Of Nostalgia Filters and Hidden Blades.

Nostalgia has a habit of making everything from the past look good.

 It may be an old game you used to play, an old toy you used to bounce around or, heck, even an old friend you used to have - they all start looking good. It's almost like our brain refuses to acknowledge the fact that the "game" was nothing but a few colored pixels, the toy was just an overpriced beach ball and the "friend"  was just a kid who shared a crayon with you in kindergarten.

Old is gold, my friend. NO EXCEPTIONS.

This is a sad truth of life and growing older only makes it worth. It is also the reason why your grandparents won't stop talking about the "good old days" before such "modern luxuries" as internal plumbing. 

The anonymity offered by the internet, coupled with the growing trend of fanboyism, has made the Nostalgia Filter worse than ever.

Generation one Pokemon will ALWAYS be the best. The older Elder Scrolls games will ALWAYS be superior to the "dumbed down, mainstream abomination" that is Skyrim. And Final Fantasy 7 will ALWAYS be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Case in point.

People refuse to understand that changes in their favorite franchises mostly happen because of necessity, clinging instead to the age old notion that innovative designers are all Greater Daemons of Tzeentch. 

Attempting to replay these classics may soon turn depressing as players retroactively realize just how much they themselves and aged. Indeed the Nostalgia Filter may be the only thing that keeps players replaying older games going.

This was the mindset I had when I decided to replay Assassin's Creed II (courtesy of Steam Sales off course). Having enjoyed Assassin's Creed IV greatly, I was kind of taken aback by the fanbase deriding the game and proclaiming Assassin's Creed II as the greatest in the franchise.

I was skeptical. As good as AC-II was, surely it's dated graphics and game-play mechanics would make a playthrough tedious at best. Putting on my Cynicism Goggles and turning off my nostalgia filter, I decided to dive, once again, into Renaissance Italy.

Right off the bat, Assassin's Creed II strived to show us that it was a different game from it's predecessor. But more than that, it tried showing the gamers that yes, it had learned from Assassin's Creed I's mistakes.

As Desmond once again enters the Matr Animus, we are thrust into the birthing room of Maria Auditore just in time to witness her second son come into the world. A short QTE later, we first hear the voice of our protagonist, Ezio - Ezio Auditore da Fierenze! Here is a protagonist the players get to know from the first moments of his life! 

Fast forward a decade and a half and we're introduced to a teenaged Ezio doing typical teenager things like cracking jokes, getting into brawls and parkouring all over the roof-tops of Renaissance Florence.   

Introducing and making the audience empathize with the main character is the first goal of every narrative, and how quickly and concisely they manage to do it may well determine the quality of the rest of it. Assassin's Creed II does this remarkably well in its first 10 minutes! Not a bad start, Ubisoft, not bad at all.

The next hour or so of gameplay basically revolves around Ezio exploring the beautifully crafted visual master-piece that is Florence while happily interacting with his family.

"It is a good life we lead, brother."

"The Best! May it never change."

"And may it never change us." 

A chill went up my spine as the game's title popped up on screen, accompanied by Jesper Kyd's brilliantly haunting Ezio's Family. Even without knowledge of what happens next, even without acknowledging the tragic irony that is to follow, one cannot help but feel a sense of foreboding.

And sure enough, like every good story structured around the Monomyth, Ezio's beautiful life takes a morbid turn for the worse as his father and brothers are wrongfully executed.

Now, this is a part where AC-II truly outclasses its predecessor. Whereas the inciting action in Assassin's Creed was brought about as a result of Altair's own arrogance and failures, in the sequel Ezio ends up being a victim of circumstances more than anything. A conspiracy he did not know even existed, ends up destroying his life and forcing him into adopting a role he never wanted to adopt.

The fact that Ezio was, for the most part, a normal everyman thrust into such a larger-than-life role is what ultimately made him so relatable to the typical modern gamer. 

Following the traditional three act structure, the rest of Ezio's life goes by in a hurricane of blood, betrayal and vengeance as he struggles to root out the conspiracy that claimed his family - as he desperately tries to understand why his family was so savagely taken from him. In the process Ezio pulls a Forrest Gump by interacting with, and influencing, many, many key historic Renaissance figures and, indirectly, shaping the period into what it ultimately becomes.

The wide number of widely different locales, from the riverine beauty of Venice to the tower-city of San Gimignano and even to the swamps of Forli, that Ezio visit over the course of his life not only serves to keep the player entertained with the widely different vistas, but also reflects the slow change in narrative tone as the game progresses. 

Every different locale had its own distinct color palette and, while the game wasn't nearly as open ended as its most recent sequel,the design decisions served its purpose of making the game world seem so much bigger than it was.

One can say that the distinct cities reflect Ezio's own mood of sorts, as he undergoes massive character development.  The gold and yellow of Florence portrays Ezio's own glorious youth; the grey and blue of Fiorli represents both the slow birth and death of cynicism as Ezio scampers through the early morning Italian mist in search of purpose. The subtle silver and violet of Venice marks a transitionary point in our hero’s life while the bronze and green of San Gimignano brilliantly conveys a feeling of ascension - of a young Ezio realizing his potential as he climbs up a towering behemoth of a monastery.

The narrative covers over two decades of Ezio's adult and, in that time, vengeance slowly drops down our protagonist's priority list until, finally, the self-destructive nature of revenge itself is deconstructed. Ezio matures in more than just looks, going from an angry young Italian man to a suave, charming inidivudal, lovingly called Mentore  by the rest of his order . 

Sometimes it’s hard to realize that it is Roger Craig Smith himself that's been voicing our protagonist since his early teenage days. The massive amount of work that must have gone into completely altering one's tone and pitch to portray single character over such a long period of his life requires a lot of dedication indeed.

In the end I realized that what made Assassin's Creed II wasn't it's individual merits, but rather the sum of those merits. Assassin's Creed 4 had better gameplay, Assassin's Creed 3 definitely had a better story (though, not necessarily, a better narrative), and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood probably had the greatest city ever designed in the franchise.

But Assassin's Creed II was the game in the series that took the very basic components of its design and merged them seamlessly into a master piece. The core experience that the designers tried portraying was definitely one of living in the shoes of a 15th century James Bond-esque figure: an Assassin whose wit was just as sharp as his hidden blade. And they succeeded.

Everything about the game said "Renaissance."  From the soaring architecture, perfect for an Assassin's Creed Game, to Kyd's brilliantly composed pieces, and right down to the ambient dialogue of the masses - every element of design meshed in perfectly. And it is this, more than anything, that makes Assassin's Creed II the best game in the franchise - not the nostalgia, not the individual elements but rather the coherence of them all put together.