Last Descendants (Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants, #1)

by Matthew J. Kirby

[sa090]

Do you know what sucks the most about reading? Not finding the time to actually read when you want to do nothing else.

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This is one of my favourite video game franchises so going into this book, I hoped for some really interesting outlooks and of course seeing a new Assassin VS Templar fight. Did I get that? You can say that I got a little more than I asked for. I mean I assumed that it’ll be from an Assassin’s point of view only, like the majority of the games but here we get to see things from both perspectives and better yet, a completely different one too. This in particular makes me really curious to see the clash of different ideologies and how it’s going to sweep our main characters through their histories and their new lives which wasn’t as heavily explored here thanks to this being the first book but you can easily see traces of that once things started making sense to our main characters.

One of the coolest parts of this series for me is it’s take on historical events and for once I saw something I’m completely unfamiliar with given my own background and where I actually come from so it was interesting to see. He doesn’t focus all that much on it though until a certain point, now if each of them had a book or this was a series of standalone book in different periods of time all leading up to one collective goal then it might’ve been more entertaining in the end because we could’ve easily had that focus I wanted to see if it went by that way, instead I only hear about the results being mentioned offhandedly.

On that note, this story might’ve benefited from having less characters to move it along. Let me put it this way, all of them are going to be put through the animus where they will come out in the simulation as different people, this is not hard to follow at all if you’re interested enough to really focus but it does leave the majority of them (honestly all at this point) with so much room to develop that they feel lacking. Or rather, they don’t feel that different compared to those we started with which again might be because of this being a first book but it also pushes the notion that with all of these people together it’s going to be difficult to noticeably develop all of them quickly.

It also kind of makes it difficult to care that much about any of them, I mean, if any of them matches a stereotype of a character that you like then maybe it’ll be easy but collectively, it’s difficult to care about any of them for me, regardless of it being a good kind of care or a bad one. One more thing that this story heavily relied on was coincidence, some of the character feel like they just popped out of nowhere which only further strengthens the before mentioned point of lack of care. I do however, think this is going to be on very fun game to play since we usually play with one characters or two if you take Syndicate into consideration so with 2+ around here and different return points and such it would surely be fun if this was a real full adventure.

This is only the first book once again so maybe it’ll get better as we go by ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Final rating: 3/5