Why Assassin's Creed is Dumb (Spoilers if You Actually Care About That Sort of Thing)

What's with the Jolly--ooo I see what they did.

I'll fess up now: I've only played the first Assassin's Creed game in its entirety, the one where you're the American-sounding Arabian assassin with a baller hood and parkour moves to boot. It was okay. It took me a while, but only because I got bored with it. It's not a terrible game, and indeed the gameplay was good enough that they recycled it with a little bit extra for four more games with a fifth one coming soon. I just found the story dull, the gameplay repetitive, and HOLY GOD IS ALTAIR A TERRIBLE PROTAGONIST.

As is his descendant, who you also play as in all of the games. I dreaded the intervals where you're cooped up in a sterile-looking penthouse between pseudo-time-traveling. You have two things you can do: move your character and press a button. Any button. They'll all do the same thing, assuming you've encountered something you can interact with like strange writings or a person. Most of those intermissions are spent conversing with that lady from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and all of those sequences are boring. Yes, they serve to further the plot. But never mind is the plot silly and convoluted for the sake of being convoluted.

In these games, you either play as Desmond, just some modern day dude who gets caught up in a secret war between the Assassins and the Templars. Oddly enough, the Assassins are the "good" guys, but that's just because between them and the Temples Templars, they're the less dickish. The Temptations Templars want to rule the world because that's a convenient motive for bad dudes. But you don't just play as Desmond, you also play as one of his several ancestors who--get this--were all Assassins. Crazy, no? And the way the game explains is that you're tapping into Desmond's genetic memories to, uh, learn stuff. I guess. It was to find a relic in the first game, I think it's to learn how to become an Assassin in the third game. Don't ask me about the rest. The third one wasn't too clear either.

Of the games I've played, Desmond seems to be progressively groomed to be the savior of humanity from the Temps and their diabolical designs. The second game's intro gives Desmond a little bit more to do, like beat up some innocent security guards hired on by the Evil Templar Organization because somebody wants a little taste of freedom. Desmond gets to do more than just talk to Sarah Marshall; he gets to punch some guys.

Already, it's a step up from the first game's modern day interludes, but it's still not great. Desmond is still uninteresting and clueless (granted, it picks up right at the end of the first game), and despite being voiced by everybody's favorite voice actor Nolan North, he has the charisma of a fake potted plant. The long-ass introduction with Desmond from the beginning of Assassin's Creed III doesn't help things, although given my ignorance of the end of AC II and the everything of AC Brotherhood and AC Revelations, I missed where the weird got turned up.

Yup. Weirder than genetic memory.

But in the process, they also picked up a new cast member, everybody's favorite interdimensional godlike manchild from Star Trek: The Next Generation, John De Lancie.

Q, now with 100% more goatee.

But he doesn't have his mystical Q powers in this as far as I can tell, and he's only there to be the hard-to-impress dad to Desmond's angst-ridden son. Again, I missed some things so maybe the father-son dynamic is more worthy of my emotional investment than I'm giving it credit. But then again, this game is from the same makers as Assassin's Creed with Most Boring Video Game Protagonist of 2007, Altair. 

So good of an Assassin he doesn't have a face.

So we have a fourth game coming up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (pictured at the top). As you can probably tell, it's about pirates, which sounds promising. But so did III with its Revolutionary War backdrop, until it killed the entire series for me. As I mentioned before, you play as at least two different characters in these games, Desmond, and some random descendant. Desmond's plotline serves as a pointless frame in which, honestly, if ditched could improve the games ten fold. An argument could be made that the cuts to modern day from the first Assassin's Creed were to help the pacing and give players respite from the action. Except there isn't much action. The parkour movement gets stale after you realize that all you're doing is holding a button down with an additional button if you want to move faster. The missions are identical: kill this bad dude and escape the guards. The extras are all scavenger hunts that aren't remotely interesting because, get this, to do find stuff you have to hold a button down for an extended amount of time. It's a boring sandwich with slightly less boring meat (or vegetables if you're awful). 

In III, you again play as Desmond and, get this, some rad English Assassin named Haytham who's gotta take some targets out in the Colonies. And he's pretty alright. It might be the accent, but he's already a load better than Altair and an improvement over the rich boy Assassin of AC II. He's interesting. He's got a three-corner hat. He hooks up with a Native American lady. He turns out to be a Templar. Damn, didn't see that one coming. And I don't mean that in the good way. If there's anything I learned from my college creative writing classes (except that I don't like a lot of creative writing students), it's that you can't be coy with your readers, and Ubisoft, the first few hours of your game is a hot mess of coy sauce. It's at that point that you start playing as his European-Mohawk offspring, Connor. And it's at that point I stopped.

Nothing against playing as that character (except that he's a kid and one of your training missions is a game of hide and seek), but it's then when everything takes a dive. One of the characters you associated with as Haytham is a premium buttpipe, but only after you encounter him as Connor. Maybe the last few years corrupted him, but it's still a stark contrast to what we saw of him pre-Connor. 

I felt burned. Duped. Like I'd been played with a plot line sleight of hand that had picked my precious time from my back pocket. The game's dull framing narrative was bad enough, but then they took away a protagonist I actually enjoyed playing as. Maybe Connor would grow on me if I kept playing, but I don't have it in me to give the game another chance. Assassin's Creed IV comes out near the end of October. It's got pirates, and from what I've read Desmond is dead at the end of III so that's a vast improvement. 

I'm looking forward to not finishing it.