People have been whispering about the Video Game Adaptation Curse for years, repeating the myth that all video game adaptations are bad and therefore doomed to fail. There are a lot of bad ones, to be fair. Angelina Jolie’s films reviewed badly, the movies were widely criticised, and basically anything Uwe Boll has touched over the years has drawn heavy fire from fans and critics alike. Historically, video game adaptations haven’t done all that well. And I don’t have high hopes for the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:recently greenlighted Assassin’s👍 Creed show, either.

When HBO’s arrived a couple of years ago, many cried that the curse had been broken, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:including its own showrunners. Finally, a critically acclaimed adaptation of a critically acclaimed game! Never mind that The Last of Us was a very adaptable game already – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:like many of PlayStation’s bꦕlockbuster games, it was full of cutscenes and told a tragic story with comprehensible, somewhat complex themes, which, to gamers, meant it was a cinematic experience, practically already a film. This success may have been a fluke, considering the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:significantly harder to adapt led to an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:upsettingly bad second season.

Arguably, the ‘curse’ was broken 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:long before The Last of Us.

I personally think Amazon’s series is a far better adaptation – it showed a deft underst🍰anding of♑ the franchise’s world, aesthetic, and themes, without just copying a video game story wholesale. The thing about video game adaptations isn’t that they attract uniquely bad directors and editors. It’s just that a lot of the time, the people (and corporations) involved in bringing those games to the big or small screen don’t really understand the material they’re working with and what makes i✱t so appealing to players.

Why Did Yakuza Fail?

This was the case with the very bad TV series that Amazon released last year. The adaptation of the Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) games simply couldn’t tꦚoe t♛he thin line between drama and comedy that the games 🍌did, and instead chose to focus on the grittiness and drama, departing from the narrative of the games and🔯 doing its own thing.

That isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it completely failed to capture the surreal, hilarious magic of the games. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It wasn’t really for fans, but it ꦡlacked the uniq♔ueness that could make it stand out to mainstream audiences. It was a yakuza show, not a Yakuza show.

Now, we finally circle back to , because the news of its adaptation finally being in the works is raising similarly red flags. The show was in limbo for quite a while prior to this announcement – talks about television adaptations started nearly a decade ago in 2016, announced three separate AC shows in 2020, and then 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the live💙-action take lost its showrunner.

Assassin’s Creed’s TV Show Is Already Raising Red Flags

Apparently, now that has remembered that there’s supposed to be an Assassin’s Creed show in the works, the series has pegged Roberto Patino (a p𒉰roducer on Westworld, Sons👍 of Anarchy, and DMZ) and David Wiener (showrunner of second season and producer of Homecoming) as showrunners and executive producers.

According to , the showrunners say, “Beneath the scope, the spectacle, the parkour, and the thrills is a baseline for the most essential kind of human story – about people searching for purpose, strugglinꦓg with questions of identity and destiny and faith. It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance. But more than anyth♏ing, this is a show about the value of human connection, across cultures, across time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species, when those connections break.”

I would like to say that Assassin’s Creed is not about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance, but it’s not really clear at this point what Assassin’s Creed is about. That’s one thing that puts Assassin’s Creed on the wrong foot immediately – its storyline is, at this point, so🐽 convoluted and full of alien gods and character arcs that seemingly have nothing to do with each other that it’s really not apparent if As♕sassin’s Creed, as a series, has any clear themes at all.

Ostensibly, it’s about the fictional Templars and Assassins, but if you asked me, a person who’s played nearly every Assassin’s Creed game, to tell you what’s going on with them, I would have to simply shrug and gesture vaguely in the direction of my nearest Ubisoft headquarters. It also seems as though the show will be somewhat anthological, which at least captures the spiri𝐆t of the games, considering that every game features different characters and points in history.

Apart from the Ezio trilogy, of course, which is 168澳🌌洲幸运5开奖网:arguably as good as the series ever got.

It look𒆙s like the show is attempting to distill decades of confusing Assassin’s Creed history in𝓰to a single series, and I simply cannot see a way for it to succeed. Successful video game adaptations build on the groundwork set by their source material, but Assassin’s Creed offers some awfully shaky ground. We can only wait and see if the series turns out alright… if it ever materialises, that is.