Assassin's Creed: The End?

I stayed up way too late last night to finish off Assassin's Creed.

At first I thought I'd go looking for some more flags, but after spending an hour in the Rich District of Acre and coming up blank, I decided to shift gears and go a head and finish the game.

Weirdness Ensues

I headed my horse into the Arsuf zone and something bizarre happened: none of the characters would fight back! Even worse, as I walked further into Arsuf, I heard battle noises and was getting hurt, even though there was no one around. I ran a little further down the road and saw some Saracens beating on a cliffside -- only I was getting hurt by each strike.

My character died and went into resync back at the start of Arsuf -- only this time, there were two of me! I had a dopplegänger mirroring my movements about 2 feet away. Again we found enemies that wouldn't fight back, but my twin started fighting me! I ran from him and dropped through the map into nothingness. After falling about 200 feet, the game registered my death.

Okay, too weird, and I don't think this is what Ubi intended. I dumped to the 360 Dashboard, reloaded the game and set out for Arsuf again. Same thing: enemies that don't fight back and weird zones where you can walk out of the world and fall to your death. After revival, I again had an identical twin nemesis.

It was about that time that I noticed I had a dancepad still plugged in as controller 2. I unplugged it, restarted the game and headed for Arsuf.

Aha! Now the archers were fighting back!

BIG TIP: Unplug or turn off any additional controllers when heading into Arsuf. Apparently, you enter some weird test mode when a second controller is attached to the game.


End Game?

NOTE: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

After you complete the encounter in Arsuf, you will have one additional battle -- one that you should have been able to predict, in part, by looking at the list of memory strands in the Animus.

You will go through a series of battles and then the goal of the Animus experiments on Subject 17 (Desmond) is revealed. You are jerked out of your memories and back into the lab.

If you've been following the story closely to this point, there are no great revelations here. Abstergo gets the locations of other pieces of Eden from your last memory fragment, Lucy is revealed to be a true friend, and you find out what happened (in several ways) to Subject 16, who leaves behind a plethora of "documentation", much of it referring to the end of the world, Templar symbology and chaos theory. You find messages written in Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese script. There are also some coded messages or gibberish written into simple geometric shapes. It's hard to know, which. There's even a two foot tall bar code of the value 1221-2012. (December 21, 2012 -- the date the Mayan calendar ends.) You will also find an email regarding horriffic events in Africa.

You are then left to wander the lab and replay any memories you wish to in the Animus.

But you are left without a resolution -- Abstergo got what they wanted, you are still a prisoner, and Lucy has only delayed your execution, not stopped it. You have the writings of a prior Animus test subject, all of which seems to point to Armageddon, but you have no idea if his writings are prophetic or simply the addled spewings of a mad conspiracy theorist.

It was 2AM back in my media center, the credits had rolled and the game had left me feeling hopeless.

Now, there's a possibility that there is more here -- it was just so late I didn't follow up a remaining possibility. Just before you go into your final memory, Lucy reveals something to you and encourages you that there is always hope. The last memory in the Animus has a "Play" arrow on it (like the transport control on a CD player.) Could there be more there? I really hope so. I just can't see the game ending where it has. Plus, I've talked to Lucy at every chance and not gotten the "Conversationalist" achievement, so maybe... just maybe...

I'll let you know what I find out.