The webcomics weekly is back in your life. This week Michael Mazzacane returns looking for forgotten temples in an eternal story of templars and assassins.
Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple
Episodes 1-2
Schedule: Tuesdays
By SHYATAN(adaptation) ARC(story) Tabii(art) Ubisoft(original story)
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
I was surprised to discover “Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple” after Webtoon uploaded a trailer promoting the newly licensed series. It raised all sorts of questions like: why hasn’t there been an Assassin’s Creed webtoon before? Sure, there have been comics set in the world of Assassin’s Creed since the start of the franchise, but why hasn’t there been one in webtoon form specifically? The franchise’s emphasis on verticality seems like an obvious fit for the vertical scrolling medium. The animus macguffin, one of several that populate the franchise, essentially allows for this strip to be an isekai. To make the point clearer: what is more quintessentially generic for a webtoon than to be not just an isekai, but an isekai with the formal elements of a video game? Nothing, there is nothing more base on the Webtoon platform than a video game isekai. (Disclosure: I don’t even know if the Animus and that framing device is even still in use for the franchise at this point, I fell off around the time of Black Flag anyways.)
“Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple” checks off many boxes that would drive me away from it, but it also checks off a few of the boxes that interest me. Tabii’s art is the main draw for this strip, because as it turns out the verticality of the larger Assassin’s Creed franchise works really well when put in the vertical scroll of a webtoon. The action sequences in these first two episodes are engaging, not avant-garde in terms of style but plainly well-executed craftsmanship. The panel in the second episode wherein Edward Kennway spin dodges around a would-be bar fight is both an effective adaptation of the combat animations from the video game franchise and a moment that plays into the perspective-shifting interactivity of a webtoon. In the first episode, the chase sequence that starts the series makes good just of the verticality of the franchise and medium as Kennway traverses a ship on the run from members of the assassin order.
Where “Forgotten Temple” runs into choppy waters is the narrative, at least in these opening chapters. It just isn’t that much to dig into or something we haven’t seen before. After an online DNA test triggers an Abstergo flag protagonist Noa Kim is offered an all-expenses paid trip to Macau. Where he is soon kidnapped hooked into an animus and things begin to get video game isekai. The core plot, Kennway is on the hunt for the titular lost temple promises some decent adventure plotting. The writing just gets a little too cute for me at times with Kim wondering if he’d “been to Macau” before and such. This sort of heavy fingerprinting makes sense for this kind of product as a potential entry point into the larger franchise, it’s just as subtle as a rock. This is the franchise that is all about stealth kills after all.
What anxiety that existed from Kim’s plot, ya know the whole kidnapping and put in a mysterious machine that sent him 300 years into the past, is quickly dispelled in an unsatisfying fashion. Kim just appears to start running with it after a few panels, which is a very gamer response so perhaps it makes sense. The Kennway-Kim dichotomy is effectively erased after a while, leading me to wonder whose personality I’m seeing. These are all questions that can be teased out as the series progresses. It would just be a better hook with more well-defined characters. Do we really need Kim as a surrogate for this framing device? Why not just have it be a story of Edward Kennway?
It makes a lot of sense why “Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple exists and it manages to, mostly, justify its existence as something other than a hollow bit of licensing and transmedia storytelling. Tabii’s art is going to have me checking in on this in a month to see where it goes. It is a bit generic from a narrative standpoint but the quality of the art pushes it into interesting territory.
