I don't usually write reviews at all, much less long ones, but I thought this game was really a waste of potential. It's one of the better games Ubi has released in a while now, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's "bad", because it isn't. And I'm not too happy giving this one a thumbs down, but I really just...don't recommend it. tl;dr: Ubi doesn't seem to know what they're doing with this series anymore, but we all probably knew that. Game's absurdly repetitive, none of the story or characters are interesting, not worth the purchase. I held on for the expansion and AC nostalgia reasons, but just ended up disappointed. Gameplay: Stealth is pretty fun, when it works right, but the AI is horrible and inconsistent. When you're Naoe, the AI sometimes has Jedi-level awareness, but then they sometimes can't hear Yasuke killing all their friends and firing a gun, 15 feet away, on the other side of a paper door. Combat, I didn't enjoy at all. Ubi made some effort to try and make it varied, I could see that, but it didn't matter, because it usually boils down to mindlessly hacking away at the health bar of an enemy wearing a kosode who's spamming uninterruptible attacks and barely reacting to a sword across the chest. And, by default, most of the primary targets across the world just can't be outright assassinated because they have too many "health segment" things. You can turn this feature off, yes, but there are a lot of perks and gear buffs that are intended to increase the amount of segments you remove, so those all become useless. The gameplay loop itself is just the same thing over and over, with basically nothing different or unique about most of the targets. Plus, most of the assassination targets are pointless, and there are A LOT of them. Nothing changes if you kill them, and most of them aren't related to the story. It's just some loot and XP. Quantity over quality is a big problem in this game. I held out to do pretty much everything because I have that completionist OCD, but man, I need to work on that. Story: I'll keep this part spoiler free, and do some minor spoilers towards the bottom of the review. The game starts off pretty good, and it had me kinda hopeful for a solid revenge story with the Assassin's Creed conspiracy cloak and dagger, creepy ancient sci-fi stuff, and modern day crisis with characters learning the alternate history and secrets along with me. Well, that isn't what we got. We got a solid act 1, a completely pointless act 2 that's just hunting down some people I don't remember anything about, and an underwhelming act 3 that ends on a cliffhanger designed only to sell you the expansion if you didn't already have it. And not even a good cliffhanger. I think one of the things that really annoyed me the most, personally, was how many times there were important story beats, or stuff that could've been really interesting going forward, that were either completely glossed over, solved by the sudden appearance of annoying and sorta demonic looking children who took over the scene, or characters just not acting like believable human beings. The terrible facial animations take you out of it pretty often too, and they're still using that weird stage animation thing they do in place of cutscenes that make everyone look like a malfunctioning robot. Which is a real shame, because the Japanese voice cast is pretty good. I still think using a real historical person (Yasuke) as a primary protagonist, in a series that has a background of keeping to some level of historical accuracy, was an odd decison. That feeling never went away. It's weird making rpg decisons about a dude's life when we don't even know much about the real guy. Of course, I guess the historical accuracy days for the series have been over for a while, so maybe that's a me problem. I held on for the expansion, since I was dumb enough to pre-order and had it anyway, but it's a whole lot of nothing. Shockingly so. And it keeps crashing to the desktop right before the final encounter, but I don't care enough to wait for a fix before I leave this review. I hate to say it, but I really can't stress enough how there is literally nothing compelling about this game in any way. Spoilers, but minor: [spoiler]This game has almost nothing to do with Assassin's Creed. Naoe has a hidden blade (the folding one like Connor's, so that's cool), you can get some pointed hoods, you see the crest a few times, and you kill a few Templars near the end of the game, but that's it. And the Assassins are all dead (again) because some edgy guy didn't get to sleep with Naoe's mom, so he betrayed them because he was jealous. I'm not joking. The modern day stuff is restricted to text files you can earn through some weird battle pass thing they shoehorned in, and nothing else. And there is not a single peep about the First Civilization through the entire game. Not even any Isu gear you can find. No temples, nothing. The First Civ and modern day has been a driving force in every AC game, in some capacity, since the first game, and there's nothing about either in this one. If you're like me, you've been waiting for the potential Japanese setting since back when Subject 16 was poking around from beyond the grave, and I guess this is the payoff for that wait.[/spoiler] So yeah, I don't know. If you liked Valhalla, you might like this. It's the same bloated mess, but less buggy, and with mostly-working stealth. Before launch, I kinda already decided this would be my finale with anything new from Ubisoft if it didn't impress, and I'm still feeling pretty solid in that decision. It's not often I play a game for so long and feel like it wasted my time, but maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did. I hope you do.
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