Assassin’s Screed
The world is going to shit, and it has been for a while. Right wing nationalism is coming home for many countries, and openly fascist politicians are becoming a disturbing norm even for countries that previously kept their oppressive impulses to foreign countries with right wing coups they could back to further the military industrial complex. Or fruit companies. On top of that, the world is metaphorically on fire (and California is literally on fire), with climate disasters creating new problems, like the increase of refugees from drought and hurricane afflicted lands to the lands where the streets are said to be paved with gold.
It’s a time when even just saying “maybe all this authoritarianism is bad” is pretty revolutionary, and that makes it a perfect time to talk about the Assassin’s Creed franchise, whose primary conflict can be summed up as “authoritarianism is bad”. Or maybe it’s a perfect time because another year has gone by without me playing the newest entries and I want to go over them all again. After all, I did buy a bundle six decades ago back in January, and I only played the pirate one.
First released in 2007, the franchise has been going strong for eleven years now, and has something like twice that many releases, even limiting it to just video games. There will probably be a new game by the time I’m done going over them. Beyond the games, there are novelizations of each one, spin off novels of characters from outside the games, comic books where major plot threads from the games are tied up with little fanfare, and an absolutely terrible movie. It’s Ubisoft’s biggest tentpole franchise, and in many ways has shaped the landscape of both that company and gaming as a whole. Which hasn’t always been a good thing, unless you like climbing towers and collecting a billion pointless knicknacks.
There are a billion videos on Youtube explaining the lore and history, as well as useful tips and series conspiracy theories, and an entire wiki dedicated to collecting and categorizing the entirety of the series, but unlike Dark Souls or even Fallout, the series hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention for the actual themes and messages. That’s probably because the series is a disjointed mess that often seems to contradict itself and undercut it’s themes at every turn in an effort to be as broadly marketable as possible, but I mean the same could be said of Call of Duty and people still subject that franchise to media analysis.
This will be the first in a [vague mumbling] part series that attempts to give each game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise the full Noah Gervais treatment, going over what the individual games try to say about both the real world and their own setting, the political views they seem to espouse, and how the Assassins and their rivals the Templars are presented to the audience. And because as the series goes on it becomes more and more of a big tentpole game that has a grand meaningful story but also needs to serve as a six hundred hour content delivery system, we’re going to go over all the ways the franchise contradicts itself and how the gameplay serve the marketing more than the story itself.
And there’s no better place to start than the original:
Released in 2007, at a time when September 11th and other Islamic terrorist attacks like the Madrid bombings were still fresh in the minds of Western society, Assassin’s Creed stood out to me even in high school as being something unique, with the way that it focused on the Middle East during the height of the Crusades, even featuring an Arab protagonist. It was a time when South Park was being censored from showing the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by Comedy Central because even well before Charlie Hebdo there was a fear of radical Muslims retaliating for the offense.
Islamophobia and fearmongering about terrorism never really went away, but it was certainly at more of a high point in the years of the Bush presidency, after 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act, than at any other period. And then here comes this game that portrays Christians as invaders, and shows an Arab — though not Muslim — protagonist. It seemed radical to me, though I can’t say I recall much commotion about it. I’ve had one member of Ubisoft’s staff say that it’s different because they’re a French company, but even so, the creators certainly felt the need to put a disclaimer at the beginning of their work:
It’s a message that would show up at the beginning of every single Assassin’s Creed game until Syndicate changed it to include the more topical gender identity disclaimer.
A Trip Down Memory Lane
The story of the first game has you playing as Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, the highest ranked member of the Assassin brotherhood as he reclaims his honour after defying the titular Assassin’s Creed and being stripped of his rank and it’s benefits. Except that you don’t.
The story of the first game has you playing Desmond Miles, a bartender who was captured by the mysterious agents of a global megacorp and forced into The Animus, a machine that lets him experience the memories of his ancient ancestors. Abstergo is looking for something, and the best way for them to find it is to go directly to the source: The master Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. Desmond is an Assassin himself, raised in a desert commune by paranoid parents that he escaped from several years ago, living off grid save for his motorcycle license. And somewhere down the line, Desmond is related to an Arab Assassin from the Crusades. There’s an explanation for how the Animus works, involving genetic memories and instinct, but in the end, this scifi is pillow soft.
It’s an intriguing set up, and while it’s hard to call the science fiction elements of the franchise a “twist” when they’re so front loaded, in the first game at least they’re downright subtle, compared to later games where immortal precursors are trying to download Etruscan gods into your brain and the Shroud of Turin is being used to revive clones. That little hint of science fiction primes the audience for some of the later twists. Throughout other games, we learn more about the apples in Desmond’s family tree, and the modern day plot expands and is handled in different ways by different games in the series, but for now we play as Desmond. Desmond plays as Altair. So we play as Altair.
The game proper begins with Altair, Kadar, and Malik dispatched to the secret tunnels beneath Solomon’s Temple to stop the Crusader Robert de Sable from obtaining a treasure that’s held in the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones style. Within seconds of the very first cutscene after the tutorial, Altair violently grabs an old man, kicks him to his knees, and stabs him in the throat with a hidden blade: a retractable stiletto hidden along the bottom of a gauntlet, the signature weapon of the Assassin Brotherhood. Kadar is impressed, but Malik chastises Altair, who responds with egotism. Malik would have followed the Creed, like they’re supposed to.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, Altair shoots back. This is the maxim that forms the backbone of the franchise, ostensibly, and certainly for this first game. At the beginning, Altair is brash and confident, a swaggering jackass who has no problem deciding to take an innocent life simply because he might draw attention to them and alert the guards. When he cites the maxim of the Creed, he does it in the same way a rebellious teenager views anarchism: “Fuck you, I do what I want”.
It’s that attitude that gets Altair into trouble when he makes a head on attack to kill Robert de Sable and take the treasure. He’s beaten, cut off from his allies, and left to run home with his tail between his legs. In the end, Robert attacks Masyaf, Kadar is killed, and Malik loses his arm. But it’s okay, he brought back the treasure where Altair failed, and the invading Crusaders are beat back.
Altair has still broken damned near every rule the Assassins have, and a few that weren’t in the book but probably should have been. Al Mualim, the leader of the Assassins, has him held down and stabs him. When Altair wakes up, he’s alive and unharmed, but stripped of weapons and titles. Back down to square one, a new man. If he wants to earn his spot at the top back, he’ll have to kill to get it. Nine men need to die, and Altair is the only man for the job.
The Crunch
It’s a pretty good set up. Nine targets, broken up into little chunks of two or three at a time. Each time you get a little bit of choice in which target you want to go for first, with each target in a sequence being in a different of the three main cities: Damascus, with a sandy brown filter that makes it look like a 00s era Call of Duty game, Acre, pale and grey-blue like Silent Hill or an episode of CSI New York, and Jerusalem, tinted with the same sickly green that so many scenes in The Matrix have. In between the memory sequences, Desmond has a chance to learn some of the meta-story from Lucy and Vidic, and then goes to sleep.
The game takes place over only a week in the real world, with Desmond needing to properly “Synchronize” with his ancestor by living multiple memories before the Animus can just show the memory they want. It’s a neat excuse. The Synchronization is also treated as your health, and living as your ancestor lived restores health, while doing the things they never did takes off from your sync ratio.
It’s a cool metaphor, but it does get stretched a little thin. For one, we see in cutscenes that Altair both has killed civilians and has been hit by enemy attacks. But if we take what we’re told seriously, after the incident at Solomon’s Temple, Altair was a master assassin who never once was hit by an enemy sword. Unfortunately this was 2007 and the mechanics were still being worked out, so in actuality you will be hit with a sword. A lot.
At Assassin’s Creed’s mechanical core is the “Puppeteer System”. Each of Altair’s limbs is controlled by a separate button. Head for shifting into first person or using Eagle Vision, an almost entirely pointless mechanic that functions as a precursor to Detective Vision or Survival Senses, or one of a dozen other features modern games have adopted to allow a player to have heightened awareness of what’s happening on screen and what the enemies are doing. Except that here the Eagle Vision requires the player to not only be standing completely still, but also to have full synchronization. It highlights assassination targets, but almost all of them are well designed and stand out from both guards and civilians, even when they manage to flee into crowds. The Weapon Hand button does combat, or assassinations. The offhand button gently moves people aside, or full on tackles them, or grabs on ledges as you fall. The Feet button blends into crowds, or allows you to run and jump and freerun across rooftops. The different modes are shifted to with the High Profile button, letting you change from attempting to be part of the crowd with fleeing and tackling everyone in your way as you leap across buildings. At its core it’s a good concept and fairly well done. It’s almost a shame that later games muddled the concept and did away with it. Even if the mechanics were in a clunky, early stage.
Early on, you have to fight or flee from any enemies you manage to anger — an event that seems almost entirely up to the winds of chance — because being stripped of his rank means that much like Other M’s Samus Aran, Altair refuses to use techniques that he already knows until he’s been given permission, and that means no using the counter kill technique that makes combat in the middle game not only easy but somewhat satisfying. Later on, in the last Memory Sequence or three, you have to fight because the counter kill no longer actually kills opponents, it simply knocks them down. There’s no actual change to the type of guard you come across, they simply react differently to being attacked.
I’ve seen the argument from at least one other player that the combat in the game is intentionally bad, comparing it to Silent Hill 2, but honestly when looking at other mechanics like the climbing and freerunning, which were still new and untested at this point, in all likelihood they weren’t intentionally bad, simply bad. Half the time I feel like a badass as I counterkill everyone, but other times I feel like I’m doing the exact same thing and getting my face bashed in with a sword. In training I can get a perfect combo kill, but out in the main game I barely even got one by accident.
Even after ten or twelve hours I have no idea what the different weapons actually accomplish, except that the short blade doesn’t do nearly enough damage for it to be worthwhile and yet getting Altair to actually throw a knife in combat never seems to work until you’ve just killed the last enemy, in which case he’ll feel the need to fling a celebratory knife into a crowd of terrified pedestrians. The hidden blade is able to instantly kill anyone with a counter, but actually managing to do it is more a leap of faith than jumping twelve stories from a viewpoint into a pile of hay. It’s a matter of very precise timing. Meanwhile the sword is the most uninteresting and of course most useful tool in Altair’s arsenal, and the one the game defaults to any time you initiate combat, and when properly used results in Altair effortlessly shish kebabing enemies, or brutally breaking their limbs with his sword before delivering a killing blow. Every successful attack has the sound of a twig wrapped in bacon being splintered. It’s very satisfying.
Unfortunately the satisfaction is short lived, as eventually enemies come in such massive waves that it’s impossible to flee or deal with them. More often than not, you’ll find yourself finishing one of the “Save the Citizen” side missions — which quickly become busywork, even if they do often open up useful chase breaking Vigilantes who grapple guards, or religious Scholars with white robes that Altair can hide among — only for more guards to show up at the scene of the massacre and fight you before you’ve even had a chance to check on the citizen you just saved. Counter”kills” too become a thing of the past, as too often in the late game a properly performed counter only seems to result in Altair gut punching the enemy and sending them to the ground. When ganged up on by twelve enemies or so, the AI seems to have trouble contemplating who will make the first move. It makes for a tense situation the first few times, but after that it becomes tedium, as the player has to go on the offensive and break the defenses of all the enemies instead of waiting for them to attack him.
Many of the later missions involve fighting the controls to manage your assassinations, as well as dealing with the everpresent drunks and lunatics who seem to be everywhere in Acre and Jerusalem after Altair accidentally dooms them to a life on the streets. They’re especially present all throughout the docks of Acre, an area also covered in water. The Animus software can’t handle water, and falling into it instantly desynchronizes Desmond as if he were a platform character falling into a hole. Taking the more circuitous route along the boats and poles means fighting with the freerunning controls, which aren’t much better.
I will admit that much of the problems I had with controls might have come from the fact that I was forced to play with a keyboard. Not a mouse and keyboard, no, a keyboard. Tabbing out of the game once would forever lock me into playing windowed mode, and using a mouse meant clicking outside the window. I had to set the shift key to high profile, WASD to movement, and NUM8456 as the puppeteer system and the arrow keys as camera movement. It was far from a perfect port, and the controls, coupled with the lack of subtitles, made playing this game far more frustrating than I’d have liked. But then again, even eleven years ago I don’t exactly remember Altair being so graceful.
One of the smoothest parts of the game is definitely climbing. The way Altair’s hands move can sometimes be a little QWOPish as hands snap to where they need to with no respect to realistic comfort, and sometimes he just gets ‘caught’ on ledges where he refuses to move to a handhold that isn’t directly above him (while other times he effortlessly glides at diagonals). Overall, though, it’s an amazing experience climbing on every structure in the Holy Land and looking out at the sprawling city below you. This was the first of the tower climbing games that have come to dominate Ubisoft’s catalogue, and it’s something that spread out even to the Zelda franchise. None of the towers in Assassin’s Creed — both the first game and perhaps even the entire series — are as interesting and creative as what Breath of the Wild features, with most being a simple matter of moving around the tower until you can move up, with only one or two requiring you jump from nearby buildings, but once you reach the top, the view is worth it. Complete enough towers, and other busywork, and Desmond will be able to Synchronize with his ancestor better, represented with a larger health bar.
And oh boy is there a lot of busywork. Each area has a handful of flags to find, with some cities having two or three different kinds of flags, and even the sprawling mazelike and terrible ‘world’ map has flags to find. The flags don’t actually do anything, other than give you things to hunt for, but that hoarder part of my brain kept lighting up whenever I saw one, so even though I know I’ll never sit down with a guide to find all 30 or 100 of each kind, I was still making time during the final boss to go collect a busywork flag. Much like the towers, this is something that would only get worse in other Ubisoft games, and especially other Assassin’s Creed games, where multiple collectibles feature.
I’ve probably spent far more time than I should complaining about the controls of the game, but in a lot of ways they really do hamper the experience of being the Master Assassin. The thrill of freerunning is undercut when Altair leaps out into the open air instead of to the building you’d thought you were aiming for. And while there are multiple beams, planks, and overhangs to make traversal on the rooftops — one of the most liberating parts of the game — mostly viable, there are also so many archer guards and open thoroughfares that it can be incredibly frustrating getting across the city. Quickly going up the buildings is incredibly fun. Quickly going down them is something the franchise struggles with for a while. Thankfully Altair can take a fall, but that horrible BWAMP sound that happens whenever you take falling damage is forever more terrifying than losing a single block of health out of twenty has any right to be.
The game is fun. But after eleven years of progression in these mechanics, I’m a little let down going back to the original. Of course, in later years the series certainly does swing a bit too far in the other direction when it comes to the story told by gameplay and the story told by dialogue.
The Story
After a short introductory mission to teach the player the basics of the Investigation phase, players are sent out in the world to Damascus to deal with the first of the nine supposedly evil men on Al Mualim’s list.
I’ll try not to make too many statements about later games without first refreshing my mind on them, but these sequences where Altair, demoted back to grunt, has to do his own legwork, are simultaneously one of the most repetitive aspects of the first game that it was right to get rid of, as well as one of the more interesting and core features of the game that later entries in the franchise are lesser for not having.
Each Memory Sequence in this section presents Altair with a handful of targets (one, two, three, two, one) and a choice of which ones to strike first. In the first two missions, he has to manually ride through the countryside of an unusually canyon filled Holy Land, between the cities of Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem. Once there, you’ll generally need to get into a fight and murder whoever is bothering the requisite old man, and once you’ve saved him, a group of Scholars will be created, who can help get you passed the gate guards (or you could fight twelve people when you only have five health or so and haven’t unlocked the counterkill ability). Inside the city, you find the first viewpoint tower, climb it, and unlock one section of the map as well as the location of the Assassin’s Bureau building.
At the bureau building, one of the men there will discuss the target with Altair, and tell him where to find information around the city. The game could probably do a better job of diegetically allowing the player to find information to help them plan their Assassination, with the rafiq directing you to different city landmarks and you having to actually walk among the people to find the Investigation missions.
Instead, you go climb more of the viewpoints, unlock more of the map, and then go to whatever Investigation mission is located on the maps. Occasionally you might need to get into a guarded part of the map, but that can usually be accomplished by murdering some guards hassling a citizen to create Scholars who will allow you to walk through guard stops, running across the rooftops, or judicious application of murder on the guards in your way.
The Investigation missions themselves vary greatly in both quality and interest. The easiest type of mission is the eavesdropping missions, where all Altair has to do is sit on a bench, lock onto the target, use the “Head” button to zoom in, and sit there quietly listening to two or occasionally three people discussing some kind of plan or observation that they usually wouldn’t want someone else to overhear. It’s the easiest mission, and often the one that gives the most interesting information, but it’s also completely boring, and I’m once again spoiled by other entries in the franchise where eavesdropping is interesting in its own right, even if it can often be just as easy.
Next are the pickpocketing missions, where Altair overhears two or three people discussing secret plans, but this time he has to tail one of them and use the “Offhand” button behind them without being seen to grab whatever they had in their pocket. Getting caught before pickpocketing them means having to leave the area to reinitialize, but once you’ve got the MacGuffin you could stand there while they look around in frustration and they’ll never call the guards or retaliate.
The last of the actually somewhat fun investigations, and the least fun of them, involves finding a crier shouting out propaganda for whoever the assassination target is, waiting for them to finish, and then following them into a back alley to beat them. In a game with better combat, it could be pretty interesting, but fisticuffs in the first game amount to blocking, getting punched, and then throwing a punch before going back to blocking. Thankfully no one takes more than three or four hits to surrender. While the “interrogation” missions where Altair brutally beats people are mechanically tedious, they are also one of the missions that consistently gives the most interesting information, both from whatever lies the propagandist is spreading and from the interrogation itself, where they spill the truth, only for Altair to stab them in the gut regardless (even though at least one of them was definitely an innocent man forced into the position).
There are three interesting Investigation mission types where Altair does his own legwork. Unfortunately it requires two and later three of six Investigation missions to get the rafiq to sign off on your murder and give you a feather to stain with your target’s blood. The rest of the miscellaneous missions all involve doing errands for stray informants. These include trashing merchant stalls by shoving people into them, doing a race across town, doing a race to pick up busywork flags, escorting the informant across town as guards attack, murdering guards on foot, murdering guards on rooftops, murdering guards with a time limit, and generally just frustrating things that aren’t worth doing half the time.
It would be fine if the Informant missions gave you interesting information, but all too often all they do is inform you of broken walls or missing guards or other things that are ostensibly marked on the map, except that the map is nothing. The game’s minimap contains nothing other than a compass and the direction of whatever location is selected or nearby, and as far as I can tell there’s never a point where the assassination target’s escape routes are ever marked on your map. It’s all abstracted as evidence Altair collects in order to prove he’s ready to obtain the feather, and no matter which information Altair does or doesn’t pick up, once he’s gotten two (later three) points of data, he’ll tell the bureau’s rafiq the same information as if he picked it up from the crowds.
Overall the investigation missions are incredibly repetitive and over half of them are frustrating and for me at least incredibly unfun, especially when you end up with the corpse of a target from an Informant Assassination Challenge that won’t seem to go away, so you have the target investigating his own corpse and becoming violently threatened by your very existence. But even when the information gained amounts to “there’s a hole in the wall that you could use to get passed guards instead of simply going over the wall”, what these tedious busywork missions bring to the table is a chance to better understand the people whose lives you take simply because of the way that people talk about them behind their backs.
Once you’ve completed the requisite number of busywork missions, Altair reports back to the bureau to tell the rafiq what he learned. The information is always the same each time, regardless of whether or not Altair actually learned it or if you did two Informant missions and only learned a guard schedule and back entrance. The rafiq will then present him with a feather, and Altair is free to run across town and commit political terrorism in broad daylight. Every one of the Assassination targets has a grand set piece cutscene setting them up, usually to make them seem incredibly reprehensible, and the player is given a chance to plan their murder, as well as the escape. Unfortunately in my experience the murder always tended to result in some kind of sword fight with my target and six guards, which certainly isn’t the “dramatic leap onto a man’s throat followed by a hectic rooftop chase, leading to a smug Altair blending into a crowd of priests” that the eyecatch trailer promises. Once you do finally have a target’s blood on your hands, the scene transitions to the Memory Corridor, the same cyberspace white room that makes up the loading sequences, and the… data ghost(?) of the target gets to reveal the truth of what they were doing, and why. I haven’t played the entire series of over a dozen games, and I’ve never read any of the novels or comics, but as far as I’m aware there’s never an explanation given for these sequences, and honestly I’m okay with that. Maybe it’s the Animus filling in the blanks with incredibly pivotal and important moments in the ancestor’s life that in their actual memories weren’t in the often hectic and combative moments that they often are in playthrough. Maybe like Eagle Vision it’s just a trait of the mysterious precursors. It only adds to the aesthetic and style of the series. It sits in a weird place where you can’t tell if it’s supernatural or highly advanced technology.
In the first game more than any of the others, Assassin’s Creed is a game about hearing what everyone in the city has to say about someone, then stabbing them in the throat to hear their side of the story. And everyone’s story is interesting. Everyone, even the guy who really is just in it to flex, is a deeper character than you first assume. Okay, maybe not the guy who really is just in it to flex. He’s pretty simple.
In some ways, it’s hard to say just what Assassin’s Creed’s story really is. A lot of things happen, but there isn’t really one thematic thread to grab hold of. It often feels like it wants there to be, but in many ways the final twists of the story undercut that.
Altair is the greatest assassin, we’re told. But what we’re shown is a man who breaks the rules at every step, and who confidently walks up to an opponent and gets his ass handed to him almost immediately. The rest of the story is all about him learning his lesson and growing beyond that, but none of the nine targets, the meat of the game, really teach him any lessons, other than to question all of the things he’s been taught in life, which is in direct contrast to his need to obey the authority of his Master. An obedience thrown out the window when he has to ride for Arsuf and stop Robert de Sable from using the numerous murders Altair committed to unite Saracen and Crusader in much the same way that Ozymandius used a giant fake space squid to unite the US and Soviets.
Desmond’s story on the other hand is far more important narratively. After all, Altair’s story happened in 1191, while Desmond’s is happening in 2012 (as would be revealed in later games). His has immediate weight and importance to what would become the series’ overall plot, but throughout it all he does is provide worldbuilding, as well as a few bits of foreshadowing, like Vidic telling him that all the great technological discoveries of the last century that the Templars have provided the world through companies like Abstergo are all gifts from “Those Who Came Before”.
I don’t say these because either story is necessarily bad, but while playing the game the change of attitude from Altair — and more importantly from Malik — felt pretty striking. The majority of the conversations in the game come from the Desmond sequences, and when Altair speaks with an Assassination target in the Memory Corridor, very little of it really feels like it applies to Altair’s growth as a character. Because he’s so taciturn, and because there are only about fifteen characters with meaningful dialogue — The Nine Templars, Al Mualim, Maria, the two unnamed Rafiqs, Malik, and Altair himself — so much of it is internal. The voice acting, which is very good for the time, and the graphics, which are very good for their time, have a lot of work to do. And ultimately while the story is very good, I’m not sure that they do all that good a job of selling Altair’s personal growth through murdering people with good intentions and bad motives.
The Templars are the primary motivation for Altair’s growth, and it’s worth looking at them individually.
Tamir
The first Assassination target after the introduction to the Investigation and Assassination mechanics, Tamir is a weapon merchant in the city of Damascus. He finances the war in the Holy Land, and clearly wants the war to continue, according to the scuttlebutt. He may even be financing the other side.
When Altair finally tracks him down in the busy Souk Al-Silaah, Tamir is angrily discussing a weapons deal with another man, the largest deal he’s ever made. Tamir spends the entire meeting browbeating the man, who pleads forgiveness and asks for more time to complete the weapons order. Tamir pulls out a knife in a rage and slashes the man, whose cries of pain and begging for mercy is ignored by the watching crowd. He harasses and abuses one of his subordinates, and finally murders him violently and throws his body into a reflecting pool. Then he demands everyone get back to work.
After a knife to the throat, he tells Altair that he was a target of assassination for a reason, and that he’s part of a larger brotherhood, with an ultimately noble goal, though as of yet the player isn’t privy to the specifics. He’s clearly a shitty guy, but his conviction and motives are surprising, considering he was assumed to be in it for the money. He’s the first hint at something larger, though neither the player nor Altair know what.
Talal
Presented as a slaver, Talal is feared among the people of Jerusalem for taking people off of the streets. He bribes the guards and they turn the other way as he kidnaps the poor and destitute, taking them to never be seen again. He tricks Altair into becoming trapped in a warehouse, showing the people in cages that beg for help. Talal claims that he’s helping the people, and that he was once helped in a similar way, but the people he’s kidnapped don’t seem to see it that way, and Altair rejects him. His men are fanatically devoted, though, and throw their lives away to protect Talal.
Upon his death, Talal points out that all of the people he’s taken are beggars, whores, lepers, and other sick and ill people who can’t help themselves. They’re people who God has abandoned. Talal took them not for slavery, but to save them, and he claims Altair damned them all.
Garnier de Naplouse
Garnier de Naplouse is the other side of the coin, and one of the two strongest members of the Templars. Grand Master of the Knights Hospitalier in Acre, he’s the man on the other end of Talal’s “slave” shipment, though because the Garnier and Talal can be faced in any order (and indeed the DNA Memory Sequence places Garnier first), the game doesn’t make this explicit quite yet. He runs a hospital in the poor district, and performs cruel experiments on his patients, who wander the courtyard in dirty rags, many babbling incoherently.
When Altair enters the hospital, a man tries to flee, shirtless and bruised. The guards catch him and beat him, though when Garnier catches up with them he chastises them for their violence. He changes his tune when the man shouts that Garnier looks to steal men’s souls, and that he won’t stop until the entire world bows to him. He claims he’ll run away again. So Garnier tells the guards to break both of his legs. Even with 2007 era graphics, a floppy leg ragdoll ignoring the way knees usually bend is pretty effective.
When he’s killed, Garnier’s main concern is what will happen to his patients, whom he calls his children. All the men that act as his guards were once his patients, and now they’re devoted to him, loyal, and of sound mind. They were taken from sewers and gutters and prisons and were once madmen. And now they’ll be madmen again thanks to Altair. And he’s not wrong. In later Memory Sequences, Jerusalem and Acre both have far more of the beggar women and lunatics and drunks.
Talal and Garnier are the greatest example of the Templar’s main ideology. They ultimately want a better world, and they even help people, but they help them in a paternalistic and controlling fashion. They don’t work with the people, they use them.
Majd Addin
Majd is a character that stands out among the crowd of Templars. All of them have noble motives, but not Majd Addin. He’s in it for the power. He rules Jerusalem, having taken up the position for himself by killing off anyone else who might be appointed while Saladin is off fighting the Crusaders, and he rules with an iron fist. Altair assassinates him in the middle of an execution ceremony, and Majd certainly plays up the “ceremony” aspect. He comes out like a wrestler, raising his arms to shouts and cheers. Many people in the city fear him, but others, the ones who gather at these ceremonies, they want blood. They want the Bad People™ to be done away with. Majd Addin is a perfect Heel, and he knows it. He revels in it.
So when Altair kills him, and talks to him in liminal space between life and death, he doesn’t lament his unfinished work, or worry about what will happen to the people he believes he’s helped. He just misses the power. That feeling of killing people, taking their lives into his hands. He reveled in it, and he helped the Templars control Jerusalem because he wanted that power. “Dissident voices cut deep as steel”. People who criticize the rule of Majd Addin — and if their plan had gone well, the Templars proper — needed to be taken out.
He’s nothing unique in the real world. Most heads of state, most leaders, fear criticism more than anything else. There are hundreds of examples of politicians criminalizing dissidents, or even people they simply personally don’t like. America has a long history of disappearing activists (a history that no doubt continues today with the rather convenient suicides and “accidental” deaths of Ferguson activists). Stalin sent his daughter’s Jewish boyfriend to gulag. Majd himself sentences a woman to death on the charge of prostitution, though she tells the crowd that she’s on the platform not because she sleeps with other men, but because the man she wouldn’t sleep with is Majd himself. Paternalism and “tough love” aren’t unique either, but the power hungry Majd Addin who kills anyone who criticizes his reign somewhat grounds the other Templars, who have supervillain goals and yet see themselves as saviors.
William of Montferrat
Regent of Acre while Richard the Lionhearted is away, everyone believes that William plans to kill Richard and give Acre to his son Conrad. In his introduction, he argues with Richard before the king returns to the front lines of the Crusades, and behind his liege’s back he claims that men like him are unfit for “the new world”.
When Altair takes his life, though, he denies the accusation. He isn’t planning to give his son the city, it belongs to its people. This is a downright anarchist proposition, but people don’t tend to lie in the Memory Corridor. William conscripted men not to make them his soldiers, but to give them the discipline that they’ll need in the new world. And considering he’d previously execute two men for whoring and gambling, clearly it was a harsh discipline he taught.
Much like Garnier, William is another example of the Templars using extreme authoritarianism to push forward their goals. They force the people to grow, using cruel methods to achieve benevolent means.
Abu’l Naqoud
The Merchant King of Damascus, the de facto ruler while Saladin is away, is without a doubt my favourite of the Assassination targets, and the one that I can’t entirely blame. Richest man in all of Damascus, he stages regular celebrations, inviting people into his home to enjoy his food and entertainment. The people hate him, though, and he hates them as well. He fears them, and only comes out during these celebrations, to look down on the people.
When we see him at the celebration, looking down on the crowd of wealthy merchants, we get a few implications of why he’s so reviled by the people. He’s hideous, for one, fat and covered in boils and warts on his face. His fountains pour wine, and he invites the people to drink, and as they do he mocks them, and the way they’re so willing to finance a war, the way they hate the English, and the way the English hate them. He condemns religion, and the way they all talk behind his back and call him an abomination and judge him. From the way that he caresses his guard’s shoulder and upper arm, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t just talking about his face, either. Abu’l is queer, and his society rejects him. He’s a queer man caught up in a world at war over religions that both hate him, and forced to deal with people who think that he’s a gross pervert. As a gross fat pervert queer myself, it’s relatable.
So is the fact that he poisoned the wine and orders his guards to murder anyone who tries to run away. Naqoud claims to have dedicated himself to something better than the religious squabbles over the Holy Land and it’s riches. He wants to bring peace to the Holy Land, and you can’t really blame him for murdering a bunch of rich cis hets. Even when he puts a sharp bit of metal in Abu’l’s throat, Altair’s first words are consoling, telling him that the people’s words can’t harm him anymore.
At first he thinks that Abu’l Naqoud was doing what he did, stealing money from the people of Damascus, because he wanted vengeance, but as he dies the man pleads his conscience. He couldn’t bear to finance a Holy War in service of a God that hates him, calls him an abomination.
I’m not even from that religious and queer hating a family, and certainly not from a society embroiled in a Holy War, but even I’ve been called an abomination and seen the hate from Christian religious groups in my society. Abu’l Naqoud is my favourite character in Assassin’s Creed and it is 100% because he’s just so hashtag relatable in his motivations. Even if the organization he worked with sought to rule through oppression and mind control.
Jubair al-Hakim
Billed as Saladin’s chief scholar, Jubair created a cult based around the destruction of the written word, claiming that it’s nothing but lies, and can’t be trusted. They’ve been collecting books and other writings, and when Altair comes across his men throwing books onto a pyre, Jubair throws one of his own men onto a bonfire, saying that he can burn with the books. The rest of his men go through the city, collecting the written word to be brought back and burned. I feel like this plotline was inspired by historical book burnings, and even the bonfire of the vanities, where the friar Girolamo Savaronola had objects that might tempt people to “sin” burned. Savaronola and his Italian bonfires would later be revisited by Assassin’s Creed in a DLC for the second game. Here it feels very out of place.
While I admittedly don’t know much about Levantine literacy in 1191, but this was a time period before the invention of movable type. It’s not like you could go harass people into giving you their books, they wouldn’t have had books because binding them would have been expensive, and creating them would require copying manuscripts. Nobles might have them, but they would be few and far between. The sequence with Jubair is mechanically interesting, though. The man wears the same robes as all of his followers (though with broader gold trim and pouches at his hip), and while the player is normally given a magically accurate compass that points to targets, instead it points to all of the cult members. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that he’s the furthest one away, and you can make a beeline straight for him, but it’s interesting in theory. His followers don’t even have a fake Memory Corridor sequence.
Upon his death, Jubair makes an argument in favour of atheism, and against the religious texts that inspire Saladin and Richard, something of a twist on the typical reasons for burning literature, which at least here in the States is primarily because it competes with the dominant religion, as opposed to simply because the text can inspire religious fervor at all. Much like Majd Addin, Jubair sought to control society by keeping down dissent, but where Majd would silence the shouting voices, Jubair and his Illuminated would take away the things that encourage rebellion in the first place.
Sibrand
Rightfully paranoid after seven of his fellow conspirators have been murdered by a figure in hooded white robes, Sibrand, Grand Master of the Knights Teutonic, has been commandeering boats in the Acre docks and conscripting sailors. He lashes out at everyone and when Altair tracks him down, he harrasses a Scholar, claiming that he’s an Assassin in disguise. No amount of pleading from the Scholar works, and in front of everyone, Sibrand murders the old man before shouting at the gawkers to get back to work. He then heads off to his personal boat and hides, shouting at the air and threatening an Assassin he doesn’t actually know is there, firing arrows blindly.
When he’s finally killed, Sibrand reveals that the reason he’s so afraid of Altair’s blade is that nothing awaits him after death, only oblivion. It’s actually interesting because some of the men, seemed to welcome death. Garnier even calls it “the endless dream”, and says that he can finally rest. Sibrand reveals that his part of the plot was to use the ships he commandeered to blockade the port, and keep ships from arriving from Europe once the Templars had freed the Holy Land from both Saracen and Christian control. From the tyranny of faith, he says.
Maria Thorpe
[Long, drawn out sigh]
[shorter sigh]
[Longer sigh…]
Maria isn’t a character in Assassin’s Creed. She’s somehow even less of a character in Assassin’s Creed II. She becomes a slight character in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Maria doesn’t get a name in Assassin’s Creed. She gets a name in Assassin’s Creed II, but only if you play the Playstation 3 version and only if you connect it to the PSP game Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines (a game I’m not sure whether or not to go over, yet), the spin off game for the PSP that even if you’re a fan of the series, you’re probably only hearing about just now. Maria gets to be a character in that game, which takes place a year after the events of Assassin’s Creed, and she gets to be a character. I don’t know if she gets to be a good character, but at least she gets a name. She’s also fleshed out in the novelizations by Oliver Bowden that tell the story of Altair’s life. Her page on the Assassin’s Creed wiki is a Featured Article, but you could be forgiven for forgetting about her entirely, since she goes unnamed in the first game, and has no lines in the second, though you do get to see the conception of her child.
In this game, though, she’s a body double for Robert de Sable. Though the rumours spread that he was in Jerusalem, and that the Crusader came in peace with gifts to see come to the burial of Majd Addin, Robert left a decoy in his place. After her ambush at the cemetery failed, Altair refused to kill Maria — here simply an unnamed woman with lines and her own character model — because she wasn’t on his list.
Maybe I will play Bloodlines, if only to learn more about Maria other than from a Wiki page.
Robert de Sable
Robert’s name is fun to say, with that French accent, “Rowber de sah-bluh”. But he’s kind of a bastard. Altair first encounters him in the beginning of the game, stealing the Ark of the Covenant. He seems just as cocky as Altair, and soundly defeats him. Throughout the rest of the game he’s treated as a looming threat, the final notch on Altair’s belt once he’s defeated the other Templars.
Altair spends the entire game murdering his compatriots, and after defeating his decoy, she reveals his back up plan: To unite the Crusaders and Saracens against the Assassins. After all, Altair has spilled blood on both sides of the war, and both Saladin and Richard have plenty of reason to fear the Assassins. And so, Altair rides to Arsuf to stop him, and warns Richard that his lieutenant aims to betray him, and was part of an elaborate conspiracy to murder him and take control of the Holy Land.
Richard gives Altair a trial by combat, and will believe him if he can defeat Robert in single combat. And by single combat I mean literally fighting ten men at first. I guess this is because if you’ve been paying attention instead of brute forcing your way through the game like I did, it’s assumed that you can easily tear through ten end game level soldiers before moving on to a boss fight in a game where you’re supposed to avoid actually fighting the bosses. And when Robert is defeated, bleeding out in your arms…
He reveals what many had already begun to suspect: That Al Mualim was the mastermind behind it all, or at least a member of the Templars who found the Piece of Eden and schemed to use it. Where Richard and his men had noble intentions, they sought to govern collectively, while Al Mualim couldn’t share power, and so he sent Altair to murder them all, and now only Altair and the Old Man know the secret, and the best way for two men to keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
Al Mualim
Aside from Altair, Al Mualim is the character we see the most. He guides Altair, and tries to shape him throughout the game. He sets Altair on his journey, and it’s through conversations with him after every defeated Templar that Altair grows. At the beginning of the game, he shows himself to be cruel and uncompromising, and demotes Altair even after he chases off the invading Crusaders. He attempts to control the Holy Land through fear and intimidation, and has his men perform mock suicides to demonstrate to the invaders the loyalty the Brotherhood has for him. When a man betrays him, he executes him, claiming that some men have corrupted wills and can’t be reasoned with, so they must be destroyed. That last one goes well beyond him, and is the guiding principle of the Assassins as a whole.
When Altair is demoted, Al Mualim stages a mock execution, ‘killing’ Altair and making him think that he’s dead, only for him to wake up still alive. Later in the game when Altair returns from killing Garnier, he questions the loyalty of the man’s followers, and the way that enough patients mourned the cruel doctor that it gave him pause. Al Mualim offers the suggestion that Garnier drugged the men and had them awake in a paradise garden, and that having been shown these pleasures and lain with the beautiful women that they’d be fanatically devoted to any man who claimed to be able to return them to that paradise. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the myth of the Hashshashin knows this is what they were said to do, but Al Mualim presents it only as a rumour created by people afraid of the brotherhood. While he may deny doing such things, it’s fairly certain with the trickery of Altair’s mock execution and subsequent not being dead plays out that Al Mualim still does similar things.
After the execution, Al Mualim tells Altair that the thing the Assassins seek is peace in all things. They don’t only kill people and end the harm they do, they look to bring about internal self-actualization as well. Peace within and without. This, he argues, is Altair’s problem. He doesn’t have inner peace and instead is filled with arrogance. Of all the things that Al Mualim says throughout the game, this is the most accurate and true. But as Altair goes on a spree of murder and is greeted with uncertainty and doubt about his actions, Al Mualim shows that much like Altair at the beginning of the game, he doesn’t have inner peace either. After all, it’s arrogance that leads him to try to become a God, and where the Templars, at least at this point in the series, see themselves as a vanguard preparing the proletariat for communism, Al Mualim is an opportunist, who only wants to use the levers of power to enrich himself.
With every assassination, Altair returns to Masyaf and relays the men’s dying words to his master, who constantly twists his questions back, deflecting them. When Altair says that Tamir seemed to know Al Mualim, he simply tells him not to ask questions, claiming that sort of attitude is what lead to Altair breaking the Creed. When Altair questions why the assassination targets seem to be connected, Al Mualim praises him for trying to find connections and think of things, yet at the same time he tells him that as an Assassin it’s his place to quiet those doubts and just do as he’s told. Many of of Altair’s victims claim that he’s nothing but an ignorant knife — Jubair even compares himself to the books he burns, and says that Altair is simply destroying a source of information that he disagrees with — and Al Mualim not only doesn’t contradict those claims, he encourages them. All he wants is an ignorant knife.
At one point he explains what the relic that started all of this is: A round, detailed silver orb. It was the Apple that lead to Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden, it was how Moses turned the staves into snakes, and parted the Red Sea. It was the Apple of Discord that Eris used to start the Trojan War. And it was what allowed Jesus to turn water into wine. He calls the Piece of Eden “Temptation”, and he fell for that temptation. We later find out that here he actually did try to manipulate Altair with it, because all he wanted was a knife to eliminate his competition, and then be thrown away in return, just like Robert de Sable accused on his deathbed. Well, death battlefield dirt. It’s no surprise either that the scene we learn was an attempt to control Altair with the Apple’s powers comes after the scene where Altair finally confronts Al Mualim, demanding to know why the men all seem connected. He threatens his master, and stands his ground when Al Mualim pulls out a sword, knowing that he’s the only one who can accomplish the mission. When he starts to finally demand answers instead of simply ask questions, he becomes a threat to Al Mualim’s plans.
Whenever the Old Man talks about the Templars, he speaks derisively about their plans for control and domination, but in the end he was lying the entire time, and didn’t care whether or not they planned to control the Holy Land — and in reality it seems they were far less interested in control than Al Mualim claimed they were — because he wanted to control it himself. He opposed the villains, through Altair, but it was only because he wanted to be the villain himself.
The climax of the game sees Altair facing his master. He returns to Masyaf to find the people there oddly distant, moving about their lives with an unfocused, mechanical air. The man who greeted him at the beginning of the game to mock and insult him for his arrogance is now speaking in a monotone about a light, and The Master. When Altair approaches the castle of Masyaf, his own brothers attack him, and he has to fight the Assassin guards. Malik and some of his men show up to help, having been swayed by Altair’s determination and growth (and also the secret journal that Robert de Sable kept underneath Solomon’s Temple conveniently summing up the betrayals), but in the end Altair must face his master alone, and moves through the dead eyed crowd gathered at the castle to meet with Al Mualim in the garden.
When he gets there, the game takes a shocking swerve into fantasy territory. While we’ve been told that the Apple of Eden has some kind of magical abilities, and the Animus itself might as well be magical, it’s certainly a different thing for the game to actually depict glowing beams of golden light holding Altair in place in a way that is unambiguously magical. Though with the science fiction looking design of the Apple of Eden and Vidic’s mention of “Those Who Came Before” in the modern sections, it was well telegraphed that eventually this game would have some Stargate bullshit. While here the Apple only creates illusions and controls minds, many of the later games and especially some of the spin off material like Facebook games would go all in on the Stargate bullshit, which really comes to a head in Black Flag, though it will be some time before we get there. Swords and Shrouds and Staves and other incredible Pieces of Eden will have to wait.
It’s almost a shame that the actual fights in this finale sequence are so damned terrible.
Politics
Now we come to what was meant to be the meat of this analysis, the thing that makes me want to examine the series in the first place, and in many ways the thing that makes me keep coming back to the series even after it continually lets me down with it’s treatment of the Assassin’s ethos and ideology. The political views.
Templars
What the Templars want makes up the bulk of the game, and so has probably been the bulk of this essay as well. Each of the nine men had a part to play in getting the Holy Land ready for the power of the Apple of Eden. Talal took the most oppressed in society against their will and prepared them to be shipped to Acre where Garnier used medical experiments to, with a generous set of fingerquotes “help” them. Tamir outfitted the men with weapons so that they could defend the enforced peace. Sibrand would use his men to hold off the European powers. Jubair destroyed the old knowledge so that the bad ideas of the past wouldn’t be repeated. William of Montferrat would kill Richard and instill his men with discipline they’d need to lead a society. Majd Addin would execute any who resisted — as Al Mualim said when Altair told him that someone would always resist, “there can be no peace so long as man has free will” — and Abu’l’s money financed the whole thing.
None of them, save for Majd Addin, are strictly bad people in a traditional sense. They aren’t driven by greed or pettiness. They don’t even want the Holy Land for the sake of power and prestige. They all want to help the world. But there’s always that saying about the road to Hell and what it’s paving stones are carved from. Their actions are paternalistic, driven by an assurity that they know best, and that anyone who doesn’t obey their orders is not only wrong, but dangerous. Majd Addin exists explicitly not to act as the law and punish people who harm others in society, the necessary part he plays is to get rid of anyone who harms society by questioning and criticizing it.
Talal and Garnier do much for the poor of Jerusalem and Acre, saving them from lives of poverty and destitution, but they do so with force. They don’t offer a better life, enticing people to join them. A crier seems to be trying that method, but what we still see are men and women in cages, and wandering a dirty hospital. They care for the poor, and sick, but with the same concern as a controlling parent. And with Garnier and William, we see that much like a controlling parent, they’re willing to use violence to bring unruly children into line. While they might ‘love’ their charges, that love is conditional, and breaking the conditions mean suffering.
Even Vidic, the man who had Desmond kidnapped and constantly berates him for not performing well enough in the Animus, has a similar attitude. He claims to want to make the world a better place, and even says that the Assassins had the right idea in killing evil people, but they thought too small. We don’t actually learn what Vidic and Abstergo’s plan for the Apples of Eden they learn about through Altair’s memories are in this game, but giving someone like Vidic a magical shiny ball that mind controls people is clearly presented as a negative.
Before sitting down to write this analysis, I joked that the Templars were at the top left of the political chart, in contrast to the Assassin’s bottom left. After playing the first game again, that feeling is strengthened. While it’s not entirely accurate to call the Templars “Communists”, they do seek to bring about a better world through authoritarian means. Plus, I mean, it’s not like it’s entirely accurate to call people in the supposed top left of the political compass chart “Communists” either. Sectarianism aside, it could be said that the Templars’ proposed society is a rather more authoritarian — and thus oppressive — version of some pre-Marxian socialist ideas. And while they’re ultimately atheists, with the way that they clothe themselves in the trappings of Christianity, the original religious connotations of “Communist” might be even more suitable.
Assassins
The Assassins are a little harder to pin down, as their ideology isn’t the focus of a conspiracy plot. They live by the maxim “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted”, but just what that means is recontextualized throughout the game. In the beginning, Altair uses it as a get-out-of-jail free card, an excuse for why he murdered an innocent old man. He dismisses Al Mualim’s criticism of his arrogance and lack of internal peace with the phrase. After quite a few amateur tracheostomies, Al Mualim asks Altair what the truth is, and we get an explicit explanation of the phrase.
“We place faith in ourselves. We see the world the way it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.
“What is the world then?”
“An illusion. One we can either submit to, as most do, or transcend.”
“What is it to transcend?”
“To recognize nothing is true and everything is permitted. That laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our creed does not command us to be free. It commands us to be wise.”
The Assassins seek to dispel the illusions of society, to make others understand their maxim. If one was the type of person who learned leftist philosophies more from memes and disjointed threads on Twitter instead of actual books, one might be tempted to say that the Assassins view society as a spook, and want people to see passed that. The Templars on the other hand want to use the illusions to rule.
When Al Mualim reveals his betrayal, he tells Altair that the Apple of Eden never performed any of the miracles attributed to it, and that it’s only capable of illusions (and obviously mind control), and Altair shoots back that his plan is an illusion as well. No one would actually be a willing slave, even if they act like it under the Apple’s command. Al Mualim then counters back that the Crusaders and Saracens are both following craven gods that he dismisses as ‘phantoms’ who abandoned the world and left men to kill each other. Everything Altair did was work done under an illusion, even, having been mislead and manipulated by Al Mualim not to bring about peace — whether or not it was achieved — but for his own goals. While religion may be an illusion, it’s an illusion that men choose to obey, whether Al Mualim’s illusion of a world of subservience involves less blood shed or not.
That’s ultimately the ideology of the Assassins. Free will over dominance. Where the Templars seek to control, the Assassins seek to free. People will make bad decisions, they’ll do horrible things. Some of them need to be stopped, with violence if necessary, but when they are it’s a consequence of their actions, and they should be allowed to choose those actions. When Altair kills Jubair, he says that people should be free to believe what they want, and that isn’t our place to punish them for it. Hearing those words in 2018, I can’t help but roll my eyes at them after the slow rise of fascism in the last four to six years, and it’s exponential acceleration, but it still serves as another example of the Assassin’s outlook. Of course, Altair has just opened up Jubair al-Hakim’s carotid artery with a sharp piece of metal, so his accusations about Altair simply destroying another source of knowledge he disagrees with isn’t exactly unfair. He tells him that instead of destroying these books, he should teach men to be better, to do better. Altair goes so far as to say that it’s Jubair’s inability to believe that society can learn and grow that is why he must be killed.
It calls back to Al Mualim’s words at the beginning of the game. That the man who betrayed Masyaf to Robert de Sable’s men could not be reasoned with. Some men do evil out of fear or ignorance, and can be saved, while others suffer from corrupted wills, their minds poisoned and twisted. These men must be destroyed.
And so it turns out that the man who said those words was himself suffering from a corrupted will, which is why Altair was forced to kill him, and we come full circle. There are many times where the health of the cities, and by extension whole societies, is compared to the men who rule them. The means by which men rule are reflected in their people. When Robert is defeated, Altair has a conversation with Richard the Lionhearted about Saladin, and peace, claiming that whether Saladin wants it or not, the people do.
“The people know not what they want. It’s why they turn to men like us.”
“Then it falls to men like you to do what is right.”
“Nonsense! We come into the world kicking and screaming, violent and unstable. It is what we are. We cannot help ourselves.”
“No. We are what we choose to be.”
It’s not exactly a rejection of the Leviathan, but ultimately it’s down to choice. That’s what the Assassin’s believe in above all else. And if the people do choose to follow men like Richard and Saladin, then they don’t have an excuse for exploiting those men pledging themselves to them.
Of course, there’s a problem here. While this is only the first game, and it doesn’t suffer from some of the very liberal writing decisions where a secular cult dedicated to freedom from tyranny for some reason works alongside the American revolution, or God forbid the British Monarchy, or, worst of all colonialist explorers who enslaved and raped and pillaged, like in that damned movie that I’ll eventually get to… it still features contradictions. The Assassins are strict. They’re a cult, and while they are atheist in their beliefs, they definitely have hierarchy, as well as religious beliefs of a sort. While the game never states it, and in this first one, the modelers seemed to have forgotten it for nonplayable characters, promotional material made mention that Altair’s missing ring finger (seen prominently in the trailers, and the box art, and when he pickpockets) is a sign of devotion to the brotherhood and a requirement for an Assassin who wields the Hidden Blade.
Much like the Templars, if I were to place them on a political compass in the bottom left, it would not be in the form of a modern Anarchism or in a rejection of all authority or hierarchy, it would be in some vaguely defined pre-Marxian form of socialism. Or, once again playing on the pre-Marx historical connotations of the synonym, communism.
Even more than their hierarchy of course is the fact that they murder the shit out of people. Not just that, but they do it in extremely dramatic ways with the intent to send a message and spread fear. For all that Altair suggested education as the path to a better world, the Assassins have similar tactics to the Templars. When William of Montferrat has men executed, it removes them from the equation and sends a message to his other men. As the player can see when hunting down Sibrand, the Assassin method certainly sends a message as well, resulting in the man’s utter paranoia and confidence that he was going to die. Confidence that obviously was correct.
Many of these contradictions are explored in greater depth later in the series, but for now they’re left as they are, aside from the taunts of dying Templars, and Richard’s simply commenting that seeking peace through targeted murder might be a bit of a contradiction. But some men cannot be reasoned with, as Al Mualim said earlier, their wills corrupted.
When Altair defeats Al Mualim, we’re given one last use of the maxim:
“Impossible! The student does not defeat the teacher!”
“Laa shay’a waqi’un moutlaq bale kouloun moumkine.”
Altair’s story ends when he slays Al Mualim, and vows to destroy the Apple of Eden. He walks towards where it rolled away, and the Apple glows, projecting a glowing sphere of light, a hologram of the globe with several points marked on it. In the end, Altair can’t bring himself to destroy it. The ghostly voice of Al Mualim tells him that he can destroy it, but he won’t.
Closing
Here now as I watch the page number of this document move into 20, I wonder just what the hell I’ve gotten myself into. This is an expansive series, one with multiple hands working on it. While many of the creators are no doubt fans of the series who actually care about the DEEP LORE of the series, it can’t be denied that many of the later games are profit driven and have corporate mandates. The first game is fairly self contained, and it’s interesting to go back to it after eleven years. Interesting to see how the series has changed in mechanics, in presentation, in tone.
The game ends abruptly, with Desmond waking up to Vidic already coordinating over the phone to send out search teams to many of the places marked on the map, to find the Apples of Eden hidden there. Lucy saves him from being terminated by saying they might need him later, and then the two of them leave and Desmond finds that he can use Eagle Vision now, and the floor and walls are covered in glowing blood that he couldn’t see before. Credits roll.
Since I’m now pushing 12,000 words, I’m going to keep to the spirit of the game and roll credits.
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