AC: Valhalla

 The Assassin's Creed game are... odd. Probably around 90% is historically-set Ubisoft open world with a dash of the fantastic. Combat is okay. Stealth is pretty good. There are scenic vistas on a wide map to explore. There's been iteration and occasional innovation along the way, but the core hasn't really changed much through the series. It plays well and I find them generally entertaining for a fair while even if overall things are a bit shallow.

I would have to say I think I may have seen more technical issues with this over any other AC game I played. Maybe I didn't dig into the others as early in patching or maybe this one was actually worse. The game crashed outright on occasion and there were maybe half a dozen spots where things seemed to get stuck and I had to reload and/or change graphic settings to proceed.

And along the way, a story is told. Valhalla follows Eivor and his/her adopted brother Sigurd as they set out from a newly-united Norway to establish a foothold in England, building up their clan, making alliances, and playing kingmakers. The story has some good and bad points. I like some of the personal interactions and threads. I dislike the constraints on the story due to how it's told - each new zone to ally/conquer has its own storyline and there's some flexibility in order but they each play out pretty much the same regardless of possible choices in the others. There are a few choices you can make that carry over some minor consequences, which is better than usual, but it still doesn't amount to much branching of story (save perhaps a couple different endings). On a grand scale, each AC game is a history tale, so there's only so many ways one can tweak details when history still needs to happen. And though the Hidden Ones and Order of Ancients exist and matter in some ways to the story, this is probably the least Assassin/Templar-ish AC game I've played. Eivor is too busy fighting for clan, kin, and glory to give a flip about their factional philosophies.

Valhalla delves into its mythical elements via a couple zones in a "vision quest" of sorts where Eivor takes the role of "Havi" (Odin) in a telling of some Norse Asgardian myths. Though, as revealed by some secrets in the game world, this is sort of a mythological perspective overlaid atop events that "really" transpired among the Isu in the AC series' overarching timeline.

Of course, THAT is where things get arguably messy. Early on in the series the Isu were largely an absent race of technologically-advanced precursors to humanity and the Animus-enabled jaunts into genetic memory that comprise the main part of the games were research into them and their tech. In the latest three installments (Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla), the Isu and their creations have had a certain degree of presence - viewed as culture/time-appropriate divine figures for the most part. You get into a whole lot of unreliable narration there, as its difficult to tell if these different pantheons are representations of the same Isu from different cultures or different Isu... and how much of what is seen about them "really" happened versus how much is filtered through the Animus to the modern day protagonists. As each new bit of the Isu story is shown, it also feels a lot of things are being retconned in. Seriously, if series writers have this part of the multi-game story planned out, they've done a poor job making it look like it. 

And yet, I do have a sort of fondness for the sci-fi meta-story that wraps around the historic AC tales, so I manage to excuse that and go along for the ride.

I do have to say the ending of Valhalla disappointed me, though. On one hand, it's simply too long and drawn out. Narratively, the climax of the story felt to me like fighting to get Sigurd back - that was one of the larger castle sieges and a decent boss fight. After that, though, you still have to go through another zone or two. Then Eivor follows Sigurd back to Norway and to "Yggdrasil," which seemed almost like it should have been the climax, but felt more like a quiet denouement in spite of ending up at an abrupt fight with someone who could be seen as the "real" bad guy. There was just no tension there, though, so it felt hollow. And THEN we get an ending to this installment of the modern day story which changes the protagonist from someone who may not have gained a major following among players to... a new anti-hero who feels totally wrong to me for the role. For one, we just fought this guy. Additionally, he has his own secret plans and knows way too much to feel like a good point of view character for the player.

Of course, as one of these open world game, you can then hop him back in the Animus to re-inhabit Eivor and go about clearing additional stuff on the map, including some scenes that imply the transition from the Order of Ancients to the Templars as seen in other games. But all of those "ending" scenes just went on too long to maintain the tension or effect of a narrative climax, which leads to it feeling kind of blah.

Still, I don't regret the purchase or anything. It was a reasonably good and familiar means of entertainment to burn away some hours, and sometimes that's what I want.