Assassin's Creed 2 Original Game Soundtrack

"Assassin's Creed" franchise has only two full-fledged games so far (versions for portable platforms do not count), but for a progressive video games composer Jesper Kyd it has already become not less important than a series about Hitman, which has made this Danish electronic musician an icon of modern game music. Like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed is a game about a killer though very ancient one. A medieval setting for Kyd is not a barrier but vice versa it’s an incentive. It’s not just a stimulus to step into a territory of unusual for him creative directions, simply to do something new but to reinvent a particular music style, to deconstruct music, take all familiar elements to pieces so as to reconstruct them later to his own taste, gracefully ignoring standards and authenticity. For the composer who has long gone beyond the framework of electronic sound and pure genres, in whose career there was both cold IDM, organically woven into the disturbing orchestration, and choir of the Hungarian Radio, performing pseudo-Soviet patriotic songs in broken Russian to the accompaniment of techno rhythms and vintage synthesizers, there are no obstacles and nothing is impossible. Each new Kyd’s work is not similar to the preceding, it has no analogues in the game industry and sometimes no analogues at all.

On the whole Kyd’s music solution for Assassin’s Creed 2 was rather radical. He completely abandoned the variety of music genres of the original game, which action was set in ancient Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus under a solid fusion of ethno-electronics, Hollywood symphonic music and chorals with a religious flavor, Kyd has adopted instruments and methods of the Renaissance and in a certain range of styles he creates an extremely delicate and romantic musical palette. Sequel’s events take place in Florence and Venice in 1476 with a meticulously recreated architecture of the cities and such historical persons as Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli as game characters. The music atmosphere in Assassin’s Creed can be described as neoclassic with tender keyboards in the style of avant-garde pianist Harold Budd and with viscous motives of a string ensemble similar to orchestra pieces by such famous minimalists as Philip Glass or Ennio Morricone as well as electronic music and mystical female vocals. Altaïr, the protagonist of the original game, is a best Assassin of the Assassin’s Order, who is tasked by his teacher with death of important persons getting ready for the Third Crusade. Btw, he doesn’t understand his actual role in what is happening. A young Florentine aristocrat Ezio is a main hero of Assassin’s Creed 2, who in its turn is seeking revenge for his parents’ death that’s why the sequel’s music has a distinct personal feature – it’s deap and emotional and sometimes even shrilly tragic.

Even with a complete change of style and music instruments Kyd’s melodies continue to serve as a slight background for a peaceful world of Assassin’s Creed. Moreover, the atmosphere of the second part is directly dictated by the time of the action – in the Renaissance times people used to celebrate almost everything with fanfare, fireworks and live musical accompaniment. In the original game the effect of the meditative atmosphere was achieved due to hypnotic music mood, that is a subdued electronic beat, special synth backgrounds and abstract voices. In the sequel the surrealistic atmosphere is kept mostly because of the overall minimalism and drawling string and piano parties.



But like in any other action game in Assassin’s Creed 2 peace is fragile and it’s its violation for that everything is constructed. Enormous open spaces, life simulation, expensive scenery and detailed sound landscape – all this loses any sense in no time when you’re surrounded by three dozens of bold-minded and heavily armed guards; when during a thrilling chase on the tiled roofs of Venice you understand that everything has been specially designed just for such moments – wild hack and slash, mad adrenaline rush, sophisticated curses from all sides and driving music. Background melodies in Assassin’s Creed 2 both for quality and quantity are giving its way to dynamic action tracks, once again stressing that surroundings unlike action are secondary. Though before it used to be the same.

A very powerful 9-minute suite Access The Animus from the first part is a piece of unreal magnitude and beauty (no doubts it’s the greatest electronic track since Vegas). It overshadowed the rest of the music form the game immediately, but in the absence of any analogues it sounded too often and as a result it became boring. In Assassin’s Creed 2 an approach to the plot has been carefully revised in favour of gameplay variety. The music now is used more rationally. Now there’s no such an epic and original work as Access The Animus in the game, but the composer did his best to give something instead – more action themes, more short ones but still effective. A music theme of the main hero Ezio can serve here as a consolation for the absent Access The Animus 2.0. It opens the album and extends for 3 pieces: Earth, Ezio's Family and Venice Rooftops, which being put together are equal to one Access The Animus timing (it also consists of three equal segments but they are cemented together in a chronological order).

The prologue to the entire album is a track entitled Earth, probably it’s the most significant and the most completed part of the soundtrack. The composition greets its listeners with melancholic play of acoustic guitars and sadness of female voices. But with the start of the second minute it rapidly begins to gather momentum - a few seconds later the emotional peak of the composition will come, like in the best moments of post-rock a dirty electro guitar and a string ensemble will join, and Earth will spin around in a rapid whirlpool of assertive percussion and electronic effects. Ezio’s Family is a calm version of Earth without rhythm and electronic part, but using the same leitmotif and sealing the vocal part. Here keyboards and solo strings also appear. Probably if these tracks had been a part of the one suite, then Ezio’s Family would have preceded Earth. However, Venice Rooftops, a wonderful end of the triptych, is strictly in its place - after a concise introductory part – you can hear dynamic rhythms as a basis and already familiar sound design: strings and violin, a drop of electronics and an abundance of vocal parts.

In general Assassin's Creed 2 is the first Kyd’s work, which has got into a serious dependence on keynotes, repetitions and variations of one and the same vocal studies, guitar riffs and other elements. Composer’s view is understandable – too much material has had to be written for the project. To some people it may seem monotonous: sometimes there's too much of acoustic guitar solo, and at the same time electro guitar should have been used more often. There’s no bass here – for one thing it is all right, cause too many similarities with the soundtrack to Splinter Cell: Double Agent from Ubisoft are no good – though Venice Fight sounds just like a tribute to one of the tracks by Michael McCann. For another thing, why not use the opportunity to the full? For the other category of listeners who welcome experiments, these two hours will fly by like 20 minutes: the structure of the album won’t get them bored – an airy Air Flight Over Venice 1 will be replaced by Back In Venice, delivering the spirit of adventure as well as it’s possible, and then a feminine Dream Of Venice - Best Choir composition of the album will follow.

Rationalism in Assassin's Creed 2 music is not simply in the increased number of sequences for fights and chases, but also in more successful allocating of background tunes for locations. While for the first part Kyd wrote only one song for each of the three cities, in the sequel even some areas of settlements have its own musical themes. Strong changes have affected percussion patterns too – percussion has become truly epic and awesome. It sounds in the manner of a choral hit Apocalypse from Hitman: Blood Money or like Bear McCreary soundtracks to TV series Battlestar Galactica. Also there’re some things which are more typical for Kyd, such as Venice Escape, for instance, - an aggressive track closing the first disc with a shocking techno base and sampled industrial rasp.

A gloomy track Darkness Falls In Florence sets the general tone of the second (the second, you heard that right - this is the biggest Kyd’s work, which saw the light in a form of a commercially released album), more abstract disk. But even here there are special, extraordinary discoveries such as Chariot Chase, which drag all the attention. However, I can’t say that the amorphous orientation of the second part of the soundtrack goes soft - ambient is too subtle and varied, gentle as in Sanctuary or panoramic as in Hideout and The Animus 2.0. It is nice that for the first time in a long time Ubisoft released a more or less exhaustive two-hour compilation of tracks from their game - the original Assassin's Creed hasn’t been honored this way - the publisher didn’t go beyond a disastrously short promo album. Hopefully in the future Ubisoft will only be praised for such gestures of goodwill, but now it’s too early - Ubisoft did too much it should not have. Still guilty after all these years.