Assassin's Creed Valhalla is interesting it's like if the tint glimpses in odyssey where it seemed like they had something to say about rpgs or anything whatsoever (they didn't) were just the whole game
games are good when they hit the nice buttons of "guh i built a new house in my estate power go up happiness go up" and then make you feel immediately bad about it
Assassin's creed is at its best when it's taking the idea of good and evil as concepts being designed and defined by the society and culture of present rather than some ancient objective force, and applying it towards the ways in which video games train you to be sympathetic towards certain win conditions/mechanics that in any other form of art would otherwise be rightly looked down upon in horror. Such as endless expansion/colonization being an unshakeable facet of the Open World Game (which goes against the very idea of an opened world), the recruitment of soldiers to a nebulous and violent cause and in turn abandoning their personhood and people to uplift the strength of the player (in rpgs, shooters, etc.), choice as a system of wanton freedom without consequence (aka power, and in games with moral choice, fascism), rather than a prescription of real agency, and so on and so forth. This is why like, in Freedom Cry, the way that settlements and plantations are not "cleared" or "completed," how they just come back with a new leader, and new slaves to fill its fields, it hits so hard, it's noticeable. Because this Shouldn't Be. This Isn't What A Video Game Ought To Do. The player may see this instead as a way to create infinite playability rather than the sobering red light that it is, but it is effective regardless. The game offers no catharsis through the slaughtering of slavers, only a depiction of righteous desperation that feels as tenuous and far from liberation as any art made so soon after "abolition." We do not occupy a world that hasn't known Power and to depict one is to anyhropologize the impossible, that which cannot be understood. And so the masters respawn, and so the story of adewale ends in a quiet, wet puddle of iron, and so the world keeps struggling, and the fight keeps expanding, and the player keeps looking away, and the eyes keep imagining, and the game gets remade, and freedom's tears coil and starve, and the ground turns to sand.
