- Up there I talked about how Naoe is the best assassin, gameplay-wise. Now if only the actual game mechanics worked. The more I played the more frustrated I became. How many times did I throw a Kunai at somebody, while the healthbar of said enemy was 100 % highlighted, only for Naoe...to just completely miss somehow, remove only a fourth of health and have the entire garrison be alerted to my presence? How many times did I press the assassinate button only for her start a normal attack? How many times did I use one of those yellow special skills only for her to hit the air? I've lost count. This game has some weird problems where actual game mechanics only work when they want to. Don't even get me started on that bullshit rope swinging mechanic where it's somehow never enough for her to just jump far enough, only to fall down. Jesus.
- Notice how I keep talking about Naoe? Now I don't know about you guys, but I absolutely cannot stand Yasuke. Don't misunderstand, this doesn't have anything to do with the character itself, but more so about Ubisoft's *insistince* to have double protagonists. Why is he here? Why do we have a slow moving tank in an Assassin's Creed game who's only positive is that he's good in combat and absolutely nothing else? While Naoe checks all the boxes an AC protag should have, Yasuke checks 0. He can't climb shit, he's slow as hell to move, trying stealth with him is just making it unreasonably harder, the list goes on. The world itself rejects him. You cannot go to viewpoints with him. There are locations within a map where certain stealth paths are made obvious by the devs, such as a small opening at the back of a house. Guess what. Yasuke is too fucking fat to get through there. I'm asking once again, why is he here? It was frustrating every time I went to a location on the map that I had marked, only to find out it's a Knowledge Point for Yasuke. Or when you clear a castle and it takes you ages, carefully stealthing around with Naoe and making sure the alarmbells don't ring and your reward for that is...a helmet for Yasuke. A character that I don't like playing. Cool!
- The outright REMOVAL of game mechanics. This one made my scratch my head one too many times. Why the FUCK would you remove torches?? When it's nighttime you can't see shit. In the RPG games prior you could just whip out a torch and that's that. Why is it gone?? Another thing that upset me is how they removed the manual changing of day and night cycles. You see, the devs have decided to have certain missions be locked behind very specific conditions, such as "you can only do this during winter" or "do this when it's nighttime". Why can't you just let me do the mission? Let me play? I now have to wait around 30 minutes goofing of somewhere else instead of just doing the mission that I wanted to do. You also can't change the seasons as much as you'd like, and winter is a season that barely happened in my playthrough. Maybe like 5 times? So when there's a mission that only takes place in winter..well. Get fucked. Just..why?
- It doesn't stop there. The biggest sin in this is that they removed the ability to climb rocks. You see, when it comes to the RPG games, they seem to specifically go for settings where we don't have urban jungles like Baghdad or Paris, instead they opt for settings with lots of landmass and with a lot of natural landscape in general. It's a balance act, because within those settings, you only have smaller towns and villages. The Origins devs understood that and decided to have the player be able to climb anything and everything because limiting it only to those small villages would be desastrous, as 90% of the map is just natural landscapes. Guess what, Feudal Japan is the same but the geniuses at Quebec decided to remove this feature for virtually no reason whatsover. The games does NOT like you going off the beaten path and trying to reach your destination through a shortcut through the mountains, nuh uh mister. All those trees will stop you. You will collide with trees, bushes and rocks and Naoe won't be able to climb, so you'll just slide down constantly, making for a very frustrating experience going from point A to B.
- Another thing they removed which completely destroys stealth are enemies that can climb. In all previous AC games enemies could climb just like you did and find you out. In this game, that is gone. For a game that pushes stealth so much this is an insane design failure. Get spotted? Climb a roof and wait a minute. The guards will stop looking for you eventually. Isn't that great?
- As I was playing Naoe for like 90% of my playtime, it means that I use stealth a lot. What really got on my nerves at some point is that they seem to fill a lot of places CHOKFUL of enemies. There have been moments where I thought, is it really necessary to put (what felt like) 500 guards in there? I got exhausted doing castles and temples more often than not, and playing Yasuke was a no-go because I like playing as him and the combat even less.
- While beautiful, the world is still the same static old design that you've known for over a decade now. Nothing but emptiness aside from the millions of ? marks that you can work through. Work is a good word, because that's how it will feel like. Doesn't matter if you take a break inbetween gaming sessions or not, it's the classic Ubisoft checklist design. I honestly think they should have grown past this by now, even if it's Ubisoft.
- This is a big one for me and the main reason why I went back and forth with the game and ultimately why I see the game in a negative light. Bloat. Bloat in all the most creative and awful ways. The game, down to its core, down to every mechanic you can think of, is expertly designed in a way for you to *waste time*. Fighting can take long even if you play as Yasuke. Synching a viewpoint can take long because now you have to move your stick around every single fucking time you want to reveal parts of the map. Finishing a castle can take ages as you are trying to sniff out where those goddamn Samurai Daisho are.
-Minigames (which absolutely fucking suck btw) and Shrines making up what feels like 90% of those pesky question mark locations. But! You can never know because there might be a quest there, so you jump on your horse and ride and ride and ride since, you know, shortcuts through the mountains are not allowed!
- When they said they reduced the map size to Origins levels I was happy to hear that. Valhalla is an absolute monster that took me 120 hours to finish (excluding the DLCS!!), meanwhile Origins and Odyssey took me 55 to 65 hours each. This game is atleast twice as long as it should be, just like Valhalla was. They did not take this feedback into account at all.
- Combat. Something where I say it doesn't matter who you play as. I can honestly say this might be worst combat system I've ever come across in recent memory, especially from a AAA production. It's a complete mess. It feels janky as shit, absolutely unsatisfying to finally kill someone as you flail around like a retard because your enemies constantly hop back and dodge your input in the most acrobatic fashion that would make an athlete at the Olympics blush. Then you get frustrated and want to use a special skill to finally kill that dumbass that's been blocking you and guess what, you hit the air
- Abysmal, absolute dogshit writing. By *far* the worst of any modern game and within the franchise. Ubisoft have not understood or forgotten that the narrative used to be one of the pillars of this franchise. You have taken this series and you have exploded it into a huge "RPG" open world game with side quests and different ways to tackle them. You are still trying to emulate The Witcher 3 from over a decade ago, but In order for these quests to be fun and memorable, you need good writing. I have 0 connection to any quest or characters when I don't care about them. The characters in this game are so incredibly shallow and one-note that I just cannot take them seriously. This of course extends to the main story and the protagonists as well. Completely forgettable and just very artificial feeling dialogue between any and all characters you meet. This extends to *all* sorts of issues. Because it also hurts these real, larger than life characters. Oda Nobunaga, Aketchi Mitsuhide, Tokugawa Ieyasu. And here I am skipping the dialogue because it's so boring. Way to go!
- One other factor why the story might suck so much might lie in the fact that they purposefully design the game in a way where you can tackle any character on your assassination board whenever you want. Since that is the case, the story and characters do not undergo a believable change. You don't feel like you have come to that specific moment where the game gets more and more serious now because you've reached a pivotal moment. This would explain why after killing that one guy the credits suddenly started rolling and I was flabbergasted as to why that happened. I expected more narrative beats and some twists and turns, but all of a sudden I had beaten the game. The "ending" doesn't even feel like an ending, it's more of a "welp we ran out of targets, that's it folks!". Absolutely horrible way to structure and write your narrative this way. And don't even mention the modern day story, it might as well not exist and what it does do is just another shallow way of writing "hurr don't believe everything you see mane the gubbernment spies on u". Very much creatively bankcrupt.
- Did I talk about the parkour yet? I mean it is kind of to be expected that it sucks since the setting simply does not allow for devs to build a sprawling urban city and design it in such a smart way that has you parkour all over the rooftops and structures that even Mirage managed to do, but it's so bad here that I basically spent 90% (atleast) of my time just walking. Kinda reminded me of AC3 where they punished you for trying to parkour by putting guards with rifles on every building. Jesus christ..
- Nah we still ain't done. Besides the unbelievably bad writing we have another medal to award, this time to the soundtrack. Now I don't know if it's because the composers simply sucked or if this is on Ubi, but this is BY FAR the absolute WORST soundtrack in the entire almost 20 year old franchise. The Flight and Teke::Teke really produced some garbage that either don't fit with the setting at all (you can hear some real bad shit during certain cutscenes where Yasuke is in the focus) or are just so unbelievably creatively bankcrupt that I'm shocked Ubisoft signed off on this. Now credit where credit is due, 2 or 3 ambient tracks that play when you are in the open world are actually pretty great, but they fucked up immensely everywhere else, especially combat and escape tracks. Just listen to what Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi composed for
Ghost of Tsushima and compare it to
this boring shit. Give me some drums and I can just about do the same thing. I'm not gonna talk about the trap hip hop bullshit that they surprisingly didn't remove from the game because everyone already knows about it. They also really like to spam
this track in all sorts of variations and I've grown super tired of it.
- Cutscenes are still stiff and cringy because they use AI. They've done this since Odyssey and while they have improved at this, it still and always will look and feel corny.
- Lingering identity problems. This is my last complaint (for now..) as these are just the ones that stood out to me and I might have forgotten some. Anyway, ever since Origins these RPG games have sufferend an identity crisis because they are constantly trying to emulate Witcher 3 for some odd reason while completely forsaking the pillars of what AC is supposed to be. And one of the most damning issues was the complete retconning of "ancient" assassins and in turn removing the classic Assassin Brotherhood and the Knights Templars. Instead, we got those lame ass "Hidden Ones" and "Order of the Ancients" feeling like knock-off versions instead of the real deal. One might say they are the same just with different names, but I just simply cannot agree. They feel like losely based off-shoots to me. Origins introduced this dumb shit, Odyssey was so far back in time that it basically had none of this and Valhalla was just a Viking fantasy at the end of they day where the protagnist outright refuses to join the assassins. Mirage was the closest we had to proper Assassins and Templars, but all of these issues were kinda excused and sweeped under the rug for one simple reason: The time period is just too far back in the past. You'd think with Shadows, a game that takes place around Ezio's time I believe, would finally give us a proper Assassin ass Brotherhood fighting against THE Templar Knights. I think you can guess where this is going. We have another case of losely (and shittily) written freedom vs control groups. It's a huge irony since Naoe has literally everything, the robes, the hidden blade, the hood, yet she really is just some random ninja girl. Assassins and Templars are only mentioned in passing. I just don't understand why they insist on going down this route. It makes no sense whatsoever. The last time we had those 2 actual organiszations duking it out was in Unity 11 years ago. Christ.
