Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry chronicles the adventures of Adéwalé in the slave-run colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti).
Originally a DLC for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, it has since been released as a stand-alone digital release on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry provides examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The DLC to Black Flag stars Edward's first mate Adéwalé in his own story set 15 years after Black Flag.
- Asshole Victim: Governor de Fayet is not allowed a gentle passing; canonicallynote Adéwalé struck him down with his own branding iron, then slashed him open with a machete for good measure.
- Beef Gate: Once Adéwalé acquires the Experto Crede, the entire map is unlocked, and there's nothing stopping the player from sailing to Wellington Harbor in Jamaica. It's guarded by some very powerful British dreadnoughts, including a Level 60 Man o' War. It is suicide to engage them at this point, and your crew encourage you to retreat until the ship can receive proper upgrades.
- Big Bad: Gouverneur le Fayetnote . It's a spoiler due to the fact he initially seems to be a politician trying to reduce the violence and less racist than most. No, he's much much worse.
- Big Good: The leader of the Resistance, Augustin Dieufort. Amusingly, this is the rare case of a Big Good having The Dragon as he increasingly learns to rely on Adéwalé as The Heavy.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The Governor engages in a bit of this. Adéwalé pays him back.
- Crapsack World: Port-au-Prince in Colonial Haiti is a rather hard and bleak place.
- Darker and Edgier: If the main game was Lighter and Softer compared to Assassin's Creed III, Freedom Cry is far bleaker than that or any other entry in the franchise, dealing head-first with human cruelty with no varnish, with almost none of the series' Assassins v. Templarsnote , and none of the Magic from Technology hijinks, to back away from it.
- Death by Irony: If you want, you can kill the Governor with the brand he was using to torture a slave a couple of minutes ago. There is even an optional objective for it — meaning that canonically this is how Adéwalé defeated him — and an achievement for doing so.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: All over the place. Much like Liberation, Freedom Cry is about a protagonist fighting the institution of slavery.
- Demoted to Extra: One of the few times in the franchise that the Templars do not have a major role in the story. Adéwalé's quest at the beginning of the game is supposed to be hunting Templars but he gets caught up in the Maroon rebellion and decides to postpone his quest for the time being.
- Despair Event Horizon: Adéwalé has a downplayed one. The events of the game convince him to retire.
- Doomed by Canon: A case of Delayed By History. Adéwalé hopes to incite a slave revolution before leaving to rejoin the Brotherhood. The revolution he strives for does happen, forming the nation of Haiti as the result, but not until decades later. As per Initiates, Adéwalé's actions did lay the foundation for the revolution, and in fact his grandson Eseosa (whose father was the result of a post-game one-night stand between Adéwalé and Bastienne) plays a behind-the-scenes role in the Haitian revolution, much as Edward's grandson did in The American Revolution.
- Exact Words: After Bastinenne requests the parcel again after helping Adewale and he states he will keep it a little longer, Bastinenne states he is not a man of his word. Adewale reminds her he said "perhaps".
- Fascist, but Inefficient: Slaves are constantly trying to undermine their masters, escape, or sabotage their efforts. Truth in Television and a major rebuttal to the idea slaves were passive in their oppression.
- Faux Affably Evil: The veneer of French culture over the absolute evil being practiced openly is hard to ignore.
- Foreshadowing: Governor de Fayet talks about trying to make peace with the rebels but, when you deliver a message, you find a small army attacking the Maroon headquarters.
- Greater-Scope Villain:
- With Adéwalé deciding that pursuing the Templars can wait in light of the oppression in Port-au-Prince, their involvement in the plot is minimal. Their fingerprints are all over the Geodesic Expedition (which features future member Antonio de Ulloa), but their precise involvement in it is never spelled out.
- The British Empire have little bearing on the plot, but their ships patrol the waters near Jamaica, and are stronger than their French and Spanish counterparts.
- Guide Dang It!: The Mission "A Scientific Inquiry" has an optional objective of not killing anyone. It does not show the player this objective until all other mission objectives have been complete, if the player managed to kill someone before the objective ever came up.
- Historical In-Joke: The Governor makes numerous ludicrous charges at Louis Godin from ridiculous demands to spending a quarter of his expedition's funds on a diamond for his black prostitute mistress. The crazy thing? All of these charges were true and come from recorded real-life history.Godin: The expedition will cost more than our initial calculations suggested.Gouverneur: I heard you gave Bastienne's girl a jewel worth more than half the fleet. Does this account for the missing funds?Godin: What I do with my purse is my own business.Gouverneur: What happened to the funds I released LAST month?Godin: The science of navigation is expensive.Gouverneur: I dare say it is... if you measure every fathom in perfume and silk.
- I Gave My Word: Subverted:Bastienne: You are not a man of your word!
Adewale: My word was "perhaps". - Industrialized Evil: One of the most terrible Real Life examples thereof. Port-au-Prince has slavery and oppression down to a science.
- Kick the Dog: Damn near constantly in places like Port-au-Prince. Adéwalé does not have to go out of his way to notice runaway slaves being chased down to be executed, slaves tied up against a wall to be beaten, slaves locked in iron cages, slaves being sold as livestock at an auction, etc. The slavers, aside from being bad guys in principle, go about being oppressive bastards with almost sadistic openness.
- La Résistance: The Maroon, runaway slaves on West Indian plantations who formed communities, are this in Haiti, with Adéwalé joining up with them and being inspired by their struggle.
- Luck-Based Mission: The stealth missions, especially towards the end of the game, as the random spawning of jailers or slave-saving events (with their associated guards) can make a trailing mission literally impossible.
- MacGuffin: The Templar package that Adéwalé steals at the beginning, then uses as a bargaining chip to get Bastienne to help. The game never says what it is, or why the Governor wants it, or why it is more important than Adéwalé's entire crew, as Adéwalé claims. Rogue rectifies this.
- Meaningful Name: The H.M.S. Fortressnote , which is literally a floating fortress.
- Mood Whiplash: A truly epic case of it given this is the darkest Assassin's Creed story ever, and that comes right after the lightest.
- One-Man Army: Adéwalé, more than any previous heroes, gets this treatment. He canonically slaughters hundreds of Overseers as part of his slave liberations.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Adéwalé gets this, which he is aware is wrong on a level he can't put into words. He has to do some mental gymnastics to justify fighting for slave liberation over fighting Templars. Then again, the one Templar he encounters has more important matters to handle than trifling with a stranded Assassin.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: Governor La Fayet seems like a complete nonentity right up until he demonstrates the lives of those underneath him mean nothing.
- Playing Both Sides: Bastienne seems to be doing this. She's actually just trying to help the slaves as much as possible.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: To say that the antagonists of the game are politically incorrect would be a massive understatement.
- Rule of Symbolism: A machete as a slave liberator's weapon is about as on the nose as a hammer and sickle for Communist revolutionaries.
- The Savage South: Albeit, a bit further South than usual.
- Scary Black Man: Adéwalé invokes this to the French slavers.
- Shady Lady of the Night: Bastienne Josephe is the local madame who runs an informant network comprised of her prostitutes on behalf of the Maroon rebellion.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Adéwalé's signature firearm is a blunderbuss, which indeed functions like a shotgun. Being the first area-based ballistic weapon in the series other than Connor's duckfoot pistol (as opposed to the single-target pistols, throwing knives, bows/arrows, etc...), the tutorial for it is Adéwalé approaching a group of four enemies at a campfire, and fatally blasting them all down with a single shot! Notably, unlike the pistols in the main game its shots cause a One-Hit KO against any enemy in the DLC.
- Slave Liberation: Type A, B, and C, all played straight. Adéwalé, coming from a runaway slave background himself, actively liberates people enslaved to others. He can also go to slave auctions and buy the freedom of those being sold. In the end, those liberated wage asymmetric warfare to free yet more, going on to become one of the most successful slave rebellions in history.
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Not a character from either game but the Jackdaw, your ship in the Vanilla Game sank at some point after Black Flag, in some unexplained Noodle Incident. You can dive down below as Adéwalé, its former quartermaster, and salvage its figurehead. For those who bonded with the ship in the main game or acquired all the Elite Upgrades, this will be quite a Wham Episode and a
Tear Jerker. - Took a Level in Badass: Adéwalé is pretty tough in the main game, but years as an Assassin have made him even more tough than he was as a young man, to the point of being Made of Iron.
- Wardens Are Evil: Overseers are very, very evil.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Bastienne gives Adéwalé one of these. She says that his open murder of Frenchmen and Overseers is inciting retaliation. Adéwalé shrugs it off. So the Governor destroys a slave ship in retaliation, killing hundreds.
- Wretched Hive: If you thought Nassau was bad, it's nothing compared to Port-au-Prince under the tyranny of a French governor who enforces some of the worst racist laws in the world, with slaves sold in the market and runaways hunted down openly by overseers who kill with impunity. More than half of the city is made up of plantations.
- Violence is the Only Option: Adéwalé is like this with slavery. It's a bad idea.
