Hot on the heels of all the Dan Brown conspiracy silliness/success, the Assassin's Creed series has been helping to convince people all kinds of horribly inaccurate things about the Middle Ages since the first game was released in 2007. Full disclosure: I played the original but did not beat it, and I still haven't beaten the sequel, but I'm here to write about it anyway.
Plot
The game takes place in Renaissance Italy, starting in Florence and transporting the player throughout Tuscany and eventually to Venice and Rome. As mentioned above, the plot might as well be lifted straight from a Dan Brown novel: the protagonist is Ezio Auditore da Firenze , son of a wealthy Florentine merchant whose father and brothers are wiped out by their political opponents in the opening hour of the game. Ezio discovers that his family is part of a secret fraternal organization called the Assassins' Brotherhood, whose mission it is to stop the spread of Templar authority.
The player guides Ezio across rooftops, Parkour-style, and through the streets of Italian cities, as he seeks out the members of the Templars responsible for his family's deaths. Ezio also rebuilds his family's estate in San Gimignano, where he hides his mother and surviving sisters. Along the way, he makes friends with Leonardo Da Vinci and enemies with all sorts of powerful individuals and families.
Superficially
At a basic level, the game does a pretty fantastic job of immersing the player in 15th-century Italy. The cities and towns of Renaissance Italy are big, lively, and gorgeous. There are lots of famous churches and palaces faithfully recreated, and standing from a rooftop or tower, the medieval cities' winding alleys and uneven rooftops make for very believable vistas. There are merchants, thieves, beggars, monks, nuns, soldiers, and prostitutes all walking around the streets and gathering in public squares. It's a really impressive and convincing presentation, with a good color palette providing enough variation to keep it interesting: the cities obviously look rather orange from the rooftops, but from the ground there's plenty of off-whites and green hanging plants. The countryside varies from city to city, with golden wheat fields, rolling grasslands (which are especially pretty), sparse mountain trails, and marshy coasts.
The voice acting, so often the worst part of any given video game, is actually pretty great here. The accents are well done rather than over-the-top, and there's even an Italian-language setting for purists/Italian people. The writing is sometimes kind of crappy, but running around, talking to people, and advancing the plot at least doesn't require cringe-inducing acting, like in so many games. The standard is low here but the developers have done well.
Oops.
Unfortunately, the plot that is advanced is painfully absurd for anyone looking for historical accuracy. The Assassins' Brotherhood Ezio is a part of is descended from the Assassins (the Hashshashin), the Isma'ili Shia sect of Islam from the Middle Ages. The original game had players take the role of Altair, a Hashshashin agent during the Third Crusade, and the enemies there were Templars, Hospitallers, and enemy Muslims. It was a believable enough plot, given the historical reality of the Hashshashin and their wars against just about everybody around them during the crusade period.
The original hardly set a high standard for historical accuracy for the sequel to follow, though. When I owned the original, I was quite surprised and impressed by the attention to detail the game had, even though the cities were almost all exactly the same. When I saw that the enemies patrolling the streets of Damascus were in fact Templars, though, I had to put the game down in frustration. Damascus was the economic and political capital of Syria during the crusades, and was probably the most important Muslim city opposing the Crusader States. Having Templars patrolling the streets of Damascus is like having Soviets patrolling the streets of Berlin in 1939. It was a silly, needless design decision that only turned me away from the game.
In Assassin's Creed 2, the enemy grunts aren't Templars, though, they're ordinary Italian soldiers and civil guards, so it's got to be better, right? Well, enemy soldiers aren't terribly misplaced in the way they were in the original, but the main villains sure are. As mentioned, Ezio is fighting the Knights Templar, but any historian will tell you that the Templar order and infrastructure was disbanded in 1312, with the approval of the Papacy. Dan Brown's novels have capitalized on modern cynicism toward religious fanatics, and Assassin's Creed 2 does the same. While the Da Vinci Code connects the Templars to the Illuminati, Assassin's Creed has the Templars surviving up until the modern day.
Technically speaking, the player doesn't control Ezio, but one of his descendants, who is accessing Ezio's memory through his inherited DNA (somehow), in an effort to stop the modern Templars. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But the developers' compulsion to make the Templars a modern threat betrays the degree to which the story is an attempt to capitalize on the success of the Da Vinci Code. They must've seen the conflict between Assassins and Templars as a potentially lucrative one, but worried making it purely historical would make it underwhelming with Dan Brown making it a modern conflict. If you ask me, this doesn't give historical reality enough credit, since there's plenty of intrigue, conflict, and drama in the history books to make for a compelling story here. I'd even take seriously a plot involving a surviving Templar Order 150 years after their real destruction, but making the Templars survive a whole 700 years later than they really did only turns me off from the plot.
It could be worse.
While I said before that the game was superficially accurate but narratively absurd, but there are some subtle things the game does well that deserve credit. The villa-building meta-game, where Ezio repairs shops in San Gimignano and buys up famous works of art to decorate his palace. San Gimignano is a rather small walled town, clearly centered around the palace at the top of the hill. I'm no expert on Italy, but small market towns built around a wealthy estate were quite common in the second half of the Middle Ages, and I can only assume that Italy, which was more urban-centered than the rest of Europe, had lots of towns like the one presented here. It's great that the developers included small towns like San Gimignano and Forli along with the big cities. Italy certainly had larger, more politically-autonomous cities than most places in Europe in this period, but there was no shortage of small towns dotting the peninsula either. Even outside the walls of the large cities, there are wheat and other crop fields, and small houses that blur the often sharply-portrayed line between urban and rural.
There's also a pretty accurate portrayal of medieval Italy's oligarchic, proto-capitalist organization. The dominance of the merchant/banking families is made clear early on. Given the constraints of the plot, though, there's only so much of an impact these accuracies can have. The developers needed a reason for the Templars to be the bad guys, so they associated them with the Borgias before their seizure of control of Florence from the Medici. In making the villains power-hungry, the plot idealizes the Medici Florence that preceded the rise of the Borgias. Now, Rodrigo Borgia was a pretty corrupt, sketchy dude, but he wasn't a Templar and I have to assume (without having studied the region in any particular depth) that the Borgia family was about as self-interested and autocratic as any other of the time. If they were better at consolidating power than the others and developed a bad reputation for it, it doesn't mean the Medici were pure, selfless community leaders. Rivalry and market control were the name of the game in the oligarchic, almost anarcho-capitalist world of Italian city politics. For all the effort put in to making the cities large, lively, and believable, making the villains so cartoonishly autocratic rather needlessly kills the historical believability of the plot.
On a less scholarly note, the game does unintentionally get one thing spot on about the period. Early in the game, before Ezio's family is attacked and before he knows he's to be an assassin, the city of Florence is at the player's disposal, and the game has all kinds of ways to let the player be a rich, spoiled, sociopathic asshole. Walking through the crowds of any given city, holding a button basically activates "pickpocket mode". Bumping into anyone - man, woman, merchant, peasant, monk, nun, or soldier - makes Ezio steal their money. It's always a paltry sum, and there's no real reason to do it given how much money San Gimignano produces for Ezio, and it makes even less sense given how wealthy Ezio's family is from the start.
Essentially, it's all part of the game's attention to detail in portraying just how much of an asshole rich, young Italian men could and can be. Rich? Steal from some poor people! To prevent players from murdering innocent passers-by, the developers made killing two innocents in a row a game over. Which means you can kill one random innocent person every minute or so and get away with it. Hate monks? Poison one! Also, there's no penalty for beating the mother-loving shit out of people, as long as you don't use any blades. Grab them, knee them in the face, throw them into groups of soldiers who'll stab them, then kick them when they're on the ground. No penalty! It's great fun. You can be the selfish, thieving, violent, lawless 15th century Italian playboy you've always wanted to be!
Well!
All in all? A fun game! As mentioned, the standard for historical accuracy was low after the original, and given recent pop-culture representations of the Templars, it shouldn't be surprising (or even disappointing) that they are presented as inaccurately as they are. It shouldn't be disappointing, but it is. Play the game if you're looking for some Parkour fun with a well-presented setting, but not if you're looking to learn about Medieval Italy. Read a book by a real historian for that sort of thing.
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