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. Therearea lot of bad ones, to be fair. Angelina Jolie’sTomb Raiderfilms reviewed badly, theResident Evilmovies were widely criticised, and basically anythingUwe Bollhas 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 therecently greenlighted Assassin’s Creed show, either.
When HBO’sThe Last of Usarrived a couple of years ago, many cried that the curse had been broken,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 –like many of PlayStation’s blockbuster 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, practicallyalreadya film. This success may have been a fluke, considering thesignificantly harderto adaptThe Last of Us Part 2led to anupsettingly bad second season.
Arguably, the ‘curse’ was brokenlong before The Last of Us.
I personally think Amazon’sFalloutseries is a far better adaptation – it showeda deft understanding 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 screendon’t really understand the material they’re working with and what makes it so appealing to players.
Why Did Yakuza Fail?
This was the case with the very badLike a Dragon: YakuzaTV series that Amazon released last year. The adaptation of the Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) games simplycouldn’t toe the thin line between drama and comedythat 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.It wasn’treallyfor fans, but it lacked the uniqueness that could make it stand out to mainstream audiences. It was a yakuza show, not a Yakuza show.
Now, we finally circle back toAssassin’s Creed, because the news of its adaptationfinallybeing 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,Netflixannounced three separate AC shows in 2020, and thenthe live-action take lost its showrunner.
Assassin’s Creed’s TV Show Is Already Raising Red Flags
Apparently, now thatUbisofthas remembered that there’s supposed to be an Assassin’s Creed show in the works, the series has pegged Roberto Patino (a producer on Westworld, Sons of Anarchy, and DMZ) and David Wiener (showrunner ofHalo’ssecond season and producer of Homecoming) as showrunners and executive producers.
According toVariety, 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, struggling with questions of identity and destiny and faith. It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance. But more than anything, 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 pointwhatAssassin’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 otherthat it’s really not apparent if Assassin’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 spirit of the games, considering that every game features different characters and points in history.
Apart from the Ezio trilogy, of course, which isarguably as good as the series ever got.
It looks like the show is attempting to distill decades of confusing Assassin’s Creed history into 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.
