When is an Assassin Not? The Riddle of 2012So, this week’s Revenge of the 80s Kids is about the Top 10 films of 2012. With the most promising movie article prospect being a look back at the Infinity Saga, and, honestly, I think we’re probably well served on the internet for that kind of content.
Instead, I’m going to turn my attention to a different ambitious chapter in an ongoing, ever-evolving saga universe. Second only to the Parisian-drudge of AC: Unity is the American Revolution as told from the point of view of one grumpy, surly Native American, Assassin’s Creed III. 
It has always been my opinion that the game has aged gracefully. It was a massive heaping mess upon release, filled with bugs and a rude shock after three homogeneous lumps of super-Assassin Ezio. People didn’t like the viewpoint character, they hated the bugs and they found many of the new features lumpen, irritating and over-designed. When it came to PS3 Assassin’s Creed development III gave way to the more charming Black Flag and ultimately to the final word in the PS3 engine AC Chapters the heavily underrated AC: Rogue. In between all this was a PS Vita title AC: Liberation that was too good for that sadly abandoned platform. AC3 (AKA Forsaken) was a game given several tasks by Ubisoft, none of which were necessary and quite a few of which were unasked for. The one thing that reviewers and grumpy fans came back with repeatedly was that three straight years of Ezio-based assassination was getting a bit same-y. 
Assassin's don't care how slippery your roof is!
This demonstrates the fundamental problem of complaining about how something is without having a clear idea about how you want it to be. It also leads into a second problem. The hardcore fans of the Ezio Trilogy loved the assassin thing, a lot, enough to still have a soft spot for the glorified tech demo that was the original Assassin’s Creed. Add to this the need for Ubisoft to keep apace with the general gaming environment and growing pains are going to be inevitable. AC3 was possibly so harshly received not only because the day one release was a mess so hot that it would give you sunburn but because AC3 changed the core of what Assassin’s Creed actually was, what the story of Assassin’s Creed was about. A core principal of the first four Assassin’s Creed games was that the Assassins “worked in the dark, to serve the light” and grazed the notion that “nothing is true” and “everything is permitted”. The latter sentiments being problematic as a stem for storytelling and game mechanics were more a hint or flavour. The idea of “working in the dark to serve the light” on the other hand was a cool core. The original AC paid lip service to this concept essentially boiling it down to “Templars bad, mmmkay” so Altair, the protagonist of the original game, had to fight bad guys who were immensely powerful and did so by slinking through the shadows and operating on the down low. Assassin’s Creed 2 represented a quantum leap forward in this concept, the stroke of genius was to move the action to Renaissance Italy under the iron fist of the Borgia's. This was an era of beautiful surfaces and incredible creative flourish that nursed a dark heart of political corruption and the invitation of a new, more violent era that created dark clouds on the horizon. 
Ezio was disappointed to see Leonardo was a human being and not a turtle, though
As to the four centuries separating Assassin’s Creed and its sequel, just hand waved away. The assassins have been working away, like the Templars spreading back from roots in the Crusades to make their way into Europe and mostly focused on Italy. The Templar/Assassin war is, in their narrative, a driver for the Renaissance. It’s a nice, neat nugget of alt-history. The developers of the Ezio trilogy were given liberty to put Ezio at the centre of the Renaissance explosion in art, science and political upheaval, that was kind of the point. But after three games which take ~20-30 hours to play it felt like Ezio was the most important person in the history of the world. The team on ACIII had to deal with that legacy. By the time ACIII went into production AC transformed from a big new IP to one of Ubisoft’s flagship franchises. It became clear that, if the franchise was going to move on then Ezio had to be left behind and a new assassin had to come forward. Here comes another almost four century leap. Here comes another flashpoint in the history of Western civilisation. The chief lesson learned from three Ezio games was that having a person be both a key person in established history and operating entirely from the shadows was a narrative stretch. This goes a long way to explaining the dour, monosyllabic and largely ineffectual figure of Connor in ACIII. Was it the best alternative to Ezio? Not by a long way. Did it satisfy the immediate requirement of not making the protagonist comically over-important to the narrative of history? Maybe even a little too much. A key problem with the vision of Connor is that it fulfilled the immediate brief at the expense of the whole “Working in shadows to serve the light”. Connor was a man caught between two worlds, a loner trying to build something from the corrupted wreckage of what the assassins had become by the time of the American revolution. The poor guy was undoubtedly working in the shadows, but their wasn’t much in the way of light for him to serve, which is kind of appropriate for the era even as it makes a muddle of the actual role of an assassin. Ubisoft actually spent two prequel games, Black Flag and Rogue, exploring this corruption of the assassins, breaking the problem down to “Too many pirates” and “People getting their head stuck up their bottom”. 
From the period where the assassins realised how cool dark clothes look
Before we had this remedy to the context shock, however, it appeared that ACIII had, literally, lost the plot. Not only was it unrelentingly grim in its outlook but the game, upon first approach, did not have the right feels for the increasingly colourful and flamboyant franchise that people had come to know and love. The “shades of brown” colour palette did little to help this. There was something besides this though, something fundamental, something that has blossomed and grown out of control over the course of the following games. AC III changed what being an assassin was at the gameplay level. In the early days of the franchise the assassins were a club of cool, awesome people who had to remain hidden because they were just too amazing for regular folk to comprehend. In ACIII and beyond the assassins were a faction of pompous, bickering idiots who regularly put ends ahead of means and were, hence, pretty ethically compromised. It’s a bit like the difference between Jedi in the Original Trilogy and Jedi after the Original Trilogy. The game designers of ACIII morphed the assassins’ main bag of tricks into a bunch of techniques that a forest master like Connor could add to his already extensive portfolio of bushcraft and down home Native American traditional whoop-ass. If you needed to be stealthy that was cool but if you also wanted to single-handedly take out a fort batallion, also sweet. As such, hardcore fans who wanted to slowly pick off the soldiers in the fort one-by-one, killing only the soldiers necessary to achieve the other aims were coming at the problem all wrong. That there was some Ezio-style problem solving and Connor just wanted to go to town with his tomahawk and bathe in the blood of his enemies. It’s debatable whether the move from the core gameplay loop of ACI through to Revelations to the mix-and-match of ACIII through to Syndicate to the let’s-just-punch-people-and- occasionally-stab-them-from-above-but-fundamentally-it’s-a-role-playing-game-now of the last two titles is any kind of betrayal of the original fan-base, or if the franchise is just moving with the times. 
Ooh, doggos!
All I know is that I love all the games up to Unity (I still haven’t had time to plough all the way through that monster and I own Syndicate but haven’t had any time to play it), but Origins and Odyssey have left me cold as a corpse in a haycart and I have no interest in them because the key things that drew me to the AC franchise seem to have been wiped away, leaving, ironically for a franchise that has always suffered from sameiness, a cookie cutter walk and bash RPG like dozens of others on the market. ACIII represented a key revolution in an approach to the franchise, to third-person action gaming, to the presentation of history in video games and to the kinds of stories video games could tell, and for a few more games it ploughed that furrow beautifully, even though ACIII itself was far from perfect. I think, though, that there are many fans who’d rather have ACIII back than contend with the bloated messes Ubisoft are now slopping out into the marketplace that have a bunch of flash but almost no soul whatsoever. This article provides an alternative view of pop culture in 2012 to the podcast Revenge of the 80s Kids Episode 133 which has 20 minutes of gush about the first Avengers movie. The cast can be streamed or downloaded at http://theeightieskids.blogspot.com where you can also find an extensive archive of content about movies and popular culture. You can also get news about the podcast and other projects at https://www.facebook.com/RevengeOfThe80sKids 
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