Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Eggregious Storytelling Errors of Assassin's Creed 2!

After conquering Bioshock 2 I decided to take a break and go back and finish some of the many games Bioshock 2 had left ruined in its wake, foremost among them Assassin’s Creed 2. Assassin’s Creed 2 was fun, no question, but compared to Bioshock 2 it was just...lacking somehow. Bioshock 2 had tunnels and stories and little girls and Assassin’s Creed 2 had a largely incoherent cast of characters who never really developed and plot twists and freerunning and a story that made me lament the mentality governing the writing and design of games today.

Hence the essay.

Just to start off, as frequent readers know, I don’t think there’s anything endemically wrong with the ability of games to tell a story. Just to prove it, and be constructive, I want to go over how a few of the more successful games actually accomplish storytelling. Half-Life, Bioshock, Far Cry 2, even the first Modern Warfare, draw characters into their world through character. It’s the key to almost any engaging story, populating the world of that story with characters that people care about and can relate to. Even Modern Warfare 2 manages to do this, giving you squadmates that you care about, squadmates you’re supposed to feel bad about when they almost inevitably die. The root of all storytelling lies in characters, the manner in which they’re developed and portrayed.

It’s a well accepted truth of books and films. Sunshine, for example, has an absolutely retarded plot. It’s the journey of the characters which make the story it tells engaging, Kappa’s journey towards his own death which compels us to keep watching after the film veers off the rails into horrible horror territory. In fact it was less how poorly the finale of the movie is executed that drew me out of the film and more the fact that it seemed to stop caring about the majority of its characters, giving moderate face time to a handful of people and killing them off in dramatic ways that said nothing we didn’t already know about their relationships with one another. The same could be said of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. If we didn’t care about Oscar as a character the book would be an exercise in frustration, but because we see ourselves reflected in Oscar, because he’s such an interesting, likeable and pitiable character, we want to see his journey. Even when it’s asinine, when he sits around making Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, he’s still an interesting guy.

The problem with games is that they take so much of their storytelling from boiler plate, low risk, high return action films. The hero gets the girl because he’s the hero and he should get the girl. The hero trumps the villain because he’s the hero and heroes normally trump villains. It is the way of things and it is not our place as consumers to question these laws. Games like Painkiller do an excellent job with this sort of absurdity, constructing contrived and ridiculous narratives and completely divorcing them from the games themselves. Serious Sam is another great example of this old school first person shooter sensibility, wherein we are given less of a story and more of a playground to cause carnage.

When this sort of storytelling becomes sincere things can get a great deal messier. STALKER, for example, has an elaborate and entirely incoherent plot about some sort of wish granting tree/room/monolith located at the center of a nuclear reactor. Mirror’s Edge is about a city government with the means to completely dominate its population which cannot stop a single young woman from destroy their entire monitoring system for some reason. These stories, while awful in and of themselves, aren’t any more absurd than say the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow.

What makes them poor isn’t just their serious treatment of their own ridiculousness. Its their lack of character, a problem which easily extends to games with much less absurd and potentially better stories. For example Dawn of War II features an epic tale of alien invasion and human perseverance, an easy topic to make into a great story. But it falls flat, not because the aliens aren’t strong enough or the game’s action repeats itself too often, but because Dawn of War II’s characters are, by nature, stereotypes which never develop. They level up, but they never change. And why should they? They’re hundreds of years old. Never mind that the first Dawn of War actually had character development (which, in hindsight, served as the single saving grace of its single player campaign) for the same set of characters. Dawn of War II is about an epic struggle where a group of hardened marines remain strong and tough in the face of adversity, and as a result it is snooze worthy. Good luck keeping your eyes open during those wacky conversations between Space Secretary and Gruff Space Soldier number three.

Assassin’s Creed 2, however, didn’t have to go this way. It opens up slowly and invites you to develop Ezio as a character. As you learn about the world and see more of it you begin to change and grow. You learn about your past, your family, the cities you inhabit and the people you share them with. The first ten or so hours of Assassin’s Creed 2 are just remarkable in how ambitious and successful they are at drawing you into a world and making you feel like its somewhere you belong. The villains you fight are developed from the ground up and grow and change with you as a character.

But after the boat ride to Venice all of that changes. Once Assassin’s Creed leaves the smaller towns of Italy for its big cities it largely loses its sense of character and begins to bombard you with new faces, barely pausing to let you adjust to the influx of names you now have to remember in order to properly identify your assassination target. Venice’s lose memorable character, Rosa the thief, went completely out the window towards the end of the game, inexplicably replaced by her completely inept boss and a group of his similarly inept compatriots. none of whom seemed to grow as anything more than cameos in my mind. Compared to the streets of Florence where I’d learned my trade, Venice was a cold and dull place. Even the prostitutes seemed lifeless and when the inevitable twist came, an absurd and tortured thing that never needed to happen, I felt less intrigued as to just who was and wasn’t an Assassin and how that had influenced their actions and more bored by the fact that the game decided to lump all of its supporting characters together so artlessly.

What makes it even worse is the fact that Machiavelli is rammed in there for no apparent reason. The author of the prince, and guy that your intolerable boss routinely quotes without context or cause, appears late in the game and literally does nothing, aside from nod a few times and tell you to, no lie, kill the pope. This sort of absurd bullshit is where Assassin’s Creed 2 jumps from “competent” to “boiler plate” to “absurdly bad.” That the game’s credits are introduced by the phrase “What the fuck?” is no mistake – when the animus is turned off you’ll most likely be laughing out loud at the absurd twists that Assassin’s Creed 2 lays at your feet. In fact, just for fun and humor I’m going to lay the entire thing down in one nice fat spoiler filled paragraph? Ready? Go!

You journey to Rome to infiltrate the Vatican and assassinate the pope. Why? He’s the guy who killed your dad! Also, Machiavelli tells you so and no game is more about you doing what various people tell you to do than Assassin’s Creed 2, especially in its last three or four hours, depending on your skill. Now, bear in mind at this point you’ve fought the future pope several times with intent to kill, but the game engine stays your hand, inexplicably. Not the way it does with the Robert de Sable, where you’re treated to a brief cut scene explaining why you don’t end the sucker you just wrestled to the ground. No, Assassin’s Creed 2, which has spent most of the game building you into an unspeakable badass, forces you to fight the pope to be to the ground twice and never permits you to stab him in the neck. In fact you never stab him in the neck period, which is completely inexplicable. It’s not like Ezio’s vengeance is the only reason to kill him. But I digress. I was summarizing the plot.

So you’re journeying to Rome to assassinate the pope. After a lengthy series of fights along the battlements of Vatican City you’ll be treated to a brief forced stealth section. Then you’ll run along the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel and leap down, blade first, on to the pope. Done and done, you’ll think. But not so fast, gamer! The pope will push you off with his psychic pope staff, the murder everyone in the room with his pope powers. Luckily you have a magical apply that lets you make completely unnecessary copies of yourself so you can beat the pope up the same way you did before. Unfortunately, despite beating him, the pope won’t play by the rules. Instead he’ll use his pope invisibility power and stab you. But no worries, you’ll get better. Post-stabbing you’ll go down into the Vatican basement, which looks like a spaceship, and challenge the pope to a bare knuckle boxing match. After defeating him you’ll decide that he’s learned his lesson and unlock the tomb of some Roman gods who were, in fact, aliens, using the pope staff. They’ll tell you about solar flares and how shit is crazy dangerous and how the film 2012 had some great points and how you need to find one of their arks in order to survive this mass extinction events. But they won’t be telling you. They’ll be telling future you, playing through past you. If they were really meta they’d be telling player you, using future you receiving information from past you as a second mouthpiece, but everybody misses an opportunity for metatext occasionally. After this you’ll be treated to a brief fight scene with the douchebags you previously escaped from, dispatching them easily. Then a villain will inexplicably tell you that this isn’t over and drive off in the back of a van while you stand there, dumbfounded, and let him.

Aaaand...curtain.

All of this is bad, sure. And I described it to a stoned friend of mine as I played and she seemed to be quite amused, so it could be that it’s just targeted to a specific gaming market, but even so, it seems like it could’ve been saved so easily. By having some sort of meaningful character resolution for either Ezio or Desmond Assassin’s Creed 2 could’ve leapt from good game to great game. Instead it ended with a laughably poor series of story twists strung together by characters I’d since stopped caring about, which is a shame because there was so much potential for growth there. The cast of characters who operate the Animus 2.0 aren’t stereotypes in the slightest, and the brief interactions you have with them are some of the games best moments. Additionally Ezio’s relationship with his family early in the game is much of what makes him both an interesting character and what makes the game so compelling, but by the time you’re forced back to the manor to conclude things these interactions are no longer present. Despite your mother, uncle and sister’s presence in your life they never change, never speak, and never discuss what you are become or the goal you move towards. It is equal measures inexplicable and frustrating to deal with as someone who absolutely loves storytelling in games.

And it’s all because Assassin’s Creed 2 had so much promise. If it had been shitty all the way through I’d feel more the way I do towards Mass Effect 2, a little angry but not betrayed. But because Assassin’s Creed 2 opens with such a remarkably well crafted character experience and because it so effectively destroys that same experience by game’s end through its poor pacing and its decision to constantly introduce inexplicable new characters to the fold it actually makes me mad. It makes me mad because its representative of what the industry does wrong when they try to tell a story.

Games are great models to make you relate to characters and watch them develop. Bioshock does it particularly well, despite robbing you of any real agency, by providing you with histories and allowing you to recast the world around you to some extent. But gamers and game developers don’t always have the storytelling chops to tell the sort of epic tale they sold their marketing department on. And instead of bringing in professionals they just hand it over to someone who has particularly good grammar and crap out some characters interactions that sound cool, hardly bothering to edit them at all. That’s sort of where the whole problem lies. There’s little economy in the story of most games. They’re all too willing to throw as much in as possible in an effort to make the experience somehow richer or fuller. Mass Effect 2, for example, barely develops any of its many characters in any detail, offering only a brief, dismissive attempt at development to each of Shepard’s crew. You might be able to develop your romantic partner in a little more detail, but depending on who you choose that might not happen either. As a result I cared less about my actual characters and more about whether or not I would get that extra gamerscore for getting the entire team through the last mission alive. The characters never felt like characters to me, and indeed how could they? It’s difficult and perhaps a bit foolish even to try developing as many characters as Mass Effect 2 does.

And that’s what games need to learn. It’s not enough to save the world or get the girl. Those things make you feel good, but they aren’t good stories in and of themselves. They become good stories when they’re populated by people we care about, people who we get to see develop and grow through the course of our games. And until the people who receive hundreds of millions of dollars to design games get the memo on this we’re going to keep seeing games like Assassin’s Creed 2 with remarkable potential wasted on boxing matches with the pope.

Congratulations on Tasing the Living Shit Out of Someone!

The laser will have a warmup period of roughly fifteen seconds. You won’t remember the exact scene in Real Genius that informed you of that fact, but you will remember the fact, a shimmering truth in your brain. Fifteen seconds to disarm and disable Dr. Lasercut. Smiling, you’ll know you only need five.

You won’t feel hurried as you move towards him, seamlessly covering the distance in a moment and ramming the prongs of the taser into his stomach. You’ll feel him twist as he wakes, a gesture left unfinished, a simple neurological impulse cut short by the streaming electricity of the taser. It will change into something terrible in his body, sending him to his knees and then the floor.

You’ll follow him down, stripping the laser and moving his hands, quickly and gently like a child’s, behind his back and into a pair of plastic handcuffs. You’ll draw them tight and haul him to his feet, picking up his laser, turning it off and sliding it into your belt all in the same gesture. He’ll hang from the cuffs in your arms, groaning and flopping around, trying to teach his brain how to send impulses to his muscles and get them working again. You’ll grimace as you tug him close , drawing out the caribeeners you’d hidden in your rectum and clipping them on to his belt and yours, then affixing the laser gun and his flaccid body to yourself. Then final carabeener will hook on to the weather balloon.

When it’s hooked into your belt you’ll pull the activation cord and the balloon will rip you out of the window and into the sky, Lasercut’s weight digging your belt into you. You’ll hear the C-130 coming, catch sight of the sun cresting the horizon as you rise and remember how good it is to no longer be a teenager living in suburbia as you feel the balloon catch and the plane reel you in.

Congratulations on Tasing the Living Shit Out of Someone!

Congratulations on Breaking Out of the Hellscape of Your Own Memory!

You’ll sit there for what feels like an eternity trying to scream, watching your childhood self play with your insufferable super villain cousin in slow motion. It will be what you imagined hell to be like, banal shit foisted upon your mind, unwelcome and inescapable and a little bit uncomfortable in a way you can’t quite put your finger on.

You’ll feel, rather than hear, Lasercut’s amusement at your discomfort. Ha ha ha he’ll mind-laugh inside your skull.

You’ll realize suddenly that this is exactly what he expected. He expected you to fight, to return to the present at any cost. You’ll bite your lip and do the hardest thing you’ve ever done: you’ll fall deeper into flashback, trying to take control.

The world will spin around you and you’ll cascade into your own memory, falling through awkward sexual experiences and the first time you shaved your genitals and things of that horrible nature, your consciousness tumbling inexplicably through the framework of your own mind. You’ll scrabble to come to rest before finally catching hold on the film Real Genius.

In Val Kilmer’s eyes you’ll find peace for the first time in days. Staring at him you’ll wonder why you came here and then you’ll remember. The laser.

You’ll watch the film intently, laughing as you recognize the actor who would one day play Uncle Rico in the cult blockbuster Napoleon Dynamite, enjoying every line, savoring every second away from your cousin. In the real world only a few instants will have past but here in the dream it will have been a luxurious two hours spent watching one of your favorite classic films. It will have been divine.

And when the credits finish and Kodak’s logo flashes upon the screen the memory will go black and you’ll find yourself standing face to face with Dr. Lasercut. His eyes will flutter and it will quickly become apparent that he is leaving the flashback just after you. Smiling you’ll flex your fist and tense your legs as you leap towards him

Congratulations on Breaking Out of the Hellscape of Your Own Memory!

Congratulations on Entering a Flashback!

“Accompany me, if you will, into the depths...OF MEMORY!”

Lasercut will finish his statement in all caps, clearly proud of his perceived showmanship. You’ll do your best not to yawn, your desire to be courteous outweighing your desire to belittle the madman sitting before you.

“It all began in the Year of Our Lord Before Lasercut Ninety Eighty-Eight...” he’ll begin, pulling the two of you into the swirling gray mess that is the human mind’s concept of time.

Suddenly the two of you will leave his handsome, if spartan, office and be transported to a suburban neighborhood which looks a great deal more like nineteen fifties than nineteen eighties American. A great deal of that will be the young man dominating the flashback. He’ll be sickly pale and dressed in a v-neck sweater vest, playing with a chemistry set outside for no apparent reason. As he toys with the set he’ll produce what appears to be a highly corrosive acid, which will eat through the beaker containing it and spill on to an anthill, dousing the creatures in horrible melting death.

“Lasercut!” a voice will sound from off-flashback. The young man will turn, abandoning his now burning chemistry set and running towards an attractive older woman standing outside of a house. She’ll smile and shake her head. “Lasercut, are you sciencing again?”

The boy will look at his feet and stammer, “No ma. I were’t just doin’ normal kid stuff. Runnin’ and playin’. You know.”

She’ll shake her head and tousle his hair. “We’ll put you in the lie box later. Come inside and meet your cousin.”

Lasercut, smiling, will trot inside. He’ll rush into a living room where another older woman sits, sipping a cough of coffee. The woman will look very, very familiar. A young man will be seated next to her, dressed normally for the 1980s. He’ll be wearing a Cure shirt and have a bowl haircut and a frown on his face. His eyes will be a little red, as if he cried on the car on his way over. He’ll look like a sensitive boy, familiar somehow.

“Lasercut Montaghue, meet your cousin, Secretassassin Del La Monte,” the first older woman will say, and with her words the flashback will click into place and you will try to scream, but the words will catch in your throat, the flashback drowning out all sound, all future.

Congratulations on Entering a Flashback!

Congratulations on Engaging in Some Polite Conversation!

You’ll be standing there in Dr. Lasercut’s office for what feels like a day, but is in fact closer to a minute and a half, staring down the barrel of an argon gas and ruby filtered laser, effective range sixty five meters. You’ll know this because of the surprisingly thorough section about Dr. Lasercut in the CIA World Factbook which you reviewed before coming to his island. You wanted to be able to accurately engage your host in conversational topics of interest to him, like oppression and lasers, and you thought learning about his weird culture would help with that.

But of course Lasercut saw through you and we all know where the situation stands now. With you. Standing. In his office. Like we just said in the previous paragraph.

“We are not so different, you and I,” he’ll demur, looking you up and down like a piece of meat or some sort of woman.

“I disagree,” you’ll grumble gruffly, staring straight ahead at his laser, watching his finger caress the trigger.

“I’m sure,” Lasercut will purr, keeping his laser pointed at you as he strafes around you, smiling. “You’re likely wondering just what I meant by that.”

You won’t nod. You won’t move at all. You’ll just be racking your brain, trying to remember if the warmup time on argon gas lasers is significant. You’ll try to remember the fact book, but the fact book was really boring so you’ll give that up halfway through and start replaying the film Real Genius in your head instead, examining the plot chronologically to be sure you don’t miss anything.

“A fair question,” Lasercut will say, now partially ignoring you. “Would it shock you at all to learn that we are, in fact, related?”

You’ll stop replaying Real Genius in your head and give him a startled look. It will shock you.

“Indeed!” he’ll declare, taking joy at your shock. “Let me elaborate on just how we are related, my dear Secretassassin,” he’ll say, sitting down in a chair and letting his traditional black cat settle into his lap.

Congratulations on Engaging In Some Polite Conversation!

Congratulations on Killing the First Person You Meet!

When the door opens it’ll be a young man, no older than nineteen. He’ll be clean shaven with blue eyes full red lips. He’ll look content, like he’s had a rough life and he’s finally found something that doesn’t just hurt constantly to do, even if that thing is kind of horrible.

You’ll loop the rope around his neck in one fluid gesture and yank him off his feet, collapsing his windpipe with the force of the motion instantly. You’ll keep pulling as his feet scuff the ground just to be absolutely sure, just to be thorough. They’ll stop after less than a minute, panicked scrabbling fading into one last kick.

On his body you’ll find cell keys, a taser and an ID badge. Not much, nothing of real use. He must’ve been unimportant, this young man, barely worth clothing. You’ll have hoped to find a gun or something, something that you could really use to fight, but this will have to do, you’ll think to yourself, pocketing the taser.

You’ll set out into the passages of Dr. Lasercut’s base, moving slowly, stopping and hiding each time you hear footsteps. Five times you’ll avoid detection and barely stay your hand when you notice that the footsteps belong to more than one person. Moving this way it will take you two hours to reach Dr. Lasercut’s office. No search parties will impede your journey, a further testament to the unimportance of that poor, lonely young man already fading into the stone below.

As such you will be largely unexpected when you slip into Lasercut’s office. He’ll be on the phone, yelling at someone about cable installation times or something. The sound of your own blood in your ears will be too intense for you to be able to focus on just what’s coming out of Lasercut’s mouth.

You’ll slowly, carefully creep around the room in the plentiful and somewhat conspicuous shadows populating it until you come to rest just behind Lasercut, watching the hairs on the back of his neck, still not hearing the phone conversation. You’ll watch him hang up the receiver in slow motion, watch his hand tap the desk in a rapid pattern, hearing nothing, only the tap, until he turns towards you and says “Hello Agent Secretassassin.”

“Huh?” you’ll say, still in the shadows, eliciting a cruel laugh from Lasercut. You’ll move towards him with the taser but he’ll spin in his chair, a cutting-laser pointed straight at your chest.

“Not so fast, Agent Secretassassin,” he’ll say, a smile splayed across the functioning side of his face. You’ll lick your lips.

“It appears we have reached an impasse,” you’ll say, lowering the taser.

Congratulations on Killing the First Person You Meet!

Congratulations on Blacking Out Briefly!

When you come to he’ll still be talking and you’ll still be strapped to that god damn table with that god damn laser slowly working its way towards you. You’ll let loose a sigh and wonder why villains always insist on giving you an out instead of just killing you outright.

His guards will have their backs turned to you now. They’ll be convinced that their blows to your head will render you unconscious until the laser begins cutting you in half. They’ll have underestimated you, the last mistake they’ll ever make.

Or so you’ll mutter softly to yourself as you squirm on the table. This will immediately draw the attention of one of the guards who will strike you in the head again, knocking you out much more effectively this time. Blackness will take you.

You’ll awake later, having been removed from the table since Dr. Lasercut decided that it wasn’t “fun” to kill you by slowly cutting you in half with a laser unless you were awake for the entire affair. You’ll be bound to a chair in a basement, hungry and alone and wishing that you’d been able to deflect the laser with a coin and kill the guards in an action packed sequence.

Instead you’ll be left to slowly work your way out of the ropes so that you can brutally strangle whoever enters your cell, hoping that they want to kill you in some horrible way instead of just letting you rot slowly down there.

Congratulations on Blacking Out Briefly!