features I had known were gone in favor of older ones, the gameplay was way more restricting (much like if someone played Arkham City and then went back and played Arkham Asylum) and the gameplay loop of doing the exact same thing 9 times was very exhausting. After I finished the game, I had it in my head that the next game was Assassin's Creed II, and I was maybe hesitant given the fact that it might be more of the same clunky gameplay. But, I'm older now, and more equipped to deal with all that clunk in the trunk that this game has to offer.

The Game Itself

    It's a little difficult now to sit back and recount my experience with Assassin's Creed II now that I have finished it. You'd think that would be easy, since I just played it, but given the amount of content that is in this game, compacting it all in at once isn't the easiest thing in the world. How about we just start at the beginning?

    Assassin's Creed II was developed by Ubisoft Montréal and published by Ubisoft. Released in 2009 for the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and PC. The story follows the saga of the timeless conflict between two ancient secret societies, the Templars, whose beliefs center around order and control, and the Assassins, whose beliefs center around freedom and personal choice. The game picks up where the first game left off. Desmond Miles is rescued from Abstergo by fellow Assassins to not only train him to be an Assassin, but to use his memories to stop the Templars from locating ancient artifacts from a highly advanced ancient civilization known as the Pieces of Eden. For this game, you play as one of Desmond's ancestors, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Italian noble born into a wealthy family in Florence in 1459. Ezio is a charismatic but reckless young man by the beginning of the game, and as his family is executed for treason, he discovers his heritage within the Assassin order and matures into a skilled warrior and a mature man over the course of 40 years to hunt down the Templars responsible for the deaths of his family and to stop the grip they have on Italy.

    The story of this game was enjoyable. I think it follows the same typical tropes of all the Assassin's Creed games I've played. You know, some young kid has a power he didn't know he had and is destined for greatness, something horrible happens to him, and in going after the people responsible, he becomes an Assassin and learns to be selfless, rather than selfish and to uphold the beliefs brought on by the Assassins to serve something greater than just himself alone. There were some good moments in this game, but since I was playing the Ezio Collection, the graphics really threw me off. Remasters are sort of a hit-or-miss kind of thing. They are either pretty good or just not great at all. A giant portion of the NPCs and characters were intensely low-res and graphical glitches threw me off a lot when I was trying to get immersed in the game. The game crashed a few times, mostly due to me playing a big chunk of the game, trying to finish a big bunch of memory sequences, in one session. Even so, the story was enjoyable, and if anything, I am happy to finally be playing the game that starts Ezio's life and to learn all about this character. Other than the story, you have your typical side missions in each area of the game that the story takes place in. Synchronizing with viewpoints, delivering messages, gathering feathers, codex pages... all that jazz. For anyone playing this game for the first time, I'd recommend gathering all the codex pages as you go along in the story, since not having all of them will restrict you from completing the final sequence. I learned that the hard way. Fortunately for me though, I was only missing 9 when the final part of the game came. I feel sorry for anyone who had to collect the codex pages all at once just to finish the game. What REALLY made this game affecting for me was just how it plays.

I Hope You Like Running!

    The heart of any game doesn't just reside in the game's story, but also in it's gameplay. THIS GAME'S heart is completely dysfunctional. For one thing, I hope you bought Ezio some fresh new Asics, because you will be constantly running around. To be fair, I suppose that's a common thing for Assassin's Creed games, but for some reason, it seemed like a good 70% of this game was watching Ezio's dumb running animation all throughout this game. The other 30% was getting frustrated over the movement mechanics.

    While you're getting in a nice 500k run in, be careful not to even TOUCH anyone in the street. Otherwise Ezio completely loses his balance, rolls around on the floor and takes an entire day to get back up to start running again. Now while I'm running, I'm holding RT, up on the left stick and the A button. But be careful not to touch any object whatsoever, because Ezio will start to climb it. Most of the time when you climb something in this game, it looks like you can reach whatever little thing is in the wall for Ezio to grab, but actually what happens most of the time is Ezio scrambles up a wall 30 times and doesn't jump up to reach the next thing to grab. If he does grab something but can't reach the next thing (EVEN THOUGH HE CLEARLY CAN), Ezio just looks up and stares at it, almost as if to tell me, "I can't-a grab that."

    I didn't even think that you had to progress through the story to learn how to climb better. Before I unlocked the climb jump thing, I was so frustrated with the fact that I couldn't climb certain towers because I needed to jump up to grab a ledge or whatever. If you're climbing something by accident and want to get down, or climbing a tall tower to get to the viewpoint and want to go down an inch, pressing B will get you down, but not in the way you want. Ezio jumps off the wall in a completely different direction with no regard for his life and plummets to his death.

    What really grinds my gears about this game is the AI. The enemies are super inconsistent during stealth missions, so they are either completely stupid with no peripheral vision whatsoever OR they have a That's So Raven type vision and can predict my moves before I make them. That makes it especially worse when there's a mission where you can't be seen at all. The combat is sometimes unpredictable, and the AI will just bombard you, especially when you're being chased by every guard in Venice after lightly bumping into one. Mostly the combat consists of waiting for someone to attack you just to watch the cool animation of the counter attack anyways, so it's not the most engaging. The WORST offense for the AI is these fucking bards. I will be running and minding my own business when all of a sudden some dickhead with a mandolin runs after me and puts their dumb face right into mine. I could be chasing after a target and these bards so desperately want me to hear them sing that they will follow me and try to get in my way. I have murdered so many bards in this game all because they stuck their goofy ass faces in my way.

The Verdict

    Given everything I've said here, this game was sort of just an above-average experience for me. A lot of the gameplay was just infuriating for me. Even while the story itself was relatively solid, the gameplay mechanics and how clunky it all is was very immersion breaking, especially if I was trying to perform some action or assassination in a cinematic way, and something happened to ruin it.

PROS

+ Solid story

+ Has the typical Assassin's Creed magic

CONS

- Clunky gameplay

- Frustrating AI

- Bards

Overall Score: 6.5/10

-Edward Orange