When I was a young man, I had liberty, but I did not see it. I had time, but I did not know it. And I had love, but I did not feel it. Many decades would pass before I understood the meaning of all three. And now, the twilight of my life, this understanding has passed into contentment.
Love, liberty, and time: once so disposable, are the fuels that drive me forward. And love, most especially, mio caro. For you, our children, our brothers and sisters. And for the vast and wonderful world that gave us life, and keeps us guessing.
-Ezio Auditore da Firenze
It’s been years since I last played Assassin’s Creed II. The story of the Master Assassin who lost everything and went on a quest to find meaning has been a permanent part of my history, and the favorable memories of my experience with the game have grown into a pleasant nostalgia which has been protected by my inability to get hold of the game once more. However, it did not mean I was meant to put it off forever; and just as the thoughts of our protagonist evolve as he matures along his quest to kill the men who betrayed him, so do mine and so has my perception of this epic tale. In a certain time, this game was a true renaissance: a reinvention of the unfavorable and disappointing puddle of ideas that its predecessor failed to live up to. Yet this mind-blowing experience has aged, much like everything else, and as I look at it now it does not hold the same value it once did.
Back in 2012, just before the Templar’s plan of using the newly discovered Apple of Eden in order to control the will of mankind, Desmond Miles is broken out of captivity by his former captor Lucy Stillman. Having saved his life from termination by Abstergo, she takes him to one of the last remaining assassin hideouts. There, she asks him to join their cause to fight Abstergo and disrupt their plans for world domination. However, Desmond lacks the skills he needs in order to become a true Assassin, which is why he must now relive the memories of another one of his ancestors: Venetian noble turned assassin, Ezio Auditore da Firenze.
Ezio’s memories begin in 1476 in Florence, Italy, where he lives his life care free, enjoying the pleasures of life, wine and the company of women. His life takes a drastic turn for the worse when his father and two brothers get caught up in a conspiracy that eventually takes their life. Enraged by his loss, Ezio embarks on a quest to kill the men responsible for the murder of his family and put a stop to their plans to conquer Italy. Along the way, he realizes that this quest of his has deeper ties to an ongoing conflict between century old enemies: Assassins and Templars.
Assassin’s Creed II, much like its setting, is a true renaissance of style and ideas. The game reinvents its franchise and takes it on a completely separate direction that compensates for the missing potential of the first. While the first game failed in its shortcomings, Assassin’s Creed II completely revamps the dark age and reworks the elements that did not work from the first game, while also retooling the ones that did work, building an experience that stands as the definitive creative and fundamental vision of what an Assassin’s Creed game should and would look like for the years to come.
However, in its quest to rework the franchise, Assassin’s Creed II does not forget the core principles that bind the franchise and give it identity. Much like the three tenets of the Assassin’s Creed, in order to make a good and true installment of the franchise, it must adhere to the following: the inclusion of a great setting brought to life by excellent art direction that makes the player feel immersed in a time period that they wouldn’t be able to visit otherwise; precise freerunning mechanics that include a blend of speed and coordination, complimented by the architecture of the time period; and social stealth mechanics that let the player take advantage of the world and people in order to remain hidden. While there may be other variables at play to determine whether an Assassin’s Creed game is good or not, these three principles are at the core of each game’s design and truly shine brightest in this game.
For once, the art direction in the game is fantastic, even to the most basic level. The Animus has been overhauled to provide for the shift in tone. The oppressive, cold and contrasting colors of the Animus 1.28 have been replaced with the welcoming light tones of the Animus 2.0. The lack of company logotypes, ease of use tooltips and stealth indicators give the game a more welcoming and comfortable look, which is in tune with Desmond’s shift in position from a prisoner to a rebel. The Animus 2.0 is also presented with plenty of flair and style to further reinforce the artificial nature of the simulation, but also the difference in design principles between the Assassin’s Animus and the Templar’s Animus, the latter being more unstable and straight to the point than the former.
The game’s environments also reinforce the shift in tone from the first game. While the first game stuck to a gritty portrayal of the Middle Ages, Assassin’s Creed II instead shifts to a more picturesque and moody representation of the Renaissance. While it still utilizes color to give each city a unique tone, its palettes and shading have greatly changed to reflect a period of emotion and stability. Assassin’s Creed II makes great use of lighting by overexposing light to skin, metals and other surfaces, creating a contrast between pure light and colored shadows. With under saturated tones, Assassin’s Creed II can build a dark tone while still portraying the beauty of the era through the aforementioned techniques. Its use of post processing effects also help portray the artificial and simulated nature of the world that embellishes the reality of Desmond’s ancestor.
Besides art direction, Assassin’s Creed II’s graphics still hold up to a certain extent. While the indoor shading is jarring by today’s age and its models lack sufficient detail to look convincing, the overall look and tone of the game holds up through the level of detail through which the environments are portrayed. Characters also have a more extensive range of facial animations than its predecessor, building on top of the emotions of the story and acting to create characters that express and emote like people. That’s not to say it’s rough around the edges of course, as the overall animations have shown their age and the environments suffer from a very short draw distance that leads to plenty of pop-in in order to maintain a decent enough framerate.
The graphics and art direction exist only in service of the world they are trying to portray, of course, and the world of Assassin’s Creed II is one that changes the design of the game as a whole. The Renaissance is an inherently distinct time period than the Middle Ages, and because of this, many aspects of Assassin’s Creed II must change to make way for a more cohesive experience. While the first game was more talkative, philosophical and serious, Assassin’s Creed II is a more relaxed, dramatic and straightforward experience, representing the kind of narrative that was prominent during the era and the feelings associated with them.
On the surface, the game’s recreation of Renaissance Italy is one of its biggest strengths. The cities are portrayed in their utmost glory and even eight years after its release, it’s still full of breathtaking sights and appropriate scale. Unlike the first game, the world of Assassin’s Creed II is built around important landmark and locations, which make each area of each city look distinct, as opposed to the more repetitive design of the first game. The game could not have portrayed the feeling of the Renaissance without first recapturing the architecture, scale and beauty of some of its more prominent cities. Whether it is the vineyards of Tuscany, the neat buildings of Florence or the floating canal city of Venice; Assassin’s Creed II accurately and vividly paints a picture of a significant era and style, adding to the immersive quality of the game.
However, from a fundamental perspective, the architectural design of the Renaissance allows for the creation of the best and most interesting setting for freerunning that the series has seen since. The game’s relatively short buildings, coupled with curved street layouts and detailed fronts allow for natural and fluid possibilities for climbing, running and maneuvering around town, which is a great contrast to Assassin’s Creed’s more square and plain architecture. These changes are coupled with Assassin’s Creed II’s improvements over freerunning, which speed up Ezio’s climbing and running to allow for more fluidity and speed than before.
Assassin’s Creed II’s gameplay style also expands much further than the first game’s strict focus on stealth, instead becoming a more freeform game based around immersing the player in the time period instead of the role of the character. This change is able to fix the fundamental issue of the first game, which was its lack of content. Assassin’s Creed II is able to include a large variety of missions and different types of activities that are able to further immerse the player in its world and give the player sufficient engagement with the game.
Further compensating for the repetitiveness of the original, Assassin’s Creed II offers a greater variety of mechanics and systems to keep the player occupied and immersed in the world around them. For once, the game’s social stealth mechanics have been given a great overhaul, which are no longer centered on the behavior of the player around other people, but the ways the player uses the world around them to their advantage. The player is able to blend in with crowds to avoid detection, hire different faction to distract guards and even alter their presence in the city through the game’s notoriety system.
The notoriety system is a great addition to the franchise, as it gives an indirect consequence to the player’s behavior throughout the game, punishing careless play with greater challenge, as guards are able to instantly grow suspicious when they see the player unless they are blending in a crowd. This system allows not only for new players to be mindful of their actions, but also allows more experienced players to challenge themselves further and use the mechanics to their full advantage in order to remain hidden in a more hostile city. The system increases immersion this way, by making players more aware of their environments and how they can manipulate the game’s society to see them the way they want to be seen, raising and lowering notoriety as they please.
This system suffers from a big problem however, which is its
difficulty. While notoriety can progressively grow with even the most simple disturbance, the methods by which the player can lower it are numerous and effective while also requiring the least amount of effort to do so. These methods, removing posters, bribing heralds and killing false witnesses, are not scarce or challenging enough to make notoriety a threat and lower notoriety too much to be in any way challenging. As a result, managing notoriety is a bit of a mindless task that one can easily get accustomed to doing in a routinely basis, as opposed to a looming threat over the player’s reckless actions, meaning that more experienced players will want to become notorious just to make the experience more interesting.
This creates a problem with the rest of the other mechanics, because they are not useful in any situation other than when the player is notorious; a situation which will be by no means common in any normal playthrough of the game. Mechanics such as blending with crowds or using courtesans to provide moving hiding spots become useless during normal gameplay, and only required if a specific mission tasks the player with using them. Besides that, the game’s combat is already easy enough to guarantee that being spotted by an enemy requires no more than the simple solution of running away, or killing the enemy. This makes it so notoriety can be a nuisance if used on the long term making players want to go back to remaining incognito and ignore the rest of the other stealth mechanics.
Easy as it is, the combat in Assassin’s Creed II is still a great improvement over the first game. The combat now holds much more variety when it comes to actions and abilities, allowing the player to execute and fight their enemies in a multitude of ways. The great number of weapons, abilities and movements that the player can perform provide rhythm and style to the combat, making each of the player’s combined actions feel fluid in turn. It still suffers from the biggest problem of the first game however, which is the ease of the game’s overpowered counter ability, which can make any combat encounter unchallenging. Yet, this issue can now be mitigated by the exclusive use of swords during combat and the existence of multiple enemy types, some of which require diverse strategies in order to beat. Aside from that, the enemies in the game are more aggressive than on the predecessor, meaning that the player will be challenged by larger crowds of constantly attacking enemies.
The lower difficulty of many of these systems is not much of a problem however, as these mechanics don’t exist to provide challenge, but to build immersion in the world. The player does not have to worry too much about the consequences of their actions and can instead use these mechanics in a leisurely way to interact with the world, rather than be challenged by it. After all, the world is sufficiently complex to allow the player to cherish each interaction they can have with it.
The world of Assassin’s Creed II is full of activities or side missions that the player can complete to earn money, or to enjoy the game at a different pace. While most of them are simple diversions, the game’s assassination contracts make better use of the game’s stealth mechanics and provide good scenarios for the player to experiment with these mechanics and use them to their utmost effectiveness. These missions also have higher stakes, as
most of them won’t allow the player to be detected, making the player think about their approach more strategically than before.
Adding to the game’s immersive qualities, the player is also allowed to manage the improvements of their own household in Tuscany. The villa of Monteriggioni is a long term investment for the player, as it produces a steady amount of money every 20 minutes that the player can collect and then use to buy more upgrades for the villa or for their character, such as armor or new weapons. This system further increases the engagement the player has with the world and gives them a long term goal for them to fulfill as they continue along the game. The problem with this, however, is that once the player has fully upgraded the villa, there is no post-game meta or challenge for maintaining Monteriggioni. Once it’s been fully upgraded, the villa acts as a money farm and nothing else, lacking any sort of entertainment value and becoming another one of Assassin’s Creed II’s disposable mechanics.
But just as Monteriggioni develops, so does the player character, both in story and gameplay. The game combines gameplay and story to deliver its narrative in this aspect. As the player unlocks and purchases new equipment, weapons and unlocks abilities for their character’s skills to develop, so does the personality and attitude of the main protagonist, Ezio, in the story of the game. The player feels more in tune and immersed in the character of Ezio when his journey along the story of the game Is in parallel to the player’s own journey of improvement as they play.
In this regard, we can notice the different nature of the story of Assassin’s Creed II, which changes drastically from the first game. The story is now more cinematic and direct than its previous installment, focusing entirely on the character and journey of Ezio Auditore rather than the conflict and ideologies surrounding him. The writing no longer asks and answers questions, but instead delivers jokes and levity, alongside decent drama to inspire the strong motivations of each character. The tone is completely different, and it can be evidenced with the change in position of each the main factions of the conflict.
The conflict of these games between Assassins and Templars goes underground by the time period of Assassin’s Creed II. The Assassin’s Creed is portrayed this time as a secret society of individuals that uphold a set of morals, opposing the Templars to maintain the freedom of the world. The religious elements of their creed are put aside to favor a cult-like devotion to their ideals, but also a heroic and romanticized representation of the creed, which favors the goodwill of the individual assassin. Following this idealization of criminality, the Assassins of the second game are thieves, fighters and whores; the lower classes of society who rise against their high class oppressors, which are the Templars. The Order, is portrayed as a villainous cult entangled with conspiracies in the second game, rivaling the strong force of the first game, instead portraying them as a group that holds control of nobility and government in order to achieve their cause. Their villains are unsympathetic and hold no other ideal than power and greed, making them easy for the Assassins to defeat.
This change in morals drives the humanistic approach to the franchise that is inspired by the change in time period, which also drives the interest of the player not towards the conflict, but towards the individuals leading the conflict. Ezio’s character drives the plot of Assassin’s Creed II, as the player comes to relate to and understand his character, situation and motives throughout his quest for revenge and understanding of his enemies’ plan. It is not hard to relate to the killer Ezio when he, the charming, astute and strong willed young man is fighting against the corrupt old men that are the Templar masters. Yet, his motivation goes stronger than just appearances, since his character is driven by the anguish caused by the loss of his family, which the player gets to know and appreciate at the start of the experience, before they are ceremoniously killed, making them share the same motivation and reflection as Ezio in regards to their journey.
His character is then truly brought to life by Roger Craig Smith’s excellent performance, which is able to showcase the character’s delightful attitude and force of will, while also capturing his more reserved and emotional moments. Yet, the most important thing about his performance is his ability to capture Ezio’s growth from an inexperienced, cocky but also terrified young man to a worn, conflicted, yet strong willed adult. The other characters do a decent job at portraying their characters, though they hardly compare to the main lead because of a lack of material to their performances.
Bringing the setting and story to life is Jesper Kyd’s amazing score, which retains the same principles as the first game but takes them much further than the original ever accomplished. Assassin’s Creed II’s music, much like its predecessor, is composed around representing the instrumentals of its time period while also adding elements and instruments from modern day. However, the Assassin’s Creed II soundtrack pushes this further by appealing not to the atmosphere of the period, but the emotion of the individual story. His melodies are now deeply embedded into the emotions of the story of the game, with an arrangement of moving tracks that convey not only the era, but the struggle of the characters perfectly.
Further adding to the heightened emotions of this new game is its use of history to further enhance the plot. The development team of Assassin’s Creed II uses historical figures in a liberal way in order to experiment and have fun with the setting, having the main character come into close contact with Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others. Instead of merely representing them, the writers created an idealized and hypothetical representation of these characters, one that is functional to the story and time period while also creating a compelling figure for the players to get attached to regardless of their name and importance. There is also no shortage of historical nods made throughout the narrative, which further immerse the player into their fabricated reality.
The game also builds off of its predecessor with the weaving of its world and lore, which is greatly expanded in the sequel. While Assassin’s Creed kept the origins of the Apples of Eden and many of its fantastical elements and conspiracies hidden, the sequel dedicates itself to answering these questions while also asking more. The new lore portrayed in the game builds interest in its narrative by presenting a world completely separate and unique from reality, creating a special kind of juxtaposition between the historical accuracy of the story and the surreal and abstract fantasy of its lore.
The means by which this lore is revealed also adds plenty of intrigue to the narrative. Throughout the game, the player finds certain pieces of encoded information left behind by Desmond’s predecessor, Subject 16, who uncovered the truth behind the world’s biggest conspiracy. These elements are presented in a very cryptic way, and thus it becomes a game of not only solving puzzles to unlock these pieces of information, but also piece together the clues of what Subject 16 is hinting at, which is the existence of a civilization prior to humanity.
But as these elements are put forward, the main draw of the franchise slowly becomes more irrelevant. While the assassinations of the first game were a significant portion of the game, now they have been relegated to mere set pieces that would advance the plot, offering only spectacle and finality to advance from one narrative arc to the next. As a result, each assassination target lacks the development or character that the original game gave them, instead acting as one dimensional villains with only the slightest of relations to the player, making them somewhat unsatisfying to kill and much less memorable in the long run.
This problem extends itself to the whole narrative, as most characters besides Ezio are given a minimal amount of development, instead only pertaining exclusively to the arcs they are relevant in and vanishing entirely for the rest of the game, until it’s time for them to become relevant again. They leave very little lasting impact and hold no character to be invested in, aside from what is explicitly told through their dialogue. Characters in the game are not used to expand the drama, but instead as plot devices to move the plot forwards and advance Ezio’s own character. I’m hard pressed to find characters like Claudia or Maria Auditore interesting when their appearance and presence in the game is nearly non-existent.
This issue is caused by the game’s pacing and lack of focus. Assassin’s Creed II is more preoccupied with covering as much time possible in Ezio’s life than making any of these periods particularly interesting. In the soap opera that is the Master Assassin’s life, no proper arcs are built that flesh out the character’s particular thoughts and while his character does experience development, his depth is mostly a product of the player’s own experience as the character and not the plot’s doing. The game’s pacing only moves from setpiece to setpiece, but has little to no time left for the player to get acquainted with anything in-between, leaving the story unable to accomplish anything as a result.
Unlike the first game, the themes of the sequel are somewhat barren and completely married to the main character’s life. Without Ezio, there is no story to be told and there is no message. The story lacks any real binding theme or purpose besides Ezio, and without a theme, comes a lack of focus. It moves from place to place, trying to find a new direction for the character and story to go, but it ends up coming short and instead moves on to the next big thing, leaving nothing for any of the characters to do, think or feel when removed from that.
This lack of focus extends over to the gameplay of the game, which now has such a great variety of content and styles that it cannot decide which one is most important. Assassin’s Creed II is not about the stealth, action or platforming as much as it is about all of them at the same time, but also none of them at once. The principal mechanics of the game exist to create a sandbox of ideas, but not a cohesive string of thought, which makes the experience feel very loose and inconsequential as a result. While there is a decisive main content to the game, it is too simple for any of it to be considered cohesive, as it merely consists of moving from one point to another while accomplishing certain tasks. The main content is so similar to the side content that the cohesion of the game is lost.
Assassin’s Creed II starts to feel very inconsequential as a result, which is shown greatly by its modern day plot. By focusing more on characters than world, lore or tone, the cracks present in the first game begin to show a lot more. Soon, the player begins to notice how shallow characters like Desmond, Shaun or Rebecca are, existing only to serve the plot or to deliver a couple of goofy or funny lines. Whenever it’s time to go back to the present, the player no longer desires to explore the juxtaposition between the two eras like in the first game, but instead hopes to finish it as soon as possible to return to the more interesting part of the plot. While the modern day parts are still necessary to provide context for the experience, it still ends up lacking any kind of lasting appeal.
Of course, even with all these problems, Assassin’s Creed II is not long enough for them to become apparent. The experience is brief and to the point, leaving the rest of the experience up to the player’s own doing as they immerse themselves in the world that the developers built while playing around with the mechanics and finding all the pieces of content that they missed the first time around. Its immersive qualities make up for the game’s lack of depth.
But at the same time, this is the biggest problem with Assassin’s Creed II. The game’s lasting appeal is brief, and as the player becomes more and more acquainted with the experience, the more the polish and charm begin to fade. The experience of living Ezio Auditore da Firenze’s life can only be fulfilled once, and the times after that can no longer live up to it. When there is not much for the player to latch on to after the end of the experience, there is simply nothing for them to get attached to in the long run. Once the game is over, there’s hardly any reason to pick it up again, as there isn’t much new or interesting to be experienced, nor enough depth to revisit.
While I do recommend Assassin’s Creed II to anyone who is looking for a fun time, I cannot say the same for myself. Time has not given this game the favors it has given to many others, and just like many things from the past it will soon fade. The most disappointing thing about returning to Assassin’s Creed II was not that the game didn’t live up to my expectations, or that I did not remember it as it was, but that the game had nothing more than the surface level of my own memories. I remembered the game exactly as it was, and for that reason I did not need to revisit it. Yet in the end, it’s not an experience that I scorn, or resent. Simply put, I had my fun with Assassin’s Creed II, and that was enough fun for its lifespan. Now it’s time to let the game rest in peace and allow the dust to finally settle.
Meglio essere felici in questa vita che aspirare a esserlo nella prossima.
Requiescat in Pace.