REVIEW: Assassin’s Creed Awakening #2

      To start off, I absolutely loved the video game that Assassin’s Creed Awakening is based on. Assassin’s Creed Black Sails (the game) was one of the best in series of consistently great games. Now with that out-of-the-way, onto the comic. Which has its pleasing and displeasing attributes. For the most part, the pleasing parts are the couple of pages that feature the game’s protagonist Edward Kenway.

        The comic is done in a manga style. It’s about a Japanese student named Seijin is play testing a game based on the memories of Edward Kenway a pirate captain, who is also in the Assassin’s Guild. We find in this issue he was recommended for testing by his mother. Who abandoned him at an early age to develope the game. He harbors great resent for this but still decides to play. This is where we finally get to Edward Kenway’s portion which gets but two to three pages. Sorry but even with 50+ hours soaked into the game, I want more Kenway. They just haven’t built a compelling character in Seijin or the drama surrounding him.

        The comics art is mediocre and the panels don’t do anything to jump out and speak to you. The layouts feel bland and don’t do anything special to get the overall feeling across. The speech bubbles have a very odd constantly large oval, almost panel covering size to them. This in the case of characters not on the panel makes it very hard to tell who is saying what.

        All in all its hard to recommend this comic to anyone. Fan of the game? No. Fan of comics or manga? No. Fan of all the above? Still not really. There is just so many comics that fill all those gaps out there. The bland art, odd storytelling and general lack of Kenway don’t bode well for further issues either. 1/5 stars

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

STORY BY Takashi Yano

ART BY Kenji Oiwa

LETTERS BY Amoona Saohin

COVER BY John Aggs, Kate Brown, and Kenji Oiwa

PUBLISHER Titan Comics