First of all, it's pretty incredible how they were able to fit the full-blown Assassin's Creed experience into a PSP game. The only compromises here are those of graphics and scale. Other than that, it plays almost identically.

But practically all the problems I had with the original are addressed here (as much as you can do without altering the core gameplay of course).

The boring tutorials, modern-day sections and unskippable cutscenes are gone. Nothing breaks up the game flow or ruins the immersion any more.

It's still not a stealth game, but at least it doesn't pretend to be one, getting rid of some unnecessary mechanics. More emphasis is made on combat, which, while still mostly boring, at least they don't take away your skills and weapons. You end up mostly relying on counter-attacks, which are satisfying, but can get tedious, especially as any fight can chain-link into several others. It can also be frustrating how after a successful counter-attack kill your character will disengage and just stand there to receive a hit. And trying to do something immediately might resolve in him just striking air. But I think this problem existed in the original game too.

The biggest and most important difference is how side-quests are no longer mandatory, but now there's an actual motivation to do them. They generate you profits which can then be spent on upgrades, which is yet another incentive to keep playing. These upgrades can make the gameplay much less frustrating too simply by making it easier, either through extra abilities, like auto-blocking or increased health.

Unlike the original Assassin's Creed, Bloodlines lets you just do what it was advertised to do: let you kill people as a badass assassin in Crusader states. It's still not a deep or complex game by any stretch of imagination. In fact, it's not really very fun either. But it won't stand in your way and make things difficult for you like the original did. And seeing how this is an open-world game for PSP with pretty impressive graphics, I had to add an extra half-star just for that. Still from the gameplay perspective it does not really compare to the Tenchu and Shinobido games.