There are two things to note about the title of this post:
1) Read aloud it sounds like the score from a football match.
2) This looks like it is following on from an earlier post.
Number 1 is of course wrong, and number two is misleading. I was originally going to talk about Assassin’s Creed II in my previous post but I got caught up discussing the binary nature of existence. Needless to say, also on my to-finish list was the slightly more recently released Assassin’s Creed II. This doesn’t really need you to have read part one, but maybe there’s a theme. They’re both published by Ubisoft and I think they use the same game-engine, so that’s something I guess.
Just a quick note, “frustrations” might be the wrong word for this one, because I realise now that I’m not really frustrated with this game so much, just moderately baffled by something it managed to do, but I wanted to have a couple of blog posts with “Part 1” and “Part 2” after it to make it look coherent, despite the fact that they’re really about different things.
This post is spoiler-riddled so if you’re interested in not knowing how this one ends, look away now and come back another day.
I’ve never been asked to kill the pope before.
I approached the final wrapping-up moments of Assassin’s Creed II this evening and things started to go a bit funny. It turned out that over the two years that the game jumped forward by at one point, my arch rival that had inexplicably managed to escape in my last excursion had managed to become the pope and the final showdown between us was to take place in the Vatican in Rome.
Off to Rome and it’s a bit of parkour across the ramparts of the Vatican city, a bit of horse riding (I’m not sure if I was at ground level at that moment, but it still felt a bit roof-like to me, so goodness knows how the horse got up there) a bit of artistic murder, hiding in haystacks and blending in with monks: All standard stuff so far, followed by a leap through the rafters of the chapel before landing wrist-blade-first onto the pope’s mid-sermon-giving face.
But the pope is fine of course due to the pope having super-powers granted to him by his pope-stick, which is actually an ancient artefact of unimaginable power which he then turns on me and his congregation, frying them all with more super-pope-powers. I am of course fine, because I also have an ancient artefact of unimaginable power tucked away in my belt.
So then of course I fight the pope and defeat the pope, but again, the pope has super powers and he makes a startling recovery, takes my artefact and glues it to his artefact which makes a key to the vault-which-might-contain-the-secret-of-god-himself which is naturally underneath the Vatican and makes off towards the door.
I’m not sure how, but I recover from the knife to the gut spectacularly well, possibly because I’ve spent most of the game getting sliced up by various city guardsmen that I’ve upset one way or another or face-planting onto the streets from upon high due to poor depth perception and misjudged distances when leaping across the rooftops. I then naturally chase after the pope and oddly challenge him to a fair fight with no weapons and no powers, just fists.
I’ve never been in a fist-fight with the pope before.
What follows is an odd anticlimactic fist fight between an agile-cat-like-master-assassin and an overweight-catholic. After winning the fight, the assassin doesn’t actually assassinate the pope (despite the fact that the pope had killed your brothers and your father) but instead takes the moral high ground and rises above it all and goes off the vault to find that actually the pope-stick and artefact that you brought with you are some kind of alien technology and they left a message and it all gets a little bit hard to explain at that point, which is probably why it took me an hour or so for something fundamental to sink in upon finishing the game and going to make a cup of tea.
There’s something that’s known among film and television enthusiasts as Fridge Logic. This is where something happens on screen that doesn’t really register with you until you leave the sofa, go and grab something to eat or drink from the fridge and think “hang on a minute…that doesn’t make sense!”. What I experienced shortly after finishing Assassin’s Creed II was similar to that.
My realisation: I have just fought the pope and that didn’t register as absurd at any point for me. None of that growing feeling of “Oh…Kay….” that I get when reading back the above few paragraphs was anywhere to be seen whilst playing this through.
Sometimes when I’m being particularly geeky and administrating a game of Dungeons and Dragons for my friends, I’ll first of all write down something utterly absurd that I’ll try and work in to the adventure and try to play it straight, just to see if they notice or mind*. I do wonder if perhaps the developers did something similar for this one: Maybe shortly before the project started, one of the lead developers’ friends bet that they couldn’t make the final boss battle in Assassin’s Creed II against the pope in the Vatican and get away with it, and then the lead developer maybe worked back from there.
In terms of context, it does make sense. The game is set in 15th Century renaissance Italy and this is not an ordinary pope of course, this is the leader, or at least high-on-the-food-chain-conspiracy-member of the Templars, well and truly spelled out as evil ne’er do wells in the Assassin’s Creed series and his popehood is obviously a calculated attempt to obtain the secret weapon (or whatever it is) in the vault underneath the Vatican. It’s not like this is completely out of nowhere, but it does seem like it might have been lurking around in nowhere for a while before emerging.
It must be stated that I loved the game. I suppose my only major frustration is that it’s finished, but I just couldn’t help feeling that the team at Ubisoft (again) started with a silly premise of “player fights THE POPE!!!” and worked backwards. I’m astonished that I was immersed enough that it was only when I stepped back and started thinking about it that I realised how daft the whole thing was.**
Additional Notes:
*Flying sky-sharks are on my list. My players might refuse to jump a shark, but they can’t help it if sharks jump them.
**Let me clarify: Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II are both about a chap called Desmond in the future who is put into a special virtual reality machine to relive memories that are hard coded into his DNA of his ancestors who happened to be master assassins so that those around Desmond in the future can find where the Templars / Assassins hid the ancient-artefact-super-weapons. With something this daft, it’s even more surprising that I didn’t realise how daft the whole thing was. However, some of the final words you hear the protagonist utter are indeed “What the f—k?” shortly before the first set of credits roll which you do sympathise with.
(I know, I know, I just censored myself on the internet.)