I should add that if this story is meant to be episodic, then at least the first episode is nicely self-contained. The plot is nicely wrapped up, but as a result, new elements are revealed to you which must be tackled. It doesn't end abruptly or unfairly. There's no shortchanging on play time either, even without chasing the optional content. There is no downside here. I can't see owning a 360 and not having this game. The detractors who can't think past some simpler game-design mold are doing their readers and the creators of this fabulous work a disservice. Flaws are there, and some have frustrated the hell out of me on occasion. It's a matter of weighing the good against the bad, and the enormous heaping of goodness trumps all else. Just consider the achievement of realizing an ancient world in such detail, and then allowing you to own every corner of it. That by itself beats the hell out of half the games I've played in my life.
I need to talk about those new elements I mentioned, but I can't do that without huge spoilers. I don't recommend reading this until the game is put to bed. And if you don't get the conversationalist achievement near the very end, then you missed something. I don't know how much that matters, or how much you actually missed, though.
[spoiler]Did you see and understand the messages on the floor? You get your Y-button vision in the modern world at the end, and you can see two blocks of letters, one is a big square, and the other a triangle. I eventually figured out what they say. They're read bottom-up from right to left.
"artifacts sent to the skies to control all nations to make us obey a hidden crusade do not help them"
OK, easy enough.
"they drained my soul and made it theirs i drain my body to show you where is a wit"
That's more sinister, and I have no idea about what it means by "a wit". I tried grouping letters differently, but couldn't come up with other words at the end. Ideas?
Under the triangle is a number, "12212017". I'm thinking that last digit might be a 2, not a 7, which would make sense, since all the other digits are 0-2. That could possibly make it a base-3 number. Base-3 as in trinity? (See the triangle with the eye in it, symbol of God?) Heh. No clue at this point what it means.
I never made sense out of this either:
"yonA
guni"
At least that's what it looks like to me.
So from here, the (modern-day) "overworld" moves on to the next ancient scenario to conquer? That's my guess anyway. The mystery behind the artifacts has only been revealed. It seems very little is understood about them, even by the modern Templars.
Edit: OK, if that number is 12212012 base 3, then that comes out to 4271 base 10 (normal number for us 10-fingered creatures). Doesn't seem to mean anything, does it? Maybe it's just an 8-digit code that happens to have those digits in it. Door codes are 8 digits in this game. I'll doublecheck the math, but I think it's right.
[/spoiler]
