 Hello, I'm Philip Magnus and I'm back with some more Assassin's Creed DLC analysis. This time around we're talking about Episode 2 of the First Blade, Shadow Heritage. Cassandra reunites with old hobo killer Man Darius and his sexy, sexy Sunny Boy in Attackers in a chaos who once again tackled the Order of the Ancients. Will the three morally questionable protagonists win? Okay, two morally questionable protagonists and one bland NPC, or will they be defeated by the forces of Persia's Order of Ancients and their horrifying new weapon, the Greek Fire? Or, I guess, possibly Persian Fire? Shadow Heritage was a fun DLC to begin with. In between hard-to-hard conversations, on horseback and scaling the cliffside to occultist infested fortress in a care, this episode began with a few counts of murder, several local lives saved and the reveal of this episode's antagonist, The Tempest. The Tempest is basically Demos. In We Rehearge, the story of a mother who wishes to see her child return to the light after taking more than a few steps down a dark path. This is a familiar light motive from the main storyline of Odyssey and I played it in such a way as to make sure Cassandra was trying to make up for the mistakes of the past. The Tempest isn't nearly as far gone as Demos is. Even if she has a few war crimes in atrocities under her belt by the sound of things. A mother, on the other hand, is standing for Milini in some ways but doesn't have that sparse and mama-lienting going on for her dad-mate, Milini, so appealing. Shadow Heritage introduces a new upgrade to the ship, a big-ass flamethrower that makes ramming an enemy ship and lighting it up the most fun you can ever have with naval battles. The Chimera's Breath, as this new addition to the addressed years repertoire of deadly weaponry is called, revitalises a section of the gameplay that has been getting continuously stale over the 108 hours I had at this point logged into Odyssey. It's a gratifying weapon to use and for the first time in a while I want to actively pursue pirates in the Egyan Sea and burn every last one of them down. And hey, if I got a quest to burn a few Athenian or Spartan trips, all the better. So this DLC was okay up to a point. I was invested in the story of the Tempest and I really hoped she could find her way back to the light. But then the ending of the DLC turned up. And boy, what an ending. I don't have the... I like the capacity to express just what I think about it so I thought, what the hell? I know just the guy. I want to take it from here and make a troll fuse. The hatred for this travesty burns bright in my soul. I finished the entirety of Legacy of the First Blade not too long ago and it started off so promising. The groundwork was being laid out for an interesting story exploring the past of this mysterious daddy figure who appears to be the poster child for why you should absolutely do steroids past 50 years of age. Just aside, Darius is an enigmatic enough character that you actually WANT to know more about him and the organization pursuing him. And then the focus of the story takes a hard right turn into awful. The failure of this DLC has been well documented. The community outcry, Ubisoft's complete failure at riding the ship, that sort of thing. I feel like it would be redundant to focus for too long on why it's terrible. Succinctly put, the game smashes its own narrative foundation with a sledgehammer, abandoning the notions that made it great so you can bang a wet sponge of a human being for the sake of introducing the world's most ham-fisted, ultimately pointless plot. Nataka sucks. Everything about his existence sucks and his demise continues to engulf the remainder of the First Blade story in a cloud of suck. My question is not why, it's how. How did Ubisoft fuck up so thoroughly from a production standpoint? Making a game is no simple process. Millions of dollars and thousands of man hours go into creating something as ambitious as Odyssey. How did no one have the foresight to see how bad this was? This awful script had to have passed through so many hands on its way to being developed. How did nobody stop to consider the ramifications of this garbage? Think about it. Who buys DLC? The main audience would be people so enamored with the game that they're willing to spend additional money to get more content out of it. In the case of single-player games in particular, that would be the most die-hard fans. In Odyssey's case, those would be idiots like me who fell in love with its world, its incredible sense of adventure truly befitting its name, and maybe most importantly, the protagonist. Cassandra can shape the world and herself be molded by your decisions. Hell, messing up a quest has genuine ramifications, some extending to a metanarrative level far beyond what the game presents. It can at times be witcher-esque in how conflicted you feel about certain decisions as you make your way through this epic. So with all of that said, how does the company decide that the best way to reward that level of fan loyalty is to railroad the player into an abysmal romance is beyond me? How do they then have the fucking gall to present you with choices about, quote, how you frame the relationship in the DLC, unquote, that always amount to the protagonist you spend hundreds of hours with, making lovey-dovey eyes at the human equivalent of a pile of pocket lint, regardless of what dialogue path you picked? They didn't just pull back the curtain how meaningless player choice is and can be in these types of games, they fucking set the theater on fire. A month and some change after I've beaten the DLC, I'm still baffled by this. Ubisoft has always struck me as a company that exists in its own viewer-skew universe. They were quirky and strange, and even when they tried to be as malicious and money-hungry as the big boys, they failed at it ridiculously hard. Like how the time-savers in Odyssey are basically meaningless, or how Far Cry 5's purchaseable currency was absolutely pointless after two hours of play because you were rolling an in-game cash, but you can't really view Legacy of the First Blade through the prism of additional monetization, Ubisoft had nothing to gain from this. There wasn't any way to buy an alternate story that wasn't shit. The ending was horrible, downright malicious for seemingly no other reason than pure incompetence. They completely betrayed the player with this on pretty much every conceivable level. So I don't view Ubisoft as weird and quirky anymore. I think of them as a monolithic, uncaring, shambling thing that used to be a god-creator. Now a vacuous entity throgging through the gaming landscape, great in size, unstoppable, yet with nary a thought in its head. Occasionally, it stumbles in the right direction, but more often than not, it demolishes the very civilizations that it once built. What could I possibly add to this? Thanks for watching! Don't forget to subscribe, like, share, and most importantly, follow MegashordFuse's YouTube channel. Thank you, my friends, for putting into words the issues behind this DLC, even if you described Darius as a mysterious daddy figure. Shudder. Must've come. Bye!