The gameplay footage for Jade that was released during September’s Ubisoft Forward brought fans back to familiar territory, quite literally. The game is set in China, where players last visited with Shao Jun as she sought revenge upon her return to the region. While Shao is not shown to be in the new game, what fans do see has some would-be players taken aback; Jade is set to be a mobile game. This itself is not new, as Assassin’s Creed Rebellion released to mobile devices in 2018. What makes Jade so different is that its combat will be a return to the older games in the series, rather than the newer combat style, or the turn-based fighting seen in Rebellion. But more importantly, with the promise of full character customization, many fans are wondering about how this main character will fit into the larger story of the franchise.
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A New Assassin’s Creed Game, and Many New Faces
While other AC titles have allowed players to dress up the characters they were playing as, such as dyeing clothing and choosing individual pieces of the assassin’s armor, Assassin’s Creed has, by virtue of its story following figures who shaped history, never before given players the option to create their own protagonist. The basis for main characters in AC games is that this person did such extraordinary things and saw so many important pieces of history that the good guys can dig up their bodies and dissect them for information with the audience feeling bad about it. This doesn’t really work if the character can be just anyone. While the ability to make any kind of assassin the player wants can be appealing, and make it very easy for fans to feel like a part of the world they’ve enjoyed for so long, a character can’t be a legend if they don’t even really have a face.
The last two games in the franchise dealt with this problem on a somewhat smaller scale, with Odyssey and Valhalla both finding tricks in the way they tell their stories to justify giving players the ability to choose the gender, and later gender expression, of their character. However, this has sat wrong with fans. The lack of commitment from the creators of the game to having a definitive main character is a large part of why many feel like the newer assassins aren’t as memorable as the ones seen in earlier games. Both games have a single canon protagonist, but only confirm this outside of the game, begging the question of why the other option exists at all - a problem that will only be amplified by an assassin that is completely customizable.
One of the features of the Assassin’s Brotherhood is that the members are a part of a collective, serving as one of many moving parts of this machine working together for a common goal, which could be a solution to Jade’s potential problem. Other games in the series have focused on leaders of the Assassin’s Order, or those who upended the status quo, but Jade’s character creation giving the meta-textual message that everyone and anyone can be an assassin could mean that the game will instead choose to focus on those doing the grunt work.
There is still much fans don’t know about Jade, as even the title we have is only a placeholder. The fact that the game itself is not meant to be a part of the main story means that, like Rebellion before it, the developers could make little attempt to tie it back to the accepted canon for the franchise. With Mirage being far more likely to add to the ongoing plot, Assassin’s Creed Jade is free to tell the stories of what It’s like to be an ordinary assassin.
Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade is currently in development for iOS and Android
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