YMMV / Assassin's Creed: Mirage

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Given a note is found from Al-Bahamut advising "the Witch" to cut it out with the conspicuous spending, a note she has clearly ignored, and that Al-Bahamut is revealed at the climax to know full well who Basim is, her helping Basim in his investigation could be a lot less accidental, and more getting rid of an underling who's proven unwilling to listen, and therefore a liability.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In the game's cinematic reveal trailer, some shops can be seen with fish on display in a pile of salt. While some expressed confusion as to why this is, and some people even mistook it for ice^note Which would not be plausible in a setting like the hot, flat deserts of Iraq at the time before artificial ice was possible, using salt for food preservation prior to the invention of refrigeration was a common way of keeping food fresh.
• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Genius Bonus: While Basim does piece together that the Jinni represents a painful, horrific memory from his past life as Loki, the game never really goes into specifics of what the details of it were. However, if you're well-versed in Norse mythology, you may recognize what this is meant to represent; Loki's torture for orchestrating the death of Baldur. In actual Norse mythology, this torture consisted of him being tied down and tormented by a snake, who dripped venom onto his face until Ragnarok. In the game, he is bound in an Isu machine and tormented by another Isu, heavily implied to be Odin.
• Narm:
  • Assassinating someone on the ground has them calmly turn towards you as if to have a pleasant talk before you shove your Hidden Blade into their stomach. They do this every single time regardless of what they might be doing when you approach them. This leads to incredibly silly situations where some enemies who have a weapon drawn will sheathe it while you're stabbing them.
  • Assassinating Al-Ghul carries a lot of gameplay dissonance, especially if you do it the way the game clearly wants you to. The game wants you to draw Al-Ghul out and then perch above his balcony, and perform an aerial stealth assassination, clearly labelling it a stealth assassination. Except once you do it, Basim goes out of his way to be as showy as possible, jumping behind Al-Ghul, tying a rope around his neck and tackling him off a roof to publicly hang him and then performing a superhero landing directly in front of some guards. For a "stealth assassination", Basim does everything short of cheer and fist pump.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Upon the Winter Palace heist going horrifically wrong, Basim heads home and tries to sleep it off. It's only the next day when he realizes that he's left everyone at Dervis's hideout to fend for themselves. Sure enough, when he gets there, he's greeted by the horrific sight of everyone, predominantly children, slaughtered and put on display for everyone to see.
  • Ali, while undeniably well-meaning in his goal of fighting corruption, is borderline sadistic in his pursuit of justice. Perhaps the best indication of this is when Basim walks in on him torturing a man for information, with blood already puddled on the ground. When Basim leaves, Ali keeps going off-screen, though we cannot see what he does, only hear the blood-curdling screams of the victim. Later, it's revealed that Ali did not let the man live; his corpse is laid in the room.
  • The Jinni. It's a decrepit hallucination that has plagued Basim his entire life, showing up in his sleep to torment him and shatter his mental state. When he joins the Hidden Ones, the Jinni seems to go away... Only for it to return with each target he kills, further terrifying him. The Reveal that the Jinni is actually Basim's memories of being tortured nearly to death in his previous life as Loki makes the Jinni even more haunting.
  • The Isu mechanism used by Al-Rabisu is something out of a cosmic horror story. Al-Rabisu places innocent people into the machine which, upon activation, gives the person within glimpses of the Isu society from long before humankind's rise to power. More often than not, the people who are on the receiving end of the machine's treatment Go Mad from the Revelation, unable to comprehend the Isu's existence and rendered a shell of their former selves.
• Older Than They Think: It was revealed a few months before release that the game would feature an option to play the game entirely in Arabic, not unlike the Japanese mode in Ghost of Tsushima. The Ezio games allowed players to set the spoken language to Italian with English subtitles, though it was more of a conventional translation for Italian-speaking players than it was for immersion.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Stealth in the RPG entries of the series, especially in Valhalla, was somewhat inconsistent, difficult to pull off successfully, and for some players was just not worth the effort, leading to some completely ignoring stealth altogether. Mirage, however, is all about stealth, and it's overhauled a variety of things from Valhalla to make it so. Enemies are no longer capable of insta-detecting the player, all enemies (save the difficult ones that spawn at max notoriety) can be one-shot assassinated, and the tool system allows for more in-depth stealth approaches than before. This, combined with the Sequel Difficulty Spike mentioned below in combat, means that stealth is once again your preferred method of attack.
  • Similarly, parkour. The RPG games (again, particularly Valhalla) had worlds that were gargantuan and mostly flat, with not many cities that were laid out for a variety of parkour opportunities, leading it to become somewhat obsolete in the minds of some players. In addition, Valhalla's parkour was extremely slowed down and clunky for some. Mirage, however, has cities and towns that are explicitly designed to provide dozens of potential parkour routes while also speeding the player's movements up dramatically, making it far easier to navigate the city without ever touching the ground and achieving a sense of flow as you navigate the rooftops.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Assassination animations are unskippable, so if Basim is caught during one a guard is fully capable of attacking him and taking out about a third of his health before the player is able to defend themself, even if they have the Chain Assassination upgrade.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Mirage puts a lot more emphasis on stealth than the previous three games, and has made combat much more difficult. While the controls are simplified, combat has a lot more nuances and requires more skill than it used to in Odyssey or Valhalla, and while enemies are no longer damage sponges, neither are you. The game outright tells you in loading screen tips that taking on more than four enemies at a time is a bad idea.
• Tainted by the Preview: While fans were still optimistic about Mirage's goal of Revisiting the Roots of the franchise, several were not pleased by the inclusion of Assassin Focus, a Mark-and-Execute-style system that makes it look as if Basim is teleporting to each of his targets for his takedowns that was shown in the extended gameplay reveal. None-too-kind comparisons were made to the assassination mechanics in Odyssey too.
  • The devs apparently listened to these concerns as around a month after the official gameplay reveal, footage was released by some who were given a pre-release copy of the game, and it showed that Assassin Focus, while still functioning as originally shown, now has a noticeable glitching effect to make it seem like the "teleporting" is more a consequence of the Animus technology failing to properly render Basim's rapid movements.

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