494 Words About: Beating Up Cheating Husbands Assassin’s Creed II
I’m never going to complete every side-quest in any Assassin’s Creed videogame, that’s just a sad but true fact, but I will absolutely beat up every cheating husband in Assassin’s Creed II.
And I have.
Within the game there are foot-racing missions between Ezio and local thieves, there are courier missions which involve delivering letters to random non-playable characters (npcs), and there are assassination missions which involve killing some dude who probably deserved it…probably. But Assassin’s Creed II also included a few side-quests where women on the street will inform Ezio that their husband is cheating on her and she wants Ezio to beat them up.
To which my response is always an emphatic, “Yes queen, happy to.”
These missions are never complex. It’s a simple matter of finding the husband on the map, confronting him, and then beating the living snot out of his no-good cheating butt. Afterwards the man will whimper out a half-hearted apology and promise to return to his wife and be a better husband.
And that’s it.
That’s the whole mission.
Side Quests are, as I’ve written about several times, ways game designers can pad their games with content, but they’re also a way to help players master controls, build character growth,and world-build in ways that aren’t empty exposition.
Considering their design, these missions are, at their core, excuses to exercise the fighting mechanics. While most of Assassin’s Creed II gameplay involves stealth, there are inevitably conflicts that will involve sword fighting or brawls between soldiers, mercenaries, or that one dude whose wallet I totally stole. The open world sandbox provides players seemingly endless hours of distraction as they can ignore the main mission entirely and simply go about picking fights, which is, fun fact, exactly what I did while playing the game.
Fighting in Assassin’s Creed II owns, and it’s one of the reasons I spent so much time playing it.
You can literally kill dudes in armor with a broom.
Like an actual broom.
But while the stealth missions and sword fights dominate the main narrative there are a multitude of sub-narratives within Assassin’s Creed II that collectively build the world around Ezio establishing the aesthetic and culture of Renaissance Italy. These small missions involving marital infidelity (and reminding dudes that cheaters fussed around and now are going to find out) help create a world that Ezio isn’t just passing through. Renaissance Italy was a complex culture of human people, many of whom were flawed, and while there were endless military engagements between warring city-states, political conspiracies and tumultuous government corruption, plagues that devastated the populations, and expanding influence and power of religious institutions, there were also average human beings living their lives.
Lorenzo Il Magnifico was an oligarch building the city of Florence into a cultural landmark through banking and military might, but Francesca was a good woman, and her husband Petrucho wouldn’t stop messing around with farm girls and somebody needed to remind him.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.21.2026
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