Played: Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (2014).
This is a spin-off to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (which I wrote about at considerable length here), focusing on Adewale, a former slave who joins the Assassins to further the cause of emancipation on his own terms. That makes for a curious game, here - on the one hand, it’s a joy to see a character who doesn’t fit the usual narrative existing in this environment, but it also fails when it comes to Black Flag’s key narrative strength: Adewale, for all his earnestness, just isn’t a very engaging character.
Unlike Edward Kenway, the main game’s protagonist, Adewale has little nuance. That’s chiefly because he’s more of an embodied ideology than an actual person. He gets good banter - with the owner of a brothel (before you roll your eyes, she gets some of the best dialogue, and actually does receive a decent degree of character development), the first mate of his ship, and an assortment of characters whose chief reason for existing is to pass on the next quest. Beyond that, though, there’s little indication - either here or in Black Flag - as to Adewale’s inner life, beyond a need to free more slaves.
Maybe that’s enough, though. There is definitely something to be said for a protagonist who isn’t another white savior, and while it’s a shame that the Assassin’s Creed franchise has historically shoehorned minority characters into secondary media, I’ll concede that the fact that it exists at all is probably a good thing.
As for the gameplay, it’s basically Black Flag all over again. But that’s fine. It just means I don’t have to write about it twice.