Desmond and Altair's stories dovetail really well to slowly reveal the philosophies of the assassins and templars, something that later games often skip over for a simpler good guys vs bad guys conflict. Desmond is a prisoner who must sneak around and scrounge for bits of information just like Altair, but he ran away from the responsibilities that Altair has to re-learn the meaning of.

The game design reflects Altair's perspective as a tool of a strange murder cult: he doesn't care about money or doing side quests that don't relate to or aid his primary mission. The crowd is just an organic mass of obstacles for him to carefully navigate around. Nuisance characters will challenge his patience, but the right decision is always to stay calm and keep hiding in plain sight. He needs to manually lock on to targets, demanding focused attention for each kill. Like Desmond, he is not exactly a free man, and always has to operate under bureaucratic approval.

The limited toolset encourages waiting for the right opportunity to move and strike, rather than clearing out every guard from a safe position. There is always a danger of getting caught if you get too greedy with high profile actions.

I love how slow and methodical climbing is, while still allowing for agile manual maneuvers in a pinch. Even the combat being all about waiting for counters kind of works with the game's focus on slow, patient observation, though unfortunately there is too much combat for that feeling to hold.

The real problem with this game is that it's already way way too much of a ubisoft open world game. 420 collectibles and 60 templars is an absurd number, but at least those are easy enough to ignore. But the map is littered with icons for too many viewpoints and too many save citizen missions, which are all just a combat sequence with the same dialogue. Not only is there icon spam but there's also audio spam, as you'll hear the same save citizen mission barks over and over, and they're so densely packed into each district that you can't miss them. The rewards are genuinely useful, but they're such a chore that I found myself ignoring them and accepting the constant barks. Honestly I'd rather clear chests in unity than do all the save citizen missions as I come across them, or check off all the viewpoints that are 30 feet away from each other.

Masyaf and Kingdom ended up being my favorite maps because they are so sparse and quiet and moody. I think the main cities would be way better if there was less content in them. I don't mind the repetitive structure of the investigations, because it fits with Altair needing to work within the system, and they always come with unique dialogue and helpful information. But the open world fluff just drags the game down so hard, which is such a shame because the atmosphere is truly unmatched in its best moments.

Since AC2 these games have been about building your own economic empire, so AC4 wisely admits that you were playing a pirate all along, and makes the protagonist an appropriately greedy bastard. Of course Kenway would loot bodies, open random chests, get into a fight in every bar, take over forts, manage a fleet, and have a dedicated checklist button to make sure he doesn't miss a scrap of treasure.

Compared to AC3, the cities are less atmospheric and more functional. Fewer bespoke animations for NPCs and blending, ambient music replaces ambient noise and dialogue, and crowds move in big chunks like AC2. Again this fits with Kenway's character! He is not a guy who stops to smell the roses, He's rushing from one objective to the next to get rich as quickly as possible.

Social stealth is de-emphasized in favor of stalking through the bushes, which means there is always room to keep moving. Enemy detection is much more forgiving, encouraging aggressive hit and run tactics that fit the pirate theme, and work very well with the speed of AC3's combat and traversal. Avoiding detection in a boat involves always moving forward, just changing directions when you need to. Even in stealth, Kenway is always thinking on his feet.

And that's the biggest strength of AC4: the scenario is so well-integrated with the gameplay. The historical figures all have the same job as you, so they can actually be major parts of the story rather than cameo appearances. Kenway is an outsider to the Assassin-Templar war who drops in and out of it at his convenience, just as the player can always choose when to start the next main mission, free of the obligations that bound Altair and Desmond. You don't have to pretend to serve the Creed anymore. Welcome to the Republic of Pirates.

this may be the most directionless spaghetti-on-the-wall game in the series. an unnecessarily complex trading and crafting system with the clunkiest ui ever devised. taking over forts lowers the tax rate, just in case connor needed to be motivated by bourgeois concerns too. an annoying lockpicking minigame. an underground maze game to unlock fast travel. a bunch of surprisingly challenging minigames. the boat!

the story is somehow even more of a patchwork mess than ac2. once again there are a bunch of awkward time jumps where character development seems to happen offscreen, most notably in sequence 9 where connor suddenly reveres washington and the ideals of the revolution, rather than incidentally crossing paths because the templars are involved. connor has six different motivations and juggles them from scene to scene. the haytham conflict doesn't work because they just talk past each other. daniel cross is wasted. desmond's ending is an awkward comprimise clearly borne out of internal arguments at ubisoft.

mission design is generally highly scripted, and the ui really pushes constraints such that they feel less like bonus objectives and more like stage directions that would be embarassing to fail. this generally works when it encourages slow careful play, but is annoying when it demands getting a certain amount of a certain type of kill. mission design tends to get worse as the game goes on, and the final sequence is just wretched. the captain kidd missions are dollar bin uncharted.

despite all this, the game really won me over! for one, the environments are detailed and beautiful. there are lots of cool little bespoke animations for connor and npcs (my favorite is npcs holding doors open for you). crowds are more varied, and blending is more organic. dangerous rooftops in cities encourage navigating crowds, while dangerous ground in the frontier encourages treerunning.

the weather system is cool. connor and haytham are both incredible character designs. a lot of sound effects and voice lines are strangely compressed, but overall there is a great audio atmosphere that makes up for the lack of ambient music. i loooove the boat, it's a relatively simple game of positioning and timing that explodes with the sound of waves and cannon fire and screaming.

in general i would say ac3 has fantastic base mechanics. the parkour is the best in the series, the routes are easy to read and allow for smooth horizontal and vertical movement at speed, without sacrificing the ability to do slow precise movement. the little sidestep you can do on the ground maked it much easier to navigate around corners and crowds. treerunning showcases the strengths of the system, with the modular trees making it easy to trace a path without looking too inorganic.

combat dispenses with the idea that ac is about anything other than an animation showcase for counters, and lets you build fast killstreaks with the combo system. if assassin's creed is to be a game about chases and arena fights, you can't get better than the ac3 model.

these mechanics are often let down by the main mission design, with the best missions being eavesdrops and tails that let you enjoy the atmosphere and animations. the paul revere mission also really works as a game about navigating around patrols. crouching in the bushes is balanced well with good old fashioned social stealth and observing guard movements.

but the side content is where the game really shines. hunting requires patience and careful positioning, making for better "assassination" missions than the actual contracts. almanac pages also require a more carefully planned approach than most collectibles. investigating tall tales in the frontier adds a lot of texture to the world. the boat is just awesome and it's no wonder they started building a whole game around it a year before ac3 came out.

and the homestead! the homestead is where the story is truly unlocked. connor often comes off as stubbornly naive in the main story, but it all made sense once i did the homestead. he is living in an idealized schoolhouse rock vision of american colonialism, so of course he believes in the patriots. suddenly he acquires a paladin swag: he is a guy who truly believes in something and refuses to be beaten down no matter what. it's a good flavor to mix with the mostly fatalistic tone of the main story and desmond's story, which was carried over from revelations. all the striving of men may be little more than theatre in the incomprehensible machinations of the gods, but connor is going to get a baby delivered and a wedding organized.

a milestone in puppet theatre with a bunch of cool narrative design flourishes. the battle screen is just another stage for storytelling, and i know that tellah is a knowledgeable but frail old man because he knows all the spells but only has 90mp. unfortunately, while the storytelling is quite good, the story itself is not. the pacing is too brisk for its own good, characters sprint from beat to beat with few moments to breathe, and any tragedy or conflict is quickly defused and forgotten.

i initially had a lot of trouble adjusting to atb, partially due to the early game giving you weak and fiddly characters for narrative reasons. i slowly learned to appreciate the value of a well-organized inventory that's easy to navigate under pressure and the pleasure of recovering from suboptimal decisions. but in the second half when the party is more stable, i realized that most enemies don't require much moment-to-moment tactical adjustments, you can just learn their pattern and set an appropriate autobattle loop. combined with the game's linearity and set party composition, ff4 really feels like a precursor to ff13, which is a game that i love. at the very least it does the concept of "trick fights" a lot more elegantly than ff3, and the dungeons are well-designed to drain your resources between checkpoints.

i totally understand why the smooth fusion of narrative and gameplay makes this an all-time classic for many people. it makes me feel like an actor in a play, but that just means the weak script drags it down harder.

the short length and nonlinear structure of this game make it perfectly suited to short handheld sessions. as someone who has played world 1 of mario way more than the rest of the game, mario land 2 feels like getting six different versions of world 1, each with a creative visual theme that is unique for the series. of course, the tradeoff of this structure is that the game can't really build complexity over time, the difficulty curve is flat and there's no truly great levels, just a bunch of pretty good ones.

the focus on land and sea really pays off in the route design in this game, with tons of diverse and beautiful environments. the soot-covered plain, the rainy river valley with tall grass, the blistering desert, deep trenches beneath the sea. colors are so vibrant and the way sprites are drawn with big chunks of color makes the game look like a cartoon. there's many cool "next-gen" effects like footsteps in the sand, reflections and shadows in the water, and logs that buckle under your feet.

so, great audio, great visuals, great new set of monsters. double battles are much more interesting than single battles, although contests are more interesting than both. the battle frontier is where most of the challenge in battles appears. dungeons tend to be short and simple, though there are a few good puzzles in gyms. the legendary pokemon storyline doesn't do much to mix up the same old structure of pokemon league and enemy team. 8 HMs is too damn many HMs.

as much as i love the aesthetics of this game, it's easy to see why this is the point where a lot of original fans fell off. a lot of the interesting rough edges of the prior games have been sanded off, and yet the grindiness has somehow increased. this game is constantly throwing new time sinks at you just in case catching them all wasn't enough. it leaves the main quest feeling a little underbaked, because i'm supposed to get sucked into the postgame world of planting berries and making pokeblocks and rebattling trainers and breeding pokemon and winning battle points. i beat the elite four with only four real pokemon and an HM mule, because raising a full team of six would have been too tedious.

it's no surprise that pokemon was an instant classic, this game is brimming with creativity. cool semi-real setting, cool sports storyline, cool monster sprites. very much a descendant of saga, from limited movesets, limited use of moves, learning new moves on level up, recruiting monster species to your party, an unorthodox opaque leveling system in EVs, and even the style of the little monster sprites in the menu.

the biggest problem with this of course is that the rpg mechanics are stretched pretty thin over 25 hours. i like the way that types are roughly analogous to classic rpg classes, rather than how later games try to balance the types. but a lot of the game is mindless fights against easy enemies. PP makes the dungeons more about resource management, and the dungeons do have clever layouts that keep them interesting to navigate despite endless zubat fights. i think that the game is not too grindy just sticking to the main story, but it takes too long to bring new underleveled pokemon up to speed, and it takes too long for pokemon to learn new moves. type advantage completely overwhelms all other mechanics, so there's not much reason to engage in buffs or debuffs over just hitting them with a super effective attack. this can be mitigated by staying a bit underleveled, coming to the elite four like that made it a genuinely interesting challenge. these problems would be easier to forgive in a lean 10 hour game, but at least pokemon red provides a great canvas for romhacks.

the first problem with this game is that it's hideous to look at. the second problem is that the sound effects are grating. the third problem is that the level design is bland and obvious. the aesthetic problems could be forgiven if the gameplay was better, and the rote levels could be forgiven if it was aesthetically pleasing, but instead i'm left with a game that isn't good at anything.

dk94 seemed to effortlessly string together interesting, challenging levels from world 1, and the challenge did not just come from completing bonus objectives. i almost dropped mario vs donkey kong after the first couple worlds, but i held on to the hope that maybe this is the kind of nintendo game that gets better in the back half. and... yeah, a little bit. not as much as i'd like. a lot of the easy levels get replaced with levels that are just tedious, or demand a precision of movement which the controls are ill-equipped for. i'd say maybe 20% of the levels do something interesting. i really wanted to like this because it's the sequel to one of my favorite games ever, but the more i tried to engage with it the more my disappointment grew.

the smartest thing about this game is how it varies the balance of puzzling and platforming. some levels make you think but have simple platforming, some levels have simple puzzles and more demanding platforming, some are classic donkey kong style action levels, and everything inbetween. it makes it so smooth to go through a sequence of levels, and on top of that they are constantly introducing new pieces to build levels with, and on top of that the platforming feels incredible, with a 2d mario 64 moveset 2 years before mario 64. the way that puzzles have multiple solutions also makes it fun to replay them. it reminds me a lot of the better breath of the wild shrines, right down to being able to do clever platforming that feels like breaking the level, even though it's all part of the design.

this is a very visually impressive game! it's cool just to fly around, to go into hyperspace, to see small enemies in the distance become large, and to see them blow up into fireworks when you hit them.

i was really engaged with this at the beginning, but ultimately i just don't like the open world structure very much. it's too big and the shooting is not good enough to support the scope. funnily enough it's the same problem i have with a lot of modern games, where they make a strong first impression but then drag on so long that i can't help but focus on the frustrations.

the swinging section is kind of the platonic ideal of an atari game: a simple action that's fun to do over and over. the combination of the jump speed and the parallax scrolling makes it feel thrilling every time, and i wouldn't mind playing a much longer section based on that.

however, the rest of the package is very uneven. the swimming section is well-animated but always goes on longer than i'd like it to. jumping over balls isn't bad, but the arc of the large ball really makes it seem like you should be able to walk under it, which as far as i can tell can't be done. the final boss just sucks in both concept and execution.

I usually see this spoken of as a historical artifact that was ambitious for its time, but I think Stephen Landrum may have actually delivered a masterpiece that still holds up in 2024. Dragonstomper consolizes the RPG in a unique way that I haven't seen in another game, and in a way that's completely different from Dragon Quest while being no less compelling.

The game is structured into three sequential chapters: exploring the Wilderness, preparing in Town, and assaulting the Dungeon. There's no going back and forth between these modes, once you're done with one it's onto the other. This gives Dragonstomper a tight linear three-act structure that combines really well with its 1-hour length. It's surprisingly modern-feeling, the kind of thing I would expect from an RPG Maker game that has the benefit of 40 years of console RPG history.

The wilderness is a truly desolate place. There are three castles guarded by enormous cursed skulls that will trap you if you walk on them. Animals will guard their habitat jealously if you approach the handful of trees spotting the plain. Combat does not occur on a separate screen, instead enemy sprites will come flying in from a distance, dwarfing the tiny dot that represents your character. You do not gain experience from battle, only money and sometimes items, and half of the items you get will lower your stats. When you approach a hut, its resident is likely to attack you. You can pray at a church, but the game will tell you it has no effect. But you can pay them money to heal you. It's all about the money in this world.

The bridge to town is blocked by a guard who demands to see your ID. You can try to kill him, or you can go loot an ID off the corpse of a "maniac." Or you could bribe the guard with 600 gold, which is no small amount. Once you get into town, called "The Oppressed Village" in the manual, the only people there are merchants and mercenaries. To buy items in a shop you have to physically approach the item sprite, then walk back to the merchant and buy it, at which point the item sprite disappears. This gives the impression that you are buying the last of their stock, that if your assault on the dungeon doesn't work, there's not going to be a second chance. There's no reason not to spend every last gold piece you gathered from the wilderness. You can hire the mercenaries to join you with gold or jewels. No one in town has a single polite word to spare you, only transactions to conduct.

The dungeon is a long corridor filled with trap tiles and poison darts that you have to dodge, wearing you down before the final fight with the dragon. This is a long, grueling battle where your mercenary companions will probably die, and you'll be down to a sliver of health with no items left. It's partially turn based and partially in real-time, because you can try to move around the dragon to claim its prize jewel without killing it, but it'll chase you down if you're not able to stun it with spells. The cycling between your actions, the mercernaries' actions, and the dragon's actions makes this battle feel epic, all with the enormous prize jewel pulsating in the background.

It all adds up to an adventure that feels complete and polished and well-paced, with a tone that reminds me a lot of a Souls game, right down to a boss that you have to strafe around and take potshots at while your allies keep it occupied.

level 1, which is basically a tutorial, is a perfect little distillation of the action-adventure genre. navigate a maze, find a key to open a door, pick up a sword and slay a dragon. but level 2 is just too much man. i'm trying to navigate a maze with limited visibility, which alone is a fine challenge. but i have to keep passing through a flashing room that hurts my eyes while a maddeningly annoying bat keeps stealing my items. i would gladly play variations on level 1, but the variation they made is just no fun at all.