A Thing about Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
By WickedCestus 3 Comments
I both love and hate Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. That's not actually true, but I felt it was the best way to start this. I'm not very good at coming up with intros it seems. Anyways, I really like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, or AssBro as I will now be calling it. To me, this is a game based purely on things that don't mean anything. AssBro is Progress Quest but with gameplay. Now, how can that be, you may ask. Obviously, the nearest to a Progress-Quest-but-actually-a-game would have to be World of Warcraft. Well, that's true. That's also not true.
You see, to someone out there, World of Warcraft means something. Actually, to a lot of people out there, World of Warcraft means something. While World of Warcraft is basically a game about grinding, there is an element of showing people the shit you've got, and being like "Hey my shit is a higher number so I'm better." In that way, it goes beyond Progress Quest. Yes, it has a lot of the same trappings: the leveling up, the collection of spells, etc, but it means more. On the other hand, AssBro means nothing. Absolutely nothing. When you kill a dude and get better armour in WoW, you can kill better dudes easier. That is a thing you get. In AssBro, you don't get that. You run around and buy shops and collect flags, all so that your number (the percentage in the Stats screen) can go up. Yes, you get better armour/weapons out of this. But they don't play nearly as large of a role as they do in WoW.
I've spent twenty hours playing AssBro. I haven't beat it yet. To be honest, I don't really want to beat it. Not because I'm one of those "Man, whenever I beat a game I'll never come back to it" people, but just because I don't particularly care about the story missions anymore. I just like climbing around and getting treasure. I have bought every shop, and the armour and weapons are the best I could get. I just like treasure. I like flags. I don't even care about the percentage number. In fact, I take back all the shit I said about Progress Quest.
This game is more like walking in a park. You feel like you're getting something done, but in actuality all you're really doing is walking around. You're not even trying to get anywhere really. But you feel better afterwards. I don't actually know if this is the mentality of people who walk in parks. I personally am not much of a guy who walks in a park. But if I did, I know I would probably feel better afterwards. All you've really done is walk around in a circle, but you feel like you've bettered yourself as a person because you walked around outside and got some fresh air. Of course, I don't get fresh air from playing AssBro. I get flags, which are almost as good.
I don't like the story missions in AssBro. I think you might have been able to tell this by what I have written so far. To me, this game isn't about that. The story missions are like if someone put up a bunch of walls in my park to set up a very specific path. And then they had a squirrel walk around between these walls. I have to follow the squirrel without the squirrel seeing me, because if this squirrel sees me then I have to go back to the start. But, being a squirrel, it doesn't really know where its going and likes to stop and turn around a lot, causing me to change my position or get caught. And then after a certain amount of time, I have to try to chase the squirrel. This is hard, because the squirrel is faster than me, but at an arbitrary point someone I can't see shoots the squirrel to let me catch up. And sometimes when I chase the squirrel I'm on a horse. Okay, I think I lost this analogy somewhere.
Chasing dudes on horses in this game kind of sucks. Chasing dudes not on horses in this game kind of sucks too. The climbing controls work perfectly well, if you are not trying to get anywhere specific. If you say, "I want to get on top of that building over there", then you can get on top of that building over there with relative ease. But if you say, "I want to get on top of that very specific platform right now because that is where the race marker is", then it doesn't work as well.
These are the very definition of loose controls. In fact, I barely want to call them "controls". I never really feel like I'm in full control of Ezio. I'm just a navigator. I tell him where he should be going, and he figures out the rest. All I am there for is to look at the map and point out where the treasure is, then hold in a direction. Sometimes Ezio will fuck up. That's okay, he's only human. While most of the time he jumps off the buildings waving his arms in the way on the way to certain death (sorry, "desynchronization") I rarely feel it's my fault. But I don't really get frustrated by it either. That's a lie. I have gotten very frustrated at this game in the past. But, I have realized since that I shouldn't, and so I don't.
There are some story missions that are good. I'll give them that. While most of them are the "follow this man until we tell you to kill him and then kill him", a few of them stand out. Mainly the ones that involve sneaking past a bunch of guards to get to a place. These can be pretty cool, even though I'm really terrible at them. Sometimes, they let me fuck up and get away with it. Sometimes they don't. I prefer it when they do.
From my perspective of Ezio, he seems like the kind of dude who is stealthy only as a formality. I know (and he knows) that he can just jump out and kill as these fools if he wants, because he often does. I get a weird sense of pleasure when I fall off a building and am spotted by a guard who I then have to kill to make them shut up. I don't like it when I fall off a building and am spotted by a guard which causes me to restart the mission. This may be because I am no good at not falling off buildings. And by "may be", I mean is.
Since writing that last paragraph I have left and beat the game. This is necessary information (I think). I'm going to talk about the end of the game now, so if you don't want to hear about it then you should probably get the heck out. Actually, I'm not going to talk about the end of the game yet, you can stay. Not for long though.
Anyways, as I was doing the third (fourth?) last mission in the game, I got distracted. Not by laundry or something like, but by another thing in the game. This is awesome. At least, I think this is awesome. Well, what happened was awesome. So, I was doing the mission where I was climbing around the Castel St. Angelo (that may or may not be it's name, I am not going to check) trying to catch Cesare. I was climbing out of a window when I realized: wait, I am really close to the top if this castle, I could climb to the top and get to the Borgia flag there right now. And I did.
That was my favourite moment of any game this year. And last year. Maybe ever? I haven't decided yet (and I never will). (Future Note: I have since experienced an even better moment in Deadly Premonition, but we won't get into that now) I climbed to the top of this castle, right up to the very top; the highest point in the whole game. Then I looked around, and I was like daaaamn. Just looking at the city: all the places I had been; all the buildings I had climbed up, and conversely fallen off later. I was moved. This wasn't a story moment. This wasn't a game taking me down a pre-determined path and then flashing back to all the things it had told me to do. This was me looking back on what I had done. The city looked so much smaller from up there. No, it wasn't that impressive, visually speaking. It was just cool. I stayed up there for about five minutes, and then I went down and completed the game.
The end of the game was dumb. No, not the very end, because as soon as you start playing as Desmond it becomes cool again. But the last couple of missions where you play as Ezio are dumb. Dumb awesome. From a "Hey, I'm designing a cool game" standpoint, I don't think they are very good. But, they ended up being really cool. Well, for me they did. The key to these missions (SPOILERS HERE) is that you now have the Apple of Eden, and you can use it to turn soldiers against each other. There are a bunch of guards, and you have to kill a couple specific ones. Now, what I did was just immediately call in all my assassin friends, infect everyone with "Hey, let's kill eachother" juice, and then just walk around and watch as the area turned into a giant clusterfuck of killing. Eventually, the dudes I wanted to die would die, and then the mission would be done.
Hey! Back in Sane Town again. Actually I think I might have overstated the craziness of this article, because while scrolling down in order to write this outro I saw some bits that I remember really enjoying writing. So that's a thing. Thank you and Good Night!