ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD IS ST00P1D

A loosely-structured Scream-Into-The-Void© video game rant by The Only Guy Who Posts Here (i.e., thebluesader, i.e., your mother's "stress reliever")

INTRODUCTION (if you know all you need to know about the Assassin's Creed series, skip ahead to the next section where the actual review of Brotherhood takes place.  But you should know by now that I do not condone anyone not reading everything I've ever written.  So if you're skipping ahead, understand that I hate you and hope They finally come for you in the night.)

For those who have been too busy since 2007 trying to cure cancer and keep North Korea in their box to play Ubisoft platformers, the perpetually-misspelled Assassin's Creed series (should be Assassins' Creed - there is more than one assassin) follows the confusing adventures of American bartender and hoodie aficionado, Desmond Miles. This is a Ubisoft game, therefore the product of the country that invented movies that don't make any sense on purpose (France), so the less said about whatever the plot is intentionally not making sense about, the better.  Suffice it to say, Desmond has been kidnapped by a company called Abstergo and taken to somewhere in continental Europe, where he has been strapped into some kind of lawn chair computer that forces him to relive the "genetic memories" (yes) of his ancestors.  Abstergo is making him do this because they are a front company for the Illuminati-lite Templars, a thousand-year-old order of Catholic knights who are now determined to rule the world via ancient, abandoned, kind-of-alien-but-sort-of-not "Artifacts" that have been hidden all around the world.   Desmond is a descendant of the ancient order of Capital-A Assassins, a group that has taken it upon itself to defend the world from the Templars by keeping the Artifacts hidden (at least when they're not using them for their own selfish ends; more on this soon). Desmond's ancestors (or at least a couple of them) either hid some of the Artifacts themselves or at any rate knew where some of them ended up, so Abstergo intends to learn their whereabouts via the whole "genetic memory" thing.

Thinking about this kind of stuff too hard is what causes strokes, children (or at least incontinence and possibly erectile dysfunction), so let's call it what it is: an excuse for the player to lead one of Desmond's ancestors around in the time and place he lived, stabbing people in the neck with a wrist blade.  There is also what can technically be called an "ass-load" of 3D platforming, because, again, Ubisoft is French, and was therefore unable to read the English-language memo put out by The World's Gamers in 2005 declaring a permanent moratorium on broken, un-fun 3D platforming.

Or they DID read it and just didn't care, because they're French and apparently the French hate fun (just look at their confusing, intentionally-bullshitty movies).

At least in this one, it looks like

they're having just as much fun filming it as

we are watching it.

In the first game in the series (Assassins' Creed, 2007), players portrayed Arab assassin and 13th-Century-hoodie aficionado Altair No Last Name (who was suddenly given a last name in the recap at the beginning of Brotherhood, but as it is like three Arabic words long and Desmond's voice actor reads it really fast, I immediately didn't care).  Altair was an interesting guy and his story made for an interesting game, mostly because he was a neck-stabbing amoral jack-hole who got all his sweet assassins' gear and skills taken away at the beginning of AC after getting a fellow assassin killed and not caring about it.  

If you read that sentence carefully you're probably wondering how someone's SKILLS can be taken away as punishment, as did I.  But in a universe where hedgehogs are blue and can do Mach 4 and Italian plumbers become radioactive death machines by jumping on stars with eyes, having knowledge sucked out of your brain as punishment is a mundane footnote.  And a convenient excuse for making the player level up a character over 20-odd hours of gameplay, after teasing them with all his cool abilities by letting them have them all for the first 10 minutes.

The only other way to get away with something like this is to give the player character a sudden bout of amnesia (like in last year's Prototype).  And since gaming needs more amnesiac protagonists like the French need to make more movies about boring people not being able to fuck because of socialism or something, we should be thankful for the creative insanity we're given.

Assassins' Creed was, despite the 3D platforming, very fun, because as Altair you had one job, and that job was neck-stabbing.  And to be fair, the platforming itself was substantially less than terrible, owing to slick, intuitive, context-sensitive runny-jumpy-stabby controls.  Holding one button down, pushing the movement stick forward, and occasionally tapping other buttons made Altair do everything an assassin needs to do to be an assassin.  And giving him an open Medieval city or three in which to do it guaranteed 20-odd hours of runny-jumpy-stabby fun.  The story was also good, because like I said, Altair No Last Name is an amoral jack-hole, and it was refreshing to finally play a protagonist who wasn't necessarily a good guy.  All in all, Atair was a product of his times, and his times (13th Century Palestine) were brutal and filled with similar jack-holes, such as his boss and mentor, who by the end of the game (SPOILERS!) fucks him over and tries to use one of the Artifacts to kill him by overcoming the rules of the Matrix or whatever.  But, indeed, whatever.  Good game play and a consistently interesting, character-driven story truly a good game makes.

 This is you need to know about Assassin's Creed 1.

In 2009, Assassins' Creed 2 continued the story of Desmond and the wacky people at Abstergo and in his head (or blood. Or skin cells. Or whatever).  In AC2 - in between sessions in the lawn chair computer, the Animus - Desmond escapes Abstergo with the help of lab assistant Lucy, voiced by and based on (at least facially) Kristen Bell, who many of you will know as OMG KRISTEN BELL I WANT TO MAKE BABIES WITH HER.  Lucy is a bonafide living Assassin (part of the same capital letter organization Altair belonged to), and has been working undercover at Abstergo, assisted by fellow Assassins Shaun and Rebecca.  They are also trying to get a hold of Desmond and his "genetic memories," since, in addition to his ancestors knowing where the Artifacts are, he is apparently the Assassin Neo / Messiah or something.  Again, if you don't think about it too hard, it is easy to ignore, and that's more or less what you have to do here.

Because, again, this plot is just an excuse for Desmond (and thus the player) to relive the "genetic memories" of another of Desmond's ancestors, Italian aristocrat and Late 15th-century-hoodie aficionado Ezio Auditore da Firenze.  Ezio, and in that AC2 itself, is less compelling than the original AC.  Ezio, while the descendant of Altair, only becomes an Assassin because all the other male members of his family are killed by complicated Italian Renaissance politics involving people the real Assassins want to kill, and I guess he figures he might as well give them a hand.  He's a saint of a guy (aside from the neck-stabbing), whose only other personality trait is occasional snarkiness.  So he's basically the Prince from Prince of Persia, another Ubisoft franchise that, though 10 years older, by 2009 was already less popular than Assassins' Creed.  Primarily because its main character has always been an unnamed snarky hipster who only does anything interesting when he forced by circumstance to do so (secondarily because it was almost 100% shitty 3D platforming).  Why Ubisoft decided to write Ezio like the Prince is beyond me, except that 90% of video game protagonists are exactly like this (plus or minus improbable boobs), and people keep buying them.  Not me, but, you know...st00p1d people.  Like you.  And all your friends.  And your dad.

Despite Ezio being a lot more boring than Altair, I suppose you could say Assassins' Creed 2 was better than Assassins' Creed 1, because it was basically the same game, just bigger, with prettier digital building architecture.  The colors were brighter and now the people you were tasked to stab were Europeans, and as two World Wars have proven, killing members of your own race (like you're not white) is always more fun than killing people who don't pitifully beg for mercy in a language you understand.

But I suppose you could also say AC2 was NOT as good as AC1, in that I am saying that, right now.  While AC1 was all about the sweet, sweet neck stabbing and runny-jumping to get there, AC2 wouldn't let you have that kind of asocial fun until after you'd listened to historically-important but largely plot-irrelevant NPCs postulate about Italian Renaissance politics in unskippable cut-scenes.  Ezio also had to keep going back to his family's estate every half-hour to collect the money he needed to buy better swords and armor.  And while he was there, "oh hey Ezio, if you're not busy, can you tell us how many broken toilets to repair down the street, because, you know, we don't know if you want them all working at the same time, because...um...DO IT OR YOU WON'T GET MORE MONEY."

To be fair, some of the new non-assassination stuff wasn't bad.  I got really into collecting all the treasure chests scattered all over the various city maps because I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to 100% completing open-world games.  Though, at the end of the day, it had absolutely no bearing on the progression of the game, so was basically pointless.  And trying out the different types of historically-accurate weapons was fun.  But just as pointless, because by the end of the game Ezio got a hold of Altair's sword and armor from the first game, which were now fantastically overpowered and didn't need to be repaired.  The most notable "sort of okay" new additions were the Templar hideouts, building interior platforming puzzles Ezio had to complete to unlock Altair's swag (which was in Ezio's family estate's basement the ENTIRE TIME, but I guess Uncle Mario forgot where he put the key).  As much as I hate 3D platforming (I will keep repeating it until it is purged from the world of games forever), and as much as many of these sequences were WAY TOO LONG and arbitrarily timed (apparently just to make me and similarly-tempered people break expensive electronics), they were, like I said, "sort of okay."  As in, the reward was worth the effort.  Because Mario lost the fucking key.  Bastardo.

Not to say the time spent doing these sequences wasn't itself bullshit game padding.  Because it was.  Because Assassins' Creed is supposed to be about neck-stabbing.  And anything that isn't neck-stabbing in Assassins' Creed is automatically un-fun, st00p1d bullshit.

 Ezio, in the midst of some un-fun, st00p1d bullshit.

And he clearly knows it, too.

Which brings us to the shambling, vomit-covered disaster that is Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood.

ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD IS ST00P1D

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a bad title for this game (aside from the incorrect punctuation).  A more accurate title would be The Prince of Persia Takes Rome: the Lurching Loading Screen Adventure.  If you're like me, my new title should tell you everything you need to know about why this game is a mess.  If you are instead one of those positive, energetic, social people with a good job and a girlfriend, allow me to explain a little.  (After I first remind you types that you shouldn't be hanging around my blog in the first place, because I don't make nearly enough Glee references or trendy urban cupcake bistro recommendations to justify the amount of time it takes the average person to read my verbose run-on sentences.  Just so you are aware.)

Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood isn't a sequel to Assassins' Creed 2, I guess because there's no reason to make new HD character skins and building textures when you've barely collected on all the time and money you invested (some might say, foolishly) in the vast amount in the last game.  AC2 ended with Desmond and fellow Assassins Lucy, Shaun and Rebecca fleeing their giant loft hideout in an unmarked box truck, as the Abstergo Corporation had sent its goons to bring the escaped Desmond and Lucy back to their warehouse in Wherever That Was (if you need details about Abstergo or Desmond and Lucy's previous adventures, see the last section, and realize THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULDN'T SKIP AHEAD, ASSHOLE).  AC:B begins with Desmond and the Gang arriving at the modern day remains of AC2's Ezio's family estate.  The doors are locked and the building is partially collapsed, so the first thing the player has to do is lead Desmond through underground tunnels with Lucy so they can find a way into the basement, where they can continue Desmond's lawn-chair-computer-Animus sessions.

You'll immediately notice a problem.  AC1 started with a short platforming section, then Altair assassinating a Templar which inadvertently gets a fellow Assassin killed.  As you'll recall, this more or less established what you'd be doing throughout the rest of the game: platforming a little, then neck-stabbing.  AC2 started with a bunch of slow story crap, followed by an only slightly less slow platforming sequence or five, and then FINALLY letting Ezio stab a guy.  And again, this more or less established what you'd be doing throughout the rest of the game: sitting through lots of unskippable cut-scenes, doing a lot of arbitrarily-lengthened platforming, then finally, FINALLY, stabbing guys.

AC:B starts with Desmond and Lucy doing a 20 minute sewer level while their voice actors pretend they have snarky sexual tension.  And then there's another 10 minute sequence in which Desmond had to platform all over the town at the foot of Ezio's family estate activating fuse boxes.  When he finally gets into the Animus, we catch up with Ezio and surviving family who, after getting attacked at the family estate by the Evil Pope's perverted asshole of a son, have fled to Rome.  Which kind of seems like the worst place to flee to considering the Evil Pope and his son LIVE THERE.  But I guess that makes some kind of incredibly stupid sense: they're not going to expect Ezio to move into their backyards, so they won't expect him.  Anyway, all the NPCs from the last game are also conveniently in Rome - totally not drawing attention to themselves by organizing against the Evil Pope IN HIS CITY - and give updates about how much cereal they've eaten since the last time Ezio (and the player) saw them.  And how their cereal consumption may or may not have impacted Italian Renaissance politics.

And guess what?  Interspersed with such frequent and lengthy loading screens that I felt like I was trying to play the original release of The Witcher again on my crappy PC, this is the game.  There are still assassinations in AC:B, and they are more or less fun, and still important to the plot.  But you only get to do them - you only get to have fun - after the game has decided you've done enough timed jumping puzzles and listened to enough melodramatic dialogue.  Because Ubisoft, and thus the game, apparently think this is why we're here.  To not jump the right way in under two minutes and to find out what Machiavelli thinks about Vatican City policies now that it's 1507. 

 For fuck's sake, Lucy! 

Shut up and let the man stab some people already!

There are no platform-puzzle Templar hideouts this time.  But their are six platform-puzzle Romulus cult lairs scattered throughout Rome (yes, there is a pagan cult in this game.  Because a game about the Evil Pope manipulating the Catholic Church didn't have enough fucking religious intrigue).  And when I say they are scattered around the map, I mean really fucking scattered, because this map is way too big, and divided up by so many rural areas adjacent to the Seven Hills that you can't have fun roof-running across the city anymore.  But you can (and WILL) spend hours running around the base of the damn hills trying to find the one spot where you can actually climb up them, so there's that.  If you find that just as fun.  So, if you work for Ubisoft. 

As well as the cult lairs, there are also four forced stealth sequences in which you first have to raid an enemy base to find blueprints, then use the machine built from the blueprints to destroy the enemy base.  Even at their best, each one of these sequences is 80% platforming, and each one has at least one unskippable cut-scene.  And all of them, ALL OF THEM, have 0% assassinations.  In fact, in many of them, you either don't have time to kill anyone because of the tightly-scripted, autofail timed jumping puzzles, or if you do have time, killing someone will cause everyone in a ten mile radius to immediately know you're there.  And remember, this is forced stealth, which fans of the Hitman franchise will remember means anyone sees you, you fail, try again from the beginning.  AC:B introduces a feature that lets you fulfill certain specifics during the missions to get "100% Synchronization," which you don't have to do, which make the missions a little easier (you might get cash bonuses for getting 100% or something, but I never noticed if that's how it worked, which shows you how important it is in the first place).  But guess what?  To get full synchronization on a lot of these missions, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ASSASSINATE ANYONE.

Get the point yet?  The new Assassins' Creed game doesn't want you to assassinate anyone unless you absolutely have to.  This is like your favorite band (probably Train, you tasteless fuckwits) releasing a song that pauses in silence every 20 seconds, just to make sure you're not singing along with it.  What is the problem, Ubisoft?  Your assassination video game is fun because I get to assassinate people in a video game.  I didn't rent this thing (thank god I didn't buy it) because I was hoping to see Da Vinci finally make out with a dude and tell Ezio how he feels about it.  And I sure as hell wasn't interested in more timed jumping puzzles navigated with what have now proven themselves to be some of the worst platforming controls ever.

I noticed when I first started playing AC:B that Ubisoft had fiddled around with the context-sensitive platforming controls.  It was clear they had tried to make them "work more smoothly;" as in, they were now the platforming equivalent of your cell phone's Autocomplete.  Unlike AC2, AC:B now seems to be thinking ahead of whatever Ezio is doing, making assumptions about his next action, allowing him to slide into a position and its associated animation more smoothly and quickly.  And this seemed like a wholly positive innovation.

...Until the timed jumping puzzles started.  Anyone who has ever had their phone send "penis" instead of "person" knows exactly where this is going.  It is now almost impossible to tell what Ezio is going to do when you press Foward, the platforming context button, and an action button.  Depending on the landscape directly in his path, he might jump up.  He might jump down.  He might wall-run and leap off into oblivion.  He might just lurch forward and fall 80 feet into a dark cistern.  Sometimes he even grabs and interacts with features I didn't even know where there, either because the HD textures make everything look like an action point or because the camera is pointing the wrong way and I've gotten sick of flopping it around with the other stick.  Ironically enough, that last "problem" is actually a good thing, because I ended up solving a lot of the platforming puzzles when Ezio did the right thing while I couldn't even see what the right thing was.

Of course, that's only like 15% of the time.  The other 85% is him jumping to his death, going up a ladder backwards, grabbing the side of something instead of the top, or just lurching indecisively at the edge of a platform, so I can watch the five second "oops, almost fell there" animation again for the dozen-millionth time.

This is the most frustrating aspect of the broken controls.  But by no means the only one.  Context-sensitive controls are not used in games very often, especially in open world games, and there's a reason for that - how does the game know the context in which you want to use the controls?  For instance, the Xbox 360's 'Y' button can activate the following, depending on context: Eagle Vision mode.  Whistling for Ezio's horse.  Commanding followers / mercenaries to stop moving, start moving, OR attack a selected target.  Taunt enemies.  Activate a shop.  Talk to a mission-specific NPC.  Accept a mission at a glowing mission-selection point.  Do a swan dive off a ledge into a bale of hay or wheat.

Now on average, the game knows which context is the right context.  You can't activate a shop, select a mission, or talk to an NPC unless you're standing in the right spot.  You can't order followers / mercenaries around unless you're currently employing them.  You have to hold 'Y' down for half a second longer to get Eagle Vision.  But, fellow gamer, guess the correct context in the following situation: Ezio is standing on a ledge above a hay bale, is employing a band of mercenaries, is ALSO escorting a follower, and happens to be standing in front of a shop, which can be activated at any time, including during missions.  As a gamer, you would probably tap 'Y' in this situation to order your mercenaries to attack an approaching guard.  But sometimes the game can't figure that out.  Tap 'Y,' and there's an equal chance that Ezio will either swan dive off the ledge, order his follower to run head-long into the guard, or whistle for the goddamn horse.

Admittedly, this kind of specific situation doesn't happen all the time.  But it happens often enough when a game is this long and expansive that it becomes very, VERY frustrating.  And this is just the drama specifically involving the 'Y' button.  Every face button has at least half as many possible contexts, some even during free-running sequences, when you'd suppose holding down the fucking free-running context button would tell the game what it needs to know.  But sometimes it doesn't seem to matter.  And more than a couple of instances of standing there in the middle of a mission, frantically tapping the same button just to get Ezio to do the one and only one specific thing you want him to do, while he repeatedly does one of the many things you specifically DO NOT WANT him to do, is why there is a controller-shaped imprint in the plaster of my bedroom wall.  And the right analog stick is making a weird, crunchy metallic sound every time I move it.

 This is what happens 60% of the time when

you press the "quietly sneak away" button.

But all this is only a problem if the game decides to acknowledge the pushing of buttons at all.  Or even gives you the opportunity to press them.  Ezio ignored the jump button so often I was forced to conclude that it wasn't my finger's fault, that either the controller wasn't working right or the game wasn't working right.  Saying what I have about how I treat my controllers, its very possible that the piece of plastic is to blame.  

Or would be, if I couldn't throw Soul Calibur IV or Saints Row 2 in and immediately demonstrate that, abuse aside, my controllers work fine.  Apparently, the game is so busy trying to guess the context of the buttons that it just doesn't notice sometimes that they are actually being pressed.  Or STILL being pressed, like when it makes Ezio toss off an unaimed crossbow bolt that alerts everyone to his presence when I'm sitting there, finger still down on the button, trying to line up the shot.  And then there are the times when Ezio is standing directly in front of a shop or a horse or an NPC and I'm slamming the action button so hard my knuckles hurt, and the game doesn't care because it needs a second to realize where I am and prompt me to use it first.  And my favorite example of this kind of bullshit is when I jumped off a 200 foot church spire in Vatican City to test out my brand-new Da Vinci parachutes, and the "open parachute" option never activated.

Don't get me wrong, I've made Altair and Ezio face-plant off of the tops of buildings a thousand times by now just because...well, ha ha.  But I'd at least like the option to avoid suicide after I've paid in-game money specifically for it.

All of this - the context problems, the retarded button detection - really messes with the game's difficulty curve.  AC:B, like the first two games, isn't hard.  Now, we're not talking Fable series-easy here, but only like one step above.  The only hard parts actually programmed into any of these games has been the arbitrariness of the timed sequences.  And those would be the only hard parts, if the controls weren't a mess.  Since they are, AC:B's difficulty is like Grand Theft Auto IV's difficulty - it tends to be hard ONLY because the controls don't work.  Second only to GTA IV, AC:B can safely be called one of the hardest "easy" games I've ever played.  I should've been able to beat it in 10 hours, but it took 30 because I had to replay so many missions due to problems with the controls.  In all seriousness, I only lost one mission because I actually got killed because I genuinely did something wrong.  And that was pretty funny (I attacked a guy too close to a ledge, both he and Ezio fell off, and there were eight other guys waiting on the street who just hammered Ezio's ass with poleaxes before I could even get his sword out).  Every other mission I failed - mostly the timed jumping garbage - was a direct result of the game making Ezio jump wrong or at any rate not respond to what I was telling him to do.  And if you are a gamer, you know how infuriating that is.  A game that is programmed to be difficult with good controls is perfectly fine (see, oh, any Japanese game made in the last five years).  But one that is ONLY hard because it doesn't work is a game that should not have been released.

Okay. So we've established that the controls are a problem.  But it's worth putting up with it if the story is good, right?  I mean, the people who like Deadly Premonition (sad, crazy people, such as myself) don't like it because they enjoy trying to shotgun the same wall-crawling ghost child for 15 real minutes.  The story is what makes the suffering worthwhile.  The characters are the reason you replay the same godfuckingdammit timed jumping puzzle / forced stealth mission for six hours or until your hands calcify.  You care about these little digital people voiced by celebrities you'd like have sex with, and you want to see what happens to them, and be a part of that exciting journey.

Well, if it's story and characters you're after, 1) you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of suffering, and as your philosophical peer, I do not recommend it, and 2) their are Hideki Kamiya games that have more developed characters and more of a clear story in mind than AC:B.  This is basically the gaming equivalent of that second Matrix movie no one remembers, except that they remember how the theater audience booed and threw popcorn after the rip-off, bullshit cliffhanger ending.

But because of its length, AC:B is worse.  If the second Matrix movie was like a romantic weekend you've been looking forward to for months that basically ends after 3 minutes of low-level cardio, AC:B's is that, but after a week-long shuttle trip it took to get you and your lover to your vacation house on the Moon.  You punish your hands and blood pressure for 20 hours, and your reward is being told to buy the next game when it comes out.  Oh, and not to spoil it, but one of the main characters gets "killed" at the end, which you KNOW is bullshit, and it is all the more frustrating because you know Ubisoft actually thinks you're stupid enough to think Superman isn't ever coming back.  After all that work, all that suffering, this kind of "ha ha, suck it" ending is exactly that: "Ha ha," says Ubisoft.  "Suck it."

Not that I would have cared if the ending had been good.  At this point I was still waiting for the characters to do something, anything, even the least bit interesting.  Shaun and Rebecca have a few genuinely chuckle-worthy moments between them, and Lucy almost begins to seem like a character worth more than fantasies about Kirsten Bell and a strong wind spontaneously blowing off all her clothes when she's right in front of your house.

 And that wind is part of a giant rain storm that

immediately floods the street and makes her all wet.

And she is wearing a bikini under her clothes.

But "almost" is the key word, here.  Its exactly one scene, and then she tells Ezio to get his ass back to the vitally-important timed jumping puzzles.  Ezio is as Prince of Persia-y in AC:B as he can get without being Jake Gyllenhaal doing the kind of British accent Iranians have.  And Ezio's actually further along the Spectrum of Soulless Male Protagonists than the Prince, stridently approaching Master Chief territory.  Because now Ezio is King of the Assassins, and he's got the fate of the world on his shoulders, and if he shows any weakness the brain-bats will get him, and giving purposely vague one-word answers to everything makes him look like the coolest song-writing barista with scrolly tattoos ending just above his t-shirt sleeves, EVAR.

Okay, so I was being facetious about the brain-bats.  But I'm not joking about that barista crap.  Mr. Bartender Desmond seems to have spontaneous grown a tribal tattoo on his right forearm at some point between the end of the AC2 DLC and the opening truck ride of AC:B. His clothing has also been affected by whatever strange disease this is, because now his hoodie and t-shirt sport those "tattoo-inspired" Photoshop scroll-splosions that only look cool to people whose boss and/or wives won't let them get the kinds of tattoos they think bikers probably have (but don't, because people who actually pay that kind of money for a tattoo usually get a personally-designed one.  Because they don't want to look like one of those assholes with the Photoshop scroll-splosion tattoos, because those only make you look tough to college girls and people at church.  Because REAL tough-guy tattoos always have boobs and/or Batman fighting a werewolf).

If Desmond had suddenly grown a tattoo of bare-chested Batwoman fighting a werewolf, I still would have thought he was boring, but at least he would have looked like someone who had done something interesting, even if it was just explaining to the tattoo artist that he wanted a tattoo of bare-chested Batwoman fighting a werewolf.  Hell, even if it was just on his shirt, that would mean that at the very least he had had an interesting day buying that shirt.  But no such luck.  In addition to the shitty faux-tough-guy scroll work on his clothes, he now suddenly has this small kidney bean-shaped messenger bag over his shoulder, which might carry something interesting, but if so, no one ever talks about it.  And he lays on top of it while he's in the Animus, so it can't have anything sharp or made of glass in it.  And most interesting things are at least sharp and/or made of glass.

To be fair, AC:B gives us a bit more background on Ezio.  If you'll recall the beginning of AC2, the reward for doing one of the many platforming sections was watching Ezio have PG-13 sex with some woman.  This was to establish that he was a bit of a playboy, as his mother stated outright a few minutes later.  This mystery woman returns briefly in AC:B, in side missions that are unlocked as you take down what amounts to Abstergo sleeper-agents scattered throughout the map.  But her missions are short and have nothing to do with the story, and only serve to ruin what little character development Ezio was given in AC2.  See, no, he wasn't a player - he LOVED Cristina Vespucci.  She was the love of his life.  And he would've married her, had her father not opposed the union because Ezio's father had been killed by some guy for whatever reason that happened.  Or maybe he just found out that Ezio was now stabbing guys for a living and he didn't want Christmas parties to be awkward for the rest of his life.  Frankly, who cares.  As soon as I realized that Playboy Spoiled Brat Self-Absorbed Reluctant Assassin Ezio was now being retconned into a grizzled, Harlequin Romance hero with a contemporary Midwestern attitude about sex, I literally stopped giving whatever little fuck I'd ever given about him.  Because suddenly he was just another well-toned white guy in a video game aimed at 17-year-olds in Texas.  And as we all know, the only thing notable about these kinds of characters is what color jacket they are wearing, and only then because you don't want to lose sight of them during combat sequences.

Don't get me wrong. The AC2 story wasn't exactly good.  Hell, as I've said, the AC1 story wasn't exactly good, at least the parts of it that made sense.  There was too much armchair sociological speculation, and too many arguments about the meanings of abstract concepts, for the plot to make any kind of solid point except that THERE IS NO POINT (the "point" of every French creative work since at least the 1960s, and probably earlier).  But those stories were intriguing and kind of original.  AC:B can't even bother with that.  Part of the reason the series' story has worked at all is because of its existentialism.  In AC1, you weren't entirely sure if the Assassins were really the good guys or if Abstergo and the Templars were necessarily the bad guys.  The writing seemed very careful to avoid declaring anyone anything other than self-interested.  By AC2, it was pretty clear that Abstergo and the Templars were at least not the good guys, and that the Assassins at least wanted to be good guys, even if they were stabbing people all the time.  Maybe all this was accidental.  Maybe something was lost in translation from the original French.  Or maybe this was more of the plot just not making much sense.  But whatever the reason, it worked.

But AC:B has no pretensions to moral subtlety.  Abstergo and the Templars are thousand-year-old Nazis who relish employing people who think murder and incest are funny (which contradicts their supposed desire to quietly engineer the world behind the scenes), and the Assassins are noble warrior-poets who want freedom and democracy for all, and always have (even though not even the most liberal intellectual in the world before the middle of the 19th Century wanted anything like that).  What's worse is the retconning AC:B is doing, and I mean not just to Ezio with the Cristina stuff.  If the Assassins have always been the good guys and the Templars / Abstergo have always been the bad guys, that means the moral ambiguity in the first game was an out-and-out error in writing, OR that the characters were all special cases that completely misrepresented the sides they were fighting for (which would also be an error in writing).  The Templars / Abstergo have always been cacklingly evil - Vidic and his team were just especially intellectual and limp-wristed.  The Assassins have always been gloriously noble - Al Mualim was just a greedy nutjob employing a vast conspiracy to get a hold of the Artifact.  These weren't flawed people who acted like jack-holes because they thought it would best serve their good intentions.  They're just Hitlers of varying degrees.  There is no Truth.  Everything is Permitted.  Now Let's Stab Some Dudes in the Head.

Obviously, a total lack of moral subtlety can be made consistent with the mythology of this universe and the behavior of the main characters so far.  But that's disappointing, when it looked for all the world like Ubisoft was trying to make a thinking man's GTA-meets-Hitman (even if the thinking man in question was expected to not think too hard).  If you can't tell, I feel betrayed by this new tonal shift.  And what upsets me more is that there's no reason they had to do this, but just did it anyway, either because of laziness, apathy, or just plain screwing up.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a pretty game.  It is a technologically advanced game.  It should have been an interesting, fun game, like the first two in the series.  But instead it is a st00p1d game, suffering from a crap story, crap controls, and way too much 3D platforming.

Which I hate.  I really, really do.  Like your mom hates your dad.  At least, since her first night with me.

Ezio as a wolf by deviantART member ~Shagan-fury.