Assassin's Creed II/YMMV

"Erudito: What did the Shroud do to this poor kid? He should be dreaming about the Renaissance equivalent of sunshine and lollipops, not murder and politics! I've never seen anything like this!"
 * Anticlimax Boss: Rodrigo Borgia. The fight has an interesting bit of both him and Ezio using a Piece of Eden, but the idea isn't taken advantage of and afterwards it just descends into mashing the melee button on him.
 * Catharsis Factor: Those beggar women who constantly got in your way in Assassin's Creed? They're back in the form of wandering minstrels. Except this time, so long as you don't pull out your weapon, the guards don't mind if you start a fist fight. Or, if you're feeling nice, you can finally throw money to make them leave you alone; they're like pigeons.
 * Complete Monster: Most of the Templar-affiliated in one form or another. Some of them, such as Uberto and Dante Moro (neither a Templar nor a monster at all), are sympathetic. Others, like the Pazzi family, Carlo Grimaldi, the Barbarigos, Orsi Brothers, and especially Rodrigo Borgia are without question utter bastards who deserve what they're getting.
 * Vidic..
 * According to a bereaved husband, the Executioner, and he is shown in Project Legacy to be perfectly willing to kill an innocent man, because (paraphrasing) "the innocent get to go to Heaven."
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Assassin's Creed II's soundtrack is beautifully composed, but the most distinctive score is Ezio's Family which is played in opening sequence of the game.
 * Flight Over Venice, 2
 * Back in Venice, which ironically plays when you're fighting in Florence.
 * Heart, is great as well.
 * Venice Rooftops, which plays during most race and courier sequences, both in the main story and in side missions.
 * Careful listeners will notice the remixes of "Ezio's Family" that run through this peace. It is particularly poignant that said remixes can be taken as a reference to Ezio's own thoughts as he free-runs, remembering back in the day when he used to do this with his brother and father. Before they
 * End Fight, which was inexplicably excluded from the official soundtrack.
 * Sanctuary, a poignant and beautiful piece that plays through-out your time in Venice, that perfectly portrays the triumph and heartbreak Ezio must feel being an Assassin.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse:
 * Leonardo, Leading to the infamous "missed hugs = restarted games".
 * In general, the supporting cast of this series is highly popular: Mario, Volpe, Claudia, Caterina Sforza, Bartolomeo d'Alviano, Rosa and Machiavelli.
 * Even Better Sequel: According to Metacritic.
 * AC1: "Generally Favorable Reviews" (81)
 * AC2: "Universal Acclaim" (91)
 * Practically every complaint with the original game was addressed in Assassin's Creed II. Too repetitive, not enough mission variety? Every assassination has a much more varied sequence of events leading up to it, instead of "gather information, stab mark in face." Uninteresting protagonist? Ezio is a lot more relateable than Altaïr. No tangible reward for collection sidequests? Now there are, and a full-blown inventory/resource management system to boot. Can't shake the beggars off? Ezio can toss money on the ground. Framing Story doesn't make sense? It still doesn't make much sense, but it's been expanded upon in a manner that shows that there are interesting answers to the many (many, many) questions brought up by the first game.
 * Evil Is Cool: Not Rodrigo Borgia, but Girolamo Savonarola in the Bonfire of the Vanities DLC is considered highly memorable and interesting.
 * Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Savonarola believes Florence should turn away from the Renaissance and its advancements.
 * Game Breaker:
 * Mercenaries are very good at distracting guards, but the game-breaking comes from the fact that attacking any enemy who is engaged with an opponent from behind is an instant kill if you're close enough. You can wipe out dozens of guards without breaking a sweat using mercenaries like this.
 * Smoke bombs, to a lesser degree. Pop one, and every guard in a surprisingly large area is helpless for about ten seconds, plenty of time to One-Hit Kill most or all of them.
 * Mercenarii and smoke bombs are the two main ways to get the "No-hitter" achievement (kill 10 enemies in a row without being hit while remaining in combat), albeit with mercenarii you have to hit at least one guard first to initiate combat.
 * If you're in a fight with guards you can't win or don't want to put the effort into winning, you can lob throwing knives at them. They're unblockable and only one (Florence/Tuscany/San Gimignano) or two (Romagna/Forli/Venice/Vatican) are needed to kill any guard in the game. If you feel the need to use them up-close, you can also pay a one-time fee for "special weapons" training to throw three at once, though the "charge up" animation before the actual throw can be interrupted.
 * Hidden Blades are this if your timing is consistently good enough; while its "window of opportunity" is smallest out of all weapons (unarmed is equal or a close second), they are the only weapon to always have a fatal Counter Attack Kill against any opponent not named, irrespective of the opponent's Health. Other weapons only have Counter Attack Kills if the opponent's Health is low enough or if they're suddenly vulnerable (disoriented by smoke or sand, distracted by a NPC, just got disarmed, knocked down, bumped into, and so on).
 * Genius Bonus: Ezio was born on June 24, day of Saint John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence. In a sense, over the course of the first half of the story the Assassin becomes the protector of the city and, like John, he is referred to as a "prophet".
 * Goddamned Bats:
 * Like the beggars in the first game, Assassin's Creed II has minstrels who run in front of you, physically blocking you from forward movement, while singing and playing their instruments. Unlike with the beggars though, there are multiple ways you can deal with them. You can toss coins on the ground and laugh as people swarm the area, draw your sword to cause them to run away in fear, or punch the talentless gits in the mouth, break their instruments, steal florins from them, or just outright kill 'em.
 * Agiles, though they don't do well in a stand-up fight, can run you down if you try to flee, even when you're sprinting all-out. If you must run, your life will be made slightly better by at least slaying them first. Or, if you don't want to suddenly be surrounded by a dozen guards, you can just press jump when they get close to you. That'll confuse them for a few seconds and give you time to make a clean getaway.
 * Growing the Beard: Figuratively and literally; it marks a major increase in the substance of the storyline of the series, as well as Ezio growing a Badass Beard in the Time Skip of recovering from a major stab wound between the DLC sequences.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight:
 * The page quote for Munchkin on This Very Wiki was: "Munchkin: One who, on being told that this is a game about politics and intrigue in 17th century Italy, asks to play a ninja." The latter part of that sentence has since been potholed into the main page.
 * Subject 16's hysterical ramblings include a past life where he seduces a woman at the opera and talks about having sex with her. This becomes rather amusing when you know that his voice actor Cam Clarke is openly gay.
 * Holy Shit Quotient: The final boss is . You have to infiltrate to get to him, and you fight him in the middle of . And after that's over, you chase him down again, where you proceed to settle it like men.
 * Sadly, he's not particularly difficult.
 * Ho Yay Shipping:
 * Ask half of the fanbase what they think of Leonardo and Ezio.
 * It doesn't help that the animus database claims Leonardo was gay.
 * During the mission where you rescue Bartelomeo, he calls you "Madonna" and "bella mie" (my lady).
 * Iron Woobie: At the end of the game, you'll find Ezio to be one of these if you think about it a little. Ezio started as a young nobleman who was really just out to live life. His interactions with his family members showed that he had a loving relationship with each of them. Suddenly, his father and brothers are executed in front of his eyes forcing him to run and start a life of ceaseless bloodshed. Then He proceeds into  And as of Brotherhood, his troubles seem to be far from over. Poor Ezio...
 * Jerkass Woobie: Many of Altaïr's and Ezio's victims turn out to be simply misguided but well-intentioned people with their final words.
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * "Requiescat in pace" has gone from Latin for "rest in peace" to synonymous with this game.
 * The fact that this game ends with you fist fighting the Pope.
 * The Man Hug QTE with Leonardo is considered such a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming that it's worth restarting the game if players miss it.
 * Moral Event Horizon: All of the assassination targets get a video in the database in which Shaun informs you of the dogs they've kicked. Rodrigo Borgia's list of dogs kicked, shot, raped, and had other things done to them that should not be mentioned is just... What. The. Fuck. Some of the Pazzi and Barbarigo have done some bad things too, but nobody can compare to Borgia. Although Carlo Grimaldi comes pretty damn close.
 * Most Annoying Sound: As much as the fanbase adores Leonardo, when you meet him at the docks near Forli he repeatedly yells "Ezio! Here! Over here!" until you speak to him. It gets very old very fast.
 * Porting Disaster: The PC version. Runs like molasses going up-hill in January (with crutches!), about as stable as nitroglycerin and has a DRM system so draconian that it makes all predecessors look good. These issues have been fixed, to an extent.
 * Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Desmond Miles was not received very fondly by fans in the first game, in large part because of his comparatively boring role as Audience Surrogate in the present-day Framing Story, and looking like a Butt Monkey compared to his much cooler ancestor, Altaïr. Cue the sequel, where he Took a Level in Badass, the present day scenes are fewer and more interesting, plus he gets to use the Le Parkour he's learned in one. His Crowning Moment of Funny just before The Stinger (in which he also finally gets to fight!) also helped.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: A small but very annoying quirk of trying to blend into moving crowds is that Ezio moves at a different speed from the NPCs; depending on how far forward you push the analog stick, he either moves faster than them or slower than them, forcing you to alternate your speed to stay on pace with them. Thankfully in Brotherhood, this was fixed so Ezio automatically matches their speed.
 * Shocking Swerve: Rodrigo Borgia becoming the Pope, for anybody who wasn't aware of that happening in Real Life. Prior to that, the game doesn't tell the player much about who he is besides him being the leader of the Templars.
 * Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Yes, this applies alongside Even Better Sequel. The second game addressed many of the complaints with the original game, even winning over some who outright disliked the original game.
 * That One Level:
 * "Port Authority", the Merchant assassionation mission in the Bonfire of the Vanities DLC. Oh god... You have to kill a guy who's tucked into a very secure spot on a large galleon, while 10 guards with super senses patrol the deck. Oh, and did we mention you have to kill him while not being detected? This mission alone will make you regret ever getting the DLC. Especially considering the rest of the missions before (and after) it are exceedingly easy.
 * The assassination mission "Town Crier". Sure, it's a pretty fun mission, but more than likely you'll end up getting shot down by an arrow from an archer you forgot to kill. And even if you do kill all the archers before you reach the tallest tower, you may jinx yourself into falling hundreds of feet to your death, at which point you have to start the whole thing over. Worse still, due to a glitch, it's possible that he doesn't spawn unless activated first (signified by him starting to yell), meaning that the player might have spend over ten minutes killing every guard and climbing the tower, only to find... nothing.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of gamers feel that Savonarola would have made a more effective Big Bad than Rodrigo Borgia, and lament on how he's wasted for, admittedly very good, DLC.
 * The game's version of Borgia is highly stereotyped and inaccurate and he is generally slammed for being a very weak one-dimensional villain, and many feel that Savonarola as a populist religious fundamentalist would have made Ezio's story more Grey and Gray Morality, tilting towards the first game.
 * They also note that since so much of the first part of the game is set in Florence and deals with the Medici and its history, a Florentine-based villain and a climax set in Florence would have served the game better (in the same way Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, another multi-city game which had the hero exiled from his main city in the First Act, finally did return to Los Santos for the climax) and made Ezio's story richer and have a stronger climax. Likewise, the Cristina sequences from Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood which Patrice Desilets noted were originally supposed to be part of AC-II, also made many lament its exclusion and missed opportunity.
 * Tough Act to Follow: Is still the most critically acclaimed and beloved entry in the franchise, thanks to its sprawling story, charismatic hero, large cast of Historical Domain Characters, jaw-dropping period architecture, sweeping soundtrack, and for making the most improvements and innovations on the formula.
 * Values Dissonance: It's all over the pages how awesome Caterina Sforza's speech is in the DLC, and how she really said that in real life, which makes it more awesome. We're talking about 16th century Europe, where that sort of behavior from a woman would probably have been considered shocking and obscene, worthy of, if not death, then banishment. She was probably unpopular merely for being a woman in a man's job. In other words, we can't know if she actually said and did those things with certainty, especially as she was judged very harshly by history, even in contrast with other female rulers who typically get the fuzzy end of the lollipop regardless.
 * The Woobie:
 * Lucrezia Borgia. After her son's physical recovery the boy was recovered and raised in the Borgia household, but with Cesare posing as the father and Lucrezia forced to pose as the aunt (coincidentally, zia in Italian).
 * Giovanni Borgia, as lampshaded in Project Legacy.
 * Giovanni Borgia, as lampshaded in Project Legacy.