Highlights
- The protagonists in the Assassin's Creed franchise often have dark pasts and engage in acts of revenge, adding depth and tragedy to their characters.
- Bayek of Siwa, the protagonist of Assassin's Creed: Origins , inadvertently murdered his own son, making him a tragic and dark character.
- Assassin's Creed 3 features Connor Kenway, who must make morally questionable decisions, including killing his own father, in order to save and help his people.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise is filled with exciting characters that take part in various events from throughout history, always attempting to assassinate somebody that gets in their way, often with the prime motivation of vengeance on a foe that has killed someone they love.
Backstories such as these have become commonplace in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and there are a number of protagonists who, despite their good deeds under the player’s hand, have committed some atrocious acts in their past which can be difficult to forgive. There are darker games than the Assassin’s Creed ones, but many of these “heroes” in their historically accurate settings have truly dark pasts.
6 Bayek
The protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Origins is Bayek of Siwa, a hugely important character in assassin history, who begins his journey as an assassin seeking justice over the death of his son. A traditional revenge story that has come up in similar forms throughout the long history of Assassin’s Creed games, Bayek’s story takes a much darker turn with a reveal that comes later in the story.
It turns out that, despite Bayek blaming the five men he is hunting for his son’s death, it was actually Bayek himself who inadvertently murdered his own child. This reveal, and the surrounding trauma makes him feel like an even more tragic and dark character than the majority of vengeance-based protagonists met throughout the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
5 Ezio Auditore
For such a cheerful youth, Ezio Auditore quickly becomes darker as his story continues over the course of Assassin’s Creed 2. While Ezio appeared as the protagonist of more Assassin’s Creed games than any other character to date, his origins in the second-ever franchise game made for an absolutely devastating sequence of events.
Early in the game, after meeting and getting to know many members of Ezio’s family, three of them are captured and wrongfully sentenced to death. This is even worse considering that one of the three is Ezio’s young child brother. Ezio sees the three executed after being betrayed by a family friend and sets off on a dark path of vengeance, leading him to become the legendary Assassin Master. The effects of this brutal moment are felt throughout the game though, as Ezio’s mother never really seems to recover from the loss of her husband and two of her children, affecting Ezio in ways he doesn’t even realize.
4 Ratonhnhake:ton (Connor Kenway)
Assassin’s Creed 3 might be the darkest of the whole franchise to date. Focusing on the revolutionary war, the game itself had plenty of darkness surrounding the wiping out of Native American tribes. But Connor’s story, starting from the assault he suffered from Charles Lee and his men as a child, is filled with an unusual level of persistent darkness.
Much of this stems from the inevitability of having to fight and kill his own father, whom players had taken on the role of early in the game. Connor is forced to make dark decisions that make him feel questionable throughout Assassin’s Creed 3, including accepting help from George Washington after discovering it was he who ordered Connor’s village destroyed. Connor is a protagonist just trying to save and help his people, but the lengths he must go to for this are shocking at times, and the direction he went after his game may surprise some fans.
3 Eivor
It is easy to say that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is one of the darkest games yet in the franchise. After all, Eivor’s story begins with Kjotve the Cruel sacking their entire hometown and killing their parents. This was perhaps the most brutal opening to any game in the franchise, leading another Assassin’s Creed protagonist down a path of vengeance.
While Eivor tries to do good, they are a complex character with many questions left unanswered, plagued by various visions such as Asgard and Ragnarök, the end of the world, and are all the while engaging in Viking conquests over parts of Britain. While these are presented as good deeds against forerunners to the Templar Order, the real history of the Viking conquests in Britain makes this a difficult character to truly love at times.
2 Adewale
Adewale isn’t so much a dark protagonist as the entire events of Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry make the events and characters all feel brutal in comparison to other entries. Adewale was a slave who works now as an assassin, trying to disrupt the slave trade in the West Indies. His life and origin present a much more horrific background for a protagonist than any other in the franchise’s history.
Adewale and his actions in order to try and free slaves are all much more purely heroic than many Assassin’s Creed protagonists, but Freedom Cry in general is presented as a game about dark deeds and events and as such, Adewale is a character steeped in dark history.
1 Arno Dorian
Assassin’s Creed Unity is a controversial and unusual game in the franchise for a number of reasons, but protagonist Arno Dorian’s story is one of the most bizarre aspects of the game. He is the son of an assassin but was raised by a Templar, and is torn between the sides of this ancient conflict in a most horrible fashion.
Arno is framed for the murder of his adoptive father, who turns out to be the grand master of the Templar order and meets an assassin who leads him down the path to joining their order while in prison. His story is horrific, witnessing the man he loved killed, being framed for the murder, and then finding out the truth about whom that man really was, the journey is a tragic emotional rollercoaster ride for Arno.