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“Assassin’s Creed: Awakening” #1

By | November 11th, 2016
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Remember Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag? What if it was a manga? What if it was good? What if it was good and a manga? Watch out for spoilers regarding this comic and every Assassin’s Creed.

Written by Takashi Yano
Illustrated by Kenji Oiwa

Jump back into the world of Edward Kenway, lead character of the best-selling fan favorite game, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, in this beautiful manga adaptation. Return to the Golden Age of Pirates once more and relive the adventures of the brilliant young captain!

Assassin’s Creed is well known as a video game franchise that’s still a thing despite the story ending in 2010 with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Since then, other games in the series like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Assassin’s Creed III have answered questions like “Did Ubisoft really stall their franchise for two years to introduce the least memorable assassin in the franchise’s history?” Assassin’s Creed III, AKA Hamilton With a Crafting System was the last full game in the series I played. It strayed from the intricate city rooftops from areas like Rome and Constantinople to the flat geography of colonial America. There was a lot of moments during the game I wasn’t jazzed about. The first was when Paul Revere kept screaming vague directions while I had to ride a horse for an hour. The second was when the game introduced its massive ship captaining system. “God, I hope there isn’t more of this” I thought while navigating a ship that controlled like a brick being pushed into a wall of thick jello. Ubisoft, the devil, then made the fourth game only that.

So when reading “Assassin’s Creed: Awakening” #1, I was initially hesitant because it’s an adaptation of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, the game where you play as a pirate pretending to be an assassin pretending to be Henry Rollins. Thankfully, “Awakening” isn’t about the tip-toeing that game had and goes right into a bunch of pirates slaughtering each other on the high seas. Beautiful manga pirates. If you’ve played Black Flag before, you’re not missing much story wise. Partly because Assassin’s Creed stopped having stories a while ago. And mostly because this issue focuses more on the battle and wreck that leads to Kenway finding the dead body he steals some Assassin’s gear from.

Still, even if “Awakening” isn’t innovating Black Flag‘s historical plot, it does a lot to make the sea warfare prevalent in Edward Kenway’s career as exciting as can be. You see a lot less ships awkwardly positioning themselves to fire at each other and more cannons just going off. And the pirates themselves aren’t just carbon copy NPCs but real ugly bastards out to kill and ransack the other ship. Despite a more stylized aesthetic that’s so different from the core Assassin’s Creed look, “Awakening” feels less like it takes place in an Animus and more like it takes place in the real world.

That isn’t to say there’s not some Animus tomfoolery at work. The Animus is the asterisk on every Assassin’s Creed game, reminding you that you’re not really playing as a cool assassin but rather a boring character playing an assassin. Sometimes that character is Nolan North. Sometimes that character is a first person camera with no voice. It never usually goes well. “Awakening” throws the reader a curve ball however, but introducing a new character: a snarky young Japanese kid who doesn’t seemingly have any relationship to Desmond Miles. It’s interesting in that it’s an unknown variable to have a new Animus user who isn’t a silent pile of string. Of course, he’s still in a video game testing environment like the main character in Black Flag so this is probably less a new deviation away from Black Flag and more just a retelling.

Final Verdict: 7.2 – I’m a big fan of “Assassin’s Creed: Awakening” #1 insofar as I like it way more than I did Black Flag. The art style is fast-paced, violent, and visceral which is something that Edward Kenway’s story was sorely missing in a game that was cleaner than it should have been. That said, if you haven’t already been following Assassin’s Creed regularly, there’s not much of this story that will stand on its own to hook you in. If you’re in the niche group of people who want to see a video game from three years ago get a solid retelling, then this is your bag. If not, then I’ve got nothing for you here. Manga Edward Kenway is really cute? If you were hoping that this adaptation of a western video game would fill your fix, then I’m very sorry because there’s probably no other manga that focuses on pirates out there. Certainly not anything that ever lasted more than two volumes.


James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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