Finally played and finished this game’s main story yesterday. I enjoyed my time with it, and I think the idea of having the player character you don’t choose be repurposed as a main antagonist, is an interesting one. However, a few things:
I absolutely understand where some reviewers were coming from, when they said the game almost has too much stuff in it. I still have a hilarious number of quests in my quest list, not to mention all of the other mechanics, and entire landmasses I haven’t been to yet.
I thought the main story was actually kinda bad. Not all of the quests themselves, or some of the characters - but the actual throughline of the story being told. It’s a lot of treading water, in between encounters with Deimos where you largely have the same conversation over and over again “You’re being used!”. The whole “historical tourism” aspect of these games, where your journey is somehow intertwined with literally every famous person from that period of history, is getting more than a little trite. Oh, and the big “twists” with Kleon and Pausanias, were just about the most predictable things ever.
Can Ubisoft finally just dispense with the modern day stuff with the Animus, and Abstergo, and whatnot? They utterly whiffed with the Desmond storyline in AC3, and people largely don’t care about this stuff any more. Speaking for myself, I’m also very much done with the whole “Isu” precursor civilization thing too. You spend all of 10 minutes in the “present” in the first place, so why bother? At least Black Flag went a bit meta with it, having you work at a Montreal-based game developer.
Anyone else find the game’s animations kinda over-compressed? Maybe RDR2’s animation quality just spoiled me, but a lot of the animation in ACO seems like it’s missing frames or something. I’ll have to play Origins again, and see if maybe this was a thing all along and I just forgot.
I’m going to keep playing for at least a while longer, though I’m not sure if I’ll bother mopping everything up.
I’d definitely say the game has almost too much stuff, but it’s so well executed I don’t think it’s a negative, really. Very little of it is filler IMO, even if I’ll never finish it all.
I have never followed the whole AC storyline, though I did watch a YouTube video on the chronology at recently, just to try to figure it out. I agree, it’s crap, and the Abstergo/Isu/modern day stuff is utterly disposable. You could ditch it all and not lose a thing from this game or from Origins. Actually, in Origins some of it is even worse, like the meteor from the sky that leads to a mini-quest where you get an anime-style sword and shield and what look suspiciously like a Chocobo to ride. Hmm.
The actual ancient world story line in Odyssey I think is wildly variable in quality. The personal stuff with Kassandra/Alexios, the stuff that touches on their own lives and actions, is pretty well done. The meta story is pretty meh, though the side quests are often very nicely done. Luckily, the minute to minute activity and the specific details of even the story quests, the stuff you actually do rather than the broader through line, carry enough water to keep the game moving.
I actually like all of the name-dropping. I think it was well done and added a lot to the game, at least for me.
Can’t say I noticed much wrong with the animations, though I haven’t played RDR2 (no console). I did like the voice acting and the writing in general, and I thought the animations were very well matched to the dialog at least.
This and Origins I think walk a fine line between historical stuff dictating the game and historical stuff just being fluff and background. They both integrate the history pretty well, though unevenly, in ways that to me at least make the games more fun. I certainly hope no one uses them as substitutes for actually reading up on ancient Greece or Ptolmaic Egypt, though…
From a historical perspective, it definitely falls into the usual trope of portraying Spartans as highly trained thugs, versus the intellectual Athenians. The reality is that Spartan society actually valued literacy and education even more highly than Athenian society, overall.
Perhaps, though you also have to take into account that even though both societies had slaves, Sparta was an actual slave society, where the entire economic foundation was based on slavery. Even though Athenian democracy was hardly as universal or modern as some might depict it, the portion of people under their control who would be among the literate and politically active was probably quite a bit higher than in Sparta, unless you only count actual Spartan citizens.
But in general, we always tend to devalue Sparta and boost up Athens, partly I think because we don’t want to acknowledge that the Spartans bequeathed us as much as the Athenians did. It’s always nicer to think of democracy and political rhetoric rather than violence and a militaristic state, but certainly the West today is more the heir of the latter than the former.
I actually kind of thought they overdid the historical name-dropping; there’s a moment where the Historic Figures drop in pitchfork in hands into a very non-Historic Figures storyline and location. It seemed almost too much. By contrast Alcibiades popping up everywhere, innuendo well in hand, is sort of a laugh because it implies he’s not really messing with known historic stories and so is always played as a joke.
I think you greatly oversell Spartan valuing literacy and education, although this is not a new suspicion. Where have you read about Spartan literacy?
Sorry, I misspoke with the word “literacy”. Spartan society highly valued education. As I recall, illiteracy was still actually pretty widespread in both societies around the period of the Peloponnesian War. For Spartans, education was basically an emphasized part of their training from youth.
But of course, anything you say about Sparta would only really apply to the Spartiate, not the helots.
To be honest, I actually think Sparta is probably lionized by history more than it deserves to be - mostly because of Leonidas, and the legends surrounding the Battle of Thermopylae, and hagiographies about their combat prowess and discipline. I’m no admirer of Spartan society.
You can appreciate some things they did that were ahead of their time (and even then, that would 100% only apply to actual Spartan citizens), but it’s hard to put that up against the enduring contributions of Athenian society.
It’s actually Lycurgus, not Leonidas, that everyone thought was grand.
Lycurgus (/laɪˈkɜːrɡəs/; Greek: Λυκοῦργος, Lykoûrgos , Ancient Greek: [lykôrɡos]; fl. c. 820 BC) was the quasi-legendary lawgiver of Sparta who established the military-oriented reformation of Spartan society in accordance with the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. All his reforms promoted the three Spartan virtues: equality (among citizens), military fitness, and austerity.[1]
During the Enlightenment figures like Lycurgus who established a kind of social compact (“constitution”) that reformed society, and whose vision included equality, had obvious appeal as aspirational figures however unrealistic that view actually was.
That Atlantis stuff was completely out of left field. I know there’s an expansion based around it, but the mission Myrrine sends you on to talk to your father, was some particularly ridiculous storytelling. I’m part of some ancient line of people “protecting the knowledge” of Atlantis? What knowledge? Why? How does the existence and apparent technology of Atlantis even fit in to any of this story? Why Pythagoras, of all people? Why does the staff allow him to live longer? To what end? Why do the Isu care about Atlantis, thousands of years after they are gone?
Also, why exactly does my spear glow, and contain (apparently) memories? If it was forged by the Isu… how did Leonidas get it? Was he some sort of chosen champion for the Isu? Why? If he was, why not give him something more useful than a spear brittle enough that it could break in the first place? Why do the Isu care about the Persian War? Why does sticking random numbers of magic triangles into the forge, from an unrelated artifact, make the spear better? Why does the Isu forge AI lady keep pronouncing “chronicity” incorrectly?
And then the core storyline just… never brings any of this up ever again, or answers any of it. I’m sure some of it gets explained in the expansion, but people shouldn’t need to buy your expansion for core aspects of your main story to make anything approaching sense. Alexios/Kassandra just says “ah, so this is why I’m The Special”, and then you emerge from the cave and go back to focusing on getting your sibling back. Like… what?!
This is why I wish they’d just ditch the “Isu” stuff, and the animus concept, and all of it - just make games set in historical periods, where you play as a character from that period. History is interesting enough, without needing all of this meta-futurist nonsense stuff often serves to make the story garbled nonsense anyway.
This is actually some clever stuff on their part - Pythagoras’ role in Greek philosophy, who exactly he was, and his cult that followed him, were all quite strange, so it’s kind of fun to make the “founder” of Platonism somehow a mystical dude.
You can tell this is what they were thinking because they also had a very tongue in cheek moment with Empedocles, also a self-proclaimed “god”, who we will find meets a suitably “godly” end in Odyssey.
That’s certainly a warped view of history. Sure, the West has been violent and militaristic, but it is the West that saw the growth of democracy and citizenship for all of it’s people.
Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote about the historical aspects of Odyssey quite extensively. That stuff was linked to earlier upstream, but seems to have gotten lost a bit.
Yeah, it’s a weird thing. The battlefield stuff gets a lot of attention, but when it comes to political philosophy or ethics we talk about Athens far more, while acting more like Spartans (when all you have is a (military) hammer, everything looks like a nail). We also tend, at least recently, to glorify authoritarianism and militarism, even though we don’t often admit that.
Athens, on the other hand, gets painted as if it was some sort of idyllic liberal paradise. I mean, in its heyday it certainly was a center for thought and culture, and it’s democracy, while still rooted in a hierarchical and slave-owning society, was a far cry from the authoritarianism of Sparta or Persia. But Athens tended to swing back and forth over the years, between democracy and oligarchy, between tolerance and authoritarianism, and between reasoned debate and mob rule.
For that matter, I think the Persians get a bad rap. I often wonder whether we’d have all been better off had the Persians actually won those wars against the Greeks.
And the result has been…? I don’t think you can divide the world West/non-West in such a black and white fashion. Athens’ democracy wasn’t anything like modern liberal democracies, and they were certainly quick to ditch it when expedient or when they were losing a war. Was the average Greek, not an elite, better off than the equivalent subject of the vast Persian empire? I doubt it.
I’m really not prepared to say that the long history of “the West” from, say, the end of the reign of Alexander the Great through the Enlightenment was all that liberal or democratic, or really all that more attractive than most other places on the planet. For a small subset of relatively affluent Europeans, who could shift a lot of the costs of what they were doing onto other, not as fortunate non-Europeans or their own peasantry, yeah, things ended up pretty sweet. For the rest of the world, not so much.
