In July, producer Adi Shankar revealed that he would be following up his recent Castlevania show for Netflix with an Assassin’s Creed anime, partnering with Ubisoft to tell all new stories within the expansive history of the franchise. While there are many great and memorable characters already established in the Assassin’s Creed games, comics and novels, an original story with a new character is absolutely the best way to go for the anime and could open up the world of Assassin’s Creed to new audiences and new opportunities.

PREVIOUSLY: Adi Shankar and Ubisoft to make Assassin's Creed TV Series

The franchise centers around the ages old conflict between the evil Templars, who want to control mankind through submission, and the heroic Assassins, who value free will for humanity. By using a machine called the Animus, people in the present day can access the genetic memories of their ancestors encoded in their DNA and relive those lives to search for ancient artifacts left by the alien civilization that lived on Earth prior to humans known as The Precursors or Those Who Came Before.

A Whole New World

One of the best things about Assassin’s Creed is that it doesn’t stand still for any amount of time. It would have been easy for Ubisoft to commit to the original star, Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, as the star of all Assassin’s Creed games and media, but that’s not the kind of multimedia story Ubisoft has been telling for the past decade. Altaïr was followed by Ezio Auditore de Firenze, who was followed by the Kenway family of Edward, Haythem and Connor, and so on. Eventually, the games would visit French Revolution, and the next entry in the series will take place in ancient Egypt.

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Meanwhile, Titan Comics has been producing companion series to the game for years that not only fill in the gaps of the Assassins’ history, but focus more on the present day struggle between the remaining group of guerilla Assassins and the corporate empire of Abstergo Industries, the modern day front for the Templars. The comics manage to make the present day story more compelling than the games or even the recent feature film ever managed to, and introduced its own roster of memorable characters to the series.

RELATED: Why You Should Be Reading Assassin's Creed Comics

If the anime is going to be successful, it needs to pay close attention to how the comics manage to translate the storytelling of the games to a new medium and how they reinterpret the millenia-long struggle while remaining canon with the games, books, movie and everything else. There’s nothing quite like Assassin’s Creed in terms of canon and continuity; Ubisoft watches it so closely that everything fits and everything counts. The closest comparison would be how Disney oversees the Star Wars franchise now, but Ubisoft has been doing that kind of long-form multimedia storytelling with Assassin’s Creed since 2007.

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Old Faces

While the anime has been confirmed to be a new, original story that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t feature familiar and fan-favorite Assassins. While it won’t be an adaptation of any other Assassin's Creed story, there’s plenty of room within the histories of Altaïr or Ezio to tell all sorts of stories, especially as the latter became more of a globetrotter in his later years.

In the years since Assassin’s Creed III, many fans have warmed to its stoic star Connor Kenway AKA Ratonhnhaké:ton. He spends a lot of that game very silent and singularly focused and was a departure from everything everyone liked in Ezio. As such, Ratonhnhaké:ton wasn’t beloved in his first appearance but fans expected to grow to like him as the character evolved, so when the next game was announced as starring his grandfather Edward, many fans felt cheated out of the character development they felt promised to them. The new Assassin’s Creed anime could continue Connor’s story of rebuilding the American Brotherhood and provide some level of closure to his loyal and patient fans.

Location, Location, Location

One of the benefits of Assassin’s Creed media that isn’t video games is that you don’t have to focus on making them good games. There’s gameplay elements that are vital to Assassin’s Creed games that need to be considered before transplanting the franchise to a certain time and location, but comics and animation don’t necessarily need to worry about that. While a game needs to make sure it builds a vibrant city with plenty of rooftops to run across and murder from, other media can focus on the time period and the setting to tell the best possible story.

RELATED: Assassin’s Creed Planned as a Trilogy, Says Michael Fassbender

There are plenty of eras that fans have been clamoring for that might work better in a anime than a game. The most obvious one is feudal Japan, especially considering the medium’s origins and history in the country, but also the caste system and history of the time period makes it perfect for the war between the Assassins and the Templars. Other times such as ancient Greece, early settled Australia or 13th century Baghdad.

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There are so many opportunities for the Assassin’s Creed anime to explore that it might be hard to narrow it down to one location and one character, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. An anthology series similar to Nintendo’s Pokémon Generations might be the perfect solution for the Assassin’s Creed conundrum and allow viewers to experience the full breadth and scope of the franchise and its decade of history in a much shorter space of time.

While it’s still the earliest of days for the Assassin’s Creed anime, there are few franchises that have as much scope and opportunity for storytelling as Ubisoft’s crown jewel and Adi Shankar has proven with Castlevania that he can help usher in a faithful and exciting video game adaptation in a venue you may never have thought to see it. Hopefully, Assassin’s Creed doesn’t take as long to develop as Castlevania, because it should be extremely exciting to experience when it does debut.