A Tale of Two Sequels Edition
My game playing time has noticeably decreased. As such, it took me the better part of three months to finish Assassin’s Creed II, where I finished the original plus spent an additional order of magnitude of time fiddling around and hunting for flags and whatnot in perhaps a single month. It would not, therefore, be a stretch to estimate that it’s currently taking me about six times as long to get through games. But, I am still playing.
Immediately after finishing ACII, I was treated by my wife to BioShock 2 which I ran through as fast as my current spare time allowances will permit. I thought it telling that both games were sequels to games released in 2007, which I also played in close proximity to one another, and that I had very specific expectations for each sequel going in.
Assassin’s Creed
Upon my initial completion of the first game in the series, I said this, “My overall impression of the game is favorable, but I don’t think that means I misunderstand the complaints people have leveled against it.” It was mild praise for a game that, at the time, I felt deserved a very soft thumbs-up. Of course I continued to mess around with it, doing the sort of post-completion achievement hunting I typically reserve for my top tier games, and later commented, “I never would have thought that a game I was sort of on the fence about would have this long of legs…” In the ensuing years I’ve come to recall the game far more fondly than I think I expected to when I first played it. In fact, looking up those old impressions surprised me somewhat at how tepid I was toward the game.
I knew it had some issues, but I also felt after the fact like I was one of the few people who really enjoyed AC for what it was as opposed to loathing it for what it wasn’t quite able to be. Above all I think I really enjoyed the plot of the game, a wild mixture of conspiracy, history, speculative fiction, political intrigue, alternate history, mysticism and religious revisionist lunacy that scratched hard on an itch I wasn’t even aware I possessed. Sure it had either a boldly untidy epilogue or a sloppily lazy one, but it was somewhat thrilling to have a game set in ancient Jerusalem of all places. Say what you will about the storytelling in games, but this is at the very least a singularly creative vision being presented as a mass market game which simply must be admired if you care at all about video game writing.
So the sequel was a foregone conclusion but I admit to being pretty disappointed when I learned they were skipping ahead to the late fifteenth century and introducing a new central protagonist. I mean, let’s be clear here: Assassin’s Creed II is a game that could have jumped off the narrative rails in a extremely messy and tragic fashion. Almost inexplicably, though, it doesn’t. In fact, the introduction of Ezio Auditore da Firenze is an unmitigated success in part because he’s similar enough to Altair so as to not be too jarring but he allows for a greater depth of character without having to deus ex machina some silly explanation for why the stoic Altair suddenly has a sense of humor. Which is not to say that Ezio is yet a fully realized character, for large segments of the game narrative he is primarily glum and simply bitter with the quest for revenge that sets him on his path, but he is still a step up from the previous game. And meanwhile there are plenty of well-crafted secondary characters that are in this case actually memorable and since the entire assassination sequence is all part of a singular plot as opposed to a late-breaking macguffin hunt as in the first game, there allows for plenty of moments of dramatic tension and adversarial development.
In fact nearly every single element that made the original AC enjoyable is intact and the rest of the game is polish and shine to the point of sparkling brilliance. Crowd interactions are better; the controls are improved; side quests are better defined; assassination quests are better and more varied; collection tasks are contextualized and more enjoyable; the travel systems are welcome and functional without spoiling the feel of the open world; the plot is more cohesive and engaging; even the combat is slightly improved, although it still usually devolves into waiting for a guard to begin his striking animation and then hit the counter button. It is the collection of improvements on a game already ripe with Good Ideas but somewhat hasty execution that makes ACII one of my favorite games in recent memory.
I was cautiously optimistic heading in and came out dazzled and more ravenous than ever for the next installment.
BioShock 2
The obvious contrast is that while I liked Assassin’s Creed back in 2007, I loved BioShock. In my non-ToD review I summarized it thusly: “It is a phenomenal work of game design. It unequivocally ought to be experienced at least once by every gamer.” I even placed it at #11 on my (still shamefully unfinished) revised top 30 games list. That’s just outside of the top ten games all time for me. The original BioShock was so good in fact that I played it through three times in spite of the fact that it had several key missed opportunities within it, the most notorious of which was the tragically rote final boss battle. I almost never play shooters through a second time, much less a third.
But, like many, I was highly skeptical of a BioShock sequel. The first relied in so many ways on being a specific place and time, telling a particular tale in a certain way and I didn’t think it could be recaptured. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it should be tried. After all, unless you were to re-make the first game with a more robust morality system and an improved finale, there wasn’t a wide selection of places to go with a sequel but down. Or so I thought.
The good news is that BioShock 2 doesn’t trample all over the accomplishments of the first. Quite wisely the developers didn’t fall into the M. Night Shyamalan trap of trying to one-up the twisting turns of the original narrative and instead crafted a competent revisit to a strangely beckoning dystopia. Cast in the role of a Big Daddy, the game touches in a lot of ways on themes from the original game, still pushing you into the midst of an ideological war that you don’t seem to have much personal stake in. The new antagonist who takes the reigns from Andrew Ryan, Dr. Sofia Lamb, is similarly arrogant and smarmy in her radio interactions with the silent protagonist, Subject Delta. The game deals more explicitly with the origins of the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters and the nature of their queer relationship, which is interesting although it smacks of the kind of explanatory discussions peripheral to a central work that are reserved for the devoted diehard fans and could largely be taken or left by the casually interested. It also runs the risk of ruining the mystique of such elements although in this particular case I didn’t find anything to be particularly midichlorianesque. Mercifully.
And as a matter of fact, BioShock 2 does improve on many of the gameplay elements from the original: Hacking is a downright joy compared to the Pipe Dream mini-game that was awkward and out of place in the first game. The selection and progression of the tonics and plasmids are excellent as are the new additions to the old standbys. The additional weapons are nice, too, as is the dual-fisted plasmid/firearm combination granted in favor of the either/or mechanism of the first game. By far the best gameplay addition is the protection sequences where you can adopt a Little Sister, find a body capable of being harvested for Adam and then set her to it. This brings a wave of Splicers running and your task is to guard the Sister while she laboriously collects the necessary material. It’s a better replacement for the challenging Big Daddy fights from BioShock 1 (those are still there but less intense as you can stand fairly well toe-to-toe with a single dive suited foe) since you can control the environment a little and scout for possible access routes to place traps.
However, despite these incremental steps forward, there is something that feels a bit mundane about BioShock 2. While Assassin’s Creed II’s comprehensive polish created a game that went beyond just fulfilling the promise of the first or became what the original strived to be, BioShock 2 provides at best a return to a happily familiar setting, like returning to a park you played in as a child. Sure, there is some reminiscent joy to be had there, but it will never touch the cherished memories you have.
What I think stands out about this is that if there had been no 2007 somehow and these games were the first in their respective series my opinion of them would have likely been completely flipped: AC would be the one coasting in toward the top ten of my all time games and BioShock would be an interesting, if slightly flawed, game I played around the same time. What a difference a sequel makes.