Dealing with backlog: Assassin's Creed 2

It's been two weeks since I finished this game, but who's counting?

I had a really bad experience with the first Assassin's Creed, because the port was so bad and the controls not even in the slightest fitting for K+M. But I still believed that I would like this series if I kept at it. The later games really do seem like something I'd enjoy, but I want to play the series from the beginning. So I got Assassin's Creed 2 and got playing.

The controls were still a bit wonky but compared to the original game they were miles better. The wonky controls were still the reason why I didn't complete all the tombs in the game, because who wants to do timed jumping puzzles with wonky controls?

At first I had decided to not care about all the feathers, but when it became apparant that I needed them to unlock something special I started collecting all of them with the help of guides on where to find them all. I went through all the areas in the game with the help from guides and when I reached the end I was missing one feather. I had collected 99 of 100. I was not about to go through all of the areas again looking for one single pesky feather. No way in hell.

Mainly I just played through the story. Before I started the game I thought the "contemporary" futuristic bits would be annoyances. Things I wouldn't like. Things that were just there to fill out the game. But before the end those sequences became something I was looking forward to - these little hints that something that happened hundreds of years in the past actually had a bearing on the contemporary. That was huge and made it all seem a little bit closer. And I wanted more clues to the previous civilisation.

Then we also have the other thing. I don't like Ezio. He's stubborn and reckless and he doesn't listen and he's got a major case of the god complex. I understand why it's easy to make a protagonist this way, but it doesn't make me like it. And I understand that Ezio is only 17-ish when the story starts, but that's no reason why he should still be acting reckless and why he's still so childishly stubborn when he reaches Venice, some 15-ish years later. If you're still harboring a childish god complex by 30, something has gone really wrong.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the Italian. Kudos to UbiSoft for making the accents and the language true to history. If the game is set in the Italian Renaissance, the characters should speak Italian. Simple enough, but still so easy for developers to overlook.

One part of me wants to skip the other two Ezio games and go straight to Assassin's Creed 3, but a bigger part of me wants every bit of Desmond's story. I know, right? I just can't conform to the general opinion! ;P Everybody loves Ezio, but I'm curious about Desmond.