Against literally everyone's advice, I went ahead and bought AssCreeds II and III. I wonder if skipping over Brotherhood and Revelations will hamper my enjoyment of III. Probably, but I don't want to be spending ridiculous amounts of money on all this. Anyway, so far #II seems to be quite an improvement over the first one. The combat is a little better, jumping and climbing feels a lot more smooth and natural, the story and characters are vastly improved, and in general there's just much more cool stuff to do. As far as I can tell, this game does what good sequels do - keep true to the core elements of the original while being innovative enough to feel like a fresh new experience.
There's really only one thing that the first game did better, and that's the whole Animus framing device. Don't get me wrong, I still hate the retarded modern-day storyline, and I don't want to rant too much about that because I'm sure I'd just be preaching to the choir. But here's the thing, though - at least they were trying to do something with it in the first game. The overarching goal is to stay synchronized with Altair's memories, and the gameplay reflects that. Rather than health, you have a certain amount of synchronization. You lose synchronization when you deviate from your memories by doing things that Altair didn't, like falling off buildings, getting your ass kicked in fights, or killing innocent civilians. And as you spend more and more time with Altair, learning more and more about him, you gain more and more synchronization. Was it worth including in the game, no, but at least it was interesting, and it kind of made sense within its own dopey context.
Too bad it's not in the sequel! No, instead of playing as a guy who's trying to stay synchronized with his memories of an ancestor, you're playing as a guy who's playing a video game about his ancestor, regular old bar of health included. They took away the only kind-of neat thing about the Animus, and now its only function is to emphasize style over substance. And that might not be so bad, if it were any kind of decent style, but it's not. All the ugly, distracting cyberpunk elements from the first game are magnified here, from the weird lines crackling through the environment to the painfully-bright flashes of light...and those voiceovers from the two douchebags watching over you are the most annoying of all. There is nothing that shatters immersion more quickly than hearing one of them randomly chime in.