Combat is more or less the same, emphasizing a system of parries, counters and instant kills, and Edward still free-runs like his ancestors and descendants. This was difficult to reconcile amid some cleaned-up basic mechanics. Assassin's Creed 4 is more comfortable wandering the ocean in search of one big score. The inclusion of Assassin's Creed's fiction feels haphazard and often cursory even assassination feels perfunctory. Edward isn't the series' traditional lead, and his absence of allegiance hangs throughout the game. Assassin's Creed 4 is content to sit on the edges of that greater conflict. Previous Assassin's Creed games - particularly the main, numbered games - have revolved around the war between Assassin and Templar, the turning points, the meaningful moments. Edward is shipwrecked and soon drawn into the conflict between the authoritarian and power-hungry Templars and their enemies the Assassins. Read my Forbes blog here.Assassin's Creed 4 stars Edward Kenway, a pirate in the turn-of-the-18th-century Caribbean. Though I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.įollow me on Twitter or Facebook. Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth Joel and Ellie (though not biologically related, The Last of Us was very much the story of a father and daughter) and now Assassin's Creed IV.Īnd while this last one focuses on that only in its final minutes, it does so with a kind of grace and wistfulness that took me aback. Now that I think about it, all three games share this theme: The relationship between fathers and daughters. BioShock Infinite had a great twist at the end, in spite of its more convoluted multi-verse theme, but there was nothing quite so touching as these simple moments between Kenway and his daughter. Maybe not quite as powerful as the final chapter in The Last of Us, but less bleak and more beautiful in its own way. I'd set it up alongside some of the better endings in video games this year. "I like to think I would have." The dialogue moves between playfulness and regret.įor whatever reason, these final scenes-prior to the actual finale, with Kenway and his children in the opera house that opens Assassin's Creed III-were brilliant and moving an oddly sad and redemptive finale to a game mostly about killing and then killing some more. Paraphrasing here: "If I'd known, maybe I would have come back," Kenway tells his daughter. The whole thing is surprisingly touching, and filled with same excellent dialogue that comprises most of the rest of the game. He chastises her for referring to the Jackdaw as a "boat" rather than a ship, and they talk about her mother. Edward and his daughter sailing back to England. It's the daughter he never met, never knew he had, sent to him after his wife's death.Ĭredits roll, but they roll over a new scene. When Edward comes to the ship, a sailor escorts a young girl down to the dock. A ship has sailed into the harbor, and he walks down toward it, stopping only to pluck a pair of flowers.īonny and some impromptu musicians fill the scene with a lovely, sad sort of song. Kenway looks around the cove, sees the ghosts of his dead friends and enemies sitting and laughing and drinking.
She declines, but tells him that if ever stops moving for more than ten minutes he'll make a fine father. There, he and Anne Bonny talk, and he asks if she'll accompany him to England. We're not privy to its contents at first, but the truth emerges in the closing scenes, back at Kenway's secret cove which he's given over to the Assassins. After killing the last Templar target in the game, a letter arrives from England. When the story draws to its close, Kenway is a new man, and it's well-timed. He needs more of a purpose his guilt drives him, as does his anger. Whether out of a sense of real duty or a desire for revenge isn't entirely clear, though most likely it's a bit of both. But eventually Kenway emerges from his misery and self-destruction, as if from a baptism, and takes up arms with the Assassins for a time.
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