Do not read this if spoilers bother you. I will spoppzor the whole plot without shame or guilt. If you seriously want to know if this is a good game but don’t want to know the story, I will sum it up here: rent don’t buy.

ASS-ASS-INS CREED: Ok, the word “ass” is in “assassins” twice. Got it out of my system.

This game is about an assassin who has a creed. His favorite band is Creed. His favorite deadly sin and Daybreaker episode is Greed. His favorite episode of Sailor Moon is Treed. His favorite recapper is Scott Fried, unless it really is pronounced like the way you cook chicken. His favorite Canadian humorist is Al Creed, his favorite golfer was Sammy Snead, his favorite fictional boxer is Apollo Creed, he uses Snickers to Feed the Need, feel free to think up your own!

This game opens with the following preamble: “Inspired by historical events and characters. This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multi cultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.” Needless to say, the prospect of a game that knows it’s going to offend religious types got me psyched. Maybe that Huckabee dude will get elected and in the future, even Mario games will be considered sacrilege because he keeps rescuing Princess Peach/Toadstool but refuses to make an honest woman of her. And I’m a little suspicious of Luigi and Yoshi. I think there may be some of the weird, Kurt Angle bestiality sex going on there.

I should probably put up a similar “please don’t kill me Muslims for offending your religion of peace” disclaimer because I can’t remember anyone in the story’s names and provide blatantly stupid, blatantly racist names for them. Luckily, no one will get offended because no one will still be reading.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: THE MOVIE: Ok, so, the game opens with a cinema, and while Final Fantasy games have long since introduced the tradition of having a really sweet-looking cinema as the prelude to (often, but not always) dull battle scenes with blocky-looking characters, I have to admit this cinema was really fucking great. It has the badass assassin hero walking around calmly surveying the scene. Some evil dude is at a gallows and he’s gonna execute some presumably good and innocent peasants. Who refused to hail King Booker. So after some bad-add standing around all bad-assedly, the assassin starts flying around like a ninja springing off walls and stuff. He kills the evil dude with this blade hidden up his sleeve like a marked playing card and the evil dude never saw it coming. The guy’s all “Hold fast ye olde slapass I’m gonna moseyeth on in here and OH GOD THE HASHASHSHIN!” Then the assassin flees through the crowd with guards chasing him and he does more ninja shit before pulling up his white hood and simply melting into a crowd of…white mages, pretty much. Our hero escapes, strolling along mumbling fake Latin with the priests and retracting the hidden bloody death murder blade into its secret compartment and just being awesome. It’s a lot like the commercials, but the theme from “House” isn’t playing.

Then the game starts, and it all falls apart.

Ok, I’m being melodramatic, but the rest of this review is pretty negative so let me just say right now that this game LOOKS FANTASTIC. Due to my own silly purchase choices I have a bunch of games that look just a smidge better than my old PS2 could do. This was the last of my initial game library to get a play and it was the first to really make me really feel like I was playing a “next gen” system. And it holds up after the cinema…the restraints of having to be able to control your character and know what’s going on prevent the use of cool close-up camera angles and editing like you get in the cinema, but otherwise the actual gameplay looks as good as the opening movie. There is no denying that this is a very pretty game. Now to shit on the gameplay and plot.

ENTER THE STUPID MATRIX FRAMING DEVICE: First off, right after the opening movie you start playing, and you’re the assassin but you’re in some virtual reality nightmare. You’re running around and faceless people are shoving you and everything is blue and cloudy and there’s flashes of computer code and genetic diagrams and crap and voices saying stuff like “calm down” and “synchronize with the Animus” and “this isn’t just a rip-off of the Matrix, shut up.” Then you wake up, and you’re…not the assassin anymore. You’re some dude lying on this…thing. It’s like an ergonomically designed series of hot plates. It’s actually “the Animus,” and it’s a machine that lets you live out past events by following “genetic memory.” Animal instinct is actually the accumulated knowledge of a species stored genetically, and with the Animus you can actually live out the events in the lives of your direct ancestors. (Do I need to point out that this is bullshit? Suddenly the made-up scientific cackpole of “The Lazarus Experiment” seems refreshingly grounded in fact.) This is explained to you by some guy who may as well be called Doctor Evil because he’s just a generic evil scientist. Nothing to do with those stupid Mike Meyers movies, he is a true generic evil doctor. He is assisted by Lucy, who is the only girl in the entire freaking game (not counting nameless crowd women you can murder if you can pay the modest in-game penalties for killing innocents.) Throughout the game, Doctor Evil keeps telling you you’re doing a shitty job aiding his evil plans and Lucy always sticks up for you (and wears a shirt that is too tight) so you’re supposed to like her. You, it should be noted, are just some White guy with an official douche bag hoodie who should probably be wearing a white baseball cap backwards. After a bunch of dialogue, we learn that some huge business conglomerate that may as well be called Evil Co has kidnapped you and they need your memories because your ancestor was an assassin in the Crusades and he knows a super-important secret that will allow Evil Co to rule the world. But in order to get to that part of your genetic ancestral bullshit memory, you have to start at the beginning of one video game’s worth of his action-packed life and move forward to the big secret they want to know. If you don’t cooperate, they will put you in a coma and pull your brain apart to get what they need, but they’d rather do it the exciting Animus/Matrix assassination-packed way because that will be faster and have more cut scenes. By the time you finish the game, you’ll feel like you were in that coma (BA-DA-BOOM! Score one for JG!)

BABY GOT BACKSTORY: The actual game that you get to play (you can wander around your cell and read people’s email in the incredibly unsecured prison/lab but there’s precious little point) is set during the Third Crusade and stars the assassin Altair. It’s pronounced “Al Thai Ear” and it sounds like it should have an apostrophe, which lead me to speculate that Al would eventually retire and start a shop called “Mad Al’s Tires” which would be a sort of forerunner to “Crazy John’s Tire House and Rims.” Al will also be your long-last pal, but only if you agree to be his bodyguard and let him call you “Betty.” Although he appears to be just as white as his descendent in the Evil Co lab, Altair is supposed to be a swarthy Middle Eastern assassin. He and two swarthy friends are on a mission to get the Holy Grail, or some unnamed Holy Grail stand-in, from under a church in Jerusalem. Your swarthy friends keep telling you to remember the creed and stuff. The creed is never harm the innocent, always go undetected (“We can always hide in the shadows”,) say your prayers, eat a vitamin, etc. I’d think the game would be more interesting if you followed the creed, but you can’t advance (this mission is essentially the tutorial) without killing an innocent old man and then bum-rushing some baddies who also want the Grail/Not Grail. These baddies are the Templar, and they matter later but you don’t know shit about them at this point. More plot stuff you don’t control happens, and then Al escapes to the Assassin’s Guild where the head assassin, Al Somethingelse, scolds him for screwing up. You sadly inform him that your friends Ali Bongo and Al Qaeda are dead, but it turns out that one of them is still alive and got the Grail/Not Grail after you ran off like a chickenshit. Seems like this guy should be the hero, not you. I immediately expected that it turns out that IT’S A TRAP and the guy you thought was dead but survived (Al Jazeera) is working with the evil Templar (Dark Templar, perhaps) but no…they opted instead to go with plot-twists you can’t see coming because no groundwork is laid for them. It also turns out that the two guys who went with you were brothers, so the one that survived really hates your dumb ass for getting his brother killed.

But your bumblefuckery isn’t done affecting the assassins yet, because now the Templar (a sub-group of Crusaders led by some Frog you assassinate near the end of the game) have come to lay siege to your castle. Because the secret underground society of assassins have a big, conspicuous castle. But yeah, the Templar. Verily are they in your base, smiting all your dudes. You get more tutorial action, killing soldiers who barely fight back at all. Then the Evil French Guy declares that they won’t attack directly, they’ll just surround the place and starve you out. The elderly head assassin dude (Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis) delivers some neat line about how his men don’t fear death, and then gestures and some dudes leap to certain death from the castle walls. Seriously, you’re working for James Earl Jones as the villain from Conan the Barbarian. Except really they don’t die, they land in some hidden piles of hay (falling from impossible heights and being ok because you landed in hay will be a major theme in this game.) Oh, and one of them is you, and you go through the tutorial on jumping around on ropes and roofs ninja-style to sneak up on the bad guys and disperse them with some deadly logs. As a reward for sending the anonymous, unengaging Templar leader scurrying to the game’s penultimate boss fight, your boss tells you you have broken the creed and stabs you.

STUPID MATRIX FRAMING DEVICE – SLIGHT RETURN: This sends you back the reality of you being a behoodied dumbass trapped in a lab. You go from being Altair to his Altair Ego, GET IT? You have to wander around having plot conversations before you get to go to bed, get implied sleep, and jump back on the Animus/Matrix thing for more actual gaming. From here on out, after every few major events in Al’s timeline (he isn’t really dead from that stab) you come back to the lab to wander around. The game jumps up and screams at you when it’s time to steal Lucy’s laptop passwords and get access to her expository information. It’s just possible to miss getting Doctor Evil’s information if you aren’t paying attention and don’t steal his pen (which somehow has his password) when you’re supposed to. All the exposition pretty much takes the form of emails you covertly read. While on camera the whole time.

Over the course of a half dozen “wandering around the lab reading people’s email before going to bed” sessions, you learn that Evil Co are basically the Patriots from Metal Gear, who are of course supposed to be the Free Masons. It turns out that the Templar from the Crusades were an even secreter secret order than history states, and they’re still around today as Evil Co. They’ve secretly (and in secret) manipulated and dominated everything that has ever happened since the Crusades. They invented penicillin. They invented modernist literature. They invented “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” But their political/cultural dominance is not unchallenged, because the assassins are also still around. So I guess they’re the Illuminati, unless you wanna say the Illuminati are evil and the Masons are good…all I know is they’re both super mysterious and are enemies.

Maybe a quarter of the way into the game, we learn that the douche bag hero isn’t just distantly descended from assassins…his actual parents are part of the assassin’s order and raised him in a secluded assassin-only village in the Mid West. I am so not making this up. Douche bag left when he was a teenager because he wanted a normal life. I think of all the nonsense we’re expected to believe here, with genetic memory of specific events and hay saving people from drops of thousands of feet and etc, the biggest “no way” moment for me was being asked to swallow a teenage boy deciding that being trained as an assassin didn’t sound like fun. Douchie tried to stay underground, but the Templar Corporation tracked him though the DMV or something.

We go on to learn that TempCo want Al the Assassin’s memories of the Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or whatever because it is but one of many miraculous, unexplained relics in the ancient world that let the bearer control people’s minds. The implication is that all miracles recorded in all religions were delusions created by some self-serving guy with a magical mind-control doodad. (The parting of the Red Sea is namedropped, but they wisely steer clear of specifically mentioning anything Jesus was supposed to have done.) We’re never told where the relics came from, but if the sequel doesn’t bring in aliens I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If the Masonic Templar Patriots can get their hands on any one of these relics, they can put it on a satellite and broadcast some magic unexplained mind control signal to the entire world. Or as they put it, these “elite” will be able to safeguard world peace by getting rid of pesky free will. That seems fine with me; I don’t know why the assassins are whining.

Oh, and it also turns out at the end Lucy is an assassin who has infiltrated Evil Co, which she indicates to douche bag by showing him where her ring finger was cut off, because that’s the mark of an ordained assassin. I guess no one in the Evil Templar Company determined to hunt down all assassins ever noticed her missing finger. When the story ends, the bad guys get the info they need to proceed, but it is implied that Lucy and the douche bag hero will be back in a sequel to stop them. Though the hero is still stuck in the lab even after the end credits.

At the very very end, you get whacky assassin vision (for reasons not worth explaining) and start seeing hidden stuff that was drawn on the walls and floors in blood by the guy they interrogated before you. This includes pentagrams, crop circle diagrams, a drawing of that giant picture of a giant bird you can see from the air in Peru or wherever (you’d know it if you saw it,) that eyeball floating over a pyramid thing from the dollar, all that conspiracy nutjob crap. And…that’s it. When you win the game, you get to wander around your cell until you decide to turn the game off. (And no, I didn’t miss anything. Checked around online, and that really is how the game ends.)

PUTTING THE MATRIX BEHIND US: “All right,” I hear you saying, “so the game is caught up in this The Matrix fad that refuses to go away and it has a lame futuretech framing device. If you ignore that and concentrate on the Crusade stuff that the commercials focus on, that fixes everything, right?” Well, it helps. Though even the action scenes keep forcibly reminding you of the lame-o Evil Corp plot by intentionally putting “computer glitch” touches into the graphics when your health is low. Oh, and you don’t have a life bar, you have a “synchronization meter” that goes down when…things that would deplete your life bar happen. And it goes up by itself as time passes, because “your synchronization with your ancestor increases naturally with time.” So basically, you have a self-rejuvenating life bar but it insists on having a whole technology/genetic/futury motif as you run around the Crusades.

Once you return to being Al the Assassin, your boss who stabbed you (Al Abama) makes some speech about how he only pretended to kill you and you’ve “slept the sleep of the dead” but can now be reborn. Basically, the writers thought it would be really badass to set up a scene where it looks like you die and then flash you back to the Matrix plot, and then did a half-assed job of writing their way out of it. Big Poppa Assassin also demotes you, which means you lose weapons and skills. (Ok, weapons maybe, but skills? You knew how to swordfight at a certain level before, but then you pissed off your boss and he removed your memory? Maybe Al can build an Animus out of wood and sticks and learn caveman fighting from his ancestors.) He then tells you the Dark Templar are led by nine guys, none of them Zeratul. As luck would have it, there are three cities in the game with three sections each, so the Templar leaders can each roam around a different area waiting to be assassinated. Over the course of the game, you learn the Templar are literally, the game flat out says it, trying to build a “New World Order.” Hollywood Hogan more like more like Holy Land Hogan (hahahaha I’m so great.)

I AM THE SUB-GAME AND YOU WANT TO PLAY: First off, you have to smoke out the traitor who helped the Templar get to your base. This is just practice for three of the four types of “investigation missions” you will have to carry out to find each of the nine assassination targets later. The investigation missions feel really cool the first few times, because you listen closely to the dialogue and convince yourself you’re really this cool badass assassin/Private Eye who is tracking down the clues to rain bloody, steel-tipped justice down on the bad guys. But before too long it gets really, really boring. The three investigation missions are…

Eavesdropping: You literally go to a park bench marked on your map and sit down, then listen to two people drop some plot points. Then you get up and leave. I suppose it must be possible to fail at this by killing the people you’re supposed to listen to before they talk, but even then they just respawn as soon as you leave and come back. It’s handy how they stand around for hours waiting for you to show up so you can listen in on the exact conversation you’re supposed to hear.

Pick-pocketing: Exactly like eavesdropping, but you don’t get to sit down. You walk up to two people and listen to their conversation, which always involves one person telling another person to take an important letter to yet another person. When this is over, you have to discretely follow one of the previously mentioned persons and steal their fanny-pack. The important letter is generally something like a map detailing where the target’s guards are. Except it isn’t. The game will announce that you’ve stolen a map detailing where the guards are, but all you get is credit for completing an investigation subgame, you don’t actually get told where the guards are. It is possible to fail at this if the pick-pocketee notices you repeatedly (the only time I failed was when one of the game’s many, many wandering retards shoved me into the mark, more on this later.)

Interrogation: Listen to a street hawker (marked on the map) talk about how great the target is. Realize he works for the guy. Follow him discretely (exactly like in pick-pocketing) until he goes somewhere secluded. Then beat him up and he’ll talk. This is how you’re supposed to do it, but eventually I had a guy who walked right past some guards who stop the player-character but ignore all other citizens (urgh.) From that point on, I would trigger the “follow them” part of the mission, but immediately run up to them and beat the crap out of them and nobody cared. Well, one time some official ruffian citizens joined in the fight (all of them attacking me, of course) but when I landed enough hits on the interrogation target they all spontaneously stopped caring and left. When you land enough hits, a nifty interrogation dialogue will play. At the end, you kill the guy. Always. Generally after he says “I won’t tell anyone about you, I swear!” and you’re all “I know.” Smug, murderous bastard.

Noticing a pattern? In one investigation, you go to a point on the map and listen to people talk. In the next one, you go to a point on the map and listen to people talk, then follow one and pick their pocket by hitting an action button once. In the final one, you go to a point on the map, listen to only one person talk, and then follow them and beat them up by hitting the combat button maybe three times. The first time you do these they build a little narrative. The guys you eavesdrop on reveal where the guy to be pick-pocketed is, and the letter you pick-pocket tells you where to find the guy to interrogate. The guy you interrogate confesses to being the traitor, so you drag him to HQ, your boss (Al Fresco) kills him, and you get your basic weapons back and the freedom to go hunt down the Templar bad guys. From this point on, however, all interrogation missions are open as soon as you enter a city, and none of them connect to each other. It’s all just meaningless subgames. Worse yet, there’s like six investigation missions to perform for each target, but completing any two of them unlocks the assassination mission and there’s really no reward for completing the other four. Half the time you keep getting the same info anyway. “Ludwig Von Germanguy is at the port,” “Ludwig Von Germanguy is at the marina” and “Ludwig Von Germanguy is near water” can all be separate clues.

Informants: In addition to these investigations, you can also get information from informants. These are assassin guild members who have been hanging out in the cities keeping an eye out for the word on the street. They know the word on the street because they have been assigned to assassinate Rockapella on sight. When you find a brother assassin in town, he will either bitch you out for being a punk or kiss your ass (I think there’s just two assassins who keep moving from town to town but I really stopped paying attention.) They will offer to give you information if you complete a task. The task is always either A) stealth killing some targets for them (usually under a time limit) or B) collecting flags that have been scattered on rooftops (always under a time limit.)

The stealth killing mission is the only subgame I have to admit really is fun. It’s not very realistic, as to succeed you have to kill the guy without him noticing, but other people can be right there when you slit his throat from behind and they’re just fine with it. Seriously, one time one of the really annoying beggar women (who follow you around repeating the same three snatches of beggar dialogue until you want to rip your hair out) was literally clinging to one of my arms asking for money as I used my free hand to stab some guy in the heart. Not only did she not scream or run away, she didn’t even stop asking me, whom she’d just seen kill a man, for money. It can get hard late in the game, when you have to stealth kill five dudes and for no particular reason you only have two minutes to do it in. Seriously brother assassin, did you just wait until two minutes before the magic assassination deadline to even think about seeking help?

The flag collecting missions are just transparently a stupid minigame that they don’t even try to tie in with the world. At least in Grand Theft Auto if they have a “reach all the checkpoints within this time” thing they can structure it as a race or a bomb under your car or something. In Assassin’s Creed, Ali Baba will just show up and tell Al “collect 20 flags in 3 minutes and I will give you a secret tip.” Whichever mission you choose, the informers always tell you the same sort of crap you get from eavesdropping or whatever. One time, I swear to God the assassin just told me (paraphrased from memory but basically accurate:) “Ok, here is what I know. The target is afraid of being assassinated and will try to avoid it. I don’t know how this can be of use to you but with your ingenuity it may be helpful.”

Rescuing Citizens: The first time you need to get into a hostile city, you do it by rescuing a scholar who is being bullied by a bunch of guards. He lets you blend in with his group of robed scholar friends to slip by the guards like in the intro movie and it’s cool. When you do the exact same thing to get into each subsequent city, it gets old. Similarly, guards pick on women and accuse them of stealing and stuff in the city. It’s funny, because if you hang around but don’t initiate the rescue mission, they just keep cycling through the same few lines of “I accuse you of stealing so my friends and I can rape you” dialogue forever. It’s especially fun that one of Damascusian/Damascuser/Guy From Damascus guards says “you dare to steal in my presence!?” in the game’s cheesy generic Arab accent and it sounds like he says “you dare to steal my presents!?” Rescuing these girls means a short, generic dialogue and then “vigilantes” appear to be your allies. These are just big burly guys who will grab hold of guards that chase you. This is useful one time in the entire game, but if you want 100% completion you must rescue roughly ninety million citizens from gangs of roving guards.

Climbing Towers: You also have to climb specific, game-mapped high towers to survey the city and mark all the other sub-games on your map. This part is actually sort of fun when you aren’t being shot at. Watching what she believed to be a Christian crusader jumping from beam to beam as he scaled a church steeple, my sister declared Al to be “Spiderman for Jesus.” Sadly, you only have throwing knives and not a high-powered rifle, so you can’t really go all clock tower nutjob. Of course, you can jump off the tallest buildings in the world and land safely in a shallow pile of hay. If you aim wrong and miss the hay, you die…I mean, your synchronization drops below minimum tolerances and the Animus has to rephase the ancestral memory and blarg.

BEGGARS AND RETARDS AND GUARDS, OH MY: This is as good a place as any to discuss some of the locals Al has to interact with.

Beggars are…beggars. All women, and they run up to you and get in the way and repeat the same dialogue endlessly. You can’t even give them money to get rid of them. You can punch them right in the face to get rid of them, but in later levels the guards are “on alert” and actually react, taking this little joy away from you. The fact that the Jerusalem beggars have fake Cockney accents is a saving grace until you’ve heard all their lines a million times. I’m not sure, but I think one of them threw a rock at me once. I definitely fell off the wall I was climbing while someone yelled about wanting money.

Retards are…well, they’re supposed to be mentally ill, or maybe they’re lepers, I dunno. They have many skin tones but they are always male. At first, it seemed like a really neat piece of period detail that medieval cities would have the occasional crazy person who gibbers to himself and attacks people. And it remains that way until you get into high difficulty areas where you encounter GROUPS OF STRATEGICALLY PLACED RETARDS. You see, retards will shove Al if he gets close enough, blowing your cover or knocking you into the water (which is fatal. You can wall-spring from minaret to minaret but if you touch ankle-deep water you die instantly.) So to make things tough late in the game, you will find retards surrounding a pickpocket target, or piers surrounded by deadly water and packed with vicious retards. But the thing is, retards never shove regular townsfolk, other retards, or guards. They only shove you. Perhaps they can tell you’re a holy assassin via Satard power.

Guards are…Grand Theft Auto cops. If one guard sees you committing a crime (which includes climbing on walls or being shoved by a retard,) all guards everywhere instantly know who you are and what you look like. In Grand Theft Auto, this is just about acceptable because they have walkie-talkies. But in Crusade Era Damascus, there’s really no excuse for a guard patrolling the market to pull his sword and attack you on sight because you bumped into a guard at the temple on the other side of town and never officially evaded detection. There’s an on-screen attention meter, basically a retread of the “you have x number of stars of police attention” from Grand Theft Auto. And there are official ways to evade detection, which you must use to lose guards. You can climb the highest building in the land with no guards following you, but if you don’t use an official escape, all guards will continue to attack on sight when you get back to the ground. The official escapes are to A) hide in hay, B) hide in a rooftop garden or C) sit between two people on a bench. The third one is especially ridiculous, as guards who have memorized every pore of Al’s face will suddenly not be able to spot him if he manages to sit down between two women dressed nothing like him. It should also be noted that when Al is anonymous the guards all walk slowly and aimlessly, but when chasing him they have the same ninja wall jumping skills he does. It can be really funny to watch from a rooftop garden as the half dozen guards who were chasing you on the rooftops give up and jump down to street level in perfect synch. They must have really good synchronization scores with their descendents’ Animuses.

Really, the only reason to evade guards is because fighting them is so boring. The first assassination mission requires you to avoid combat because your boss (Ali Ali Oxen Free) wiped many combat skills from your mind. But once you clear that mission, one of your rewards is the “counterattack” skill which basically means you can now defeat any enemy in the entire game effortlessly. Hold the defense button, then click the attack button as the enemy starts to attack, and the game switches briefly to this cinematic view of you doing one of three sidestep then slash them in the gut attacks. The guards attack Black Ninja Style, so you can literally have a dozen guards around you in a circle, and eleven will hang back and watch as one guy swings at you, only to have you sidestep and slash him in the gut. You don’t have to switch focus between targets or anything, if you hold the defense button and hit the attack button as anyone attacks, you kill them. It looks awesome and makes you feel really badass until you’ve killed hundreds of guards this way and realize an eight-year-old who talked his cool uncle into buying him this game even though it’s rated M is just as good at this as you are.

But I do the guards an injustice by acting like they’re all generic. There are two types, regular and elite. Regular guards attack you occasionally, and you wish they would attack more often so you could counter kill them faster. If you lose patience and attack directly, they block the first few swings, then get hit and die. Elite guards attack you occasionally, and you wish they would attack more often so you could counter kill them faster. If you lose patience and attack directly, they counter you with a non-lethal blow. So there are guards you should use counter kills on, and guards you basically must use counter kills on. Huzzah.

To sum up, all guards have super elite ninja skills when chasing you, but if you pull your sword and turn to face them, you’re DX and they’re the Spirit Squad.

FINALLY, THE POINT OF THE WHOLE GAME…KILLING PEOPLE: After picking enough pockets and collecting enough flags, you get to assassinate someone. Depending on which mission you’re on, this is either where the game gets really fun or really frustrating.

In the ads and pre-game cinema and stuff, Al sneaks around and kills guards and gets close to his target and then he stealthily kills them so they never see it coming. Sadly, this is literally impossible to do in most of the game’s assassination missions. The assassination point (yes, it’s a physical place) will be marked on your map. You can creep up to it stealthily, even try to stealth kill nearby guards, but once you get close enough that Animatrixy crap starts and the screen says “memory synchronized, now recording” and you lose the ability to run, climb, or attack. You have to walk up to a point on the map and initiate a cinema scene. As you chill out in a gathered crowd, whoever you are ordered to assassinate will show up and do something nasty. One guy kills a merchant for dissing him, one evil “experimenting on patients” doctor guy orders a patient’s legs broken so he won’t run away from the hospital, some fat dude at a party announces that the wine everyone but you and he have been drinking is poison, etc. At the end of the cinema, you get control back and can attack again, but something will come up to make your life difficult. Either the target leaves during the cinema and you have to hunt them down again, or you are detected by guards as part of the cinema and have to win a big, unstealthy free-for-all with the target and his guards. To make things more challenging, sometimes you will be detected by guards automatically, but the target himself will run away. This is really annoying, but at least it makes sense. The game’s hardest assassination, for me anyway, is killing Ludwig Von Germanguy at the port. You’re like three feet away from him during the cinema, but when it ends he teleports to the far end of the marina and there’s about thirty retards waiting to shove you into the instant death water before you reach him. You can avoid all the retards by taking a route patrolled by about thirty guards. They will, of course, ignore you if you walk straight up to their boss solemnly, but if you brush up against any of their shoulders they will hack you to pieces. Because all good guards know anyone who accidentally touches you is a trained assassin.

When you kill a target, the game switches to the weird, blue-void full of genetic spirals and Matrixy crap from the beginning. You will be there, cradling your dying target in your arms and having a really preachy conversation with him. You have the camera option of listening to the dialogue with the dying guy dying, or switching to a view where he’s up and walking around as he talks to you in the blue void of pretentiousness. The dialogue generally consists of you asking your target why they were such a dick and them defending their slave-trading, poisoning, book-burning, etc. My personal favorite is when you kill some guy who was framing innocent people and executing them to keep people in fear and thus maintain order. You tell him that it’s wrong to kill someone just because they disagree with you. Neither Al nor the target see the irony of an assassin preaching at someone about how murder is wrong.

So basically, assassination missions generally devolve into fights with a bunch of guards, but one of them looks different and makes you listen to a speech when you kill him. By countering.

HIGHLANDER ENDGAME: Ok, let me tie the bow on this gift-wrapped turd by telling you how Al’s story shakes out. You already know that present-day douche bag ends up giving the baddies what they want to know and remaining trapped in a lab at the end, but what about the actual hero? Do we see him get it on and sire one of douchie’s great-great-great-great grandparents? Well, no.

When you assassinate enough dudes, your boss (Al Jolson, who has been answering all of your questions with cryptic nonsense) eventually tells you that the Holy Grail or whatever treasure the assassins got at the beginning of the game has mystical mind-control powers. He tells you that the guys you have been killing are the ones who know its secret and that offing them will allow the assassins to keep the magical device safe. Then he tells you to go kill Evil French Guy. Rene Dupree. You go to assassinate him at the funeral of one of your previous victims (AL’S GOT SOME BIG BALLS) but IT’S A TRAP and everyone at the funeral is a guard, pretty much. After counter attacking a million guards, you will eventually defeat the target, but it isn’t really Rene Dupree at all! IT’S A FAKE! It’s some woman. Hiroko, let’s say. She explains (in the blue void) that she isn’t a Frenchman (don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about that Frenchman) and that the real Rene Dupree has run off to tattle on the assassins to Lionheart Richard Jericho. I guess the fact that she’s a woman means Lucy isn’t the only female presence in the game, but she doesn’t get a name so screw it. You spare her because you only kill selected targets, which seems sexist to me somehow. In a truly equal society, women have just as much of a right to be murdered as men do.

You have a conversation with the leader of whichever city’s assassin guild. It’s the guy from the beginning of the game (Al Abaster) who hates you for getting his brother (Al Yankovic) killed. He’s been the assassin guild leader all along, but I never noticed because everyone has the same cheesy Arab accent. You apologize for getting his brother killed, but he refuses your apology because the wise, careful, creed-following dude you have become is not the same man who fucked everything up in the tutorial. Aw. It really was very sweet. You spontaneously announce that the leader of the assassins (Al Ka-Seltzer, cousin of the guy with the airship in FFVI [V-1aaah] or whatever) is hiding something, but you have to make a side-trip to some previously inaccessible area first to stop Rene Dupree from talking to King Richard. You go to this place, and have a series of unavoidable brawls with big groups of guards (the game stopped pretending to be about stealth and evasion three assassinations ago) and catch up just as Rene is talking to the King. You explain to Richard that the Templar are big meanies and he should totally trust you, an assassin. King Dick decides to let you and Rene fight, as God will side with the winner. Don’t blame Rene, blame yourself or God. So you fight with Rene…and about a dozen guards. By this point, I knew the end was near and was just anxious to get it over with, much like you must feel if you’re still reading. You defeat all ten million dudes by…wait for it wait for it…counter attacking. Rene uses his blue void death speech to taunt you for being a dupe for the truly evil leader of the assassins (Al Cohol) and does the Frere Jacques dance as he turns into a bunch of pyreflies. Then Richard makes a speech I can’t really remember at all, and you go back to assassin HQ.

The town is now completely empty, and ominous music is playing. Your fellow assassins appear and attack you. Luckily, while they dress differently they fight exactly the same way generic guards do. When you get to the assassin’s big, imposing, incredibly conspicuous secret base, all the townspeople are standing rigid and expressionless due to mind control. Creepy. But…nothing comes of it. You enter the base, have a brief dialogue with that one guy whose brother you got killed and is your right-hand-man now that there’s nothing left to do (Al Chemy,) and proceed alone to face your boss (Al Imony.) He uses the evil magic doodad to freeze you, taunts you some, and announces that now he will rule the world moohahaha. I hope he is an Al Truistic ruler. He unfreezes you for no reason and summons all nine of your old assassination targets as spooky ghosts to kill you. Luckily, while they dress differently they fight exactly the same way generic guards do. Then your boss fights you. Luckily, while he dresses differently he fights exactly the same way generic guards do. After you beat him, he switches tactics and does this thing where he “blinds” you with the magical doodad. You can see your surroundings but not him. But all you have to do is switch to the wacky assassin vision I never bothered to explain and you can see him. And he just stands there waiting for you to find him anyway. It’s possible to lose if you walk right up to him without seeing him first, but I only know this because I got curious about whether it was possible to lose and set out to lose. It’s like fighting the aeons in FFX, but without Yuna going all “I’m stoic when I’m beautiful.”

Your now dead boss taunts you and says you don’t have the will to destroy the magical mind-control doodad, and indeed you don’t. Then the doodad projects an image of the world and it has marked spots where other magical doodads are. This is what Evil Corp wanted all along, and we leave Al the Assassin to get married to the brother of the guy he got killed and found the New Assassin Order which will go on to raise behoodied douche bags in the Mid-West. The end.

Final Thoughts: Don’t seem I liked it much, do it? The train of thought that led me to mention the last battle in FFX made it occur to me that most of the gameplay stuff I shat on here is wrong with that game too. Endless battles with jobber enemies who can only be dispatched one way, check. Stupid subgames (underwater soccer/pick-pocketing,) check. A tool of a hero wandering around being ineffective as he explores a world that isn’t his own (bored in a world you wouldn’t understand,) check. But that game had a group of characters I really liked and a plot that was interesting. This game has one cool character (even Altair’s walking animation is cool) and a bunch of interchangeable guys who all sound like a slightly more coherent Iron Sheik. And it has two plots, both of which sucked. The Crusade storyline is basically “kill a bunch of guys who make speeches at you, then your boss turns bad out of nowhere and you kill him.” And it’s still the better of the two plots. So as much as I bitched about gameplay and subgame issues, I will play through a dull game happily three or four times if I like the characters. If only Altair said “lotta fiends today, ya?” and got shushed by a beggar woman.