After I finished with Starfield I decided to do the last few things of Valhalla before I started up Mirage. So I started out doing the last few Tombs of the Fallen and finished that little thing and then I dove into The Forgotten Saga, which is a roguelite and I'm not the biggest fan of those. But I gave it my best effort. I managed to get all the way to Nidhogg, the poison dragon, and the last boss before the last area and Hel herself. At that point I was breezing through everything up to Nidhogg, and he thoroughly put me in my place and told me to not think so highly of myself in the most detailed way possible - his adds beating me to a pulp while he solemnly watched. The fight was just a whole bunch of AoEs to dodge or I'd get a DoT (which stacked) and there were no healing items in the area - not equipped, not lying around, just nada. I was so done with The Forgotten Saga after that, and decided to just do The Last Chapter update and then move on to Mirage.
The Last Chapter was a nice little ending to Valhalla, which probably would have had a bigger impact if I hadn't played the base game in late 2020 when it was new, and barely remembered half the characters on the goodbye tour. The Basim stuff was a lot more interesting than Eivor's goodbye tour and half-assed footnote as to how she ended up in North America. The Basim stuff explains how he's still alive over 1000 years later and how they got their hands on his DNA so they could view his memories. It was a pretty decent connection/bridge over to Mirage.
I don't like sand. Every time a game asks me to play through a desert I'm instantly bored. Sand is just boring. I don't like it. And I knew the landscape of Mirage would bore me even before I went in, which was a contributing reason for why I shelved the game for two weeks before I finished it.
That said I did enjoy the game overall. They were hitting people's nostalgia as hard as they could but implementing a lot of polished up mechanics from the earliest AC games. I hated pickpocketing in AC2, but in Mirage it was a lot of fun, especially Darvish's collectables. Being at Alamut made me half expect Altaïr to show up, except it would be a few more centuries before he's even around. That tutorial climbing scene with Basim is a direct translation of the tutorial climbing scene in the original Assassin's Creed with Altaïr :3 And those are just two examples, there are many more ways that Mirage attempts to throwback to the earliest games of the franchise. It's great fun.
As always I made sure to get every single collectable and do every bit of side content and uncovering the entire map before I completed the story.
As for the story itself, I feel like it was pretty predictable. I had figured out Nehal's circumstances way before that reveal even came. The only thing I hadn't figured out was the purpose of the djinni and I was dreading it as a final boss of the game, instead... nothing. So that was a bit disappointing. I also feel like they established the characters of Roshan and Basim in the early stages of the story only to throw it all out in the end scenes and have them become complete stereotypical tropes, which kinda ruined the end a bit. And as much as the current time portions of any AC game kind of feels like filler, I did miss having it in Mirage. Even as filler it's an integral part of the games' universe.
But all in all it was a good game and as much as I love massive open world RPGs it was nice to play something smaller for a change.
And I forgot to take a single screenshot.
And young Basim just reminds me of Disney's Aladdin.
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