007 - Not every story has to be epic

I've just finished the single player story of Assassin's Creed: Revelations which I mostly enjoyed up until the last 10 minutes.

I played all the previous games as they were released over the last few years, including sinking an obscene amount of time into Brotherhood's perfect and unique multiplayer mode, but in my opinion the story has gotten progressively worse with each game.

For the uninitiated, the action of the game takes place in a historical setting: Crusades-era Jerusalem and Acre, Renaissance Venice, Rome and Constantinople. The main character, a member of the brotherhood of Assassins, runs and jumps his way across the roofs and streets of faithfully recreated facsimiles of these iconic places, interacting with famous historical figures, fulfilling assassination contracts and building his influence in each city.

You might think this would make for a great story, and it does, but Ubisoft decided to add a twist. Every action you take as one of the historical assassins is revealed to be part of a sophisticated virtual reality simulation played out by one of their descendants in the present day, and occasionally you can have him unplug from the simulator and have a wander round the lab. In itself, this isn't bad - it frames the story as a kind of archeological or historical investigation rather than taking on the actual role of the assassin.

The writers should have stopped here, but they didn't - I have a feeling that they thought that even this time spanning idea wasn't high-concept enough.

So the characters start interacting with Jupiter and Minerva, God-like sole survivors of a pre-human civilisation that was wiped out by an apocalyptic solar flare, which threatens to again wipe out life on Earth, unless the descendant can find and unlock "the Vault" using memories pieced together from his assassin ancestors' meetings with the Roman gods. Utterly ridiculous. And I had to go to Wikipedia to learn that since it's so badly and briefly explained in the last ten minutes of the game. It's never mentioned up to that point, just like how it was crowbarred into the end of previous editions, it's completely unnecessary, and it spoils the game.

The same thing spoiled every Final Fantasy game since FF8 and I really wish the writers wouldn't do it. They must think it makes for clever storytelling, but it doesn't, and I'd rather they didn't try so hard.

/end rant