Lookie, lookie- once again we've got ourselves an Assassin's Creed game sniffing up our rears and once again all of the Ubisoft agnostics that found themselves so utterly repelled by Valhalla are coming around raising their tail spouting the same old routine dialogue lines of a patrolling guard after their aggro has dropped. ("Huh, Must have imagined things." They say whilst nursing the arrow sticking out of their throat and hobbling back to the campfire, where now sits the corpses of the drinking buddies they left with.) And to be fair- I get it. It simply can't be worse than Assassin's Creed Valhalla- a game so utterly barren of purpose and narrative that even their most full-throated cult members say they needed to cool it down a bit. If even those lobotomised circus seals are on your case- you must have screwed up big!
'We've made the map smaller' they insist, as though it was the struggle to fill up that bulging England map which scuppered their considerable talents- as though 90% of that map wasn't just swamp-clogged country wastes populated by nothing but sheep, fields and the Welsh. 'Oh, we're focusing much more on character this time around!' is that why we're being split between two protagonists despite the fact you struggle making a three dimensional character out of one with 100 plus hours of screentime? 'We're toning down the grind this time!' You literally said that exact thing in regards to Valhalla after people whined about Odyssey- yet it seems those words left the mouth before the brain checked in to it's office because Valhalla might just be the single most 'bogged down by crap' institution since Mussolini's Italy! Don't believe the lies!
But it's only fair to judge the latest Assassin's Creed gameplay footage for it's own merits because already people who should know better are calling it the comeback of the franchise. Why? Because they gave one of the characters a hood and told everyone she's the 'stealthy character'. Hard to consider a character the 'stealthy one' in a game that has stealth mechanics so old they're entering their senior year and head-hunting for college. Ubisoft's idea of stealth are detection cones and waist-high tufts of grass placed at the sides of roads. They think 'free form level design' is making one highly tailored route into a fortified location... and then simply giving players the choice to ignore that path and clamber over everything with their decidedly too liberal free running tools. Their brand of stealth isn't stale, it isn't even rotting, it's disintegrated into dust- and remember that is one of the key pillars not just of Assassin's Creed, but literally every single one of their franchises because Ubisoft just make the same game over and over! I would be embarrassed.
I'm getting off track- what does Shadows do that no other game did before? It gives us the choice to choose between going in violently and going in quietly. Hmm... pretty sure that's literally the choice that every Assassin's Creed game has ever offered- only this time those 'playstyles' (as I'm sure they internally referred to them) are split between the two protagonists. If you want to be loud, you play Yusuke and play through the half decent hack and slash mechanics that Ubisoft have been trail and erroring since Origins, quiet lovers will familiarise themselves with Naoe and her... well she has... Oh, she can go prone now! Yes, this has been a stealth franchise for seventeen years and they only just figured out a way to incorporate crawling into the level design. (Better late than never.) Oh, and she can destroy light sources to move around easier! Which puts this game's dynamic stealth systems on par with the original Splinter Cell from 2002. (That was actually also a Ubisoft game, by the way. Guess that little innovation got lost along the way for a couple decades, eh?)
To be fair I like that there's some degree of player choice, even if the two vectors of approach lack the dynamism that makes truly great stealth games so heart pounding. Needing to switch on the dime to react to what comes your way is what gives this genre it's bite, without that I worry our pre-chosen builds could veer on being too restrictive. What if Yusuke gets overwhelmed? What if the atrociously designed open worlds they regularly make dumps an entire battalion on his head whilst trying to just walk down a road? Can Yusuke run fast enough to get away? Is he even capable of sneaking? Naoe can defend herself, but can she strike like a predator in a last hail mary ditch attempt when her back is against the wall? If this were any development company truly dedicated to their craft I would just take these ideas for granted as obvious considerations that any sensible developer would take into account. But we're not dealing with normal people. We're dealing with Ubisoft developers.
I just can't help but shake the sensation that Ubisoft are a little bit, how do you say, hopelessly late to the party with this game. That is to say- everyone and their mother has made a Samurai game and everyone else was manned by Japanese teams or at least teams with close enough ties to Japanese influences to do the material justice. Like a Dragon Ishin may have been a remake, but it soared all the same. Rise of the Ronin did great things for Team Ninja's brand, I'm told. And, of course, Ghost of Tsushima blows away literally everything that Shadow's is promising to achieve- from gameplay complexity to visual artistry to respect. Yeah, I think Sucker Punch has more respect than Ubisoft, the team who thought Egypt and Greece were such dull places they had to be spiced up with badly interjected mythology tangents that they never quite managed to justify. (Still no one can explain to me why Hades lives in a facsimile he openly construes as 'The afterlife'.)
By what mast do I hoist such a damning flag? Well how about the way the marketing has gone, sending bizarre merch with reportedly misspelt Kanji and mismatched clan emblems imprinted here and there? Maybe Ubisoft are actually trying to tell us something hidden in all this, like a physical manifestation of how little they care anymore for a franchise that once teetered on the verge of respectable historical fiction. (Then they said Aliens. The franchise never really recovered from the aliens, did it?) Then there's the little distinction in how the character's battle themes go. Naoe's are woodwinds, obviously. She's Japanese and those are the only Japanese instruments that their team have ever heard of. Yusuke? Well, he's black so... Japanese music in the style of hip hop? Sure, why not! What do you mean this predates not even the invention of hip-hop, but the founding of America and the formation of the identity known as African American? Those sound like the kinds of things someone who cares would react to... And we all know what effect that has on a team like Ubisoft!
So yes, despite the many years we waited for Assassin's Creed to get off their high chair of pretence which was scrapped over all the way back in those security logs for the second game, I cannot summon any less possible excitement for this game than I currently have. It is like a blackhole of potential sucking out my lifeforce just by it, and it's damnable parents, breathing the same cursed air as me- it's drains me to even think about. And the worst part of it all? The game will make money. Oh, it will make gangbusters. And it will be messy in a ton of supremely obvious ways that many of the industry leaders will scratch their heads at and silently wonder how this could have shipped like that. And Ubisoft will offer plenty of empty platitudes and bow before the penitent shrine, cusp their hands around the throned handle of Mea Culpa- and do it all over again next game. And no one, absolute no one at all, will be, in the least bit, surprised.
