Assassin’s Creed 2 was a pleasant surprise, that it trumps its prequel in every way that was possible, was not something we had anticipated. The fist Assassin’s Creed was not a terrible game, we even admitted that we liked the game for the fleeing moments that it lasted — while its grave mistake of repetitive mission structure (only 3 different mission types) was inexcusable, its uniqueness lay in building upon the basic Prince of Persia gameplay, lifting it onto a historical sandbox environment with stealth elements, and giving it a pretty deep conspiracy story. The most commendable element from the first Creed was always the fact about its transcendence above the suspension of disbelief of the series’ roots with its gameplay environment — that it was utterly believable, gorgeously so, that the whole city was playground for Altair and every structure was scalable, now that was unlike the Prince of Persia series, from the Sands of Time to the most recent dynamic duo, while the Sands of Time was an infinitely better game then the first Assassin’s Creed, We never really got passed the fact that every room and trap was built in such a way that only the Prince could pass it — this is a little bit different from constructing a platform that only Mario’s maximum jump distance could reach — in POP, and also in Uncharted 2, it was never about using the protagonist’s wits to defeat the environment, but it has always been how ridiculous the environment has laid the foundation for the path through the game and it is merely player’s job to discover it.
Assassin’s Creed 2, like its predecessor, is about the present-day protagonist Desmond, looking through the eyes of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, his Assassin ancestor, living through Renaissance Italy start from Florence, through Tuscany and the beautiful villa-on-water Venice, ending at the Sistine Chapel in Rome before the ceiling was painted. The familiar locale in Florence rendered perfectly in its medieval days immediately struck a cord with me because I visited the exact locations 2 years ago when the first Assassin’s Creed was patiently waiting at my doorsteps. Just revisiting those locales in the game, as the structure they were used for back in the days, was godsend. Now anyone who has visited Europe knows that unlike those of us who live in North America with our evanescent history that the historical buildings (at least the ones you get to visit) have stood against the tide of time and war unscathed (well or rebuilt to their former glory so they looked unscathed). I climbed the Dome in my Florence trip and that was one of the things Ezio would have to do in the game, though it was optional I believe, as it was one of the Assassin’s Tomb, and with much more grace and the lack of effort he ascended to the best view of Florence than I did as my real self. The scenery in Assassin’s Creed is nothing shot of breathtaking, and the entry price of the game is worth that alone if you plan to visit Italy and has visited in the past, not to mention the in-game database updates you constantly with the history of the locales, which the game could have proved an adequate guide-book if you could actually bring it with you.
Fans of the Prince of Persia series would be delighted to know some of the timed puzzles are back and they are mostly optional when you go through the tombs of the Assassins, which are all real locales I have visited during my trip. I lack the words to list the improvements the second game made over the first game, to me the first game felt like a beta built, a tech demo, and then Ubisoft listened to what fans wanted and made a real game this time around really worthy of being a spiritual sandbox sequel to the Prince of Persia. Mission varieties are a plethora of delight this time around — we didn’t keep track of the different plot-centric missions we went through because we didn’t have to. It took us 14 hours to do everything at least once in the game but not a moment of it we felt like it was repetition. Blending into the crowd is much better done this time around, and you can hire courtesans and thieves alike to distract guards and such, there’re different weapons and armors to equip, you can use funds to improve your hometown (Suikoden-light), and you can even swim, fly, and assassinate two people at the same time. The controls for the most part flowed naturally but if we had to nit-pick, and we do, is that it feels imperfect, sometimes even a bit badly designed — that letting go from a ledge, and grabbing on is mapped to the same button, this is problematic especially after Ezio learned to jump up to grab something it feels a step backwards that Ezio won’t grab on to a higher ledge on his own, instead of making you press the button, which no doubt you will fall to your countless deaths if you punched it vehemently thinking it was salvation. The same thing with jumping away from the ledge, is also mapped to the same button as climbing onto the surface from the ledge, and for the first 1/3 of the game you didn’t need to jump away at all, but you would do it frequently anyway, jumping to your death. And while that section kicked in and the game gave you an actual tutorial of how to jump away from a ledge, we couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous it was because we don’t think anyone needed the tutorial to remind them that this action existed when they have spent countless moments to avoid doing it. Now the jumping away from the climbing position was of course vital to the gameplay, we aren’t criticizing that, just like we weren’t criticizing the grabbing onto the ledge during falling, we are questioning the need to press that same button to climb onto the surface while pushing up would have sufficed — up when there’s nothing else above you to climb, that means climbing to the surface, if there was a surface, it isn’t rocket science. Despite the flaws, eventually the player of average intelligence would adapt to the system, from the many accidental deaths that he performed in the beginning half of the game, to avoid mistakes all together in the later half. That is why we called it imperfect, not disastrous, like a slight indentation in an otherwise flawless diamond.
Combat is fluid and graceful but always ridiculously easy because even while swamped by enemies, unlike what happens in Dynasty Warrior, your enemies will politely take turns to attack you, as if you were playing a turn-based strategy game and the computer AI only had 1 unit to move even when it had 10 units to choose from. And there really are just 2 types of enemies, ones that you can kill solely by countering, and the ones (bosses and knights with pole-arms) that you can’t counter at all which you have to dodge and attack. Now there was a time in the first Assassin’s Creed towards the end of the game that the combat difficulty curve skyrocketed and suddenly the game was a challenge, which we actually appreciated, and it was disappointing to never find that moment in the 2nd game, with the weapons and armor upgrade and 15 Diablo health potions you can inject yourself with, which you most likely don’t even have to use at all, because the game refills your health at frequent checkpoints, that was simply too easy all the way. And you would come to realize, that this game was never about the combat. Unlike the first Prince of Persia (the very first one from Broderbund made in 1989, which you can relive the remake on XBLA), Ubisoft has never quite gotten the hand-to-hand combat right. Ubisoft’s own incarnation of the series, has always been the exploration and the puzzle-like environments and the witty banter, and yes, not to forget the storytelling.
The storytelling and the central plot is really the meat of this game, and with Assassin’s Creed 2, the series has established itself as an epic conspiracy that is similar to Legacy of Kain which started last decade. To those who don’t get this comparison, it would be something that is equivalent to the scale of the Matrix or ABC’s Lost. From the boring repetitive plot of the first Assassin’s Creed (even though at the end it managed to salvaged itself with enough cliffhanger conspiracy theories), Assassin’s Creed 2 flowed like a master bard’s virtuoso performance of his lifetime. The pacing of the story was tenacious and enduring no matter how many things the game tried to distract you with, from side missions to just climbing the viewpoints, from visiting the Assassin’s Tomb for the seals to collecting the plot-centric codex pages, or simply reading the explanation of people or locales. You will spend hours and hours thinking about how the plot unfolds even while you are not playing the game, and when you play it you will not want to take even a cursory moment away from it. And when the final moment of Assassin’s Creed 2 unfolds, you will be awed like when you have gone through those key moments in Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, when Kain proclaims to throw a coin to land on its side, when you catch a glimpse of the big picture and figure out how you have been manipulated all along — like prying open the coffin and finding the decomposing corpse of yourself. Not to say that Ubisoft has written something that is superior to the central plot of Soul Reaver, that has yet to be seen (and most likely not), but as a game it is already a triumph over what it was built itself upon and no doubt makes its own foothold in history as one of those games that forever changes how we perceive reality. We hope to see more of the ancient Assassin’s memory in the next game, maybe, and particularly about the one that went after Genghis Khan. Though we can’t help but feel that the real conflict in the present, between the descendants of the Templars and the Assassins, Desmond, even while they are fighting for the salvation of Planet Earth, will forever be overshadowed by the counterpart antediluvian struggles of their ancestors. Do we ever really want to see Desmond flailing across the metropolitan of New York City like Spiderman? Not really, we are only interested in the medieval villas with their primordial secrets and ancient relics.
Confession: We spent 14 hours going through the main quest and selected side missions getting 860/1000 achievement points (thus you should able to tell which version we played). For once, we are glad that Ubisoft has not decided to use Jade Raymond this time around to promote the game, for the game really could speak for itself, instead of masquerading its flaws behind a pretty face.
