Working My Way Through The Stack: AC Brotherhood

By jakob187 February 24, 2011 12 Comments

Recently, I ranted about how I can never seem to finish a video game anymore.  In turn, it made me take a serious look at that stack and say "fuck this, you're going down".  Finally, the assault is on and "The Stack" is being put in a katahajime where there will be only one victor.  That victor, ladies and gents, happens to have a beard, long hair, and a fierce appetite for Raising Cane's for the last week or so. 
 
First on the list is a game that I had so much anticipation for:  Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.  What was the original reason for stopping the game?  Well, aside from the addictive-as-all-hell multiplayer, the single player itself was just too much of a slow burn.  After almost five hours wandering around Rome, there was so much to do that the focus on story seemed completely lost at some point.  This time, after firing the game back up, story has been the main focus. 
 
Folks, I come to you now with a clear head and full stomach when I exclaim these next words, and please, pay close attention: 

WHY IS IT TAKING SO FUCKING LONG FOR THINGS TO GET MOVING?

 
It's beyond goddamn annoying that I have at least a good fifteen or so hours in this game or more and I do not feel like a fucking thing has been accomplished.  If anything, I feel like I just got out of Hold-My-Hand Land and now I'm arriving at We-Gonna-Throw-Tons-Of-Stupid-Shit-At-You Boulevard.  Don't get me wrong:  it's incredible the amount of depth that Rome has in it.  The sheer size of it seems incredible, and the architecture of everything is beautiful.  However, that same architecture also forces me to almost never use my horse, since he can't climb buildings and rock walls and every other vertical fucking surface they've planted in this game.  Hell, it's more worthwhile for me to just run across this massive field of grass to get to my next objective than it is to press Y, call my horse, mount him, and then fidget with the lackluster horse controls. 
 
When it all comes down to it, though, the only thing that I really care about is rarely being presented:  what is going on in the REAL world?  Ezio's world is interesting...I guess...but nowhere NEAR as interesting as it was in Assassin's Creed II (which some of you might remember me claiming as my Game of the Year 2009).  In AC2, things were streamlined in a magnificent way, and I always felt like shit was real.  There was enough bleeding through from the real world that it seemed like a solid and structured story.  In Brotherhood, things are a bit more freeform, since you can leave the Animus at any point.  However, you have to hunt down the story pieces in that.  If there was anything more annoying about the first Assassin's Creed than the repetitive nature of Altair's world, it was trying to find every piece of dialog with Lucy...or every little nook and cranny of extended story within the real world. 
 
I really want to like this game.  I honestly do.  However, if things keep dragging along at this pace, I'm pretty sure the only solution is going to be a bottle of hydrofluoric acid and gin.  The grating pain of that combination going into my gullet would be more bearable than trying to grind through all this bullshit just to get to the roots of the story that I want to see.  Ezio's world is fine, but that's not the honest reason that we play Assassin's Creed...is it? 
 
Well, is it?  Maybe I'm playing it wrong.  Maybe I'm interested in the wrong things.

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