Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy | The Completionist

hey everyone and thank you so much for watching this big mega compilation episode of all of my videos revolving assassin's creed 2 and specifically the ezio trilogy before we start i have a quick ad read for you so once again thank you for watching thank you for the support and enjoy this mega episode you know what sucks being dead tired fortunately for me however thanks to today's sponsor sleepiness isn't an issue anymore because helix sleep has hooked me up and countless viewers at home with incredible night sleep thanks to their premium mattresses because that's what they do healing sleep is looking to ensure sleep customized needs for you so i've had my healing sleep mattress now for well over a year and the one guarantee i have nowadays is a great night's rest you can go to helixsleep.com the completionist right now and save 200 off of your next helix mattress order which will arrive right at your door with free shipping then it's just a matter of unrolling the matches from the 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probably think of ezio auditore the charmingly smug italian murder machine had so much more personality than his predecessor altair and is a huge part of the reason that assassin's creed ii is still considered by many to be the high point of the series ezio was so beloved that ubisoft made two more games with the character before moving on to number three which is just not how numbers work but i can't blame them assassin's creed 2 is the game that molded the long running series into a shape it would hold for a very long time both for better and for worse hey everyone and welcome back to an all new episode of the completionist new game plus the show where i am re-completing the original 120 games i ever completed here on the channel more on that in the box down below so since i played it when it first came out and then again for the show this now marks my third time in my life completing assassin's creed 2. is that too many times maybe but this game is still hugely influential and has always had my favorite story and characters in the whole series right here now that so many years and assassin's creed games have passed me by it's possible that my feelings will i don't know change drastically but i somehow doubt it this is assassin's creed a series where one of the big draws is that you basically always know what you're signing up for nowadays so once again here i go embarking on yet another date with ezio auditore also destiny for a third time but mostly ezio [Music] [Applause] so the first assassin's creed game is fine its influence on an entire decade of gaming can't be denied but it was really buggy and frustrating to complete and even some of the game's biggest fans would probably admit that altair is a little bit of a blank slate so when the second one came along it was a relief to meet ezio who's likable and smug and self-absorbed and charming all in equal measure and who has a real arc where we get to watch him grow and change over a number of years umisoff also streamlined a lot of the little gameplay stuff and when i think back to the early days of the assassin's creed franchise i think about this game the first game set a template that the series would stick to for a very long time but this is the game that perfected that template and truly set the course for the direction of that series that would take over the following decade they even just straight up made two more games about the guy because everyone loved him and they were in no rush to get three out which in hindsight is you know kind of fair but hindsight shapes a lot of how i feel about these games now at the time it just felt like the game i had wanted the first one to be like and the future of the franchise was wide open and it says a lot of the other two seo games were as fun as they were i've completed them both before and they definitely provide more of the stuff that works in this game which is impressive when you have a series built around exploring new time periods but everyone's still down to just hang out in italy for a couple of years look the assassin's creed series has had all sorts of ups and downs since then so stopping towards a trilogy in between two installments doesn't even strike me as weird anymore they knew they had something with ezio and so they capitalized on it what i didn't know at the time was that in a lot of ways this would remain the high point of the series for a while and may still be depending on who you ask i definitely think it has one of the more memorable stories outside of the modern story in line with desmond which is i don't know fine no one played these games for desmond but he's still here doing desmond stuff like using the animus to relive the memories of his ancestors while navigating a conspiracy involving templars assassins and the super shady abstergo corporation meanwhile back in renaissance italy his ancestor ezio auditore de frenze is avenging the death of his father and brother while training with his uncle to be a super cool assassin but of course he runs up against the templars and rodrigo borussia who wants to use one of the mysterious apples of eden artifacts to open a mysterious vault so he can do some some power hungry mysterious stuff assassin's creed 2 commits to the hodgepodge of sci-fi and history established by the first one and doesn't really change much in a gameplay sense either lots of things have been tweaked and fine-tuned but the parkour is still parkour the combat is still counter based and there are still a million little things on your map to find and collect everything about these games is so imprinted onto the modern gaming landscape that it all still feels overwhelmingly familiar or maybe it's that i've already completed this game twice already but the only thing i'm really nervous about is the thing i'm always nervous about when it comes to completing these types of games bugs collecting all the feathers and chests and weapons is all well and good but i've encountered my fair share of frustration when it comes to completing these games because amongst the million little things to do there's always one that decides to just not work in this case i am playing the remastered version on the ps4 so you know there's gonna be some bug somewhere plus playing this game is the only way i know of to travel back to renaissance italy and 2009 at the same time so that's kind of neat [Music] so the assassin's creed series finally started mixing things up with the last few installments but assassin's creed 2 still feels like the definitive assassin's creed game which i mean as both a good thing and not so good a thing because that seo's first outing is definitely the poster child for the franchise's greatest successes and also its greatest failings let's start with the story because i think that it might be the most successful in the whole series thanks in large part to ezio plus the world of renaissance italy is just delightful and the way that real-life historical figures like borja or leonardo da vinci are folded into the story is awesome there's specificity to the setting that not all of the games or time periods have the middle eastern setting of the first game was cool but it feels like the developers had more fun designing this vibrant italian world i mean look leonardo freaking da vinci is your gadget and upgrade guy which is just so cool getting new gadgets is always great but getting them from da vinci himself takes it to a whole new level and then there's the borgia the game's main villain which really pushes the game's blending of historical detail and bonkers sci-fi to its absolute limit this is a game that literally concludes with a fist fight against the pope which isn't really satisfying on a gameplay level but at the very least you have to tell yourself this is freaking hilarious so the story is awesome why is that an issue well the series basically kept trying to recapture the magic with increasingly diminishing returns just take a look at assassin's creed 3 which had a conceptually awesome time period but never from the level of texture and detail this game finds in italy not to mention the main assassins all ended up suffering in comparison to ezio with lots of returns to the stoic boring archetypes that the first game fell victim to then of course there's desmond in all the modern day absurdigo stuff now i actually think this is the only game that nails the balance between these two stories there is a lot less yanking the player back and forth between the timelines and all the stuff with the apple of eden and overarching sci-fi conspiracy stuff still feels like it might be heading somewhere interesting which if you've played the other games especially the third one uh not no it's not going in any cool direction so the series was basically incapable of milking the sci-fi stuff any further and eventually kind of just stopped trying and let itself just be a historical assassin series which is fine but i really appreciated the way they complement each other here the desmond stuff isn't frequent enough to detract and i enjoyed wondering where it all was heading but now that i know the answer is nowhere i could sense how unstable it all was from basically the very beginning but the italy stuff mostly crushes it and it sets a high bar that was never really reached ever again even in the other two ezio games because making a great game is one thing but it's a bummer watching a series consistently try and fail to recapture the magic it once had which isn't to say that some of the other games are great i will always love black flag and its pirate themed shenanigans but it's pretty telling that even though it's one of my favorites i barely remember anything about the main character and on a gameplay level this game locked the series into a formula that wouldn't be broken until assassin's creed origins many years later and while each subsequent game would add little wrinkles like new gadgets or naval combat or whatever this was definitely the game where they figured out what works and then they just kept doing it alright so going back to assassin's creed 2 now having played so many of the later games it just feels like more of the same even though i rationally know it's the entire reason for most of the elements we're so familiar with the time i remember thinking that the combat here was a huge step up from the first game but now i'm so used to this style of counter based combat that it's fine same with the parkour which would be tweaked and polished in later games but mostly just feels the way that it would continue to feel and it's not this game's fault that it was so good that it got the rest of the series caught in a rut on its own as a game it's great there's a reason that it was so influential to both the assassin's creed games and open world map games in general because on top of getting 100 sync on every memory there's a huge amount of stuff to collect but it's way more streamlined than the first game and it acknowledges how packed its world is by making the collecting process a little less frustrating okay fine finding some of the millions of feathers is still a pain but getting new weapons capes and armor is great because i always love collecting stuff that i can actually use i also really dig the glyphs hidden throughout the game which give really neat little puzzles to solve and unlock bits of an overarching video frame by frame building out the auditory manner is great too it unlocks shot bonuses and all kinds of fun stuff this right here is another element that later games would try to build on by letting you build your whole town up or even manage armies or whatever you want but it never felt quite as simple and satisfying as it does right here when a game is this successful and everything it's trying to do it's easy to see why later games fell into the trap of trying to add just enough new superficial features while scratching that same itch of scouring a map for treasure chests tombs and assassinations because there is something fundamentally satisfying about watching all those little icons disappear and it makes these games feel fundamentally designed for completion except for bugs have i mentioned bugs before because playing this on the ps4 mostly ran fine but you best believe there were some bugs including one i found in the dlc content where the game would crash constantly and at one point i had to literally uninstall and re-download the entire game which was not my idea of a great time same goes for the ubisoft you play achievements which are not only kind of dumb in the general idea and concept but literally don't work a lot of the time and i know it's not 2009 anymore but when a game wants to push such an emphasis on completion i don't appreciate when technical hiccups like this make it literally impossible to complete especially because i've already done all this stuff twice just let me complete your game again ubisoft jesus anyways i know it sounds like i'm complaining a lot but this is a great game in fact almost too great it's at a high bar and ruins the experience of the series for some people and also locked assassins creed into a formula that it took a while to change but without that context and taken on its own as a game from 2009 it's just really that good ezio's the best exploring italy is awesome and there are a million little things to do and collect it's the definitive assassin's creed experience for a reason and still feels like the best balance for what ubisoft was going with for the series i mean there are no pirates but black flag doesn't have leonardo da vinci so let's just call it a tie [Music] much like the other assassin's creeds this is one of those games where completion is meant to be its own reward having all the weapons and capes is great but there's nothing specifically for 100 in it which i was bummed about when i first played it but at the time i knew what to expect there are some smaller rewards along the way like a dope war hammer for collecting 50 feathers and the auditore cape for collecting 100 of them when you wear it it raises your notoriety which is the opposite of helpful i kind of appreciate that instead of a super useful item it's just like wear this and everyone hates you it's kind of funny you can also buy altair's outfit with you play points if you're a big fan of both altair and you play for whatever reason but let's not get altair's outfit confused with altair's armor you get altair's armor which is the best armor in the game when you complete all of the secret tombs that are in the world completing all those cool cryptic glyph puzzles you see throughout the world will give you a cut scene of what seems to be adam and eve running away from something i never really understood what it meant let alone when all the sci-fi stuff meant in the end but i always liked this cool little cutscene i got the best reward though is just watching your villa get doper and doper as you play you can see your art get discounts from fully upgraded shops and even look at portraits of people who you've assassinated which is a bit morbid but who am i to judge completing each set of collectibles adds to your villa's income too so you get to feel some sense of forward progression but since this is my third time playing this game it mostly felt like checking stuff off of a list and reminded me of how much more satisfying it was the first two times around assassin's creed 2 is a great game but i'm not sure it's great enough to justify completing in a third time around in my lifetime and even though it was the most influential game in the series it has gotten a little bit dated so it's not necessarily the one i'd mostly want to revisit if i didn't have to while i re-completed assassin's creed 2 there were 11 deaths because ezio still loves just randomly jumping off cliffs and into rivers sometimes but at least he can swim this time around which is more than all the air could say 30 codex pages 100 feathers 30 paintings 20 glyphs 22 weapons and 5 different sets of armors collected it's a lot but when i set out to complete an assassin's creed game i'm still fully aware that completing stuff is a part of the appeal 51 trophies unlocked most of which just happened as i played and started collecting everything but that does not include the uplay rewards which were even more glitchy and annoying than i ever remember them being 35 hours of total playtime which is probably quicker than either of my other playthroughs because there was a lot less wandering around in exploring and two hidden blades which is and always has been better than one it's just math so there you guys go i've completed assassin's creed 2 for the third time in my life i have played so many of these games by now that they all kind of blur together but this one still stands out for how much it blew my mind when i first played it and for the fact that etio is still definitely my favorite assassin of all time if you came to these games late and somehow never played this one you should absolutely check it out because the story the world and characters are fantastic but other than that this game very much set the mold for what assassin's creed games are and if you're revisiting it now you basically know what to expect so with that in my guys i still give this game my completionist rating of finish it finish it yes so i never really talked about this that much on the show but i am obsessed with assassin's creed not for the story not for the gameplay but for what the entire encompassing image is i really enjoy assassinating i really enjoy building up armies and things like that and i've i've actually enjoyed ezio and his whole journey but there was a point where we saw assassin's creed ii assassin's creed brotherhood and assassin's creed revelations all get released in a one year cycle back to back to back and that's a lot to take in when you really want to focus on creating a good character like ezio up to this point the entirety of assassin's creed was new assassin to go along with desmond but we hung out for three times with ezio and honestly i'm not going to complain about that but me personally i haven't moved forward in the assassin's creed timeline yet because i like seo so much assassin's creed the film just came out a couple of days ago and uh if you want to see my review of that you can go ahead and click the link right here to my personal channel and give me all of my glorious insight when i thought of that movie so i thought for us here on the show let us move forward with one more entry in the assassin's creed franchise today we're completing assassin's creed brotherhood i have my my ezio my assassin's creed hoodie i wear this all the time and i become an assassin but i am not an assassin so let's be real right the first assassin's creed back in 2007 was probably the last game ever where the internet was just like it wasn't amazing but let's just give him the benefit of the doubt right that just doesn't really happen anymore nowadays granted ubisoft's last underwhelming new ip watch underscored dogs is pretty close to redeeming itself with this recent sequel look i really liked watchdogs too but do you remember what it was like when assassin's creed 2 came out better graphics better mechanics likeable characters and a deeper story it blew people's minds remember that part in captain eo where all the computer people take off their nasty clothes and they're all just super hot and they jazz dance for like three and a half minutes that's practically a factual reenactment of me and my friends playing that game back in college and to answer your question yes i was angelica houston but then in the next year instead of a straight number three assassin's creed and that wouldn't even come for another two to three more years we got brotherhood ezio was still the main assassin even though he got some new tricks and it looks pretty similar even though it's in a few new cities and well i don't exactly know see up until when brotherhood was announced there was never really any need to worry about it until then we just assumed assassin's creed was like any other critically acclaimed major franchise where you know you'd wait a year or two between the entries and each one is leaps and bounds better and more innovative and more spectacular than the one last but assassin's creed 2.5 less than a year later nobody was really sure what to expect and yet with another big main series entry to follow for the next 6 years sales were high if tapering off a little at one point there were even two games in the same year can you imagine if they did that for star wars episode seven is out for like five months and then boom seven more months until episode eight let's just say even if the best people on earth were working on it i'm just not so sure you could creatively create something with the same quality in so much less time not to mention the fact that the following year we got one more year of ezio with assassin's creed revelations thus capping off what ubi would call the ezio collection so this week i'm taking on the challenge of playing assassin's creed brotherhood top to bottom for the most part i already know what to expect short main quests but with a bunch of extra objectives for perfect sync several categories for near meaningless collectibles that give me an excuse to free run around the city a couple of genuinely interesting extra side missions especially since leonardo da vinci's in this game and at least one scary ass glitch that tricks me into thinking i missed something or something went wrong hopefully nothing too rough but what i'm really fascinated with isn't the stuff that i have to do to complete the game it's just the simple question of whether or not a game like this can really justify itself at all so today we'll be playing the new ps4 version that was released as a part of the ezio collection so we can soak up all of that dlc to be digested right alongside the main course campaign so before all of you freaked the out i know the internet widely hated the idea of the ezio collection and even more so that it wasn't really a full-fledged remastering which i definitely agree with but those news sites out there that posted the videos of the npcs that never really happened to me on the ps4 nor did it even get close to happening and low-key my absolute favorite thing to come out of these remasterings for the ps4 all multiplayer modes and their respective achievements have been removed from this version and quite frankly as a busy completionist with lots of things on his plate i'll go ahead and say it good riddance now don't get me wrong the multiplayer was actually awesome for the ps3 and the xbox 360. but i learned quickly that today i couldn't get matches to queue up and i weighed my options it would take me way too much time that didn't seem worth my investment especially since i hate multiplayer achievements sorry sorry i just i'm i'm fine i just god damn it stop making me so hard i could review so many different brand new games if they didn't come with long-winded achievements i know that completionists aren't the target demographic but holy hell give me a break [Music] all right ubisoft you know i love you but i just played this game for about a week straight so i feel pretty justified coming right out the gate with the hard questions because i just gotta know what exactly is the point of assassin's creed brotherhood everyone was expecting a number three but instead we got this definitely weird thing that isn't a three so why even make a new game so quickly if not simply to cash it in is there really something that different about it and if so what has changed so first of all it advances the storylines of both ezio and his modern day ancestor desmond miles as the latter uses the animus to jump back into the italian renaissance memories of the former in order to locate the artifacts that can save the world from total destruction because aliens or gods or or whatever brotherhood opens with desmond miles trying to use the animus to get inside one of ezio's memories from the year 1507 but then something goes wrong and he briefly ends up in vienna in the middle of a battle before he flashes back to the day his family's country villa was similarly destroyed which sends desmond hurling even further back into time just after assassin's creed ii where main villain pope rodrigo borgia has disappeared and his papal staff which was holding one of the artifacts goes into the floor of the vatican ezio and his fellow assassin uncle mario ride back to their villa in monterrigioni and find it under siege by cesare borgia the son of that same creepy borgia pope from the last game mario is unfortunately killed in the ensuing battle which leaves the villa in ruins and etio passes out as he was chasing cesare towards rome when desmond comes out of the animus he and his fellow assassin pals lucy shawn and rebecca have arrived at the present-day villa adatore at monterrigioni in modern day italy they decided to use it as a safe house while trying to recover the artifact from wherever ezio put it using the animus to look for it lucy also seems to think that when the alien ghost from the ending of the last game touched it something about it changed and desmond begins to see visions of a much older ezio around the villa eventually they deduce that ezio came back to the villa much later and hit a bunch of numbers and glyphs all over the place and as they inch closer and closer to finding that macguffin they decide that desmond once again needs to go back into the animus to find more clues so they can find the rare artifacts before abstergo and the templars do so that's pretty cool right at first i thought so too until i realized that it's basically beat for beat the same story as assassin's creed ii where ezio is chasing down the borgia who killed his loved ones and gets mixed up in a crazy alien fueled save the world mystery on the side while desmond and his same sexy modern assassin friends from last time are somehow able to operate a delicate piece of machinery like the animus while they're on the run sure it once again puts ezio in a high-stakes situation that gives his character some room to mature into a leader uniting new assassins and training them to form the brotherhood but it's seriously like hangover two level plot similarity in fact hey a little joke for you right here right now at the top of my head uh what do the hangover two and assassin's creed brotherhood have in common they could have both just skipped straight to three and no one would have known the difference that is i guess until you really look at the game one place that brotherhood unequivocally improves over its predecessor is in pure production value it was almost hard for me to remember which stuff happened in which game considering how similar the two are and i really went in expecting them to be almost identical but in this one way there is no doubt that brotherhood is the clear winner the shift in setting to the absolutely enormous buff boy size city of rome gives the scenery and platforming a nice change of pace from the tighter series of smaller cities in two and a lot of the more normally much more boring rural areas are fully detailed in ways that they never once were before even the character models which in past games looked pretty rigid and goofy finally started looking really sharp and textured this time around we did play the xio collection so of course all three games look the best they ever have so on one hand you have articles and videos being published about how freaky some of the models from the original assassin's creed 2 game have turned out in this etio collection and on the other there's me where every time i'd come back from a break in unpause brotherhood i'd have to take a second and just go wow what was that oh owen wilson i'm sorry did you say ned flanders from the cartoon classic sitcom the simpsons no no i did not say i said i said owen wilson all right all right just check just check [Laughter] now technically speaking these games aren't remastering they're enhanced versions and maybe there's been more incidents in which the game has looked horrible for users but for me everything turned out awesome but still for as beautiful as the game truly is even now i can't for the life of me remember one specific thing that absolutely blew me away in brotherhood in the way literally everything did in assassin's creed 2 when it first came out let's take the music for example it's very appropriate to the setting and the slick production that makes the recording sound really great but all the tracks just kind of borrow that weird seventh console generation post robert downey jr sherlock holmes movie soundtrack and yo don't pretend you don't know what i'm talking about that's totally a thing and you guys know it harpist chords playing quirky melodies echoing drum stabs inexplicable slide guitar it's all goddamn there it doesn't feel so much like a movie set in the italian renaissance as it does a low budget cbs drama set in the italian renaissance and that's pretty much par for the chorus as far as artistic inspiration goes for the game in general overall assassin's creed 2 was a game i definitely walked away with having a pretty damn good time which must mean that somewhere brotherhood obviously has a bunch of good stuff going for it too right like take the sound effects for example something about that sound of clacking metal and the crunch of stabbing views is always great also the voices in these games are always pretty good too you do this claudia and you are on your own i've been on my own for 20 years major motion picture actress and emotionally vulnerable sloth lover kristen bell returns as lucy we need to get our hands on ezio's apple of eden and lowland north and roger craig smith are great as desmond as seo per usual ah and it is now customary for you to fire cannonballs at visitors but again it's just more of the same stuff as last time but done slightly better so we don't get bored or stop playing right away even the writing while average at best has pretty decent pacing and gets the job done there's just not really anything here to write home about and i think in the original it might have been different because there was the multiplayer aspect of the game and yet impossibly i still somehow count my experience as positive and in the end that's kind of just where i have to land on this i can't really put my finger on anything that really stood out as something that totally ruined the way it looks and sounds and it's definitely a noticeable improvement over too but after taking a step back and looking at it as a whole it's just not very inspired it's like the video game equivalent of the six dollar burger sure it's the best looking and the best tasting thing you can get but in the end you're still eating at carl's jr or at hardee's or whatever the fast food place serves the six dollar burger where you live or maybe you live somewhere where they don't have the six dollar burger or you've never even heard of the six dollar burger but the point is you get what i'm saying and what i'm saying is sometimes i still just get the six dollar burger it's not a bad burger it's it's all right could be better [Music] if and when you buy the new assassin's creed game it's kind of like they're making you a promise right you see the box you see the poster the trailer and your imagination runs wild with these ideas of well-produced story missions with super clean combat and stealth mechanics that make you feel really really cool this stuff is in the game sure but the main story only lasts a little over 10 hours so what does completing everything in a game like this have to offer and how does it actually feel hours and hours of slogging through boring side quests replaying missions until you do them perfectly upgrading rome finding flags and feathers and chests and collecting a bunch of dudes to train up like pokemon and send them out on missions all around the world that's all right here in assassin's creed brotherhood is there something wrong with me why am i still into this game well i think for the most part it's just because i liked assassin's creed 2 so much and this is more of the same it's still the ezio you know complete with all the climbing free running and cool looking arkham arcade style combat but while this time you are in rome which you only saw a tiny bit of in the last game during the last fight you're at least still definitely in italy and it for sure feels like it but there are a few tiny changes like addition of the crossbow and long range poison darts that add a little variation to some of the most tired parts of the original assassin's creed 2. for example the renovations now occur in the town you spend most of your time in rather than a separate map at your family villa and as you take out the borgia towers around the city more places are made available for you to fix up also the combat now favors an aggressive strike first then break the enemy's defense style which i really enjoyed since combat where you have to wait for the right time to parry always breaks my immersion just a little bit they also included a spiffy new one-hit kill chain mechanic to the game that enables you to press a button in contact sensitive situations and use things like your pistol and your knives in cool cinematic ways which is awesome for breaking up the endless monotony of slaughtering roman soldiers see i think what happened with brotherhood was that since it wasn't the huge step forward a numbered sequel had to be the creative team at ubisoft must have finally realized that what the audience really wants from this game is the cleanest and best ezio experience thus far so that it's more bearable to grind through every last quest in the game and boy are there a lot of them the big new and noticeable addition to assassin's creed brotherhood is that every single mission both side quest and main story have an added synchronization bonus in which you must do exactly as ezio did back in the day in order to get that 100 synchronization things like doing a mission faster don't kill anyone don't take damage don't fall all kinds of crazy added stipulations now this idea of this isn't that bad it's somewhat smart actually however it will become a pain in the ass as you get closer and closer to completing the game there will be a mission or two where you'll want to tear your hair out because you almost beat it or it seems impossible in addition to perfecting every sequence to 100 sync which you can now replay at will by mission from the animus menu completing the game means renovating every shop in rome there's the quest you get from the shops themselves and tons of materials to collect from chests and specific npcs 10 more crazy hard puzzle glyphs which unlock more of the crazy alien story from the last game mercenary courtesan thief and assassin guild missions and challenges which themselves need to be completed with a hundred percent sync because everything in this game has the hundred snake machine stipulations okay okay ready three two one plus there's the regular pigeon coop style assassination contracts the quicker templar agent missions a set of weird love story missions with explorer americo vespucci's cousin christina and even a tough set of vr missions not to mention the collectible feathers flags and secret flags which you can find in the six esque layers of romulus yeah yeah there's a law in assassin's creed brotherhood but then again there's a lot in all of the assassin's creed games yet unlike a game like skyrim or the witcher 3 where 100 completion takes forever and is only for the hardest of the hardcore assassin's creed brotherhood feels like it actually wants you to do everything in assassin's creed one the side missions felt like unnecessary window dressing in two they were more fleshed out for sure but they still weren't fully enjoyable but with brotherhood it's almost like the side quests are the game and they all feel a little bit more engaging because the game cleverly ties things together like how collecting feathers unlocks more merchandise at shops and how the story unlocks more and more side quest options as it goes on it's kind of weird i know but i guess for an annual series a really meaty half sequel with better production values cleaned up mechanics and a few extra features is kind of the best thing we could hope for considering i mean hey at least it's better than just re-releasing a last-gen game on a current gen game console as a stop gap to oh yeah yeah never mind my point is it's obvious that the devs tried to do something interesting with the job they had to do but the question still remains was it worth it for one thing i don't think i ever would have went back and played this again if it weren't for the show or my incompulsive need to complete everything just because it's so generally forgettable and all the seo games kind of blend together but if the rewards are good i could actually see myself walking away from this one feeling pretty satisfied and i hate to say it because it genuinely makes me feel like a consumer purely because i liked ezio last time and it's still fun to be him again damn [Music] so what are these rewards and are they really worth it well to be honest with you it's pretty tough to tell when all three progress trackers the game gives you don't make sense with each other between the trophy list 100 sync and the actual in-game bonuses you receive for doing things it's like trying to jump into westworld at episode 5. nothing adds up is this guy a robot or a person is this show about mmos why is everyone naked as usual the majority of the trophies which should be coveted badges of honor that require actual effort to get so that it feels good when you earn one are gettable without even having to think about them but then half the stuff you do get hard-earned trophies for like winning the highest bet with fights or winning 10 000 florence from the dice game have nothing to do with your 100 sync run and then there's kind of the secret other stuff like doing all the guild challenges perfections the thief the courtesans the mercenaries or getting medals on all of the vr missions that only reward you with in-game items and not trophies it's really super confusing and hard to keep track of and i wasn't even 100 sure i completed the game until i did a few hours of research literally when i thought i was done with the game i was stuck at 91.6 percent and that's a common factual bug known in the game it turns out that the thief missions are kind of a secret and you have to find them and pursue all of them though i will say for doing the vr missions you do get to dress as ryden from metal gear solid which was very very strange also and this one's just for me it's so damn good that they got rid of the multiplayer and the extra achievements that came with them for the seo collection thank god almighty honestly if it were up to me i double aerial wristband assassinate all the online achievements all together if i could they're always either impossible on purpose as someone's sick idea of a joke or there's something that you'll only ever get because you've been addicted to the game for hundreds and hundreds of hours and honestly that doesn't work for me but i have to give credit where credit's due the multiplayer in the game was super fun and innovative i'm just kind of glad i don't have to level my online character status avatar up to level 50 this week for the sake of being comprehensive but hey at least there are things for you to get in this game like i said before most rewards come in the form of more items becoming available in the shops but they're mostly sort of spread out so that you're continually getting stuff as you progress through the game so let's focus on that big boy end game stuff for completely restoring rome you unlock the adatore cape which sets your notoriety level at zero until you take it off you can also get the borja cape which you get for collecting all the flags in the game and it does the exact same thing both items are kind of rad but they're kind of superfluous when you get to the end game stuff unless you're trying to get achievements or something like that then there's the la volpe's bite altair sword maria's dagger and bartholomew's axe which you'll get for completing the guild challenges there's also the brutus weapon and armor set from the layers of romulus and then there's a bunch of weird cheat codes you can use when replaying the memories that you get for hitting 100 synchronization on each sequence now all these sound pretty good but it's not really top tier until the end when you're desmond riding on a unicorn in renaissance italy with a lightning axe and an infinite supply of killer lady assassins so in assassin's creed 2 when you finished all the glyph puzzles you unlocked a vague and mysterious movie about some ancient angelic figures known as adam and eve plays this time around you actually get to take desmond through a weird cyber world animus obstacle course that leads you to well i don't know exactly here's a tiny spoiler for the game's twist ending and some plot details so vague that even 2013 blockbuster prometheus looks at it and goes ugh i don't know man but hey at least it looks cool and the glyph puzzles themselves are pretty interesting to make up for it if this was the only reward in the game i'd be super pissed but since it's one of many i'm cool with it in my playthrough of assassin's creed brotherhood there were eight deaths 28 failed attempts at 100 synchronization 52 hours of total play time 102 borgia flags picked up because for some weird reason there's 101 in the game but my game glitched out and i skipped one so i got 102 which luckily didn't things up for me because that happens a lot in assassin's creed games looking at you number one 10 feathers collected several rome monuments and shops restored 12 assassins recruited and trained up and zero multiplayer played thank god look it's fun but to have to have done that on top of all this would not have been nice either you're like me and you enjoy the gameplay of assassins creed all together enough to crush the whole game or you're like most people and you'll play once with the main story mess around a multiplayer for a little bit and call it a day but you want to know what's kind of ironic regardless of how long you decide to play you and i will still have the exact same amount of problems all of them are small things like getting stuck in walls or a button input not registering here or there but luckily for you you had to do it only for a little bit whereas i did the for a few more hours assassin's creed brotherhood truly feels like it's not that important of a game that doesn't change the fact that the game is still fun but it is kind of unnecessary in regards to the ezio trilogy if you will assassin's creed brotherhood is kind of a letdown it really is a assassin's creed 2.5 the story is pretty much the same it's got some fun new gameplay elements but at the core it's another assassin's creed game and i honestly don't think the world would be that bummed out if we didn't get to play this game and move on at the core etio is still badass i like the overall arc of the anime situation but it does just kind of miss the mark so with that in mind guys i give this my completionist rating of play it play it you know that a series has gotten huge when there's start to be a smaller series inside the larger one like the captain america trilogy and the mcu or the many thousands of mario sport spin-offs or in this case the ezio trilogy that sits nestled in between assassin's creed and assassin's creed iii the protagonist from the second assassin's creed game ezio auditore was so dope that he got two more games before the series moved on to the next number creating a neat little trilogy package within the hundreds and hundreds of assassin's creed games that exist but the third ezio game assassin's creed revelations is the end of his trilogy and it's at its best when it feels conclusive so let's take another stab filled journey back in time and complete assassin's creed revelations here comes a new challenger [Music] hey everyone and welcome to an all new episode of the completionist where we don't just beat the games we complete them now i know there are a seemingly endless number of games in the assassin's creed franchise and that the last few installments have been a major shake up to the whole formula but it's interesting to look back at the earlier games and see the little ways that they tried to differentiate themselves within the set structure and style of the series but people really lashed on to one specific character and that my friends is ezio they love them so much they made him three games with the content now i'll be honest with you that i'm a little worried about this game getting lost in the sea of assassin's creed games or that there won't be anything interesting or unique enough for me to latch onto especially since i've played so many of the installments after and before this will revelations feel like an essential part of the big picture or is just one small stepping stone for ubisoft's quest for world domination honestly i have no idea but even the worst of these games is super playable so i'd be lying to say that if i wasn't looking forward to this trip at least one time through the assassin's creed series is hugely influential and while that all started with altair in the original game it was assassin's creed 2 that really took the series to the next level fans connected with the character of ezio and the sequel streamlined a lot of the game's ideas while also adding a bunch of cool new weapons and abilities assassin's creed brotherhood then moved that story forward but as the last installment in the trilogy assassin's creed revelations has a truly weird place in the larger picture it's the end of something but also just another stepping stone before the series jumps to a new time period and while it was immediately apparent that a huge part of the appeal of these games was going to be getting to experience new time periods ubisoft couldn't resist continuing ezio's story with two follow-ups before eventually jumping to the confusingly titled assassin's creed iii although the naming conventions for the series would continue to be only slightly less weird than the ones for the fast and the furious films it kind of felt like they were stalling before moving the series forward but taken as their own trilogy and removed from the context of the rest of the series the seo games tell a really great character-driven story and it's awesome to play as a character throughout the span of his life and watch him age across several games they're even bundled together in the ezio collection on playstation 4 which is how i'll be playing it assassin's creed revelations picks up where the previous game brotherhood left off with ezio and altair's present-day ancestor desmond trapped in a coma this means he has to use the animus which is the creepy sci-fi device used in all the games to help desmond access his ancestors memories and put his broken brain back together he also needs to collect new memories of altair tying the first game into the ezio adventures in the ezio segments of the story our aging but still dashing italian murder hero finds himself in constantinople he also finds himself in some of altair's old stomping grounds like masaya from the first game and then he you know assassinates people taking the action out of italy is great and it helps revelation stand out because altair's there it feels like a very special crossover episode and would be a very neat way to wrap things up except of course there are going to be 300 more games after this assassin's creed revelations doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or the hidden blade for that matter in fact it's the first game at this point in the series that doesn't feel like it's really bothering to contribute new ideas it's there to draw on what's come before and so ezio altair and even desmond do the things that they've been so great at doing up to this point stab people climb buildings collect treasure and in the case of desmond have some absolutely wild dreams the combat and parkour all feels pretty much exactly the same as it has before this if you're into the basic mechanics of the assassin's creed games they're all here you can slit throats from the shadows fight by countering enemy moves and dive into terrifyingly shallow bales of hay the only things that are really new are the den defenses after capturing territory from the evil templars who are the villains and pretty much all of these games they'll send guys to capture them back you've got to defend your territory and what's basically a tower defense mini game but everything else is pretty typical assassin's creed shenanigans like many of the games in the assassin's creed series revelations feels very much designed with completion in mind there are a jillion things to collect just like always and some cool hidden challenges to find but it should be just as doable as the others were and hopefully without the technical setbacks and glitches that i dealt with in the first one so if you allow me to return to my hastily formed fast and furious metaphor the first game is the fast and the furious it lays the ground rules it stars a bald guy who doesn't like talking that much etc assassin's creed 2 is too fast too furious to assassins to creed if you will brotherhood is tokyo drift because why not and revelations is the confusingly titled fast and furious which is somehow the fourth installment of that series ben diesel is back or in this case altair and is mostly just there to wrap things up before the series tries to remand itself it's a perfect metaphor and i stand by it when you're putting out a new installment of a series every single year it's important to find something that makes each game feel fresh and stand out from the others but the transitional place that revelation holds in the series actually turns out to be its biggest weakness and its biggest strength now i love when games try something new but assassin's creed revelations is consistently at its strongest when leaning into its place at the end of a trilogy and trusting itself to deliver a fun assassin's creed experience without being responsible for introducing a bunch of new ideas it's the ending of something and it's at its best when it really feels that way this is clearest in the story which is honestly pretty dope playing as an older ezio lends some extra weight to the proceedings because this guy has seen and done a lot in his life and killed just so many people while doing it but the ezio and altair segments of the game show a real respect for the past which is good for a series that's so focused on history although there are a million more lead assassin characters in the series now at the time of revelations it was just the three ezio altair and desmond so it only makes sense that the story in this game is very much about bringing those three characters together to wrap up this stage of the story the only one of those characters it kind of falters with is desmond because it's not an ending he's in the next game which means that his stuff feels the most inessential the way that his fragmented mind is visualized is very cool though with an island that he can use to access memories and you can do the five desmond missions pretty much whenever you want though there is a recommended order these sequences are in first person and use a mechanic that involves placing blocks you can walk on the same goes for the dlc the lost archive which is basically an additional desmond adventure it's kind of a neat puzzle mechanic but it feels weirdly out of place in the rest of the game it's a good idea that isn't committed to and further contributes to desmond's bits feeling kind of like a filler to even unlock these missions though you have to collect animus fragments as ezio but you only need about a third of them to get the desmond sequences which is fine because i'm definitely going to swipe all 100 of those bad boys the assassins creed games have always involved lots of collecting that does not change here but as with all the other games the map is hugely useful for letting you know where everything is and once you get 50 of the fragments the other 50 appear on your map which feels like a huge relief once it happens it makes the process easier as the game goes on as it should there are also books you can buy that eventually get you a trophy and memoir pages that unlock a secret tomb hiding a super dope set of armor there are dozens of weapons to be used throughout the game but many of them are disposable you do get some neat special ones like altair sword but honestly combat feels pretty similar no matter what you're using the combat and parkour feel basically like they do in the previous two games and you know what that's good the collecting feels basically the same too while the style eventually got stale to the point that ubisoft would totally change it for the most recent games and wasn't there yet in revelations and besides it's weird to go changing stuff in the last installment of a trilogy that consistency is where assassin's creed revelations really shines the biggest new addition to the series is also probably the game's weakest element the den defenses assassin's creed revelations feature something called the mediterranean defense game where you can seize territory from the templars and try to hold on to them you train assassins and then send them on missions and it's a neat little distraction to the main attraction that is stabbing thousands of guards in the neck but sometimes the templars try to get their territory back and then you have to defend it in what's basically a tower defense minigame and although i don't have anything against mini-games i want them all to feel like a natural extension of the game's world whereas this one just feels kind of generic and not assassins creedy enough but fortunately if you manage your territories you won't have to do these den defenses too often you have to do a couple for the sake of getting a trophy but not enough that it hugely detracts from the game still it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb because it's the biggest thing that's new and the weakest part of the game but once you get back to old-fashioned assassin activities like sneaking through shadows and stabbing two dudes at the same time it all just feels right and once the story can really get to the business of resolving things for ezio and altair i was fully wrapped up in it it got me thinking about the games that belonged to a long series like this one since all the assassins creed games came out pretty close together it's a series with a lot of history but not one that goes particularly far back so there's no real nostalgia to lean on and each game needs to strike a balance between innovation and giving the fans what they want when brotherhood and revelations came out back in the day i was actually a little bummed because i just wanted ubisoft to hurry up and give me my new time periods it seemed like the whole point of the series was to drastically change up the setting each time but there's something to be said for what a consistent product ubisoft was putting out at the time diminishing returns hadn't quite set in yet and revelations puts less energy into driving the franchise forward and more into just being like a good video game and more than that a good resolution to the historical story had been telling and that's more important because like sure everyone loves the high-speed car heists of fast five or the inexplicably named the fate of the furious but some of us yearn for the days of simple movies about drag racing a good assassin never leaves any loose ends the same is true of a good completionist an assassin's creed revelations is an extremely meticulous game it may not be the most fresh and exciting assassin's creed game but it's thoughtful and well made with tons of attention to detail there are four guilds with a series of challenges that require you to use your weapons and gadgets in a certain way several of the trophies also require you to accomplish especially assassin-esque feats and the game is good at encouraging you to use all the tools at your disposal you can craft bombs of which there are a whole bunch of different types there's even a set of specific bomb challenges to complete though they mostly feel like a tutorial for the various types of bombs and while the game offers you multitudinous methods of murder it also pays special attention to making traversal a fun experience it's one of the things that initially made this series feel so exciting the feeling of darting from rooftop to rooftop or climbing to the top of towers so while there's still plenty of climbing you also get to let loose with a hooked blade for riding ziplines plus even a parachute for one of the trophies i even had to parachute onto a zipline which is something that i will definitely never do in real life sounds way too hard but something that isn't too difficult to do is completing this game if you match the game's detail-oriented approach you can pretty quickly check things off of your list plenty of tropes fell into my lap as i played and doing a clean up of the map after i finished the story was pretty simple because the game lays everything out for you in fact it even gives you optional objectives in each mission so that you can get a hundred percent synchronization and fortunately there's only one optional objective per section in some of the later games this mechanic can get a little out of control but here it was pretty manageable so i obviously did all those on my run through the story because it involves the words 100 and you know i can't resist plus it saves a lot of trouble later on and then you can explore the world and collect the last little bits and pieces appreciating all the little details these games have to offer along the way this series is like catnip for history buffs and with good reason and yeah lots of liberties are obviously taken with the events that happen in the story but you can tell that lots of research is always involved to make the time period feel lived in and natural and although revelations mostly takes you to the types of environments you've already seen if you've played the other games there are always cool little bits of texture and the game looks pretty good on the ps4 too it obviously can't stack up to some of the later games in the series it still looks really pretty you can really count each of the gray hairs in ezio's beard you know these are definitely the type of games that benefit from increasingly dope visuals you can't buy into existing in a radically different time and place if the sights and sounds aren't up to snuff it's just like the 7th fast and the furious movie aptly named furious 7. while watching ezio age and live out his entire life is the real reward for this game it also manages to offer you plenty of stuff in exchange for your efforts there are the desmond challenges that unlock as you get your first 30 animus fragments there's also the hagga sofia challenge level which is sort of a reward for finding all the memoir pages and it's pretty cool too with some fun platforming sections but at the end of it is ishak pasha's armor which is easily the best armor in the game so that's nice you also get a dope new weapon for completing all three sets of challenges at each of the guilds and in a game with this much stabbing it's always nice to have a shiny new set of stab and utensils the game also consistently throws little bonuses at you for getting a 100 sink on your missions which is always appreciated and if you get 100 on all of them you get some dope new robes that belonged to altair unfortunately there are some items that can only be unlocked by using ubisoft's uplay service which is kind of annoying there's also a bunch of stuff that unlocks for the multiplayer mode which i haven't even mentioned because well it's not even a thing anymore in this version of the game it's fine we're moving on and pretending that ubisoft never tried to turn assassin's creed into a multiplayer game assassin's creed revelations delivers if you've played the first three games before this you're here for the story and you want to experience the expansive world while i played assassin's creed revelations there were 10 deaths or excuse me desynchronizations 100 animus fragments collected 51 trophies unlocked 34 hours of total play time and a whopping nine fast and the furious movies if you count future best picture winner fast and furious presents hobbs and shaw all told assassin's creed revelations is exactly the game it needs to be for the place it holds in the franchise some new stuff like the den defenses doesn't quite stick but if you like these games and played the three before this there's really no reason not to play this one it gives a fan favorite character an epic send-off and plays exactly the way an assassin's creed game from 2011 should play even though the series has moved on assassin's creed revelations was definitely a major stop on that journey as opposed to the filler i once took it for so there we have it i don't think i would call assassin's creed revelations my favorite in the series but it definitely is one of the better ones some of the other time periods are more interesting or have cashier hooks like pirates or ancient egypt but this game is the only one that has to close out an entire trilogy that said i don't know if i'd be bothered to get all the achievements just because i'd rather do stuff with more tangible rewards and life is too short for tower defense minigames so with that in mind guys i give this game my completionist rating of finish it that's all the time we have today guys so please as always let me know about today's episode somewhere on the internet if you like the show do me a favor hit that like button and hey stick around hit the subscribe button and click the bell for all notifications on all the time we do new videos every wednesday and saturday guys i've enjoyed the completionist and if you want to support the show head over to patreon.com the completionist or buy some merch at thecompletionist.com we'll see you next week bye

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 132,488

Keywords: assassin's creed ezio trilogy, assassin's creed ezio collection, assassins creed, assassin's creed, ezio trilogy, ezio collection, ubisoft, assassin, review, game reviews, gaming, completionist, g4tv, g4, attack of the show, the ezio triligy, assassin's creed embers, assassins creed 2, assassins creed brotherhood, playstation, nintendo, nintendo switch, switch, Assassins Creed Revelations, IGN, gameplay, compiliation, assassin's creed remastered, stealth, action, remastered

Id: A0qGn4BGoU4

Length: 62min 50sec (3770 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022