Medium transplant: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey | Vorian’s Vociferously Verbose Videogame reViews (2020)
2025 post-commentary: Not much to say, really. I like this one, and I'm just taking the opportunity to add alt text into the pictures that didn't exist before. You can read the original here
Right, so I’m pretty much writing this starting on the 1st of April 2020, deep into the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Or the COVID-19 outbreak. Or the whatever random localised name people are calling it outbreak. So I’m gonna be maaaaybe a little stir-crazy with this essay, maybe more so than the previous one, completely despite the previous one being specifically written as a video script. Who cares. AssCreed Odyssey. Beware plenty of spoilers.
Preamble: Expectations
Oi, you, complaining about me having spoilers: I mean, ok, I’ll definitely endeavour to keep my spoilertalk purposefully vague, so that the impact of how the narrative beats are presented to you isn’t lessened for when you do experience them for yourself, but really, if a single “x-does-y” statement completely saps the suspense or narrative excitement of a single moment, then it stands to reason that it was neither well-written, memorable, nor significant. Even then, really, it’s been 18 entire months since the release, so I’m pretty sure if you really wanted to play it you’d have done so by now, especially since the sale price is cheap as a fancy restaurant sandwich. Which brings me to another point:
Though I had purchased the most complete package of the game (the Ultimate Edition), I have not been able to complete all of the game’s DLC, much less all of the base game’s side content, so I will mostly be focusing on main story and related content within the base game only, with only passing references and explanations of what the DLC contents are, and what they entail. I am also cataloguing my experiences having played the game between January and March 2020, under version 1.5.1, which is going to be very different in many subtle ways compared to that of someone playing it at launch.
Section 1: Performance
Now, since I’m writing this as a function of being physically unable to play the game on the hardware that I currently possess (because I had to pack up my entire life in Canada into boxes and hop on the earliest convenient plane and thus leave my gaming pc in the loving hands of a friend in need), this section is going to be fully anecdotal (as if any other port report isn’t though)
To be completely clear, I’m a lazy fuck who used GeForce Experience to calibrate my graphics settings, so you might expect similar results (or worse) by doing so the same way instead of tweaking settings manually and running the benchmarking tool a billion times.
Regardless, here are the relevant specs:
Intel i5–6600 3.8GHz quad-core
2x8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM (chipset-restricted to 2133MHz)
ZOTAC Amp! Edition NVidia GTX 1060 6GB 1556MHz Base 1771MHz Boost
WD Black 7200rpm HDD on SATA 6Gb/s bus
The game in general looks absolutely beautiful, almost exactly like in most of the promotional images, although I’d probably attribute it more to the lighting and shaders than any specific graphical effects. Then again, I’m absolutely horrible at distinguishing colour and graphical nuance in the visual medium, so I guess that’s a feature of my flaws, rather than a flaw of the game’s features. I haven’t taken a look at the individual graphics settings, but I’m confident in saying that in terms of how intense they’re being cranked, it’s at about 80–85% maximum detail. However, the amount of texture pop-in is certainly noticeable, especially if I’m using the cosmetic customisation feature to toggle between the looks of different pieces of gear. Sometimes I have seen textures that either look like pieces of play-doh, or have had their high-detail textures of rock faces refuse to load in… even as my player character was actively scaling them.
Other than that, framerate and gameplay remained smooth to the feel, with dips below 60fps mostly noticeable because of screen-tearing. It’s worth noting that these don’t particularly happen during most gameplay situations. The only exceptions are when the camera is moving and panning over giant populated vistas, such as when synchronising a viewpoint over Greater Athens, and actual cinematic cutscenes. The game seems to render standalone cinematic cutscenes (that don’t need to transition into or out of gameplay) with far more graphical features (I can distinguished more intense shaders, more intense bloom, HDR, and depth-of-field effects, and higher-detail maps and textures) than normal gameplay. Framerate, of course, tanks real bad, and I don’t think those cutscenes have ever held a stable 30fps on that machine.
However, I did notice from the benchmarks that if anything, it’s the CPU that’s being bottlenecked, not the GPU. Similarly, load times: they are looong, especially into the open world, or into cutscenes. They probably aren’t as excessive as the minute-plus loads I’d seen in Fallout 4, but they are certainly long enough to be noticeable. And to make you get lost in a train of thought that questions why you are here wasting away your precious time experiencing a maybe sub-par mass-produced entertainment artifact that could be more poigna- oh cool took it long enough
Section 2: Gameplay
For all the action RPG trappings the franchise has taken on since 2017's Origins, this is still an Assassin’s Creed game. The most expedient and most satisfying method of combat is still simply to avoid it as much as possible; stealth and sneak attacks are your best friends, especially since your own damage output is type-categorised by which kind of weapons you deal it with, and Assassin Damage has the highest number of them all. Standard stealth game mechanics apply, as well: keep yourself as far away from the front of enemies as possible, even better if you’re above or below them. This isn’t a completely-straight stealth simulator, though, so of course the only time sound plays a part in the gameplay is when you whistle at enemies to lure them into an ambush.
I mean, yeah. It’s an Assassin’s Creed game.
And the problem is that it fools you into thinking it’s something else.
See, the Assassin’s Creed game I played prior to Odyssey wasn’t Origins. It wasn’t even Syndicate or Unity, it was Black Flag. And Black Flag had two specific things that Odyssey didn’t: a minimap, and the puppeteer control scheme.
See, I think the minimap is a fairly important part of both the exploration and navigation aspects of the Assassin’s Creed formula, because it helps visualise both the layout of the environment, as well as the positioning of any enemies/NPCs. It’s also been very useful to see exactly which parts of the landscape are restricted, and which are not. I mean, this is a video game, the boundaries between either aren’t fuzzy. Hell, it’s even present in so many other Ubisoft open worlds like in Far Cry… which is why its absence is such a jarring change that I keep looking for it even after over a hundred hours. And I don’t find it. And my brain goes “oh, this isn’t an Assassin’s Creed game!” Which is wrong. Cos it is.
Yes, I get that in recent years, level and environment design has moved towards verticality, and more properly three-dimensional environments. It’s honestly great, because the environments do indeed feel more natural now, rather than deliberately-designed before. Like they were built primarily to be lived in, or carved into being by the passage of time, rather than to be quickly navigated through. And. yes, I get that a consequence of that is the traditional two-dimensional minimap becoming less and less useful, as more and more terrain elements have come to be stacked atop one another; especially when there are complex cave formations snaking underneath complex terrain formations at ground level. Warframe has both complex terrain formations as well as a two-dimensional minimap, and sometimes, using it as a navigational aid or for finding objectives is a confusing trap that can have you going to and/or looking in the wrong places. Sure, you always have a trusty eagle to help give you a literal birds-eye view over the environment, which helps somewhat, but the fact remains that there is still some difficulty in developing an awareness and understanding of a three-dimensional space when all you have to see it with is a two-dimensional display with a limited field of view. Especially when said space is a large one, like the ancient (even by 5th Century BCE standards) ruins of the hill fort of Tiryns and the city of Mycenae.
As for the puppeteer control scheme: as I understand it, they got rid of it with their long break and giant overhaul with Origins, in a bid to bring the game experience closer to the contemporary action RPGs in the market, like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This is not exactly a bad move, really, because the puppeteer system managed to fall into this weird no-mans-land of being difficult to learn, but also simple to master; the establishing philosophy behind the control scheme only really worked for the first two games, before feature creep really started to seep in. Not only that, this control scheme was only really intuitive, as evidenced by the UI, for controller users, leaving us in this weird place where for any prior game, controller was the way to go; with the last two games, PC gamers could easily find mouse and keyboard equally, if not more intuitive for playing the game when the layout was a weird and unintuitive mess beforehand. My own experience playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on a 2009 Macbook Pro was as much a struggle against the controls as it was a struggle against anemic graphics hardware. I would very often spend a few minutes to have to remind myself what the key assignments were for each action, especially just before or just after the beginning of combat; the control scheme and UI would not click for me until I plugged a controller in and realised the layout of the action prompts in the UI corresponded to the layout of the face buttons.
So, really: it might be tempting as all hell to embrace the novelty and treat this game like any other ARPG. Sneaky-sneaky twang them bows, and swish-swosh them swords when everyone finds you. But that’s a mistake, because open combat isn’t going to be as fulfilling as you think it’s gonna be, because it’s just a slog, not a dance. Chaining combos isn’t as satisfying as it should be, because the AI sees you performing combos as an opening to attack. Button-mashing your way through combat never fucking works out, so beeline for Critical Assassinations and Hero Strike and never look back. When it’s a bossfight, just keep plinking with arrows to recharge your Adrenaline (the resource mechanic they use to make sure you aren’t spamming abilities) and move in for Hero Strike or an Overpower Attack when you see an opening.
Oh, and somehow, the Spartan Kick is the non-lethal option. (unless you kick someone off a cliff, duh)
Hold up! Non-lethal? What? Is this Deus Ex? Unfortunately no, but there’s a reason for it. You remember the great naval combat in Black Flag? OHHHHH YEEAAA IT BACCCCCC BABEYYYY. Like Edward Kenway held command of the Jackdaw, Kassandra (or Alexios) gains command (after a story mission early on) of the Adrestia from its previous captain, Barnabas, who continues on as your XO. What? You don’t- agh. OK, fine. Vice-captain. Barnabas becomes your vice-captain. The Adrestia then becomes literally your home base, and your main transportation throughout the Aegean Sea. It’s the only way you can get off the starting island of Kefallonia onto the mainland (with a quest holding your hand along the way), and is also the only way you can get to any islands you haven’t been to. It’s also a damn sight faster for going up and down the coasts than riding Phobos, your horse. And this is where non-lethal takedowns come in. When incapacitated, enemies can be recruited to serve as Lieutenants on the Adrestia, boosting its stats and serving as powerful allies during boarding actions. And true enough to history, the Adrestia is a vastly different ship to the Jackdaw, and naval combat during Peloponnesian War and the Golden Age of Piracy are equally different. Like the Jackdaw has cannons, the Adrestia has archers and spearmen on the deck for ranged combat, and both ships have a ram. The main difference is that the Jackdaw’s main damage output was with its artillery, and the Adrestia deals most of its damage with its ram. Combat and transportation aren’t the only functions the trireme provides, though, because it also serves as player storage, helping to declutter your inventory, as well as providing a message board for any procedurally-generated daily/weekly/timed missions.
Another way in which Odyssey differs from earlier games is that since it has a levelling- and stat-based progression system, the decision was made to lock story missions behind level gates. This certainly gave many reviewers headaches during the review phase of the game’s launch, because now you couldn’t just blitz through the story missions, and they had to put in 40–50 hours’ worth of playtime in order to complete the game. Seeing as how the general expectation for reviewers is that the game be completed and the review written before the embargo lifts, which is commonly about 5–7 days after the media organisations get their review keys, it’s therefore quite a lot of game to go through. Especially if it’s a game that you’ve been assigned to play through, not one that you’ve chosen to spend your time with.
The flipside, though, is that this game is expertly paced for a slow broke completionist like me who prefers to savour the experience, and drink in every single detail I can, because I have to. I don’t experience the same pressures as an industry reviewer who has a deadline to make; the pressure I experience is to draw every single bit of enjoyment out of each game, because the only times I can afford to buy a new one is during seasonal sales periods, and even then, I don’t even buy any games half the time.
The best part about this level-gating is that somehow it’s managed to eliminate the feeling of being sorely over-levelled that I’ve experienced in other games. Or it could also be the scaling system in use, but Skyrim also has a similar level scaling system, and that one still suffers from the same over-levelling problem. What I’m referring to is how typically you can get very sidetracked in other RPGs, level up a lot, get some good gear, and then come back to where you left off in the story missions, only to find that they’ve been designed and balanced around a player character far less capable than yours.
Because of the level-gating, this doesn’t seem to happen; I always seem to experience each new part of the story with a level of difficulty that always seems to be nicely-balanced for the amount of gameplay I’ve already put in. The fights with the game’s end-bosses, the legendary beasts of Hellenic mythology, feel as much of a challenge, if not more so, than the first boss of the game: a big brutish bandit who goes by the name Cyclops… because he does only have one eye. (he doesn’t take to that name very well)
Another part of the critiques that came out during the release window is that many players felt that experience point progression was very much stifled, almost to the point where even if you took a completionist’s route; you would still encounter gaps where you would be underlevelled for the content you were supposed to be playing through. The cynical among us (me included) could easily draw a line between that and the way the game’s microtransactions are implemented. Ralph “Skill Up” Panebianco said as much in his first impressions of the game:
There’s like, XP boosters you can buy in this game, that’s 50% bonus XP that you can buy with real-world cash. Fine! Some people are like “that’s optional!”, okay cool, but when I see a barrier, and I’ve gotta level-up 7 levels to get to the next campaign quest, and the campaign quests is all I wanna do? I mean, that- Like, I start asking questions in my mind. I’m like, Is this a design choice because they want me to grind side content, or is this a design choice because they want me to get fatigued and want me to buy a booster so that I can get through this shit faster?
For what it’s worth, XP rewards have been rebalanced in the year and a half since, and I did not feel the need to buy an XP booster in order to keep with the intended progression pace of the game. In fact, even with a few of the islands in the Aegean as well as most of Euboea untouched, I still completed the main story missions whilst being 3 or 4 levels above the original endgame maximum. It used to be 50, but subsequent updates have since raised it to 99. I noticed early on, in fact, that any content you outlevelled would scale to keep pace two levels below yours at default scaling. This is an option that you’re given to adjust at the start of the game, in fact. On easy scaling, it would lag four levels behind, whilst on difficult scaling, everything would keep pace with you. Given that since being “over-skilled” is not a thing, I decided to just ditch any semblance of boosted XP, and would rather be “over-geared” instead.
But I did spend $13 to get enough Helix Credits (the premium currency only used for the game’s microtransactions) for the permanent drachma boost, because you can never have too little resources in this game. After all, the final-tier upgrades for the Adrestia (of course added after a later patch) cost an average of just over 211,000 drachmae each, not to mention significant raw materials to go along with that. And there are nine of them. Resources sure don’t come easy in this game, so you gotta get as much help as you can get. Hell, trying to keep a set of legendary armour upgraded to go with your level is already expensive enough to drain your coffers once you get to about level 55.
Speaking of which, here’s how item rarity works in this game: Each weapon and armour type will have a predetermined armour or damage rating. It’s a bit different for armour, but all level 40 swords for example will have the same DPS value, regardless of rarity. The difference is in what the game calls Engravings. For lack of a better term, these are just bonuses to different attributes related to combat and skills, e.g. +% to all damage, +% Duration for elemental effects, +% to armour, -% to cooldown timers, etc, just like upgrades or enchantments in other RPGs. Common (colourless) items will have one Engraving, Rare (blue) items will have two, and Epic (purple) items will have three, and all have one extra engraving slot that you can fill at a blacksmith. Individual Engravings, and additional levels thereof, are earned through completing different actions as part of normal play, like killing certain enemies, or getting kills with certain types of weapons, or doing so a certain way.
It becomes slightly different when it comes to Legendary gear.
Legendary armour pieces have two normal engravings, and a third one specific to the set that only becomes active when you wear all seven items. Theorycrafting therefore posits that it might actually be more prudent to only collect the Legendary sets for their unique Engraving, which you can put on other pieces of armour anyway, with lessened effectiveness. After all, when your normal engravings are already giving 15% bonuses, suddenly a 40% bonus to bow damage with shield penetration doesn’t seem worth giving up seven of those.
Legendary weapons are different, however: They don’t exist in sets, so their unique Engravings are always active, and merely looting them lets you apply them to other weapons as well. Therefore, you can take two weapons with symbiotic Engravings, and apply them to each other, e.g. like I did with Arachne’s Stingers (a dagger that deals weapon damage as poison damage) and Hermes’s Kerukeion (a spear with a bonus to poison damage and elemental effect buildup). This dichotomy between the mid-to-late-game usefulness of Legendary weapons and armour is certainly strange at first glance, but honestly, I kind of prefer it this way. After a point, I didn’t give a shit about which legendary set looks or performs best, since they all suck. If you’re like me you’re just gonna put on whatever randomly-generated Epic gear works best for your playstyle, and transmog the pieces to doll Kassandra (or Alexios) up as much as you like.
I mean, ultimately, none of this is going to be unfamiliar territory to anyone who’s played any form of RPG in the last decade, so my own attitude to the gameplay is to just shrug and play the game. It hasn’t really changed all that much in the grand scheme of things, so just run with it.
Oh, and watch out for the chickens.
Section 3: Worldbuilding & Story
Right, so I’m 100% not a classicist, historian, or expert in antiquities, so I’m far and away one of the worst people whose word you can take about the historical accuracy of the game, but people like Overly Sarcastic Productions, Skallagrim, Many A True Nerd, George “Super Bunnyhop” Weidman, and Invicta have made their own analyses that can help contextualise what is historically accurate, what has been changed for gameplay purposes, and what is completely ambiguous because there just isn’t enough surviving information. It is safe to say, though, that this game is far and away one of the most ambitious and most accurate recreations of Classical Greece that exists in present-day media, even with the restrictions that come with the medium. This world is, in and of itself, woven together so tightly that the stuff that is real seems to not be able to exist without the stuff that isn’t. As for sussing out what the latter is, well… You’ve got a lot of video lectures to watch up above. Go wild, buddy.
Of course, you need to keep in the back of your head the fact that this is an Assassin’s Creed game. The entire premise rests on it being an alt-historical fantasy, rather than an accurate retelling of history, so while most of the verifiable details are presented as accurately as the developers were able to achieve, there’s a lot of obviously fake stuff shoehorned in. Obviously the Spear of Leonidas was not an ancient artifact from a technologically-advanced humanoid precursor species, obviously there is no historical evidence for Leonidas having had a daughter named Myrrine, much less two grandchildren named Kassandra and Alexios, and obviously there is no evidence of a cult comprised of powerful people from all over Hellas that conspired to drag the Peloponnesian War out.
And obviously the Spartan Kick isn’t an actual period-accurate martial technique, it’s just a meme from that Zack Snyder movie. But damn is it hilarious to use sometimes.
Just looking at the world map, and then comparing it to an actual satellite map of Greece, is a huge trip. The Korinth Canal, between the Gulf of Korinth and the Saronic Gulf, is in generally the same location as the Diolkos is in-game, a road cutting across the Isthmus of Korinth with ramps into the sea at either end that the Greeks would haul their ships across. Greater Athens is a giant, sprawling city, with long walls that connect it to the Port of Piraeus. If you look at the road network today, and the ancient maps of Athens and Piraeus, you’ll see the roads following the general route of those long walls. The seaside pass at Thermopylae in the game is, as was true of the time, a narrow passageway between a sheer drop into the Malian Gulf on one side, and towering mountains on the other. Today, Thermopylae is an open, flat, hot plain where scrubby grass grows under a browbeating blinding sun; the shoreline of the Malian Gulf has receded with the lowering of sea levels of the intervening millenia. If you go northeast from the Akropolis, you’ll pass by Mount Pentelikos, from which the marble was quarried to build most of Classical Athens itself, and then on to the beaches at Marathon, where the famous battle took place. If you then go south along the coast, you will eventually round the cape and Sanctuary at Sounion, exactly as would happen in real life. In the game, Lake Kopais dominates the centre of the region of Boeotia, and surrounds the island upon which sits the ancient legendary fortress of Gla. It, the island, and the fortress doesn’t exist today, because it was drained in the late 19th century and is now almost wholly farmland.
There’s something sublime about having memorised parts of an ingame world map based on the real world, and then looking at an actual map; the recognition of places you’ve visited in virtual representation, and also a recognition of how these actual paces differ from the condensed and shuffled-around world of video games, a phenomenon that George Weidman calls “phantom familiarity”. Then again, as he mentions, this phantom familiarity stretches over multiple millenia.
2500 years is enough time for governments, empires, languages, religions, and even for nature — trees, forests, lakes, and rivers, to come and go, while the ruins of these buildings still stay put. Constant what-ifs had my brain comparing the reality of what Greece looks like now against what it could have looked like almost one hundred lifetimes ago. That’s an abyss of time — it would be incomprehensible, were it not for the occasional columns that spring up among Athens’s modern skyline. Or the rocks at the inner-city Akropolis sites, which have been eroded by thousands of years and millions of feet into the waxy, slippery rock you’d expect to see at a river.
And we haven’t even gotten to the characters yet. There’s such a wide cast of personalities included in the game from that specific time period that I can’t even remember them all. Playwrights like Sophokles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, politicians like Kleon the “Everyman”, and Perikles, the “Father of Democracy”, Herodotos, the “Father of History”, Sokrates the philosopher, and Hippokrates, the originator of the modern western practice of medicine and the namesake of the Hippocratic Oath. It may seem really hamfisted in hindsight, but in the moment it truly is sublime to discuss intangible topics like the philosophy of crime, the responsibility and culpability of creating art, and the nature of morality with Sokrates through the very tangible situations that his quests put you in. With Hippokrates, you get to grapple with him ethical quandaries like the healer’s responsibility to treat an individual, even if said individual is actively responsible for great pain and suffering, and even the ethical nature of euthanasia: whether or not your duty as a physician is to heal a patient’s wounds, or heal a patient’s suffering. There’s a lot of good, funny, dramatic writing; hell, even a sidequest (that actually ties into the cult storyline) where you have to remember details from the previous few quests and question two twin priestesses of Aphrodite to find out which one’s the cultist that you need to slay.
Every single region in the game, save a few handful, has something like this: A short quest chain that is very related to the central gimmick of the area. The aforementioned quest is located on the island of Kythera, home to a major sanctuary of Aphrodite, owing to the island being where the goddess was born from the seafoam (and where the worship of Aphrodite, then known as the Phoenician goddess Astarte, was first brought to the Greeks), and where you have hints that the cult has a member involved. Another quest chain involves the region of Pephka, on the eastern side of the island of Krete, where they are obsessed with the Minotaur. As in, the banners of the local Polis are of a stylised minotaur head, and there are giant minotaur statues all over the place. The minor quest chain associated with Pephka, naturally, involves a criminal enterprise sending tourists on a bunch of scam errands in order to milk them dry of drachmae with the promise of hunting a minotaur, and ends with you raiding a local bandit hideout to put an end to the entire thing.
The result is that not only do you get a feel for the stories of the individuals whose names make historians’ and classicists’ pants wet and sticky, you also get a good feel for each individual region: the people, the culture, the personality. You’re given a window into the lives and times of the peoples that lived in that specific time period, interacting with them on a pseudopersonal level. This is a three-dimensional world that Ubisoft have built, one that seems to be attentive to your presence, but also one that could easily just keep on existing completely ignorant of you.
However, any amount of interaction is still all ultimately prewritten and predetermined, and a lot of the portrayals of actual historical figures is still deeply rooted in our own time; Kleon is portrayed as a blonde boisterous warhawk who literally promises to “make Athens great again”. The modern influences are blindingly obvious. After all, this is a game, and a product of modern people, working with what’s left of a civilisation and society that existed so long ago and a landscapes so different from today’s that we really don’t have any proper tangible way to get to grips with it. We don’t truly understand what it was like to live during that time, only infer… And of course, ironically, a literal flight of fantasy is the closest we’re ever gonna get in the Year Of Our Godforsaken Existence 2020. It’s in a time like this that I’m heavily reminded of a piece of dialogue from the end of the minor DLC mission “You’re Such a Sokratease”, at the end of the episodic story Sokrates’ Trial. It recounts a fable about writing that comes straight out of the Phaidros, written by Sokrates’ later student Plato:
Kassandra: What did you do that for?
Sokrates: Nobody asked him to write down my words.
Kassandra: Even so, why not keep it? Share it with others.
Sokrates: Because of a story I was told as a boy.
Kassandra: Alright, let’s hear it.
Sokrates: The king of Egypt, Thamus, was visited by the god Theuth. Theuth offered the invention of writing to the king and told him it was an elixir of memory and wisdom.
But Thamus disagreed. He believed the people would no longer use their memories, for they would simply read instead. These written words would not offer true wisdom, but only the appearance of such.
Kassandra: You don’t want your words written down so others can’t use them to pretend to be smart.
Sokrates: Much like creatures in a painting, the words sit there unmoving. If you ask them a question, they will preserve a solemn silence, and no matter how many times you ask, they will only ever say the same thing. They cannot defend their message.
Kassandra: That’s the part you like. The defense of your words.
Sokrates: All who speak should defend their words if questioned about them.
That is why I choose to speak and not write, that is why any words of mine that last beyond my final breath will be those that people choose to remember. Those words will be true wisdom, and not an illusion.
Strange thing, though: the only reason we know of Sokrates’ teachings is that people did indeed write them down. The reason we have Sokrates reciting that fable of Thamus and Thoth is because Plato wrote it down and attributed it to him. Plato chose to remember those words, and so did generations of philosophers henceforth. So has history proven Sokrates right about writing, or wrong? Are the words we choose to reproduce, either in our stories told informally to one another, or in writing passed down from generation to generation, truly to be considered wisdom, or are they still merely the pretense of such? In this context, how different is a piece of recorded spoken dialogue from those same words written down? Can we really find wisdom in a video game, or merely the illusion thereof?
Judging by how I’m literally starting to produce metacommentary about commentary on a piece of interactive media with that same piece of commentary on a piece of interactive media, you can probably tell that I’ve pretty much run out of things to say about the story and worldbuilding. Let’s move on to the music.
Section 4: Music
I got two words for you, buddy. Two words.
Joking aside, british duo Joe Henson and Alexis Smith (as The Flight) and Mike Georgiades have done an excellent job marrying Hellenistic Era music with modern Greek music and the oxymoron known as Contemporary Classical. I mean, yeah, there’s so damn much that you can talk about the inherent ridiculousness that is the modern-day classical music community, how it’s got tons of racist and classist baggage, how it’s simultaneously both dismissive of and utterly dependent on contemporary musicians and composers, and how we as a modern “civilised” society doesn’t seem to want to unpack any of that, but this isn’t really the place. I mean, fuck it, if you want just go read some Camus and turn your brain into mulch. I’m here to talk about soundtracks, and this soundtrack is Good. I mean it’s not Ace Combat 7 or Ace Combat Zero levels of good, but Kobayashi Keiki and the rest of the Bandai Namco music team are literal gods among men, so it’s not the end of the world if Henson and Smith don’t measure up to Kobayashi and Nakanishi.
Back when I was in music and audio school, one of the most major things we had to learn to be aware of was the power of our profession, especially within the medium of video. Emotions can be called forth with a good acting performance, but the ultimate dictator of an audience’s reaction is always going to be sitting in the orchestral pit. The vocal and mocap performances by Melissanthi Mahout and Michael Antonakos (also shoutout to Elias Toufexis as Nikolaos and Leonidas, I’d recognise that quiet, raspy voice anywhere) are excellent, and especially when they’re being backed up by that soft but heavy Family leitmotif.
Although… It must be said that that’s not the version that you’d hear often in-game, but rather a lyrical version of the Myrrine theme, that is itself derived from the Modern version of the Odyssey theme. I don’t particularly like this version, because with the cadence of the lyrics and the melody, it’s clear to me that the lyrics were originally written in English, and then translated whole-cloth into Greek. It’s just a thing in music in general that bugs me though, so I wouldn’t expect the average listener to really be that bothered by it, and judging by the comments on YouTube, it seems that most players actually prefer the Greek version to the Modern one.
Comparing the two, though, is also a demonstration of the power of arrangement. Henson, Smith, and Georgiades have genuinely succeeded in most respects in creating a soundscape that evokes Greece — both in its modern incarnation, and its historical one, and in this they’ve done justice to one of the most distinctive leitmotifs of modern video game music, one that is irrevocably tied to the franchise: the Ezio’s Family theme from Assassin’s Creed II, composed by Jesper Kyd.
This theme plays over the introductory title screen; I got goosebumps the first time I heard it, much like the first time I heard the Trigger leitmotif in Ace Combat 7. Like how that theme invites you to dance and soar through the yawning blue skies, this theme draws you in for an adventure of drama and mystery, of hope and despair, and everything in between. Buckle up, cos y’all in for a hell of a ride.
I can’t end this section without talking about one more thing, though: musical reconstruction. See, while there’s a lot of examples of ancient Greek music that survive, there’s a hell lot more that doesn’t. This brings me to one more question:
Have you heard of Heilung?
Their main schtick, a thing they call Amplified History, is taking recovered and/or preserved writings, prayers, poems, etc of pre-judeo-christian Indigenous European cultures and writing and performing music to them with instruments appropriate to the time, if not to the exact place, trying to recreate and capture the “Ur-beat” of a prehistoric and tribal humanity.
In a similar vein, the environmental music in the game, including sailing songs (or sea shanties, as most other people have taken to calling them because of Black Flag), have undergone a similar kind of recreation and reconstruction, albeit with much more attention to historical accuracy and historical Greek musical traditions and with a less pan-indo-european bent than with how Heilung does theirs.
{That’s right, they’re all genuine ancient Greek poems.](https://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-odysseys-sea-shanties-are-actual-greek-1832218435) The sound team went around researching surviving poetry that was contemporary-ish to the Peloponneisan War, and wrote melodies to go along with them. And I should say, as a cheeky aside: listen to how all of their lyrics flow together with the melody! /sideeyes Odyssey (Greek version)
As a musician in Heavy Metal, It’s a hell of a thing to make music that sounds complete and good with just a typical 4-instrument rock band arrangement, but it’s even more of a hell of a thing when you’re working with just one instrument: the human voice. This makes it all the more astonishing that basically all of the damn shanties are so fucking catchy. But I guess it’s like they said so in the Kotaku article I linked above: The Greeks considered all their poetry as interchangable with lyricism anyway, so I guess all of it works together serendipitously, even if it happens literal millenia in the future.
ἐρρέτω, ἐρρέτω, ἐρρέτω, (Erreto, erreto, erreto,)
ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω! (Exaftis ktisomae ou kakio!)
Section 5: Whatever The Fuck This Fucking Game Means To Me Or Whatever The Fuck That’s Supposed To Mean
So like after 120 hours of playing this game (with quite a few more to go, because I still have DLC and sidequests to complete), it’s been a hell of a ride, and I sure as hell don’t wanna get off. I think this is the first time that I’ve felt this way about a historical setting of an Assassin’s Creed game, where I feel more emotionally invested and interested in that rather than the modern-day secret-society black-ops spy stuff that almost seems ancillary to the plot nowadays but I’ve always been very intrigued by. I guess that specific form of contrarianism is what a childhood full of James Bond movies gives you. The influence of post-Bronze-Age Classical Greece stretches long and deep into the bedrock of our own global culture, and there’s way too many things in this game that I can point to and say “so there’s where that comes from!”, and I’ve spent more than a significant amount of time in between that 120 hours learning about the historical and cultural context around all them things.
My own conception of Classical Greece used to blur into that of both Ancient Greece as well as the entirety of Roman history, but that’s such a myopic view and understanding of the subject, and I feel ashamed for holding it. See, here’s the thing: I’m as much a product of and heir to Eurocentric civilisation as I am Sinocentric civilisation. My blood may be wholly East Asian, but I’m also a native anglophone. I’m Singaporean, and there are millions of my fellow countrymen who share this confluential reality, if not by blood, then by the influence of a post-colonial culture, education, and upbringing. This game was a big wake-up call to me, and a more clear window into the actual naissance of whatever the fuck western civilisation is supposed to be than anything else I’ve ever experienced. Imagine! The originators of the western traditions of history, medicine, and philosophy, all right there being contemporaries of each other, no sweat! What the fuck! And even this far back, milennia in the past, there are ruins!?
It’s because of this game that I actually fully understood the gravitas and the deep halls of history. I truly saw the historical heritage of the Greeks as equal to that of the Chinese. These are two peoples for whom History flows seamlessly into Legend flows seamlessly into Myth. Two legendary peoples who, despite everything, are still here. History exists in history itself too; Sonder is a hell of an emotion to experience.
Anyway, here’s what this section is really about: in late 2017, I met a lady in one of my university classes. She was a member of the significant Greek diaspora in the greater Toronto area, was studying physiology and sport science, and was a student leader with the campus Hellenic students’ association. Her family called the Ionian island of Zakynthos, off the west coast of the Peloponnese, their ancestral home, and she loved to go diving off the island’s picturesque white cliffs.
At that point in time, you could barely count my conception of Hellenic history and culture as charitable. All I knew were the major battles of the two Greco-Persian Wars (them being Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium Strait, Salamis, and Plataia), The Iliad and the Odyssey (mostly due to the Symphony X song and the 1997 miniseries starring Armand Assante), the Eurozone debt and austerity crisis, the associated riots, the neofascists in the Golden Dawn, their feud with Turkey over a whole host of historical and geopolitical reasons, and that thing with North Macedonia (or The Artist Formerly Known As FYROM). As a result, my mental image of her wasn’t… kind. Even after she was the one who decided I was worth talking to. I might have given her the impression I was an aspiring or amateur classicist with my recounting of the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot during in-class discussions, who knows. Either way I should honestly really thank this silly fuckin’ alt-history fantasy game for making me go learn shit about stuff way beyond the Peloponnesian War, because compared to then, I understand so much more now about how the land and people of the modern Ellinika Dimokratia are the way they are.
And by extension, I think I understand her a little better.
See, I used to think it strange and idiosyncratic of her to be holding such strong opinions over the naming of what is now North Macedonia. I mean, it’s literally just derived from the geographic region, right? It’s not like they’re trying to lay claim to any sort of undeserved historical legacy, right?
Yes, I’m afraid. Yes, they are. You see, the modern ethnolinguistic majority of North Macedonia does not have any Hellenic heritage to speak of.
They’re Slavs.
Their entire creation is a result of displacement and sociopolitical separation from their Bulgarian cousins due to the geopolitics between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. That entire Slavic heritage is the main reason they were a part of the nation of Yugoslavia. That’s what the Y in FYROM stands for, because it stands for the Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia. In the middle-late 4th century BCE, during Alexander the Great’s conquests, their ancestors would have either been proto-Norse Scandinavians, or Central Asian steppe nomads. Which makes it real fuckin’ suspicious, right, when in 2011, up goes this giant bronze statue of a man mounted on a rearing horse with classic Alexandrian features, raising a sword, in the middle of Skopje. Ultimately, the very idea of North Macedonia being in any way related to the ancient Hellenic kingdom is a complete fabrication of both Ottoman colonialism and modern cryptofascist nationalism.
I’ve come to also understand why the feelings of both my classmate and of Greek foreign policy itself are so strong, aggressive territorial claims from a foreign country nonwithstanding. Greece is a land that Eurocentric civilisation and history has left behind. For their great cultural contributions, all they get in return is fetishism and theft. You might have noticed that I seem to be using spellings of Hellenic nouns that you could call unorthodox. See, when I refer to people like Sokrates, or places like the Akropolis, of course the more “normal” spellings are “Socrates” and “Acropolis”. The reason I’ve switched out those Cs for Ks is because in the Greek alphabet, they’re spelled “Σωκρᾰ́της” and “ἀκρόπολις”. Greek doesn’t have a C letter, and the letters for those sounds are a hard K. The reason we have those spellings with the Cs in English is because we inherited them from the Romans. Latin doesn’t have a soft C, and they did not use the K. Hence, this is a more accurate and direct transliteration into English, and is why I use it.
And speaking of Roman influence on how we engage with this particular history, you might have noticed that I use the words “Greek” and “Hellenic” interchangeably. That is because we also inherited the former from the Romans, who called the country Graecia. The etymological source for that name is, of course, uncertain, but a leading theory is that this was what the name of the specific colony where the Romans first made contact with the Greeks. The proper self-referential name is Ellinika, anglicised as Hellas. It’s where we get the official English name of the country: the Hellenic Republic. I’m far from consistent about this, since I’m still figuring out for myself what’s appropriate to write as Hellenic, and what to keep as Greek.
And now, from Romans to those bastards in Constantinople; I speak, of course, of the Byzantines and Ottomans.
Did you know that atop the Akropolis, there used to be a giant bronze statue of Athena? This was called the statue of Athena Promachos, or Athena Who Fights On The Front Line, a literal colossal embodiment of Athena as the Goddess of War and Wisdom. It was tall enough that contemporary sources cite it as being visible from a ship way down south rounding Cape Sounion, though if this is hyperbole is not known. Either way, not a lot is known about its whereabouts after the Peloponnesian War, but there are reports of a statue in Constantinople matching its description being destroyed in a riot perpetrated by crusaders.
After the decline of the Byzantine empire, the area was taken over by the Ottomans. It was them who converted the Parthenon first into a mosque (when it had already been converted by the Romans into a church), and then into an ammo dump. When the Venetians arrived to take Athens in September 1687 during the Morean War, the Ottomans retreated and fortified the Akropolis, destroying a few temples in the process. The sieging Venetian mercenaries did the rest, and that’s why the Parthenon has no walls nor roof today. It was also ostensibly under the purview of the Ottomans that the 7th Earl of Elgin stole the marble sculptures that are now referred to with his name, and that Hellenic authorities have tried for decades to get returned.
Which, by the way, they fucking should.
This game is a love story to a civilisation that set the stage for every single one that followed in its footsteps. A civilisation to which we owe so much, but have given so little. A people that, once proud and strong, have seen themselves reduced to the colonial possessions and subjects of other upstart domineering empires. But still they stand. Firm, proud, independent, still ready to face down any existential human threat like Leonidas did to Xerxes at that pass 2500 years ago, and say
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Molon Labe. Come and take them.
I’d been thinking about that classmate of mine a lot those few weeks that I went ham on playing this game, and of course again during this pandemic. I hope she’s doing ok.
I’m feeling pretty guilty. I had judged her and per perspective without the appropriate wisdom, I was willing to talk to her more for selfish reasons than curiosity(cos yes she was hot), I squirrelled away instead of actually form a friendship, and I didn’t even make the effort to learn what her family name was. On the very slim chance you’ll read this, Athena, I guess I’m sorry I didn’t put any effort into a friendship you obviously wanted. Let’s maybe get lunch sometime when all of this dies down, and catch up on things.
Unless you’re a golden dawn supporter in which case fuck that, fuck you, and fuck everything