Turns out the Leonardo Da’Vinci also just happens to be on his way to beautiful Venice. Perhaps he’ll be willing to travel with us since we’ve become such good friends.
I somehow managed to forget that there’s a mission where do a classic video game “protect the carriage” mission, except our cargo is Leonardo Da’Vinci on his way to Venice. Honestly, the goofiness of the whole affair is part of what makes it so fun. If one aims to fictionalize historical events in a video game, they might as well take full advantage of the setting.
What I can fault them for is how little time we actually spend in Forli as part of the main story. It seems strange to have this full map available to us, but only have it serve as a detour en route to our primary destination. Of course, there is a reason for it that we’ll get to later, but not one that I find satisfactory.
At the very least, in the downtime we get to spend some more time with Desmond and the “real-world” portion of the fiction for a brief moment. Like I said before, Desmond was not a very well-received character critically, but he had already been baked into the franchise as a linchpin that binds together all of the ancestors we would play as, as was The Animus as a vehicle to execute on that premise. Thus, the dev team did their best to only use him sparingly enough to advance the main thread while allocating as much time as possible to Ezio and his journey.
Though we won’t get to them, it became clear later on that many of the games released after his story-line was revolved suffered for it. His character did a lot of heavy-lifting tying all of the various threads of the franchise together, and without someone like him in that role it became difficult to maintain a sense of forward momentum.
The lesson to learn from this is simple: Never listen to your fans. They don’t know what they want.
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