Re-playing the series, I realize that Assassin's Creed has only gotten better over the years.

[Blade]

These Borgia Towers are much harder than I remember. I actually got 100% synchronization in Brotherhood when I was younger but stealth mechanics have improved so much since then that I genuinely forgot how janky the detection system can be in these older games, From guards seeing you assassinate other guards through walls, to skipping the detection meter and just instantly attacking before you have to time to break their line of sight, to guards spotting you from from a mile away, the AI really was unrefined back then. The parkour is just disgusting when 4 times out of 10, Ezio just does something completely random like jumping the opposite direction off a chimney to fall two stories and break his legs instead of down onto the roof because the game just guesses what it is you're trying to do instead of following your button inputs. There's nothing more annoying than that during a chase sequence or trying to catch a Borgia Messenger except when Ezio jumps into a hiding spot instead of running passed it and costing you 10 seconds.

It's made me realize that Assassin's Creed never "got bad" or anything like that, we just have a blind nostalgia for the older games that we mistake for them being better in some way, when in fact the modern Assassin's Creed games only got better and better up until Valhalla which wasn't really Assassin's Creed, but it was still a decent game. After all the open-world Assassin's Creeds the city layouts in these classic games become obnoxious as you try to get from point a to point b through the giant labyrinths. Outside Nostalgia and the story, these games really have nothing impressive by today's standards and actually didn't age that well. I've always held the Ezio Trilogy in the highest esteem but coming back and re-playing them, the janky mechanics can be extremely annoying to the point you have to set the game down for a few minutes every 20-30 minutes because something annoying happened and it just killed your mood playing the game.