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  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • Due to the game's mechanics, the fight with Robert De Sablé can end quite abruptly if the player manages to knock him down early on in the fight and follow it up by stabbing him with the Hidden Blade as he lays on the ground, or countering one of his attacks with the same blade. This can be done in a matter of seconds after the fight with him starts, effectively having Altaïr curb-stomp the man who who deflected Altaïr's assassination and threw him across the room back at Solomon's Temple.
    • The first part of the boss fight against Al Mualim has him summon clones of the nine men you've assassinated over the course of the game, which sounds like an epic battle, but the clones are at the same level as basic level guards and constantly attack, meaning the fight will likely be over in nine counters. The only thing that makes this fight even remotely difficult is the enemies no longer attack one at a time, so it is possible to get hit multiple times in rapid succession if you're not careful.
  • Breather Level: Between the action-packed assassinations, Altaïr has to complete multiple relatively peaceful investigation missions.
  • Broken Base: The final levels of the game from Arsuf onwards can be summed up as awesome video game levels or disappointing ones. On the one hand, it's very freeing to simply run through the level slaughtering everyone in your path, not having to worry about stealth and simply fighting everyone you see. It serves as a test of skill from what you've learned from the game's combat system, because you aren't going to survive an army of these soldiers mashing the attack button. On the other, it's an inescapable gauntlet of enemies that are in a linear path. Combat has always been a defining trait in Assassin's Creed, but not to this magnitude.
  • Camera Screw: Ever since the first modern Prince of Persia, Ubisoft has insisted switching the camera to the most dramatic (read: inconvenient) angle for especially difficult jumping passages. AC continues the proud tradition. The idea, in theory, is to give you a very clear view of where exactly you are supposed to jump. However, since the controls are relative to where the camera is facing, the jump itself becomes harder to perform correctly.
  • Catharsis Factor: After completing the game, the damage penalty for killing civilians is removed, so you can feel free to assassinate all the beggars, madmen, and annoying citizens who happen to be in your way without consequence.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Malik, the Jerusalem Bureau leader, barely qualifies because his role in the game is bigger than the other Rafiqs. Nevertheless, he has a sizeable fandom.
    • To a (much) lesser extent, Sibrand. He's the only Templar in the first game who has much presence in fandom.
    • The nameless Rafiq in Damascus, mostly for his cheery nature and amusing sarcasm. He's not as dour as the Acre Rafiq, or as bitter as Malik.
  • Event-Obscuring Camera: Since the game's camera is forced to maintain a fixed distance away from the Player Character, the brief cutscenes when Altaïr performs a counter-attack usually make the camera adjust to even more inconvenient angles, especially when fighting in cramped, narrow areas.
  • Fanon: Many like to portray Altaïr as someone who can't swim or is afraid of water, in order to explain why the player drowns if they end up dropping into the water. Either that or he's water-soluble.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: While Altaïr is canonically paired with Maria, most fans prefer to pair him with Malik, due to their tense relationship-turned-friendship and feeling that they had better chemistry, with Altaïr/Malik still dominating fan works for the franchise even to this day.
  • Game-Breaker: Counter attacking with the Hidden Blade is a One-Hit Kill, even against the final boss (once you jump through his other hoops)... so long as you have the timing down enough to succeed consistently (key word here).
    • Not to mention, if you get the timing down well enough to consistently counter with the Hidden Blade in this game, you've just developed a skill that will make the entire rest of the series MUCH easier.
    • You can kill entire armies with the Hidden Blade. Throw two people to the ground and knife them, and others will start to recoil in horror or distract themselves. The ones who recoil can be assassinated before they recover, that assassination will make someone else react, and so on, and so on...
    • Throwing Knives can be this, as well, so while a counter attack won't always kill, Throwing Knives will always hit their intended target. Even during a fight where the boss will block all your other attacks, Throwing Knives can make quick work of them. They can One-Hit Kill Al Mualim's clones, for instance. The game also has a surprisingly good feel for where the blade should be used and when knives should be thrown, so large fights done with the Short Blade can go surprisingly fast if the player is good with the targeting system.
  • Genius Bonus: Despite being the King of England, Richard the Lionheart speaks with a prominent French accent. During the Crusades, French was spoken by royalty and nobles until 1399 when English itself took over as the dominant language.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • The guards can feel like friggin' bats when you're trying to run and hide, and they pelt you with rocks as you climb away, or the alert goes off again just as you're about to dive into a rooftop garden. They also like continually spawning just after you've killed a bunch of them to save a citizen, immediately starting another fight.
    • There is also the beggars, who constantly harass you (and only you) for coins, and the lepers, who shove you (and only you), sometimes into a group of guards or an informer's assassination target.
    • The madmen will shove you out of the way if you get near them, which has the very severe potential to ruin any plan you make - all it takes is a single shove and suddenly you're exposed to the guards or your pickpocketing attempt is ruined. Like the beggars, they also can gang up on you, knocking you to the ground and refusing to let you get away from them. And, because of the way their animation works, if they back you into a corner, there's literally no way to get away from them unless they choose to leave you alone, meaning a single person can leave you stuck with no way out.
    • The archers. Up close, they are just normal guards, but at a distance with their bows out they are unblockable. Throwing Knives can easily kill them, but early on you only have five, and you have to either steal from thugs (whom you have to leave the rooftops to find) or return to Al Mualim to restock them.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Snooping around emails in the modern day will reveal that 96% of Africa’s population has been killed by a virus called L-11 (this was later retconned to be a hoax created by a third secret organization called Erudito). Then came the West African Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020…
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • After one of the main Assassination targets used poison on some civilians, Altaïr makes a side comment to the Rafiq in Damascus that poison is a coward's weapon. In Assassin's Creed II, one of the Ezio's weapons is poison (A blade dipped in poison, to be exact). Making it even funnier, said blade was invented by Altaïr himself, as Leonardo da Vinci builds it from the designs in the Codex.
    • Many fans of the first game call Ezio weak because he uses dual hidden blades and his hidden gun. "Altaïr never needed those." Considering that it was Altaïr who invented them... well, what does that make him?
  • LGBT Fanbase: Malik and Altaïr, due to the huge amount of tension between the two that lasts until about halfway through the game when Malik forgives Altaïr for costing him an arm and getting his brother killed.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Has its own page.
  • Memetic Badass: The In-Universe mechanics indicate that only a perfectly played game is canon, in turn implying that Altaïr was so badass that his enemies literally couldn't touch him. Keeping in mind that Altaïr is forced to fight dozens of opponents at once to the death at certain points. This has not escaped fans' notice.
    • The Memetic Badass page has more examples of Altaïr's awesomeness, but the best relates to desynchronization. The player (as Desmond) "de-syncs" with Altaïr if the player does something Altaïr doesn't remember doing. Being hit causes de-sync and misjudging a jump and falling causes de-sync; Meaning Altaïr was never, ever hit and performed Le Parkour perfectly every time.
  • Padding: The 9 assassination missions for Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre are very repetitive. Once you've done one of them, you've pretty much done them all as the build up for each assassination always plays out the exact same way. The only real differences for each of the missions is the final section when you finally have to go about assassinating the target.
  • Polished Port: With the backwards compatibility program, when played on Xbox One, the game runs at a 4k resolution. When played on Series X or Series S, it goes even further with it running at 60fps with its compatibility with the FPS Boost program.
  • Sequel Displacement: Due to Assassin's Creed II's reputation as being an Even Better Sequel and being popular enough to spawn a trilogy of its own, it is often the first thing people think of in regards to Assassin's Creed rather than this game. To add insult to injury during The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games, the Ezio Trilogy, and even the contested Assassin's Creed III received remasters for the current consoles, leaving the original Assassin's Creed game as the only one that never got a remaster or port to current consoles (outside of being backwards compatible on Xbox One and Series X/S).
  • Slow-Paced Beginning: It takes quite a while before you finally get past the exposition and get to work assassinating people.
  • Spiritual Successor:
  • Squick:
    • The result of Garnier's Wham Line will forever be engrained in players' memories: "Break his legs. Both of them."
    • Two of the Short Blade counters are just sickening. The first is very similar to another example where Altaïr breaks a guard's knee with a terrible crunching sound before snapping their neck with a very similar sound. The other is a counter where he stabs a guard straight in the top of the skull with a sound that can only be described as "wood breaking in half", which is not helped by the fact that Altaïr actually struggles to pull the blade back out afterwards.
    • There's even a Counter not many players know about which allows Altaïr, himself, to break one of his enemy's legs to incapacitate him, complete with screaming in agony on the victim's end. note 
  • Take That, Scrappy!: You get an achievement called "Enemy of the Poor" if you grab and throw 25 beggars. That's right; the game actually rewards you for grabbing those annoying buggers and throwing them across the road, preferably at a market stall.
  • That One Achievement:
    • All of the flag achievements. The flags are listed under Guide Dang It! on the main page for very good reason. Every city has 100 flags (except for the much smaller Masyaf, which has 20 instead) scattered across the entire city with absolutely no indication of where they're hidden. Even if you're looking straight from a guide, the Kingdom alone is going to take roughly four hours of looking at a map, marking a waypoint, and traveling to the spot, and unless you have a photographic memory or have marked down locations from previous playthroughs, this is really the only way to do it. The achievement for killing all of The Templars is also just as hard to get, as there's only 60 of them across the entire game and also no indication of where they are. On the plus side, if you manage to get all 480 collectibles in total (420 flags and 60 Templars), you'll have eight more achievements than when you started.
    • "Conversationalist" is legendarily annoying. The actual method of getting it is rather simple: go through every possible dialogue with Lucy. The problem is that this has to be done across a single run, and several of them are very easy to miss (the one after memory block 6 actually has a glitch that can potentially break the achievement for that run), and if you miss a single talk, then you have to start all over. There's no real way to tell how many times you're able to talk to her except to mash every button to try to get her to talk until she finally says, "Aren't you tired?"
  • That One Boss:
    • Robert de Sablé. Naturally, the guy who foiled Altaïr's assassination attempt on his life, and flung him away like some hapless child at the start is going to be a pain for the player to defeat.
    • Sibrand, or more accurately, "how to navigate through a body of water Altaïr can't swim in using small boats and poles and trying to avoid being shoved off by madmen just to kill one person, and parkouring all the way back".
    • Robert de Sablé (Maria Thorpe in disguise) in Jerusalem counts as well. There are archers stationed around the cemetery that you can't take out. You actually have to run away in order to survive (unless you can dodge arrows and the highest tier mooks at the same time), but doing that will lead you through more guards than you've seen in the entire game to this point.
  • Vindicated by History: While the game never became unpopular, it was seen as an awkward first step (or a tech demo to newer players) for the franchise while II would fully realize the potential for the series. In retrospect, while parts of the game remain unpopular (especially the sidequests), ACI possessing a more subdued attitiude to its open world antics and keeping all of the focus on the Assassins gave it more fondness in retrospect as the series after Ezio's games became victims of feature creep and over-filling the sandbox. Altaïr especially has become almost a Memetic Badass figure in the fanbase, with his cool professionalism standing out after the wave of attempts to emulate Ezio.
    • It also helps that the combat system has a bit more nuance to it than games such as Assassin's Creed III, for instance.
      • Counters are much harder to pull off, here, than any other games, due to the fast-paced nature of the animations, and each weapon of the three blade weapons Altaïr has all have a different window to initiate.
      • Guards generally have most of the abilities Altaïr will relearn at the course of the game, and they're fairly competent fighters.
      • Rather than Throwing Knives being a separate weapon category, they work in conjunction with the Short Blade. This make ideal to switch to to the dagger, as these knives are generally One-Hit Kills to Mooks, especially their higher-ranked leaders.
      • It's possible to chain-kill guards with the Hidden Blade by countering and/or assassinating downed guards, while assassinating the ones who lose their composure. Rinse and Repeat.


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