Assassin’s Screed II
Welcome back to Assassin’s Screed, the only place on the internet where someone tells you their opinions about video games. We’ve been through one major game and one spin off so far, as well as the made for YouTube movie (and, just a bit, the novelization of Altair’s life, which was surprisingly good). It’s finally time to play The Good One, the game that sticks in everyone’s mind as the peak of the series.
Assassin’s Creed II is one of the most important games of, if not all time at least the least decade, and it’s definitely where the hallmarks of the series were refined, both for better and for worse. While the first game introduced concepts like climbing towers and collecting meaningless objects, it was Assassin’s Creed II that defined them in ways that stretch out even to other Ubisoft games, like Far Cry and Watch Dogs. Even Zelda has taken up the tower climbing mechanics, although Breath of the Wild uses the mechanic in a way that far outshines what Assassin’s Creed does. With the simultaneous release of not one but two portable games, Assassin’s Creed II also solidified the cycle of constant release, which results in groans more often than not, placing this heavily story driven and (mostly) single player franchise in the same category as Call of Duty.
Assassin’s Creed II currently sits at 91 on Metacritic, and is the series’ highest score, as well as the only “Must Play” in the batch. If it weren’t for the constant releases that followed it, Assassin’s Creed II might have joined games like Kingdom Hearts or Ocarina of Time. Instead, we’ve had between ten and a billion games since then, depending on whether you want to count the Facebook and mobile games I mentioned when discussing Bloodlines. Even during the year where Ubisoft said they were taking a break to release the movie in theaters, they still released three games.
And so, Assassin’s Creed II, a period piece epic spanning two decades of betrayal and revenge, and ancient precursor beings that genetically engineered humanity, is relegated to nostalgia, and the thing that people cite when they say “I remember when the series was good.”
Does it hold up? Does it still resonate? How does the cheap novelization hold up? Will I ever track down those Goddamned feathers?
Much like the first game, which this one serves as a direct sequel to, not worrying about the events of either Bloodlines or Lineage. Like the previous game, the story is broken up into two parts, the first being a framing story about Desmond Miles, Assassin runaway turned bartender turned Abstergo captive as he trains to become a real Assassin by reliving the memories of his greatest ancestor’s defining years. The second story is that of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the master Assassin, during his formative years as he experiences loss, betrayal, and a conspiracy that spans two decades.
Eschewing the original game’s Crusades era location and using the setting conceit that the Assassins and Templars are world spanning secret societies divorced from their real world historical concept, Assassin’s Creed II sets Ezio’s story at the height of the Renaissance, in Italy, the very center of it. The story of political corruption, greed, and the lust for power is set to a backdrop of scientific and artistic enlightenment. It would be the first time the series explored the potential of its primary fictional technology, starting off a trend of living out the memories of characters in historical settings, though it wouldn’t be until Assassin’s Creed III, the seventh game, and fifth main game, that players would get to experience a completely new time period, as the next two chapters in Ezio’s story would take place first in Rome and then in the declining Constantinople.
The world of the Renaissance is vibrant and alive, and the scope is expanded well beyond what the first game covered. Altair’s entire story across both Assassin’s Creed and Bloodlines takes place in only a few months in the year 1191. Ezio’s story spans from 1476 to 1499. In this game alone, the first of three featuring Ezio.
Where Altair’s story is that of a master assassin brought low by his own hubris clawing his way back to a position of prestige and exposing his mentor’s hypocrisy, Ezio begins this story as a rather privileged seventeen year old who grows into a man while embroiled in a political conspiracy that threatens Italy and the world. Even the motives of the antagonists, though far less sympathetic, are far more grand. Control over the Holy Land, as large as it is, would never do. No less than Godhood itself is fit for the historical figure who serves as an antagonist, though his motives are only revealed at the very end of the game, after literal decades of his scheming and manipulation.
Even mechanically and technically it’s no wonder that while many still have fond feelings for the original game, this is the one that people point to, the point in time where the series was at its height. Though coming back to it nearly a decade on, the crowds that were once so impressive are rather sparse, and make many of Italy’s beautiful vistas feel strangely empty. But small as they seem now, looking back, they would still have been an amazing feat back in the day, and the cities of Italy are breathtaking.
Years ago in an art class we were told that it was the creation of the Duomo, the massive domed roof of Florence’s cathedral, that started the Renaissance, a fact that I’d already learned thanks to the Database of Assassin’s Creed II. And digital recreation or not there is something awe inspiring about climbing that historic landmark. It is literally breathtaking to scale. To climb to the very peak of it and pan the camera around and see the city of Florence spreading out beneath you. Even as simple and effortless and low risk as climbing the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore is, there’s still a sense of height and vastness that comes from the time it takes, and the simple, meditative act of going up and up and up, higher than anything in the previous game.
With the introduction of the Database the series begun to not only use the historical location as a backdrop, the creators showed their work and shared it with the audience. Told through the sardonic narration of new modern day character Shaun Hastings, the Database is roughly accurate and provides context for things that in the first game wouldn’t have gotten explanations, like the political factions of the era, the historical (and fictional) characters the players meet, and hundreds of pieces of information on people, places, and things of history. If ever the first game is given a remake, I hope we get an in-character encyclopedia that gives information on all of the buildings we climb.
One of the most memorable and long lasting impressions that the sequel had on the franchise isn’t mechanical, though, its auditory. I started playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the (so far) most recent game in the franchise, and I was surprised and delighted to hear an Grecian inspired rescoring of Jesper Kyd’s beautiful and awe inspiring leitmotif, Ezio’s Family, that plays during the title drop of Assassin’s Creed II. It now serves as the sound of the series, playing while out in the world exploring, like the Hyrule Fields melody in the Zelda franchise. It’s an amazing piece of music, and it’s no wonder that its stuck around so long.
I won’t lie, the title sequence of Assassin’s Creed II brings a tear to my eye, especially in hindsight. It’s no wonder everyone from those Youtube comments I showed earlier felt that the series had lost something, and Ezio’s Family represented a better time.
The opening of the game is effective as hell, too. A slow burn until that title finally does show up, more than half an hour into the game. Delaying the title and/or the main character donning the iconic franchise uniform is another of those series staples that II introduced. The title finally appears on screen in a touching scene that is almost overwhelming in how much it telegraphs the fact that bad things are going to happen. But if people didn’t want their emotions manipulated like that, they wouldn’t turn to fiction, now would they?
It’s not until an hour after that, longer if you dawdle, until Ezio finally dons the trademark robes of the Assassin, which stand out like a sore thumb among the colourful citizens of Florence and Venice, and even the more drab residents of Tuscany and Romagna.
And why wouldn’t you dawdle? Even the limited district of Florence you begin the game in is probably bigger than any of the individual cities of Assassin’s Creed, and even without a hundred flags to hunt for in each area, there’s so much to see, and places to climb.
Ezio Auditore is everything Altair was not. Where Altair was quiet, calm, and kind of a dick, particularly in the beginning, Ezio is outspoken, brash, and something like Spider-Man with the way that he taunts his foes and thinks of clever solutions. There’s even a dedicated “Taunt” action in combat, if you’re ever feeling the need to learn a few Italian insults. It also helps break up the slow combat by encouraging opponents to come at you, something very useful when the best answer to every fight is to use the Counter skill.
And despite those colourful taunts, Ezio is still perhaps one of the most likeable protagonists in that attractive white guy with two day stubble mold. He’s certainly one of the few that you’d actually want to be friends with, or be around for extended periods of time, unlike your Nathan Drakes. When Courtesans show interest in him, it doesn’t feel unreasonable, and he never seems like he’d be the type to force himself on a woman, or have that slap-slap-kiss relationship that so many others protagonists seem to have. He’s charismatic and polite to his allies, and in some scenes he even has a few endearing himbo moments, despite his overall cleverness.
This changes a bit by Brotherhood, where he’s a little harder, a little colder, but in his origin at least he’s a decent man, and that’s something unfortunately rare in protagonists.
Another criticism of Altair, of course, was that he had the accent of a white guy despite being a dusky (but not too dusky) skinned Arab with a name like “Altair ibn la-Ahad”. In that game, no one spoke Arabic other than in the titular creed at the end, and perhaps a few snippets. In Assassin’s Creed II on the other hand, Ezio is so Italian he shits pastrami. The Animus 2.0, that Rebecca Crane affectionately dubbed “Baby”, has subtitles this time around, an addition that allows Desmond to lean on the fourth wall a bit by mentioning, even though both the modern and Animus version 1.28 scenes are subtitled.
It’s a good thing, too, because there is a load of Italian peppered throughout the English dialogue, with the explanation that the Animus’ babble fish isn’t quite fully functional. It’s completely unnecessary narratively, but it adds to the charm. Later Animus updates — and by extension later games — would continue this trend where they could, even up to Odyssey, where terms like malaka and olisbos go untranslated.
Ezio is a more likeable protagonist, who fits within his own world better — at least, as far as his voice goes; the trademark white hooded robes of the Assassins stands out quite a bit when there are no scholars around, only citizens in colourful dyed outfits with hats. Ezio does have the option to dye his own robes, an early example of customization that later games would more strongly embrace, but that hood certainly stands out. Unfortunately, one of the other changes in response to criticism isn’t something I’m nearly as positive about: the structure.
Assassin’s Creed was an incredibly nonlinear game, especially compared to many of the later games, in II in particular. The mission structure of each Sequence gave you two to three targets to hunt down, and six Investigation challenges to choose from, though you only needed to complete about half of them. Within each Sequence, you could do these in any order you wanted. Go to Acre, complete all the Investigations and the target, then go to Damascus. Or go to Jerusalem, complete a few Investigations, go to Acre, complete a few Investigations, go to Jerusalem and kill the target, complete the Damscus Investigations, etcetera.
You could do the challenges in any order. None of them were good, and they were repetitive, but you could do them in any order. In Assassin’s Creed II, there are no more investigations, and the game is much more linear. Ezio’s story is constrained. You can explore the world as you like — and you’re encouraged to return to Monteriggioni occasionally to collect the fat stacks of florins that pile up after you’ve renovated parts of the town — and when tracking down the practically nameless members of the Pazzi Conspiracy — who are so superfluous to the actual meat of the plot that they’re lumped together in one Sequence and one Database entry — but the bulk of the game is one long narrative that happens the way that it happens.
I’m not saying that I want a return to chasing after flags, or assassinating guards without being seen so that a damned Informant will tell me what he knows, even though telling me what he knows is his fucking job, but it’s kind of a shame that the actually good aspects of the investigation phase, like eavesdropping and interrogations and pickpocketing to learn information about your target are completely gone. There are a few sequences where you have to eavesdrop, and maybe one where you have to pickpocket, and certainly cutscenes where Ezio interrogates people, but none of it has that same freeform feeling of Investigation that the first game had. It’s definitely the same trend we saw in Bloodlines, and it will be the norm going forward.
One section that definitely has improved between the first and second game is the social stealth. Ezio isn’t limited to simply hiding in crowds of monks and following their movement perfectly, although nor is he able to simply clasp his hands together in prayer and become practically invisible until the game decides he isn’t, as with Altair in Bloodlines. Once Ezio learns the Blend skill from the courtesan madam Paola Ortega he becomes able to blend into any crowd of three or more people, provided you can keep yourself from picking the pockets of everyone around you. It’s a good improvement to the system, and starts a much stronger focus on the “hide in plain sight” aspect of the Assassins, which was always my favourite bit.
Eagle Vision, the mechanic where the world goes dark and specific things are highlighted, also gets a glow up, and is even treated as being something diegetic as opposed to simply a gameplay mechanic. Ezio is told to use his special talent to find the hidden entrance to his father’s secret room (one wonders how he never noticed it before). In Desmond’s story, his increased ability to use Eagle Vision is treated as an aspect of the Bleeding Effect, where using the Animus too much causes him to take on the traits and skills of his ancestors. It helps him find the code to a door by seeing which buttons get pressed. Unlike Altair, Ezio can now use this special camera filter while moving around, and since health no longer heals over time or represents synchronization, it can now be used at any time.
It’s interesting to compare Eagle Vision in Assassin’s Creed II with the Detective Mode of Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was released a few months earlier and also very clearly based on Assassin’s Creed’s original use of Eagle Vision. One day I’ll have to compare awareness mechanics in video games. But not today.
Assassin’s Creed II is at its heart a superhero origin story.
Where Altair was already an established member of this secret world of assassins, reduced to a low point in his career because of his own hubris and failure, Ezio is an outsider brought into the world of secrecy and conspiracy that his father was a part of. While the next two major games in the franchise would be direct sequels to Ezio’s story, this is the standard template for the majority of the series. An outsider suffers a loss and goes after the ones responsible, only to uncover a greater conspiracy and eventually be welcomed into the Assassin Brotherhood and take down the Templars. Along the way the character reaches personal growth through political murder.
The games get longer and longer, but scenes where they’re inducted into the Brotherhood and don their trademark robes are common. Ezio doesn’t put on his superhero costume until several hours into the game, near the end of the first act, and after his father and brothers are arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. The scene where he does so has all the drama and importance of Batman appearing for the first time.
For Ezio, his origin story is one of betrayal. He lived a simple life as a well off Florentine and the son of who he assumed was a banker. The game lets you get to know his family through a series of tutorial quests, one of the few sequences where the choice of what to do next is open. They don’t really help you get to know these characters, but Ezio’s reaction to their deaths is still emotional, and it helps sell the weight of their loss, even if they don’t really get talked about much after that. Maria Auditore pines, catatonic, over Petruchio’s box of eagle feathers, which you can fill with the requisite collectibles, and Ezio loudly declares his family isn’t dead because he lives, and how he’s continuing his father’s work, but there isn’t really any scene where the Auditore boys are talked about in terms of personality or character. It’s one of the many ways the the game falls short.
The Auditore men are hanged for crimes they never committed, and Ezio sets out to kill the man responsible, with the aid of skills he learned from Paola, the madame of the brothel that took he and his mother and sister in after their palazzo was sacked. She teaches him the Blend and pickpocket skills, and you would think that learning to be seen without being seen and move stealthily through crowds, taking from those who have too much would take quite some time, but after what feels like only a few moments Paola is declaring Ezio a master of the skills and suggesting that he assassinate the man he deems responsible, Uberto Alberti — the [fictional] Gonfalionaire of Justice, who in Lineage had already proven himself untrustworthy — using a subtle weapon, telling him to have none other than the great Leonardo di Vinci, who is without a doubt best boy, repair his father’s hidden blade (which was damaged during Lineage).
In one of many scenes that take place in convenient out of doors locations, Ezio uses his skills at social stealth to make his way to the art show where he knows Alberti will be and assassinates him. The man’s death is brutal and violent, and in what will be another unfortunate departure from the original game, while the Memory Corridor, the white space sequence where the Assassin characters speak to their victims, allowing for lengthy death bed conversations and information exchanges, is still around, all of the targets of Ezio’s ire give only short statements, followed by Ezio’s rather truncated last rites. With Alberti’s death, Ezio shouts to the heavens and all who listen that his family lives on, that he, Ezio Auditore, still lives.
It is also with Alberti’s death that Ezio uncovers a greater conspiracy still, lead by a mysterious figure in the shadows. Ezio dedicates his life to taking down this shadowy cabal leader and putting a stop to his plans to subvert and control Italian politics across the decades. But only really after he learns of the Assassins and Templars from his uncle, Mario, who is introduced with “It’s-a me, Mario”, a reference that is either endearing or cringey, depending on how one feels about such things (I loved it). Its with his uncle Mario that he gets to take down his rival teenage shithead, Vieri de Pazzi, and in taking out his rage and anger on a young man who helped see his family framed and murdered, violently stabbing at him repeatedly, Ezio learns a lesson that would stick with him throughout his life:
From this point on, Ezio doesn’t kill with a lust for violence, and even driven by revenge he treats death with respect and importance. His conversations with his victims often involve him hoping that death soothes the hatred in their hearts, and brings them some kind of peace. Requiescat in pace, “rest in peace”, becomes something of a catchphrase for Ezio throughout his life. Not that he doesn’t also senselessly murder literally thousands of guards, often for little reason more than to take their uniforms, and often with no desire for a stand up fight, and none of them get their last rites dictated to them in the somber Italian intonation of a killer with a heart of gold. But thems the breaks, soldiers are disposable tools. I really should get around to doing this for Metal Gear Solid some time…
At this point, Ezio has uncovered the Pazzi conspiracy, a real life historical incident where a group of men lead by the Pazzi banking family got together to plot the assassination of the Florentine banker and de facto ruler of all of Firenze, Lorenzo de Medici. The beginnings of this conspiracy were already shown in Lineage, and just like in that the historical plot is one part of a greater plot by Rodrigo Borgia, the man who would later become Pope Alexander VI, one of the most notorious Popes in history and the post child for the sin and vice that marked the Catholic Church’s mountain of hypocrisy. Here he is the Grand Master of the Templar order, and he schemes to unseat Lorenzo as part of a plan to gain control over all of Italy. While few if any of the characters in Assassin’s Creed II are sympathetic, compared to the Templars of the first game, who were controlling and, as I kept saying in the first Assassin’s Screed, very paternalistic in trying to make the world safer and more prosperous through force and subjugation, the vast majority of them are real historical figures. There are no fake Arab merchants designed to flesh out the plot, or even random knights and giant meteor hammer wielding religious zealots like in Bloodlines. There are characters whose existence is completely fictional, but the game has some twenty characters plucked straight from history, and you even get to kill like five or six of them.
The game’s version of the Pazzi conspiracy is a bit different from the real world’s. For instance, one of the biggest divergences from history is the way the attempted hit went down. In the real world, it happened within the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, where the brothers Lorenzo and Guliano de Medici were ambushed by Francesco de Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini dei Barocelli stabbed Guiliano repeatedly in front of a crowd of thousands, and Lorenzo got to safety, hidden in the sacristy, while his brother bled out. Needless to say, there was no mysterious figure who came to Lorenzo’s rescue.
As with many sequences in the game, the attempted assassination happens outside of the Duomo. There are a great many scenes that take place outside. Everything from clandestine meetings to people terrified of being murdered, everything in this game happens out of doors, like the unusual outdoor art exhibit at the Santa Croce where the gonfalionere is murdered, or the multiple times people fearing death shout out paranoid orders and religious scripture right in the open instead of locking themselves away. It’s something not really obvious at first, but on multiple playthroughs — or having read the novelization — it really stands out. It’s obviously because of technological limitations and the difficulty in building multiple single use sets (the Duomo’s interior is used for a sidequest platforming challenge, but filling it with people would definitely tax the original hardware of a PS3 or XBox, and most computers at the time), but it’s still rather jarring once you notice it.
The other historical divergence is in how the Pazzi Conspirators died. Of course they weren’t taken out by a single man. But there were, in reality, over eighty people eventually guilty of involvement in the conspiracy, including Pope Sixtus himself. They were severely punished, many of them outright lynched by the Florentine public. Jacapo’s corpse was sent in a grotesque journey that involved being exhumed, thrown in a ditch, thrown in a river, beaten by children, thrown back in the river, and eventually his head was used as a doorknocker for his own house. Most of the conspirators were hunted down rather quickly, and they never went to Tuscany, though Baroncelli did flee to Constantinople, but was arrested by Mehmehd II and returned to Florence where he was hung, still in his Turkish robes. The Pazzi family themselves were struck from the records, barred from public office, and forced to change their surnames. Coats of arms were smashed.
It was also not Rodrigo Borgia who was behind the conspiracy, but Girolamo Riario, husband to Caterina Sforza, one of the historical figures who shows up later. The game does say that he was a Templar, but Rodrigo takes on his involvement as mastermind. And while Sixtus is, vaguely, mentioned in the game as supporting the attempted coup, his involvement is really only given weight in Lineage, and perhaps the Database. Riario was Sixtus’ nephew, by the way. When Sixtus died, Caterina marched troops into the Castel Sant’Angelo to pressure the college of cardinals into electing a pope that aligned with Girolamo. Though, of course, in the end he settled for fleecing them for 7,000 ducats, after which his bloodthirsty wife reluctantly pulled her army out of the Castel.
After the Pazzi conspiracy, Ezio retraces his father’s footsteps from Lineage and finds himself in Venice. A beautiful city of canals that were probably filled with shit water instead of the beautiful and picturesque blue in the game. Here he gets in with the Thieves’ Guild of Venice, and learns of yet more conspiracy being perpetrated by that dastardly Spaniard. Here fictional members of the real Barbarigo family are strangling Venetian merchants and making things terrible for everyone. The Thieves’ Guild, filled with Venetian pride, set themselves up as revolutionaries against [the fictional] Emilio Barbarigo. He later completely fails to foil a plot to assassinate Doge Giovanni Mocinego, who really might have been assassinated by poison as depicted, and who is replaced by the Templar puppet [and real historical figure] Marco Barbarigo.
There’s then a really long stretch of Carnivale stuff that looks really cool in the trailer but is actually just disappointing filler in the game itself. The trailer suggests a Carnivale sequence where Ezio uses his courtesan allies to distract and lure guards in a hectic and confusing time of fireworks and large revelries to seemlessly slip into and become the blade in the crowd. Unfortunately 2009 didn’t really have the hardware to accomplish that, and completely refitting Venice for Carnivale must have been too expensive and time consuming, because what we get instead is one single district of Venice that becomes available in the relevant chapter where it’s Carnivale every day, and people just stand around half set up carnival equipment while clowns and firebreathers perform their routines without any audiences. This section of Venice honestly seems incredibly lacking. The bustling crowds of Florence are lackluster by today’s standards, but even compared to different levels in the same game — or even the same city! — this section seems bare.
The actual events, too, are bland. Ezio must compete at a series of carnival games that all use the standard mechanics of running, pickpocketing, and fighting, to win a golden mask so that he can get close enough to the paranoid Marco Barbarigo as he gives a speech on a barge to shoot him with the newly acquired hidden gun upgrade. This is one of the only times you ever need to actually use one of the “codex weapons” throughout the story. They were designed by Altair during his time in exile, their schematics written down on in an Assassin Codex that he gave to Marco Polo, and manufactured for Ezio by Leonardo da Vinci. Throughout the story, more and more pages are found, with story pages giving new weapons that never get used and aren’t worth opening the weapon wheel to equip. The first upgrade is a second blade, along with a bracer (the great da Vinci needed a diagram to tell him how to flip the mechanisms for the other arm, I guess), which allows for more complex assassinations that the first game didn’t have. Then there’s the poison blade, which is used to prick enemies and cause them to go berserk. And last is the hidden gun, which is exactly what it sounds like. Only here, in assassinating Marco Barbarigo, is any of the codex weapons acknowledged by the story after they’re acquired, except for the tutorialesque scene where a disgruntled John murders a courtesan in the brothel of Ezio’s most recent ally, the nun-themed madame Teodora. He conveniently runs outside, only to grab a courtesan hostage a few yards from the brothel entrance in another sequence of conspicuous out-doors.
The task to win the mask is complicated by Silvio Barbarigo [fictional] and Marco Barbarigo’s [fictional] bodyguard, the brain damaged bruiser Dante Moro, who try to compete against Ezio and then just bribe the judge in the end to get the mask anyway, necessitating that Ezio steal the mask, because apparently murdering Dante would raise too much suspicion, but stealing his mask, leaving him alive to raise a fuss, and assuming his identity wouldn’t? In fact, they’d even ruled out stealing the golden mask to begin with, since all the golden masks were numbered. I’ll be honest, though, I find it hard to care about Venice, the Carnivale sequence in particular. Once Ezio has the masks, and has dodged the guards looking for him, since Dante was left alive and finally pointed out that someone stole his mask, in a very linear and controlled sequence you finally shoot the Doge as the fireworks are going off.
Silvio and Dante are taken down next, and Ezio learns they were set to go to Cyprus, and that the boat is returning now, on the night of his birthday. With the help of Leonardo, Ezio finally deduces that a prophecy found in the codex pages is about to come true, and the Apple of Eden is being brought to the floating city (of Venice), where the prophet will appear. Following this trail leads Ezio, donned in the outfit of a Templar guard, to Rodrigo Borgia, who has come to Venice believing that he is the prophet. The game then gives you your mission: Fight Rodrigo Borgia. Now, a lot of the claims against the Borgia family are probably either not true or exaggerations, and like all rulers they were a mixed bag, but by the time I’d first played this game in 2011 or so, I had known who Rodrigo Borgia was and what kind of historical reputation he had, and this was the most ludicrous and amazing quest I’d ever experienced up to this point. There’s just something surreal about fighting the not-yet-Pope who, historically true or not, serves as the model of all of the Catholic Church’s hypocrisies.
When all seems lost, Ezio’s allies, all of them, show up and aid him in his fight. Also, Niccolo Machiavelli is also there, despite the fact that he would have been about 19 at the time. It turns out that everyone he ever knew was actually an Assassin. How convenient. And not only do they believe that he is the Prophet spoken of in the codex, they also want to induct him into their order officially. The superhero has become self-actualized and defeated his greatest opponent, and been extended an invitation to the team of superh — I’m sorry, what? There’s like six more hours left? You’re fucking kidding me. It’s more filler?
Assassin’s Creed II solidified many of the things that Assassin’s Creed introduced, like tower climbing to reveal the map, and it doubled down on the wacky space alien Greek God bullshit that would become a series staple. It helped show what an “awareness” mechanic like Eagle Vision could be used for. But one of its most enduring legacies is the utterly fucked era of capitalist bullshit and the business model it helped popularize that continues to this day.
Assassin’s Creed II had several different preorder purchasing packages, requiring a chart to understand just which parts of the game you were buying and which bonuses you’d have with which versions of the game you bought. More than that, though, Sequence 13 and 14 were cut from the game intentionally and packaged as DLC. The chapters weren’t even released until January of the next year, meaning that anyone who bought the game day one would play through ten hours or so of game only to experience a massive gap in the story. Nothing that happens is, strictly speaking, integral to the plot, but you could honestly say the same about Venice. The game skips forward several years to Ezio’s final confrontation with Rodrigo Borgia (in this game, at least) without explaining what happened in the intervening decade or so, with the explanation that those DNA Memory Sequences are corrupted by the presence of the Apple, which is rather odd considering the bulk of those sequences are about getting the Apple back after having lost it to filler bullshit.
The “Story DLC” model is something that Ubisoft would continue for pretty much every game they’d ever make from then on, but at least after Assassin’s Creed II they wouldn’t literally carve out sections from the middle of their games to later sell back to customers. They’d save the carved out sections for the end, and at least they’re usually the size of the traditional and long since forgotten expansion pack. Not that their games aren’t filled with microtransactions, gameplay boost DLCs, collectible reveal DLCs, costume DLCs, and different tiered collectible Deluxe Editions that never seem to have the full features unless you pay over 100$ for their nickel and dime bullshit.
Assassin’s Creed II helped make the public used to these things, with all of its Gamestop exclusives and its cut content DLC. Though thankfully the Game of the Year edition included everything, so when I finally did get to buy it, I didn’t have to deal with any of that. Until I replayed it just now, where I did buy the Deluxe Edition just to make sure I’d have the DLC and the additional challenge dungeons, except whether or not I’d already had the DLC and the challenge dungeons seems uncertain. A decade later and the confusing purchasing schemes still causes confusion.
What’s worse is that I actually kind of like the DLC Sequences. They just shouldn’t have been DLC.
Sequence 13, the Battle of Forli, begins with Ezio and the Assassins all in Leonardo’s workshop, trying to make sense of the Apple of Eden, which reacts to Ezio’s touch by releasing a burst of light and knowledge beyond mortal ken. The group decides to keep the mysterious artifact safe, it must be taken to Forli, in the Romagna, an area of the game that existed, but was not very important up to this point. As Ezio and Leonardo first went to Venice, they passed through Romagna, and there Ezio helped Caterina Sforza after her husband abandoned her on the rocks. They flirted. She was technically 17 to Ezio’s 24 at this point, but its less creepy when literally no one in the entire game ever ages except for Ezio and stays eternally in their mid-twenties. Actually that makes it weirder. But now its 8 years later, and Caterina Sforza, fresh off of occupying the Castel Sant’Angelo (while pregnant) is an Assassin ally, though no details on how that came to be are given. She’s even had her Templar husband murdered. Unfortunately good help is hard to find, and the men she paid, the [real] Orsi brothers Checco and Ludovico were then hired by Rodrigo to gain a map Girolomo was making of the locations of the codex pages.
The entire Battle of Forli is, very loosely, based on the real life Orsi conspiracy and their siege of Forli, although in real life a “siege” does not actually involve one army attacking a castle and trying to break in. Its a long and boring affair where one army stands outside of a secure location and seeks to starve the defenders. The entire event in real life actually cost Caterina a great deal of good will from her own people, who felt that she should have given in. One of the more exciting and lurid details from historical accounts does make it into the game, though. When the Orsi brothers kidnap Caterina’s children and threaten to murder them, she lifts up her skirts and shouts that she has the instruments to make more. The entire exchange comes from Niccolo Machievelli’s account, and by all indication he kind of hated her, so he ended up doing that thing everyone does when they hate a woman: He made her come off as a lot cooler than she actually was. In reality, she likely only claimed she was pregnant, which would have meant that her [nonexistent] unborn child would be Girolomo’s legitimate heir should the other children die, but honestly the idea that she flashed her cunt and called their bluff is a better story.
Caterina is the real main character of the Battle of Forli, in fact. In scenes where Ezio retakes the city, you can hear Caterina launching out a stream of expletives and insults, many of them sexual in nature. It’s a little cringey hearing her suggest that maybe the soldiers would like to feel a long wooden shaft up their asses (when she impales them like Dracula), or that they haven’t got any balls. But at the same time it’s also quite a trip to hear Cristina Rosato, Sforza’s voice actress, let out unbroken streams of vulgar Italian threats and insults.
The actual gameplay of the Battle of Forli, unfortunately, is really just a whole bunch of senseless combat, and while the combat wasn’t terrible in Assassin’s Creed II, it does still suffer from the problem that enemies block everything and need to have their defenses broken down first, or you can just hold back and wait until they attack you and perform an instant kill with the Hidden Blade. Having the end of game gear really helps, but in the end combat is still just mashing X until everyone is dead or waiting very patiently, perhaps taunting, and then countering properly until everyone is dead. Ezio liberates the city, rescues the children, and finally assassinates the Orsi brothers one after the other, getting back the Apple of Eden that they stole in the confusion, only to pass out from being stabbed by Checco (or Ludovico? They’re honestly pretty interchangeable) in the Memory Corridor and have the Apple stolen from him by a mysterious black cowled monk with a missing finger.
The hunt is then on to track down this mysterious figure. And by hunt, I mean Ezio goes to two churches and asks around, and gets the information he’s looking for, although there is a bit of trouble when one of the monks recognizes Ezio as having been the man who killed Stefano Bagnone, and attempts to flee, fearing the “killer of monks”. Of course, Ezio also killed the Archbishop Francesco Salviati, whose death in real life resulted in the entire Republic of Florence being excommunicated by Pope Sixtus. The interdict lasted for two years, though none of this is mentioned in the game. And frankly Bagnone got off pretty well in Assassin’s Creed, considering in real life his face was mutilated before he was hanged from the Palazzo della Signoria.
There’s actually a massive gap in the narrative here, where everything jumps forward nearly a decade without any real explanation. No one acknowledges the missing years in this game or any other, but it turns out that while he was looking for the man who stole the powerful artifact forged by an ancient precursor race, capable of terrible and unfathomable power… Ezio just went off to Spain for a while to deal with protecting Christoffa Corombo of all people from the Spanish Inquisition. This is the plot to the DS game, Assassin’s Creed II: Discovery, which has likely been retconned by both the movie and Rebellion. I have strong feelings about the Assassin’s Creed series’ whitewashing of Columbus, but also its the only game that seems to acknowledge Jewish people exist, and it would behoove me to criticize the game, so I might just play it.
Anyway, It turns out that the man who took the Apple of Eden was none other than Girolamo Savonarola, the man behind the Bonfire of the Vanities, where citizens took to the streets, burning artwork that could have been perceived as sinful. Here he’s presented as a petty and cruel man obsessed with cleansing the world. Of course, the reality is a bit more complicated, and in many ways he was a much more democratic and popular leader than Lorenzo, who threw lavish parties even as the economy suffered, to the point that he began to take money out of the city’s coffers to do so. Lorenzo was also incredibly vindictive in his obliteration of the Pazzi, although Riario never felt that sting because he was actually a relative, not that their relation stopped Riario from plotting to murder his cousin. Many Florentines actually approved of Savonarola, and took part in the bonfires. This isn’t to say that he was a kind and just ruler, of course; after all, if there’s one lesson Assassin’s Creed II could have really used, its that there is no good ruler. But history is also complicated, and as such even people depicted as history’s monsters, like the Borgia family themselves, can have histories of reforms.
Within the narrative of Assassin’s Creed II, though, Savonarola is a controlling monster, mad with power and paranoid. Much like with Venice and Carnivale, a new section of the city is opened up that permanently shows off the intended mood, where everything has drab colours. Except, strangely enough, for the bouncy poles found on some of the rooftops, which have bright red scraps of cloth signalling their presence. Creeating a literal last minute mechanic that only exists in one tiny section of the city, which is itself one map of several, is certainly an odd choice. But beyond the new tone being confined to one section while the DLC itself takes place over the entire city, and the introduction of a barely there new mechanic, the DLC is an amazing mechanical and even narrative callback to the original game, and it honestly highlights some of the ways in which the rest of the game was a bit of a disappointment, even though the story was much better.
Starting from the beginning of the DLC, where a group of black robed monks walk back and forth between guards standing at the gates of Florence, Bonfires of the Vanities is a love letter to Assassin’s Creed, and one that serves as a vertical slice of the entire game. This is the kind of section that would make for a great demo. Ezio returns to the city, sneaking in passed the guards by blending in with monks the way that Altair did the first time he came to Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem, and he finds it a rundown, miserable place. Historical accuracy aside, the opening scenes are amazing, with the city portrayed in dull colours, and voice overs diegetically filling us in on the changes that have happened to Florence, with citizens lamenting the oppression, and even wishing that “The Assassin” would return. Once inside the city, Machiavelli explains the history to Ezio, with some liberties taken, such as blaming the problems all on Lorenzo’s son, Piero, because the historical reality would portray the ruling figure the Assassins sided with as being ineffective and corrupt, which he very much was, regardless of any good he did for Florence. The people themselves, Machiavelli tells us, are not being controlled. Instead, Savonarola has used the Apple to corrupt the hearts and minds of nine key figures in the city, who rule through fear and power. Ezio suggests taking out these leaders, and then having his allies come in and sow dissent, thereby creating a rebellion against the Mad Monk.
And while I’m trying not to bring up the novelization just yet, it gives Machiavelli the best “wink wink, nudge nudge, aren’t you glad you paid attention in history enough to get this joke” line where he tells Ezio that he likes the way he thinks, and that there should be a word for people like him. (That word of course being “Machiavellian”).
The theme of rebellion is a common one in Assassin’s Creed, and this actually marks the second time that it appears in Assassin’s Creed II. There are nine men that Ezio has to kill in order to weaken Savonarola’s hold on the city. And unlike the rest of the game, he’s given free reign on how to proceed with that, just as you did throughout Assassin’s Creed. The similarities to the first game don’t end there, though. While long and involved Memory Corridor scenes have still gone the way of the non-avian dinosaur, with every man that Ezio kills, they actually argue with him, telling him that they were not being mind controlled and forced to act against their will. They were convinced that what they were doing was right and necessary, even when it was the destruction of art, the withholding of food from starving people who wouldn’t submit, and other methods of controlling the people. One man, another priest, even says that he isn’t being corrupted or convinced by a belief in a path to wealth and fame, he truly believes in what Savonarola is selling.
Its all very simple, but the fact that each man Ezio kills ultimately says the same thing: “I did this because I made the choice to, not because I was forced” is amazing when the main game gives each assassination target an animated video showing snapshots of their past while Shaun Hastings narrates how they once literally murdered a dog for fun and never say “excuse me” when they bump into people. A straightforward revenge drama doesn’t need the complex and sympathetic motives of the original game, but having characters who acknowledge that they weren’t controlled by magic but instead deluded themselves is…. A breath of fresh air I didn’t realize that the game was lacking.
The game simplifies the rule of Savonarola into something that was all bad, and a step down from the Medici, but it also has a habit, both with the Bonfire of the Vanities and with some of the The Truth secrets, of treating every bad thing that humans have ever done as only happening because someone had an ancient relic that manipulates people into doing their bidding, and I think that can skirt the edges of not outright denying historical atrocities (though the series certainly does whitewash some things, like the fact that the Medici family owned slaves) but it certainly divests people of responsibility. “Well, of course people went along with something like the Holocaust; Hitler had a magical bauble from the Greek Gods that mind controlled the Germans”.
I think the Apple of Eden and the other trinkets left behind by the Isu works best as a metaphor, for charisma, and manipulation, and paternalistic and abusive controlling attitudes. And while I’m not quite sure Bonfires of the Vanities gets to that, it certainly comes close. Of course, it ignores the complex historical context under which Savonarola actually came to power, as well as why even the youth of Florence were on board with his declaration that the Republic would become the New Jerusalem.
Savonarola, also an enemy of Rodrigo Borgia (here because he had the Apple), who had already become Pope Alexander VI by this point excommunicated him and sentenced him to death. The story of how he actually ended up being turned on by the mob and arrested is kind of funny, and involves a completely different friar offering to take Savonarola’s place in a trial by fire, which eventually got rained out. You’d think that would be a sign of God intervening, but damnit, the people came to see someone walk through fire. In the end, it turns out that Savonarola was not fireproof after all, because in addition to being hanged, he was burned.
But this game doesn’t portray the real Savonarola, and here the mob directly burns him at the stake instead of torturing him and putting him on trial. And so Ezio is given the opportunity to step in and end his life before a painful death at the tongues of flame. He then stands there, on the platform where his father and brothers were murdered twenty years ago, and gives one of the best speeches in the entire franchise, where he implores the people of Florence to think for themselves, and choose their own paths in life. It’s a revolutionary speech, that criticizes the way that many people will give up their freedom of thought, and it ends with the declaration not to listen to Ezio or anyone else. Parts of the speech really hew close to that feeling I have of the Isu artifacts being really good for narrative metaphors, particularly in that all of the assassination targets in the Sequence were willing collaborators who had fooled themselves. But overall the speech is simply just very anarchist, and is the kind of thing where if I had any conviction I’d live my life by that maxim, but I don’t, so instead i just sleep all day and don’t really have any moral fiber.
Overall, the Bonfires of the Vanities DLC is a surprisingly good snapshot of everything that the series could be, but also in how it falls flat. Its disappointing that it also exists as the beginning of some of the worst trends of the last decade. Also I think you get to kill Botticelli? So that’s pretty neat.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for, the final (but not final) showdown between Ezio and his long standing rival, the man behind his family’s murder, and all of the corruption, Rodrigo Borgia.
Rodrigo became Pope Alexander VI shortly after the Apple of Eden was taken from him in Venice, and in doing so he became the most powerful man in Italy. Except not, because Italy wasn’t actually a united nation at this point, it was a series of warring city states, which kind of explains the constant presence of condottiere all throughout the game, but other than a few skirmishes, there isn’t really any sense of larger war. In fact, throughout most of the game you’d be fooled into thinking that the Renaissance for Italy was actually a time of peace. It wasn’t, though, and much of the Medici’s rise — and fall — was actually due to the constant presence of war.
But for this game, at the moment, that doesn’t matter, and so we’ll save the discussion of war for Assassin’s Screed Brotherhood, when the desire of the Borgia to unite Italy under one banner is the goal. For now, Ezio infiltrates the Sistine Chapel, which at this point was without its famous Michelangelo frescos, and the game portrays it accurately in that regard. The Assassins would be fucked if ever the Templars hung out in buildings that aren’t constantly under renovation, but Ezio drops from the rafters as the Pope gives service to a bunch of monks. As Ezio rather anticlimactically assassinates Rodrigo, saying he thought that he had finally gotten over his obsession with revenge, but he really hadn’t. Except, in a twist that plays on the established conventions of the narrative, while in the Memory Corridor about to shove his hidden blade into Rodrigo’s throat, the Pope knocks him away with the power of the Papal Staff, which is revealed to also be an ancient artifact from Those Who Came Before. This would also be a dramatic twist if not for the secret The Truth puzzles, which give all sorts of superfluous Expanded Universe information.
One mystical artifact brawl later and Rodrigo steals the Apple from Ezio, stabs him in the gut, leaves him for dead (he gets better) and retreats into a secret hidden passage beneath the Vatican, where he confronts Rodrigo once again for the real final showdown:
A fistfight with the Goddamned Pope. Its kind of uninteresting and the fistfighting is even easier than the rest of the combat mechanics, necessitating a halfway decent player actively hold back to hear all of Rodrigo’s speech that actually tells his entire plan, which seems like really poor game design. Its possible to knock the fat old man who could be Ezio’s dad out before he even gets to the reveal that all of the manipulation and scheming has, somehow, been to the end of gaining both the Papal Staff and the Apple of Eden so that he can, as the Prophet foretold by the Codex, open the secret Precursor vault beneath the Vatican. Rodrigo believes that God lies within the vault, and that he will be able to take God’s powers, under the belief that the Apple and Staff and other artifacts were “made for felling gods”.
It’s a goal that honestly makes no fucking sense and doesn’t at all seem to connect with any of the things that he actually tried to do all throughout the game, and I don’t even care because the Stargate bullshit is my favourite part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and it’s about to get a whole hell of a lot more Stargate.
Ezio chokes out an old man, but finally gets over wanting to kill him, and the Staff and Apple open up a secret door in the futuristic looking vault that they fought in. Going into the strange tunnels, Ezio finds himself in a place that looks full on scifi, and is eventually greeted by a holographic projection of a woman in a big hat and white robes who calls herself Minerva. As in, the Roman Goddess of Wisdom.
That’s right, the Gods are real in Assassin’s Creed. They were an ancient civilization who came before humanity (they weren’t yet given the name Isu in canon yet, though I’ve been using that term quite a bit already), and they made humankind. The humans and the Isu went to war with each other, and while they did, a massive solar flare hit the planet and reversed the polarity or some shit and caused catastrophe and chaos, and only after the calamity ended did the Isu and humans make peace and begin to rebuild, though by now the Isu were a dying race. And twist! The entire time she wasn’t explaining this to Ezio, but to Desmond, who she knows experiences his memories through the Animus. That’s what being The Prophet meant this whole time. More to the point, this sets up the plotline of all the Desmond games, with the goal of the modern day plot being to stop the new giant solar flare that is going to happen on 12:21:2012. That’s right, in addition to the Greek Gods, I guess the Mayan ones are real, too. It wasn’t actually revealed that this game took place in 2012 yet, aside from a few teases at “12212012”. That wouldn’t come until Assassin’s Creed III, where the game was actually released in time for the 2012 apocalypse.
Minerva tells Desmond and/or Ezio to seek out the hidden vaults like the one beneath the Vatican so that humanity can survive the horrible catastrophe that’s about to occur. Honestly this plotline sort of goes nowhere if you ask me, and its a shame that the Templars using a satellite to broadcast the power of an Apple all across the globe sort of… just gets dropped. But there are several plotlines that just get dropped, so I won’t dwell on it. Overall the reveal of who Those Who Came Before were is really cool and I love it, and by focusing on the Greco-Roman ones, it avoids a bit of the racism inherent in “aliens built the pyramids”, although there’s still a bit of Egyptian pyramids Chariots of the Gods symbolism used while Minerva gives her history lesson. Of course, if you did those The Truth puzzles I mentioned earlier, it gets a whole lot more off the wall.
Throughout the game, hidden as mysterious “glyphs” that Subject 16, the previous captive of Abstergo before Desmond, somehow hacked into the Animus software memories of Ezio, are little puzzles that usually involve picking out the similarity between different famous paintings or doing little dial twisting puzzles or solving codes. Some of them can get a bit difficult. All of them come with commentary by an increasingly paranoid and irrational Subject 16 (who is later revealed to be the Assassin Clay Kaczmarek), and reveal information about the Templars and Assassins, and their longstanding war. Completing each series of puzzles then gives one little snippet of a larger video, with each little snippet being about the length of a Tumblr gif.
The revelations in individual The Truth puzzles are honestly wacky as hell, and come off like someone on the creative team kept hitting Random on Wikipedia and started keeping a list for the writers to embellish. For instance, The Sword of Mars and Excalibur are both Swords of Eden. The Papal Staff and the Imperial Scepter of the Romanovs were both Staves of Eden. The Imperial Scepter by the way was destroyed by Nikola Tesla, in what was the Tunguska Explosion. It obliterated the Staff save for a tiny shard, but we’ll get to that later when I finally cover Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia. Or the comics about Nikolai Orelov.
And much as I love the wacky bullshit, it can get a bit problematic. Like when one of the The Truths reveals that World War II was not caused by complicated geopolitical reasons resulting from the fallout of the first World War and the longstanding history of European imperialism and the centuries of antisemitism that resulted in the Jewish peoples being a scapegoat for everything. It was caused by, or at least strongly manipulated by, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler — all Templars — trying to control the world through chaos. This honestly would be neat, except that it also implies that it wasn’t that centuries — millennia — long history of scapegoating the Jewish people that lead to the Holocaust, it was a magical orb made by aliens mind controlling everyone. It gets back to the problem that the Bonfires of the Vanities almost but not quite overcomes.
The Apples of Eden and all those other Pieces that control minds being used to explain away human failings and historical strife kind of ignores that people really are kind of shit. Saying that a magical artifact is why people agreed to oppress minorities is a very simplistic and almost Saturday Morning Cartoon revelation. And ironically that same Apple that Hitler used was also the one that Henry Ford had used to convince his workers to put up with long hours. With some elaboration, this could work as a really good metaphor for propaganda and capitalist ideology, but its not really elaborated on. Just a letter from Henry Ford to Thomas Edison thanking him for “PE4”, an Apple, that he used to convince his employees he was raising their pay to 5$ a day when, in fact, he was giving them a pay cut, and how he shipped it to Europe to “H”, and how they’d let him have his fun (“Lord knows, that kind of purge will be good for Europe”).
And I suppose that’s as good a time as any to talk about the Jewish question. That question being: “Where the hell are all the Jewish people?” Assassin’s Creed had a Jewish quarter, despite having no Jewish characters, despite the fact that one of the cities it takes place in is Jerusalem, and the Muslims were well known for allowing Jewish people refuge within their holy city, in contrast with the Christians, who enacted violent pogroms whenever they were in control. It could, perhaps, be excused by the fact that there aren’t really that many named characters in Assassin’s Creed at all, but they do at least get mentioned in that there is a Jewish Quarter of one of the cities. In Assassin’s Creed II, the existence of Jewish people is kind of an important thing, considering that both Lorenzo de Medici and Rodrigo Borgia were friendly to Jewish refugees fleeing from other places such as Spain, which was going through its Inquisition at about this same time (which is the plot of that DS game, Discovery). This gets even stranger in Brotherhood, where an entire Jewish district is just never even commented on. Perhaps it would have made Rodrigo out to be less of a villain than the one his laters depicted him as?
Of course, that isn’t the only problematic issue. There’s also the teeny tiny little matter of the fact that slavery was a thing during the Renaissance, and Lorenzo owned slaves. This is likely one of those things that’s not depicted because it would make things rather complicated to portray likeable characters as being flawed or anything less than good guys. Of course, the game also ignores colonialism, despite making Amerigo Vespucci’s cousin one of Ezio’s love interests. And in The Truth, JFK is a charismatic defender with an Apple of his own who also… wanted to get the Apple off the moon? I’m not entirely clear on that part, to be honest. Either way, it feels like there are a lot of aspects of the Renaissance that the game simply… ignores. Because they would be too complicated to acknowledge.
It’s actually kind of refreshing that Odyssey actually does allow the world to be a bit brutal. There are slaves, and while the Eagle-Bearer can’t really comment on the fact that the heart of so-called Democracy has such things as institutionally treating human beings as property, it is still a thing, that dichotomy exists, and you can see Kassandra (or Alexios) react to that. All in all, like many things, it really undermines any revolutionary or progressive rhetoric the games have when they also portray complex or outright monstrous historical figures (like Columbus or Churchill, who shows up as an ally in Syndicate) as being not only good guys, but very good and noble heroes.
Of course, the most important revelation in The Truth is The Truth itself: A very short video from [DATE CLASSIFIED] BCE of two freerunners in translucent jumpsuits that you can tell are futuristic because they’ve got circuitry lines on them climbing through a futuristic city of glass and steel, briefly seeing some sort of overseer with an Apple controlling mindless workers in a darkly lit steel factory or something. They bust through the windows and climb to the roof and overlook Kilimanjaro despite being white as hell and refer to each other as “Adam” and “Eve”. Adam and Eve are real in Assassin’s Creed! And they escaped from the Isu! Of course, this is one of those plotlines that gets dropped later, but for now its wild and wacky and I love it. The sheer audacity of the backstory of this game. Precursor civilizations, Adam and Eve, the Greco-Roman Gods. Atlantis is real! You find that out much later in the series, but still, it’s so ridiculous.
Aside from the historical omissions and the way the Apple is not quite made into a metaphor for more earthly propaganda and manipulation, even just the controls and the story itself are not as good as they could be. The game hands you a great deal of weapons and tools by the time you’re in Venice, for instance, but none of it ever really gets used. Smoke bombs, throwing knives, poison blade, hidden gun, it’s all nice but at the end of the day none of it really matters, especially not when actually changing between the various weapons means actively stopping attacking, pulling up the weapon wheel, and then choosing what you want. It really stops the flow of combat. And if you had the poison blade or hidden gun selected and end up going into combat, you’ll automatically switch to the hidden blade, meaning if you want to use that weapon again, you’ll have to go back to it again. And really what’s the point of switching anyway, when your hidden blade is such a good weapon choice? It has an instant death combo, and does decent enough damage until the late game, when your swords can cut through opponents like tissue paper anyway, even if you can’t manage to get off the instant kill counter. Of course, even if you have trouble, healing with Medicine is quick and easy and you get a ton of it.
I mentioned the strange and underused springboard mechanic that shows up in one tiny barely used section of the Bonfires of the Vanities DLC, but there’s another mechanic in the main game that’s equally underused: The ability to jump up from a climb and then grab onto a ledge at a higher elevation. It’s a really video gamey mechanic, and Ezio first sees Rosa, one of the thieves who serves as a love interest but isn’t actually worth talking about in the grand scheme of things, fail to use it when trying to infiltrate Emilio Barbarigo’s palazzo. Later, he has her teach it to him before they assault Emilio’s manor, and it never actually gets used in the narrative outside of one tiny little section of Venice, and maybe one or two Viewpoints in that same tiny DLC area of Florence. Neither mechanic is necessarily bad, but there’s a sense of “what does this really add?” The jump-climb gets quietly taken away from the player in Brotherhood, too, so even the creators didn’t think it was that necessary.
One of my biggest issues with Assassin’s Creed II is the pacing. Its a very long game, but in all honesty it should be longer. Not with hundreds of collectibles or a billion side quests, like would become the norm for Assassin’s Creed games extending their length, but transitional scenes. The time scale of the game is literal decades, but you’d have a difficult time realizing that since the only time you ever get a date is when transitioning to a new Sequence. The game shows the passage of time only through Ezio’s model changing in tiny subtle ways, like getting a beard and getting chubbier cheeks, but he also wears a hood and literally no one else ages. Claudia stays a teenager forever. There’s never a sense that time has passed in a substantial way until you get a new Sequence. When Ezio is training, first with Paola and later with Mario, there’s no sense of time. He simply does a tutorial and then he knows a new skill, as if only an afternoon has passed.
This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest things that actually made me like Assassin’s Creed: Renaissance, the novelization of the game by Anton Gill under the pseudonym Oliver Bowden (read in my copy of the audiobook by Gildart Jackson, though there’s another version read by Gunnar Cauthery) more than the game itself in a lot of ways. The novel gives names and personalities to minor characters, and allows for more introspection into Ezio’s thoughts and feelings during the events of the story. It also does a really good job at contextualizing time and space, and details events that the game can’t do because of limitations of assets and time. The long trek from Florence to Monteriggioni is more than just walking with his sister and mother until he comes to the part of the map that asks if the player wants to go to Monteriggioni. It’s a several day journey where Ezio has to secure fake documents, and wisely spend what little money he had with him. Cristina Vespucci — here called Cristina Calfucci for some reason — has a number of scenes where Ezio encounters her throughout his life, and makes her into his first love, who he strongly cared for, as opposed to simply a teenage tryst. These scenes would later show up in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood as repressed memories, but it really doesn’t flow well when taken out of the narrative and treated as just a hidden secret that you can only get if you manage to get X% of the game completed. Ezio even has a bit of a relationship with Rosa that makes their familiarity feel more natural.
Almost every aspect of the book is better than the game, except for the fact that all the best lines are rewritten to be objectively worse, and Mario never says “It’s-a me, Mario!”
But beyond that, there are so many things that get more depth. Historical context is given, tying Savonarola’s rise to the half-millennium, and fears that the year 1500 would see Christ return. Pope Sixtus’ interdict on all of Florence and the conflict that followed is brought up. Time passes in the book. Even personal things have more depth. In the game, Antonio’s little study (which exists as the only room in its building, and right next to the windows, letting you see inside a tiny bit) shares no similarities with Mario’s, but in the book Ezio remarks to himself how similar the two are, and how it shows off an aspect of Antonio’s personality; it actually helps Ezio get to appreciate his new ally. Antonio also gets a surname, and La Volpe, the head thief of Florence, gets a name period. The book fleshes out so much, including the villains. None of them are really well meaning but paternalistic like in the first game, and I don’t think they ever really go back to being that way, but some of them at least lean towards that more than simply being mustache twirling schemers. Of course, other characters get fleshed out as simply being easily manipulated by Rodrigo. He chooses Marco Barbarigo to replace Mocinego because Marco is easily controlled and stupid, something we learn when the narrative briefly focuses on Rodrigo’s internal monologue.
It also drops the more gamey aspects, like the secret challenge dungeons with hidden seals to unlock the Armor of Altair hidden in a sanctuary beneath Monteriggioni. Though it does keep the codex weapons. I’m not sure whether Anton Gill didn’t play the games or only had footage to go off of and got confused by it or what, but the second hidden blade and bracer is turned into a “double blade” instead of one on each arm, and each new weapon is treated as a completely separate attachment, with Ezio actively choosing between them and changing them out. The poison that in the game causes anyone stabbed with it to go berserk is also instead replaced with an instantly fatal super poison that turns Ezio’s blade into an overpowered gamebreaker.
And with a weapon that can instantly kill his opponents with so much as a scratch if he chooses to use it, it should come as no surprise that the book’s version of Ezio is almost just as much an unstoppable killing machine as in the game. Here at least he’s allowed to feel fatigue. Speaking of which, as with Secret Crusade — which was actually written as the third novel in the series, while this was the first — when Ezio uses the Apple of Eden to fight Rodrigo, he feels fatigue, and he knows that Rodrigo must be feeling it as well. The game’s cutscene kind of implies that there’s some sense of fatigue, but it could just be chalked up to the two of them fighting hard against each other, and not necessarily because of the influence of the magical artifacts draining their vitality to power their supernatural effects. Its an aspect that Anton Gill seems to have completely made up for the novels, and frankly it’s a neat addition.
Assassin’s Creed II is one of the biggest stories in gaming. I really do believe that it stands up there with games like Ocarina of Time and Half-Life 2. Or, maybe it would be more fair to say that it stands alongside games like Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines. It isn’t a horribly janky mess of a game, and its problematic aspects and mechanical failures don’t ruin it, but it really does have a lot of faults that going into this I hadn’t perhaps remembered or thought too heavily about.
In some ways, it has more to say than its predecessor. In other ways, it has a lot less to say. There’s no confusion about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and you’d never find yourself agreeing with the Templars on their methods. In fact, they don’t really have any methods. They’re all just greedy backstabbers looking to gain more power.
Even the motivations behind the Pazzi conspiracy, which while not exactly noble were a little more complex than solely wanting power and involved complicated Papal politics that don’t really even get covered in Lineage, is treated as just being this scheme to knock off Lorenzo de Medici because he’s got all the power and they want it, with a brief, very brief, mention about jealousy over Lorenzo being nouveau riche in someone’s database video, not that I can remember whose, because they all sort of blend together. I mean, I already mentioned how Girolomo Riario, the Pope’s nephew, was behind the plot. And in Lineage, Giovanni tried to stop the assassination of the Duke of Milan, a powerful ally of the Medici. That incident was never really mentioned in Assassin’s Creed II itself, but it was actually part of the overall Pazzi conspiracy.
The villains, outside of Rodrigo, aren’t really memorable, and I think the only reason that Rodrigo is memorable is solely because of Manuel Tadros giving an excellent performance and having a really good voice.
While there are aspects of the game that really have meaningful, if commercialized, things to say, the majority of the game just… doesn’t. The people you help are all treated as being unquestionably the good guys, with no critiques of institutional power at all. The use of torture isn’t even questioned.
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that the actual structure of the Assassin Brotherhood is a confusing mess! Mario, la Volpe, Paola, Antonio, and Teodora are all Assassins, but are the condottiere, thieves, and courtesans? Mario says Vieri harasses Monteriggioni not because of Ezio, but because “we are Assassins”, but none of them look or act like it. This is the only game where non-player Assassins don’t look at all like Assassins. At least they do still espouse enlightenment era philosophy while working with incredibly powerful and oppressive heads of state without realizing the conflict.
Ezio’s story ends, for now, with Minerva looking directly into the camera and telling Desmond what he needs to do, but Desmond’s isn’t, and after that reveal he’s given a hidden blade and made to hold off the Templars while Shaun and Rebecca pack up everything so that they can flee to a new safehouse. There’s an interesting confrontation here between Lucy and Vidic where he highlights how abusive he is by saying he saved her life (from the Templars, who thought they had no more use for her), to which she points out it was only to continue doing exploitative and unethical experiments on people. Vidic shoots back that she was with him the whole time. Its an interesting narrative thread, and one that bears ruminating on. Is Lucy complicit in all those horrible things that Vidic did with her help? How much of the blame does she share when she was a prisoner? These are questions that become even more complicated with later developments about Lucy’s loyalties. But, oh, no, like many questions the game raises, it isn’t really interested in thinking about the answer, not when you have a bunch of Abstergo thugs to fight over the credits. They fight with collapsible security batons, but they all have the sound effects of a mace from the Renaissance, because it’s a lot easier to do that than it would be to program in a bunch of firearms that a security team would be likely to have when assaulting an Assassin safehouse. That’s kind of a metaphor for a lot of things in the series. “Here’s something neat, think about how neat it is. Okay, now for a fight”.
Then the screen goes black again, Desmond is hooked into the Animus to poke around (presumably for people who hadn’t finished The Truth) and Shaun and Lucy give a bit of unnecessary exposition on what sun related incident Minerva was worried about, all while the credits finish rolling.
All in all, I’d still recommend the game, and there’s still things to think about, but we can see how the liberalism, as well as needing to stick to a historical setting where players can’t just overthrow the Medici or Barbarigo families and turn the Republics of Florence and/or Venice into socialist communes really hinders any themes that border on radicalism. Even the modern storyline, which is honestly surprisingly apolitical simply because the villains are cartoonishly evil, lacks a lot, partly because its given no elaboration besides being a framing narrative, and excuse for the gameplay to happen, and to help contextualize the Stargate bullshit.
The novelization is also something I can’t recommend strongly enough. It handled the same story in a way that goes beyond the simple mechanical actions. As much as I love the facial animations in this game, particularly a few of Desmond’s early in, the game is very limited by its assets and the constraints of the genre, especially at that time. It kind of makes me really excited to see that Netflix series that hasn’t put out any info on over a year.
This one was a bit of a beast, and I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out how to get it all down and just settled on this, so if you managed to get to the end, you deserve my thanks.
If you like the nonsense I say, you can support me emotionally by sharing this post and clapping it (not that I know what that even means, but the numbers go up and that makes me feel good), or support me financially by becoming a Patron or giving a one time tip.
