Assassin’s Creed: ValhallaThe Viking protagonist has a lot of luggage with him. Eivor is one of the more malleable playable characters in the series Valhalla is pretty firmly anchored in the decision-oriented RPG genre Assassin’s Creed has shifted recently. But Eivor is also one of the strangest attempts at dealing with canon while still giving the player the freedom to make the character their own. Because of Assassin’s CreedA mix of mythology and science fiction, Eivor is an incarnation of Odin, the Norse god. But you can play as either a male or female version of Eivor… only to find out that the male version is just Odin’s DNA projected through the Animus.
Ubisoft introduced this as a solution to creating a specific Eivor “canon” because no matter what you do, Eivor was a woman and her male counterpart is just the DNA of her previous iteration, confusing virtual reality technology. But this late-game twist just makes you wonder why Assassin’s Creed can’t have a single woman as a lead actress. It even ends up complicating things like the numerous homosexual love affairs for a male Eivor by claiming that they were secretly heterosexual all along. ValhallaThe decision-driven structures invite the player to define who Eivor can be, only to have the rug pulled out from under him at the eleventh hour.
Eivor is a very likeable protagonist who pushes away all the baggage with all his might. She’s caring, loves her clan and, interestingly enough, is quite different from the usual Assassin vs. Templar story. I appreciate some of the interesting narrative changes Ubisoft has brought, but Eivor ends up being a case study in how modernizing historical fiction is both an advantage and a detriment to gaming Assassin’s Creed series so many years ago. – Kenneth Shepard
