Assassin's Creed—Fragments: The Blade of Aizu (La Lame d'Aizu)

Assassin's Creed: Fragments, Book 1

By: Olivier Gay

Narrated by: Sophie Oda

Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

The fate of Japan will change...

1868. The Boshin War is about to break out.

The Templars, infiltrated among the Emperor's closest advisers, pushed the sovereign to launch a campaign against the Shogun Tokugawa, himself supported by the Brotherhood of Assassins. Is the glorious era of the samurai coming to an end?

A 16-year-old Japanese girl, Atsuko grew up in the wealthy neighborhoods of Aizu City, in the shadow of her brother Ibuka. Promised to an arranged marriage, the young girl hides a secret: she wields weapons just as well as her brother, whose talent with the sword actually masks an insurmountable fear of combat.

When war is declared, Ibuka must leave to fight alongside their father for the honor of the family. Defying the tradition forbidding women to take part in battles and wanting to protect her brother, Atsuko enlists in secret as a simple soldier, eager to show the extent of her talents.

But in the face of manipulations and conspiracies that overwhelm the two teenagers, will brotherly love be stronger? Stronger than convictions and honor?

Experience the heart-pounding first novel Assassin's Creed Fragments, set in the final moments of medieval Japan.

©2022 Olivier Gay (P)2022 Recorded Books

A Fun Listen

There were some cool ideas that I wish were explored a little more. This is not what I would have expected from Assassin's Creed. The use of historical events, introducing certain cultural beliefs or practices were pretty surface level. It was still a fun listen and I devoured it over the course of a couple days.

Still worth a listen!

Not even the Assassins

The author clearly has no idea what an Assassin is. The most prevalent “Assassin” tells the main character to kill a bunch of innocents to better kill the enemy, literally breaking the creed and the most important value that separates them from the Templars. I thought at first it was just a test to see if she’d do it and it probably wasn’t actually poison but no she later tells her thats just how it is and thats what they do. But no thats not what they do and anyone who’s played a single game about the Assassin’s knows that and how important that has been throughout all those stories. And the few other Assassins never say it was wrong or condemn her actions in anyway. This is a one off in an anthology series so it’s not going to come back up or have a plot about how the Japanese brotherhood is corrupt or anything of that nature.

Wasted Potential: A Complete Disappointment

Firstly, let me preface this review by saying that I adore the Assassin's Creed franchise with every fibre of my being. I have played and enjoyed every single main and minor entry that Assassin's Creed has to offer and have generally found myself pleasantly surprised rather than angry or annoyed whenever Ubisoft decides to subsititute fantasy for reality. Ubisoft has brought numerous historical figures and events to life in a way few other historical fantasy series have even approached.

Which is why I was so thoroughly disappointed with the content of this book. The Bakumatsu, Boshin War, and Meiji Restoration are very interesting events that probably deserve to be made into a full-fledged game rather than being relagated to this unimpressive Mulan ripoff. Furthermore, the choice to make the Assassins side with the Shogunate is and forever will be one of the dumbest ideas Ubisoft has ever made with regards to Japanese Brotherhood. The reality of the Tokugawa Shogunate was that it was an authoritarian, xenophobic, and repressive regime. The peasants regualry starved, and fires and riots were commonplace. The "peace" of the Bakufu was only relative to the chaos which preceded it. The general population lived in abject fear of the samurai and the samurai could exert cruelty at swordpoint to any who crossed their path. There is no way that any true Assassin who followed the tennents of the Creed would ever truly side with the Shogunate by the late 1800s as portrayed in this book under any other circumstances besides convenience... if the Bakufu was portrayed in a more historically accurate light.

And that brings up my second issue: This author has little to no familiarity with the actual history of this time period:

1. The Shiba clan is a real clan... but they were exterminated in the Sengoku period and most lived nowhere near Aizu. They were Owari Shugō who clashed with Oda Nobunaga in the 1500s. The ahistorical survival of this clan and the emergance of someone as apparently well-known as Atsuko's father is laughably silly. Such blatant anachronism has no place in good historical fiction whatsoever. It completely ruins my immersion when an author treats their OC as someone important and well-known in their time but whom is completely absent from the actual historical record because they never existed nor could have existed.

Secondly, Kiyomori did not die at the Battle of Aizu... this just a plain inaccuracy here. He died in 1893 long after the Bōshin War. There is absolutely no good reason that he should've died in this book.

Thirdly, Brunet served the 2nd French Empire, not the 3rd French Republic as stated on this book. This is yet another basic inaccuracy. Not too sure why, seeing as the author is French and ought to know this... Unless he is implying that Brunet and his allies already concieved of and served the 3rd Republic three years before it ever existed... possible, but unlikly.

Fourthly, this author has no clue how Japanese naming conventions work. A Samurai's name is extremely complicated. Most had at least three separate names used in different circumstances: (1) a childhood name, given at birth and used by family members, often using kanji to designate birth order; (2) a real name, given during the coming of age ceremony (~13-20 yo)—consecrated with battle—usualy only used by those very close to oneself but is nonetheless the name most historians use when referring to a particular Samuari for some odd reason (i.e. "Nobunaga" was not what contemporaries would have called Oda Nobunaga in his life time); (3) instead they would have used Nobunaga's common name (i.e. "Saburo")—this is an extremely important part of samurai history that nearly every single piece of historical samurai fiction made for mass consumption completly ignores because it over-complicates things... but that's the problem, it was meant to be that way! By ignoring this very important part of samurai culture the author makes a massive blunder in making it seem okay to speak so disrespectfully towards one's lord... which was NOT OKAY in medieval and feudal Japan. This makes this work extremely jarring for people who genuinly value Japanese history. Nobody ever tries to do this... but they really should!

I could go on with other inaccuracies. But I want to move onto my primary gripe with this story: It completely ruins any chance that this time period will feature in any future Assassin's Creed projects. Which is a shame because this drivel is a complete disappointment.

Furthermore, this book excludes interesting historical events that occured during this time period. But due to the way it was written it actively excludes any of the main characters from actually participating in any of them. This is a shame because a full-length game set during this same time period coud've covered numerous cool historical events: from the arrival of Perry's Expedition, the Convention of Kanegawa, and the Ansei Purge in the 1850s through past the Sakuradamon Incident, Sakashitamon Incident, Mito Rebellion, Chōshu Expeditions, and Boshin War in 1860s; and ending with the various Rebellions in Kyūshū in the 1870s. There is so much wasted potential for a longer, deeper, more complicated story than what the author wrote in this book. It's a shame because there is so much wasted potential that could've been channeled into one of the best samurai games ever:

We could've had a historically accurate samurai-shinobi templar (perhaps a member of the infamous Black Cross) with an ironclad warship armed with gatling guns, armstrong guns, & torpedos; while still being able to wear traditional samurai armor as this was what happened historically as well as being able to use traditional samurai weapons like the katana, wakizashi, nōdachi, tantō, nagamaki, naginata, yari, yumi, tanegashima, bo hiya, shuriken, and more along with an array of historically accurate foreign-imported firearms like the minié, snider, starr, drysse needle, chaspot, gweher, spencer, and the S&W army revolver no. 2; the badass Kunimoto air gun was made in the 1840s and would be a great addition to our Black Cross's arsenal. Although it wasn't known to be in use during the Bōshin War the awesome Giradoni air rifle had been around for nearly a decade at this point and could become available to us later on in the game—a semi-auto air gun with enough power to rival traditional muskets... sign me up! But... alas... we got this depressing piece of angsty teenage garbage instead.

Given Ubisoft's massive screw up with making the Assassins support the god-awful Shogunate, the least they could've dome is make a sympathetic Templar character. Lloyd, while completely fictional, feels like a caricature. He is given unreasonable skill and strength without justification and his goals are barely worth mentioning because they mind as well not exist. Why does he want to restore Emperor Meiji to the throne? No real reason other than to overturn the assassin-allied Shogunate... Which the Templars should have been aligned with for it's dogmatic desire to control society in the first place! It seems like the author was just attempting to pigeonhole Templars into Japan for no other reason than huberis... it's a mockery of Templar ideals and runs completely contrary to their stated goals in Japan as depicted in the now-defunct mobile game, Assassin's Creed Memories. Back then, the Templars wanted to stop the civil wars that plagued the country in order to allow their ideology to take hold... well, the Assassins supported the unifier of Japan, but the Tokugawa Bakufu certainly seemed to like power and control over society, so it would seem that the Templar's plans actually worked... So why bother with all this bs?

This is such a boring, lazy motivation that it feels like an infant wrote it. The Templars ought to have more ambition than regime change... they are not petty enough to simply want to get rid of the Assassins for no reason if they were serving their own plans. Thus this motivation seems completely unimportant and inconsequential in the grand scheme of the Assassin's Creed storyline. Imo, the least the author could have done was give Lloyd some sort of personal stakes in the outcome of this conflict. He just feels so flat and unidimensional. I honestly don't know why the author bothered making him in the first place when they could've just chosen an obscure historical personage from this time period (like Takeko) and expounded on that.

Lastly, the least of my critiques is that the narrator was not pleasant to listen to. Her monotonous cadence, terrible accents, and childlike delivery were so grating on my ears that I had to take a break nearly every 20 minutes or so because she was so unbearably bad. I truly hope she improves because if they choose her to voice other AC properties in the future then I might need to get a digital copy and just use text-to-speech instead.