Only one name remains on the list: Rodrigo Borgia aka The Spaniard. One more name, and our revenge is complete.

On one hand, I like this as a part of Ezio’s character arc, where he learns that all of his friends have been secretly guiding him over the past decade, but as other voices have called out, this is strange. Stranger even than the fact that Machiavelli is 17 years old when this scene takes place and was 7 years old when Ezio’s family was killed.

I remember at the time being surprised not that all of these characters were secretly Assassins, but that I was supposed to be unaware of that fact despite the fact that Uncle Mario made that pretty clear in the early game. I was also not aware that Ezio wasn’t officially an assassin until this moment. I figured that when he told Mario that he would take on his father’s work, that would come with the implication that he was an Assassin.

Normally, we would be marching straight into the endgame. However, this version of Assassin’s Creed 2 comes with the missing DLC sequences 12 and 13 packed into the game. Therefore, we will begin next week with Sequence 12: The Battle of Forli.

Two more Templars exist in Venezia, and it’s time to strike their names off the list once and for all.

At last, the end game approaches. And next time, all will come into focus.

Somehow we’ve been roped into playing Carnival games in order to gain access to our next target, so we had better play to win.

It’s very amusing that Carnevale is the sequence that the initial E3 trailer was built on, because in retrospect it’s probably one of the least interesting from a gameplay and story perspective, even if it’s a winner in terms of visuals and atmosphere.

This section almost has the feel of a filler episode, where instead of stalking our target and planning our assassination, the developers manufactured this detour in order to justify Ezio playing Carnival games. The problem is that the justification is sloppy. We enter the games in the first place because the mask is too unique to steal and pass off as our own, but then we immediately steal it after it’s wrongly awarded to the target’s bodyguard.

As it turns out, stealing the mask absolutely works, drawing us close enough to our target that we can reenact the trailer(-ish) and take him out with a well placed shot.

We may be the most wanted man in all of Venezia, but that’s no problem when it’s Carnevale.

At last, we finally obtain one of my favorite upgrades for our arsenal: The Hidden Gun. It was one of the first things unveiled to us in the market thanks to the E3 trailer, and it’s a logical extension and evolution of the Hidden Blade. Arguably, the only reason it doesn’t break the game is the slow startup time and limited ammo, but the ability to handle targets at range is very useful (and we’ll see in the next episode).

And as I said in the episode, it is easy to joke and jape about Ezio’s mask being the reason he can go out in public despite being easily identifiable through his assassin’s robes, but it is especially funny where one can barely see the mask underneath the hood of said robes.

Despite that, I don’t mind it as a storytelling convenience, since we’ve already accepted that Ezio can blend into crowds effortlessly despite wearing such ostentatious attire. What I do mind though is the conceit with the Golden Mask, which we’ll get into next time.

With the leader of Venice subject to an assassination plot (not ours), it’s up to us to stop the Templars from taking control of the city.

If you’re going to involve Leonardo da’Vinci in your story set in the Italian Renaissance, you’re almost contractually obligated to make use of his legendary flying machine in it’s own dedicated gameplay segment. And thankfully for us, it’s actually a fun, if brief, segment of the game.

With it’s help, another Templar lies dead, but not before his own plans succeeded. Our newly acquired infamy is bad for us, but that does lead to one of the most interesting sections of the game: Carnivale.

Although we have word of yet another big Templar conspiracy, we haven’t done our court mandated Assassin’s Tomb for this session yet.

And that means it’s Tomb Time! Nothing

Though these tombs are all fun platforming sections, I don’t have much more to add than that. This is our 4th Tomb, meaning we have 2 left to go.

But for now, let us return to the main story next time.

Looks like we’re just about ready to deal with Emilio Barbarigo. At least, we will be once we finish a few more preparation tasks.

As a history fun fact, apparently Cantarella was a poison that the Borgias allegedly made frequent use of during Rodrigo Borgia’s term as pope, though it is more of a myth than something substantiated by historical record. Still, for a work of fiction its a useful tool for a writing team to employ to add some authenticity to their storyline.

Aside from that, though it might be easy to clown on a late 2000s tailing mission, I admit that it’s easy to feel like a badass stalking our targets in the streets. When using the factions like courtesans and thieves to run interference with the guards, we begin to embody the Ezio from the E3 trailer, where we’re using our contacts to set up the moment we can strike in the middle of the crowd (despite not actually assassinating anyone during these tailing missions).

It’s as much a core part of the fantasy that Assassin’s Creed 2 is invoking as the actual moment where our Hidden Blade gets embedding into the target’s throat.

It didn’t take us long to identify our next target in scenic Venezia, and acquire allies in our fight against him. The merchant king has bought himself time, but not much of it.

Looking over a Let’s Play of the original version, the issue I have with the eyes on Rosa’s model is still there, but much harder to see then it was here in this re-released version. We can only partially blame the up-res here.

Having said that, one of the things that this episode demonstrates, and a key contributor to why Ezio became so popular, is that even as a revenge-seeking adult, he retains the charisma and charm of his younger self. His banter with Rosa, like Catarina back in Forli, feels natural.

And given the time period this was developed in, it would have been easy to write this in a chauvinistic manner, but at least from my viewpoint the writing team does an excellent job at avoiding that trap. He’s more than happy to learn from anyone who can do something better than he can, like Paolo back in Florence or Rosa in Venice. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than I’d expect from games written in the late 2000s.

It makes him a very easy character to like, despite the job description.

Looks like Desmond’s visions are lasting for longer than 30 seconds. If this was a professional outfit, he might want to see a doctor about that.

But I guess we’ll just have to make it work.

I must admit, I like the scene where Altair does a leap of faith and the camera doesn’t follow him. It’s a good way to use the conceit of the game’s narrative to show how his relationship with Maria has become something more (in the PSP game).

That said, it’s definitely a shame that our time in Venice begins with one of the worst mission types from this era, escorting an NPC who has many 3 lines total that repeat endlessly on loop. We are lucky that this mission is easy, otherwise it could be far more grating on the nerves.

Oh well. At least we’re now in contact with the Thieves’ Guild. Maybe next time they’ll show us that cool move from before.

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.