--Aveline de Grandpré, Assassin's Creed III: Liberation
As a portable, open world Assassin's Creed game, Liberation definitely succeeds in many ways, but as an integral part of the series lore and chronology and as a title that is part of a franchise that at its height tends to be more philosophically oriented, it is at best mediocre. Occasional bouts of terrible controls, random slowdown, and its weakly developed story do not match well with the mostly well-translated combat and climbing gameplay that was still far newer at the time of this spin-off's initial release. Its strengths more pertain to the fact that the general style of the series is brought to the Vita without any additional mechanics issues that did not already plague the franchise. At the very least, Liberation also does an effective job of introducing its first playable female protagonist, even if she, like the other characters, could have been developed far more.
Production Values
For all its faults, the open world style of Assassin's Creed is represented well in this title, but without the extreme number of optional items in a map I have heard plague some of the newer games. The game does slow at times, and the control issues that make players miss jumps or leap in an unintended direction, so the successes here are not all without any flaws. 1700s Louisiana gets brought to the Vita with the typical series problems with navigation. The voice acting is unfortunately hit or miss in its realism, sincerity, and general consistency of quality, and the music itself is highly repetitive. It does not help that the story is short and lacks any intensive characterization. This only makes the mixed voice acting squander the fewer opportunities Liberation has to do something with its voice cast and soundtrack.
Gameplay
Liberation features a new (at that point at least, as I have not played every primary series game since 2012) persona system where Aveline can wear the clothes of an Assassin, a slave, or a lady, with lady referring to an upper class woman's persona. Each of these has its own strengths and challenges. As the lady persona, for instance, you can charm guards or more discreetly kill people right in front of the public's eye without being noticed, but Aveline's movement speed is extremely limited and she cannot climb. The slave persona is closer to the Assassin persona in running speed and Aveline can actually climb in this outfit, but she must occasionally perform tasks along with other slaves or workers to not get caught in certain areas. The Assassin persona can freely travel and of course bears the strongest visual resemblance to the icons of the series, but Aveline automatically attracts suspicion. For all of these personas, though, there are costumes with differing color schemes that can be purchased.
The standard elements of the older Assassin's Creed games are also here beyond the persona system: avoiding detection, opening chests, completing primary and secondary objectives in missions, and, of course, climbing every structure you wish and assassinating other characters compromise the core of the experience. Most of the time, the controls are also fairly standard, but there are sections where you have to use touch screen controls or even the Vita's rear camera to progress. An example of the former is using touch screen controls for rowing a boat, not unlike the boat controls of Uncharted: Golden Abyss. There were other handheld Assassin's Creed games before this one, including Altair's Chronicles on the DS, Bloodlines on the PSP, and Discovery on the DS and iOS, with Discovery mildly taking advantage of the DSi's camera for a minor feature, but none of them ever went as far as Liberation does with incorporating the special abilities of the portable system in question. Liberation has multiple parts where you need to hold up the Vita's rear camera to a light source, which, for all the annoyances it might bring, is still a unique mechanic.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Aveline, the son of a white man and a former slave woman, grew up in a wealthy, caring family despite being black and the daughter of a slave; her father freed her and her mother upon her birth. In part because of her lineage, she is deeply interested in helping the slaves of colonial America find freedom, and, as an assassin years later, she investigates the disappearance of slaves that she hoped would have been escorted to safety. A Templar figure has been offering freedom and a place to work for slaves in Mexico, with Aveline discovering that the work projects are a guise for searching out an artifact from the First Civilization. Aveline travels to and from a Louisiana bayou, Mexico, and her place of residence in New Orleans as she tries to stop the Templar plot.
Intellectual Content
The self-refuting impossibility of the titular Assassin's Creed with its statement that nothing is true (which means the creed itself could not be true, but that something is true is self-evident, as it would then be true that nothing is true, which is impossible) is completely ignored by this game as far as I recall, with the more philosophical emphasis of the early installments in the series getting mostly ignored here. The story itself, as undeveloped as it tends to be, does have a very promising premise in Aveline being the freedwoman daughter of a former American slave owner. She consistently acts and speaks as if she loves her father despite his involvement in the American version of slavery, perhaps to some extent due to how he freed her and her mother as soon as she came into the world. This is a very multi-faceted issue that would have benefited from more detail and focus in the story. There can indeed be far more to personal interactions between people than social norms and outward perceptions might otherwise suggest, even if Liberation could have addressed this nuanced example of an already nuanced issue far more thoroughly. Aveline neither hates her father for once owning slaves in a racist practice (American slavery was rooted in racism, but general servitude and even slavery involving kidnapping are not racist in themselves) nor forgets that she could have been another slave woman unable to freely partake in the mission of the Assassins.
Conclusion
A story with more substance and perhaps also greater length would have certainly helped Liberation have greater depth and made it a vital spin-off instead of just an another Assassin's Creed game. It is not that it does nothing right, and it is still a welcome addition to the Vita's game library for showing years ago that the handheld console can run games that are in some ways very similar to what would eventually appear on the PS4 after it released around a year later. Moreover, it does showcase the unique functions of the Vita (the touch screen, gyroscope, and camera all get implemented), and it helped set up the path for more prominent female protagonists in the series later on. Liberation just does not do almost anything with the more substantial parts of its premise.
Content:
1. Violence: Blood appears for a short time when enemies are attacked or killed with bladed weapons, but not with darts.
2. Profanity: The infrequent profanity includes words like "bastard."
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