Assassin’s Creed 2 is an epic story of family, vengeance and conspiracy set in the pristine, yet brutal, backdrop of a Renaissance Italy. Ezio befriends Leonardo da Vinci, takes on Florence’s most powerful families and ventures throughout the canals of Venice where he learns to become a master assassin.
Page 2 of 3
Assembling all twenty Glyphs unlocks "The Truth," a short video depicting a man and woman named Adam and Eve running through a futuristic setting called Eden. The video closes on a binary string that translates directly to the word EDEN.
One Glyph puzzle asks players to find the shared element across five famous paintings, including Atalanta and Hippomenes and The Fall, the answer being that each artwork secretly depicts an Apple of Eden.
Solving a sonar-based Glyph puzzle reveals a hidden message quoting a Hopi prophecy warning of "a container of ashes" thrown from the sky that would burn the land and boil the ocean, an omen tying into the series' looming solar-flare apocalypse.
One of the Glyph puzzles displays the Assassin creed itself, "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted," and is deliberately unsolvable in the traditional sense, there is no right or wrong answer, only the phrase itself.
Although he never appears on screen, the real-life assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, is referenced in letters Giovanni Auditore writes to Lorenzo de' Medici, framing it as the opening spark of the game's Templar conspiracy in 1476.
Caterina Sforza, one of the game's major allies and a romantic interest for Ezio, was the real illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the same Duke of Milan whose assassination kicks off the story.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Ezio's mentor figure in the Italian Brotherhood, was a genuine Renaissance diplomat and writer widely regarded as the father of modern political science.
In-game, Leonardo da Vinci relocates his workshop from Florence to Venice in 1481. In real history, Leonardo left Florence for Milan that year, not Venice, a deliberate artistic liberty so Ezio's ally could stay close during the Venice chapters.
The flying machine and tank Ezio uses in-game were real Leonardo da Vinci designs, but neither was ever constructed in his lifetime, he reportedly worried about his blueprints falling into the wrong hands and included deliberate errors in his notes.
When Machiavelli asks how Ezio recruited the city's guilds, Ezio credits "Virtù," a real concept from Machiavelli's writing on leadership. Later, Machiavelli jokes about writing a book on Ezio one day, a wink at Machiavelli's real, famously short work, The Prince.
