Going Back to Basics, Assassin's Creed Mirage Loses the Essentials

The lore of the Assassin’s Creed franchise has been building for 15 years. Across that time, through third-person action games, 2D side scrollers, comics, a movie, digital short films, mobile games, a Facebook interactive experience, and more things so weird that they cannot be properly summarized in a list, Ubisoft has been making this massive world. For all that time, the story has been relatively simple: In the deep past of humanity, we were created by a precursor species called the Isu as a slave species. Their species collapsed; ours lived. Two factions, the freedom-loving Templars and the control-hungry Templars, have fought under those names and others to determine the path of humanity. Sometimes they fight over Isu artifacts, and they rumble.

However, in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it was revealed that there was a wrinkle in this relative simplicity: Some of the Isu are in us, uploaded into our DNA so that they might live again. As we learned that information, we discovered Basim Ibn Ishaq, a ninth-century proto-Assassin hailing from what is now Iraq. Valhalla gives us Basim as a villain, perhaps one of the greatest video game villains of all time, although his treachery is buried behind 50 hours of gameplay that many might not have gotten to. He’s clever, he’s dedicated, and he’s (for all purposes) a god in man’s clothing, a creature with the memories of an Isu and a desire for revenge.

So when I realized that Mirage was meant to be a story about Basim’s rise from street thief to Master Assassin, I became excited in a way that I rarely am about a video game. The opportunity was there for something explosive, threading together the loose ends of Valhalla and connecting broader franchise questions about the emergence of the Assassins in the time before the setting of the original Assassin’s Creed. I’ll shortcut it for the busiest among you, but it doesn’t work out that way.