L’habit ne fait pas le moine
(Why Unity is the best Assassins Creed)
Les Yahoo terrible
By Yahoo Silverman
Allow me to preface this by saying no game can ever be the "objective best", I just like seeing who has actually ready the article and who stopped at the title card. I have not played and/or finished all the entries in the Assassins Creed series, and if I’m being completely honest, I necessarily plan on it. I’ve played roughly 15 hours of Assassins Creed III, 40ish hours of Origins, 10ish hours of Syndicate, 40ish hours of Black Flag, and I have beaten Assassins Creed Unity… Twice. (I do plan on buying and playing Assassins Creed I & II, Rogue, and Odyssey at some point)
The first time I beat Assassins Creed Unity was in 2018. This was four years after its notoriously messy launch in November of 2014. By this time Unity was no longer the buggy mess that made up its reputation. In 2018, when Yahoo of the past booted up the game for the first time, Syndicate and Origins had already released and the only Assassins Creed I had ever seen through to completion was Black Flag, which was a strong entry.
So, if I haven’t finished the other entries then why do I consider Unity the best entry? I can give you three irrefutable reasons.
I.) This is my website, I can (and do) say whatever dumb stuff I want.
II.) With the exception of Black Flag (and to a lesser extent Origins) every Assassins Creed game I have played other than Unity has felt like an absolute chore.
III.) Recently, for the second time, I booted up Unity with no intentions on beating it start to finish within a couple of days, however just like in 2018, that is exactly what wound up happening.
My 2018 playthrough of Unity took place on a PS4, I had come across the game at a local game store for a few bucks and figured “why not?”. I spent the next three nights completely hooked on this Assassins Creed game to a degree that even Black Flag could not claim. On Saturday January 15th, 2022, I was performing an audio/video test on my Twitch channel for an on-stream interview I had coming up in a few days and wanted to run a game to test the quality of my recording as well as the live feed. I had been playing a lot of Witcher 3, Death Stranding, and Cyberpunk 2077 recently and wanted to play something I had already beat and wouldn’t mind just goofing around in for a while during these tests. I began digging through my game libraries and remembered that I had recently bought Unity on the Epic Games Store for a few bucks, so I figured I’d install and run that. This resulted in back-to-back 9+ hour streams of Assassins Creed Unity and my losing an entire weekend to that darn game.
I have seen White Light and Jayvee’s videos praising Unity, a sentiment that seems to be shared by many at this point which is a near 180 from the initial post launch public consensus several years ago. I know that my liking Unity is not a bold take (or even that interesting but I’m writing this anyway), but I want to figure out what it is about this game that caused me to fall victim to its duration not once, but twice. To be honest I have no clue, but here is my best attempt to understand and explain why I believe Unity is the “best Assassins Creed game”.
Reason #1
Arno is awesome
Arno Dorian’s personality can be described as “What if instead of a modern-day superhero, Spider-Man was a broken and vengeful French Revolution era murderous assassin that traded web swinging for parkour?”. In other words, he’s what my mother would call a “smart ass”, and like chess club extraordinaire Todd Howard would say, it just works.
A perfect example of this comes after Arno gambles away and decides to keep the pocket watch his late father had given him. (Well, that he found on his father’s freshly dead corpse, but this isn’t a term paper, so I’ll ignore semantics if a darn well please). The following is an exchange from that scene.
Fella Arno lost the watch to: "It's my watch, I won it fairly!
Arno: "Well, in a just world, Victor, I would agree with you. But this is not a just world. This is France."
This is a shower line, something that most of us wouldn’t think to say until well after the fact when we are mentally running through the conversation, and before you say “Yahoo, this is a scripted line, this isn’t real life” allow me to point out that there is a comment section below specifically for you to air your grievances, have at it and if it doesn’t work just keep refreshing your browser until it does. (Maybe one day I’ll run ads, in which case I will use this line frequently)
Reason #2
The gameplay really makes you
feel like Batman
When I first started playing Assassins Creed III, I noticed that I couldn’t crouch… in a stealth game. I Googled this because I can be known to be a bit of what some may deem “a dumb”. I found out from (probably reliable sources) that the reason you cannot crouch is because this is primarily a “social stealth” game. So, I stuck to social stealth, like dangling from a roof above a conversation, or dangling from a tree above a conversation, or standing in a bush near a conversation, you know, social stuff. Notice the theme between the three of those examples. I hate tailing missions.
Nakey Jakey once referred to the gamer’s attention span being affected by something he deemed Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain. Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain is the part of the brain that demands action in games. It feeds on and craves explosions, shooting, loud sounds, the works. I had never experienced Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain more than when I had to slowly follow some oatmeal box looking NPC at a distance, one after the other, in Assassins Creed III.
Unity does a pretty good job of avoid this. I’m thankful for that. My dumb brain is too.
In Black Flag and Assassins Creed III I would constantly find myself a victim of its parkour mechanics. I would get stuck to walls as if I were an anime poster in my teenage bedroom, no I don’t have them up anymore and no I won’t prove it, stop asking. When I would finally break free from the shackles of endless tailing missions my Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain would go from floppily flaccid to immediately erect. I’d be running for one reason or another, my blood would begin pumping all fast like and I’d be excitedly thinking “I’m ready to be Assassin boy”. I run towards a building thinking “I’m gonna scale this building” just before shouting for my mother, “mom, come watch me climb this”. My mother would rush in excited to see her 20 something year old son do a parkour, then… bam. Stuck to wall. My mother would then hand me an eviction notice and call my brother, who she is proud of. He never gets stuck to walls like the anime poster my stepdad tore down when I was twent…. fourteen.
Unity’s stealth and parkour mechanics address these issues. You can crouch. You rarely need to follow some chatty Kathy, and the parkour magnificent. Ask my mom, and while you’re at it ask her if I can come home.
Reason #3
Élise de la Serre?
More like Élise de la Someone whom I respect.
The story in Unity is fine. Your dad dies in the last game (Rogue), you end up being some powerful French guy’s personal assistant or orphan intern or something like that, and you fall in love with his daughter Élise de la Serra (aka danggggg, more like de la Seriously, I respect you). Your dad boss gets killed, you get blamed, in prison you meet your new Assassin daddy, you find out your dead dad boss was a templar, then idk hilarity ensues.
To be honest, despite beating this game twice, I hardly remember the story. It’s pretty run of the mill “vengeance time” stuff. It isn’t bad, and the writing and acting is pretty darn solid. Although I do not remember every bit of the story, I do recall every moment I spent with Élise de la Serre (aka Élise de la Sadly this will not be the last time I make this joke). We did kissing, we did a hot air balloon ride, one time we did them at the same time, we murdered people that almost certainly had children, It was love without compromise, well, other than the whole “we are ancient enemies” thing because she was a templar and you became an assassin… thanks to assassin daddy.
I really enjoyed the story of their forbidden love that never once felt the need to address the fact that they were kind of step siblings. Élise wasn’t as funny as Arno, she wasn’t as bad butt as assassin daddy, and she wasn’t as dead as boss daddy. She was her own character and you really felt that. You felt like Arno and her had history, like they had spent their whole lives waiting to be together. This goes out to you Élise de la Serre (aka Élise de la Saving myself for marriage).
I don’t really have any other reasons why I consider it to be the best Assassins Creed, maybe I will play Assassins Creed I & II, Rogue, and/or Odyssey and decide one of them are the best, and yeah, I left out Valhalla, I am very much aware.
Anyway, if you enjoyed reading this nonsense then follow me on Twitter, Twitch, and/or join the Discord. I’m the least smart person in there so it only gets better from here. Anyway, I love you and one day we will be together. Thanks for reading!
