Welp, I thought simply indenting would be enough to break up the text into distinct paragraphs, but apparently not...and the site won\'t let me edit this without removing a lot of the text or just delete/redo this outright, so I guess we\'re stuck as is for now! yaaaaaaaaay
Meditating under the weight of the log with a thousand backs.
TV Tropes still has the 3,000 character limit on reviews(yours is 4,611 characters), but there's a bug- the site doesn't enforce the limit when you first post it. Instead, it enforces it when you try to edit the review, and won't let you save your changes until you bring it into compliance. It's rather strange, but it's gone on for years; I first saw that when I reviewed The Legend Of Zelda Breath Of The Wild about four years ago.
I definitely think you should trim down your review if it's so long that you can't get around to talking about the gameplay(it's already more than one and a half times the character limit), or at least you should designate this as a "Story Review."
Haaaaaaa... yep, that sounds right.
Meditating under the weight of the log with a thousand backs.
Alright, since editing comments is also a completely broken function, lemme just post a properly formatted version of the rant above:
- Connor and his story are the biggest and most pervasive grips I have with this game. Again, on paper Connor is a fine idea for a protagonist (especially as a contrast to Ezio as the latter was to Altair), and I have nothing but respect for the voice actor who clearly tried his best in his first real role and with the material he was given, but in practice Connor is just. So. DULL. He only gets to actually display emotion and express a damn personality a handful of times throughout the story; everywhere else he\'s just being ordered around or reacting flatly. You know what this isn\'t helped by?
- The cutscenes. I legitimately do not know why this \"artistic decision\" was made, but they are all so...lifeless. The Ezio trilogy and even Black Flag bring their characters to life in their many cutscenes with well-placed BGM, lots of movement and subtle facial expressions/body language, humor, and everything else you\'d expect from a dramatic storyline - this game has almost none of that, with characters instead remaining in one spot at all times mannequins, delivering their monologues with little to no human expression involved, and while the background audio remains dead silent. It\'s hard to get invested in a story portrayed like this, and that\'s only exacerbated by...
- The characters. Aside from Haytham, Connor (sorta), Desmond, Rebecca, and Ben Franklin, I did not like or care about any of the cast. Know why? Because pretty much everyone else is written dully or as such an asshole (particularly Shaun, who went from lovably sarcastic to needlessly caustic and condescending for no real reason), so I was left in full Eight Deadly Words mode for the whole game. Hate those Homestead fuckers too. And finally...
- The ending. So you have a worldwide apocalyptic event that you\'ve been building toward for 5 full-length AAA games (about 150 hours of playtime). You\'ve established that this can and will wipe most or all of humanity off the face of the earth, and that the Precursors have been directing history for millennia in order to stave off or stop it. You have Desmond, now perhaps the most experienced Assassin to ever live in a prime position to lead the Brotherhood to a new comeback as Ezio once did...and Minerva, who\'s finally \"speaking\" directly with him and has spent almost all her screentime in III explaining the many different methods that her people attempted to stop or overcome said apocalypse with, going into considerable detail about each method and why it ultimately failed. Finally, you and Desmond find the last method they devised, the one that CAN stop the apocalypse and save the world: Desmond puts his hand on an orb and fucking dies. Why? How does it work? What exactly is happening to stop massive solar flares from cooking the earth? Fuck you for asking, because the game decided that THIS method, the most important of them all, wasn\'t worth explaining beyond \"it will work\" and because killing Desmond off just as he was finally cool was SO important, SO crucial to the continuation of the franchise.
In my experience, you should be able to edit comments. There's a bug with comments in which backslashes are inserted after every apostrophe or quotation mark, but it's fixed if you edit the comment(even if you don't change anything).
Conversely, in my experience editing reviews is fine so long as you stay within the character limit, and it said it in comments that never ever works, while spoiler tags and other formatting never display properly!
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A Deeply Disappointing, Unnecessarily Different Sequel
I "got to" ACIII about 8 years later than most players, so I'd already heard of the Broken Base it garnered at release, but I still booted it up with an open mind - having just replayed the Ezio trilogy, I'd found new faults with II and Brotherhood while enjoying Revelations much more than I had on my first go years prior, so I was willing to treat III fairly and without bias as much as possible.
Unfortunately, III didn't want to return the courtesy.
To be clear, I like quite a few aspects of the game - Haytham is a great protagonist (and the twist that ends his portion of the game is solid), the setting is fairly unique for video games and isn't afraid to portray the shitty racist parts of colonial America, and the concept of Connor as (to my knowledge) the only First Nation/American Indian protagonist voiced by someone from the same ethnic group is pretty cool - but a lot of it is frustrating, insulting to previous games/the player(s), and/or bluntly disappointing as a depiction of or conclusion to something. Let's go down the list:
-Connor and his story are the biggest and most pervasive grips I have with this game. Again, on paper Connor is a fine idea for a protagonist (especially as a contrast to Ezio as the latter was to Altair), and I have nothing but respect for the voice actor who clearly tried his best in his first real role and with the material he was given, but in practice Connor is just. So. DULL. He only gets to actually display emotion and express a damn personality a handful of times throughout the story; everywhere else he's just being ordered around or reacting flatly. You know what this isn't helped by? -The cutscenes. I legitimately do not know why this "artistic decision" was made, but they are all so...lifeless. The Ezio trilogy and even Black Flag bring their characters to life in their many cutscenes with well-placed BGM, lots of movement and subtle facial expressions/body language, humor, and everything else you'd expect from a dramatic storyline - this game has almost none of that, with characters instead remaining in one spot at all times mannequins, delivering their monologues with little to no human expression involved, and while the background audio remains dead silent. It's hard to get invested in a story portrayed like this, and that's only exacerbated by... -The characters. Aside from Haytham, Connor (sorta), Desmond, Rebecca, and Ben Franklin, I did not like or care about any of the cast. Know why? Because pretty much everyone else is written dully or as such an asshole (particularly Shaun, who went from lovably sarcastic to needlessly caustic and condescending for no real reason), so I was left in full Eight Deadly Words mode for the whole game. Hate those Homestead fuckers too. And finally... -The ending. So you have a worldwide apocalyptic event that you've been building toward for 5 full-length AAA games (about 150 hours of playtime). You've established that this can and will wipe most or all of humanity off the face of the earth, and that the Precursors have been directing history for millennia in order to stave off or stop it. You have Desmond, now perhaps the most experienced Assassin to ever live in a prime position to lead the Brotherhood to a new comeback as Ezio once did...and Minerva, who's finally "speaking" directly with him and has spent almost all her screentime in III explaining the many different methods that her people attempted to stop or overcome said apocalypse with, going into considerable detail about each method and why it ultimately failed. Finally, you and Desmond find the last method they devised, the one that CAN stop the apocalypse and save the world: Desmond puts his hand on an orb and fucking dies. Why? How does it work? What exactly is happening to stop massive solar flares from cooking the earth? Fuck you for asking, because the game decided that THIS method, the most important of them all, wasn't worth explaining beyond "it will work" and because killing Desmond off just as he was finally cool was SO important, SO crucial to the continuation of the franchise.
So yeah, after growing up on the Ezio trilogy and Black Flag, finally seeing this game in action was a massive disappointment. It felt like an insult to everyone who invested their time, money, and energy into the previous four games and built up their expectations for what the saga's conclusion would play out like, much like the endings of Naruto and Attack on Titan. So long as I live, I will never change my stance on that...
...and I don't even have space to get into how garbage the revamped gameplay is!