The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Assassin's Creed Unity
La Halle aux Bles
Lethal / Reaper / Stealth Kills

The Initiate synchronizes with the memory of Arno Dorian infiltrating La Halle aux Bles, following Germain's tip-off that Lafreniere may have some vested interest in the location. Their true motives are to get some stealth training in before starting to synch with the memories of Arno they have laid out for the rest of their session. Any red guard the Initiate comes across is immediately targeted and purged.

***

The Temple (Assassinate Germain)
No Kills, No Detects, Blade Only

Arno Dorian and Elise de la Serre move to confront their mutual enemy, François-Thomas Germain in a veritable Templar fortress. As the treacherous Templar Grandmaster is overcome with the mind and memories of Jacques de Molay, Arno moves into the castle, knowing there is no time to waste. While Arno can see no weaknesses, he is a far greater Assassin than he once was, and he knows there must be a way forward. Many of Germain's guards have no clue as to the true horrors of what lies inside the Temple, and killing them would only waste precious moments.

This memory is straight-up oppressive to an impatient player, or someone who's very quickly trying to figure out good routes and how to get to where they need to go. A long time ago I made a "Non-Lethal / Target Only" playlist for Unity, and when I got to this final mission, I was unable to do so. I was unable to do so because back then, I couldn't find a way to beat it without killing anyone, and that's why the video you see for this mission in that playlist is just "The Temple -- Lethal Stealth Speedrun". It was the first time I was pushed toward experimenting with stealth kills, rather than just going non-lethal all the time. (I almost religiously stayed away from producing content that had Murder in it for quite a while, because I loved the badassery of Ghosting/Pacifist play.)

There are no crowds here. The entire fortress is a restricted area. There are hiding spots but moving between them is crazy difficult, and there are gunners on just about every single rooftop that matters. Getting spotted is a death sentence here unless you have somewhere you can immediately run to, and doing all of the above without killing or KOing a single guard is pretty damn difficult.

The Germain boss fight is actually one that holds some very cool ideas. You basically have a Rogue and a Knight fighting back against a Mage, but all of them are appropriately Shadowy characters because... well, because this is Assassin's Creed. Germain either has Eagle Vision or some Fragment of Knowledge due to having Aita's DNA, which means he can actually scan for Arno to flush him out from behind cover. The Sword of Eden that Germain possesses attacks via electricity-based abilities and phenomena, like the Lightning Bolt AoE he can strike you with if you don't run away after his Awareness Pulse. Germain cannot be defeated via Combat or Ranged Weapons. Shooting him with Projectiles will just cause him to say, "A waste of my time..." Trying to hit him with a sword will, as far as I'm aware, not damage him at all, though he will take about three strikes' worth of hit-stun, after which the Sword of Eden will fry you.

What this all means is that the only way to defeat Germain is through Stealth, which is really, really cool. This is one of the few Stealth boss fights I've played in games, and it always feels super rogue-y to have a boss fight like this. Sadly, it's not terribly deep. You only need to Assassinate Germain three times for the fight to be over, and there's very little variation in tactics necessary. Nothing changes between each strike, he doesn't get new abilities, the arena doesn't change in any way, and the cooperation between Arno and Elise is superficial at best, barely affecting gameplay at all. She throws a Smoke Bomb for me once to save my life, which felt pretty cool, but that's about it.

As I played this memory quite a few times to get the footage for this, I realized I actually really enjoy it. I might go back and do more content on this at some point, depending on what seems interesting to me.

Assassin's Creed Unity
Memory: Bottom of the Barrel
Style: Reaper / Lethal / Stealth Kills

Arno, hungover, stealth kills a bunch of guards because he wants to steal their wine. Then he goes on a murderous rampage because some other guards stole the watch his father once gave him. You don't mess with Arno's watch.

***

The wobbly and grey effect on the camera in the first part of this mission, and the similarly blurry effect on the camera in the second part of the mission is because Arno is drunk, and later, hungover. If you use Eagle Vision during this mission, Arno's head will hurt, and, because of the visual and audio effects that accompany it (screen distorted by sharp/saturated colors, ringing in ears sound effect) your own head will hurt too.

Thankfully no Eagle Vision was used during this video, because I won't subject viewers to that, even though I do appreciate the little detail that Ubisoft tacked on.

This mission's actually quite tough, believe it or not, except for the last part, where all the guards are just positioned by the Level Designer(s) in such a way that you can just play "Connect-the-Dots" with them, quickly Stealth killing them all one after the other just by killing one, walking to the next one, killing him, walking to the next one, etc.

Coming up next, sometime in the next two days is a video of the same mission, but with No Kills and No Detects... If I can actually do it. I'm not sure if it's even possible, but we'll see.

Hope you enjoy.
Safety and peace.

Leo K here, to pick these videos back up before Syndicate. This is the worst-designed target in the entire game. Everything that is broken about Unity is exacerbated by moving Arno indoors, and the worst interior areas are the sewers/catacombs due to their lack of possibilities. As a result, I do multiple checkpoints/record multi-segments for this one. It's very possible to do this entire mission in a single pass, but it is difficult as many things can go wrong that have little to do with the player's input. Cutscenes removed and video edited for maximum viewer enjoyment.

As the annotation says, you only need one Smoke Bomb to climb the column in the final area of the escape.