Video Game / Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

"As you write your odyssey... across the mountains and the seas, remember, the fate of Greece journeys with you."

"Our choices are like ripples on water. They seem tiny and insignificant at the beginning, but they can become devastating tidal waves by the time they run their course."

— Sokrates

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the eleventh major title in the Assassin's Creed series, set between 431 and 422 BCE during the Archidamian Phase of The Peloponnesian War. It was released on October 5, 2018 for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC.

Unlike earlier games, which were linear single-player open-world games, Odyssey is an RPG with player customization, leveling, branching paths, and multiple endings based on player actions. It's possible to exercise control over dialogue trees to better control one's character. You play as either Alexios or Kassandra, brother and sister, who both descend from the legendary bloodline of King Leonidas of the Agiad dynasty of Spartan kings. A series of incidents sends you far from home, becoming a mercenary (or misthios in Greek) known throughout the land as the "Eagle Bearer" because of their eagle "pet" of sorts, Ikaros. The Eagle Bearer makes a living in the midst of the ongoing war between Sparta and Athens. As their involvement grows, they come to be embroiled in a conflict with forces behind the war seeking to take control of all of Greece, and the plans said forces have for them and their family.

Free DLC includes the Lost Tales of Greece, a series of quest chains centered around several locales in the Greek world. In addition there is the Discovery Tour, returning after much acclaim from Assassin's Creed Origins. In December 2021, a quest chain (complete with a new area) was introduced as part of a crossover with Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

The Season Pass includes several Story DLC, three-part episodic stories starting with "Legacy of the First Blade," which features the first person to use the Hidden Blade, Darius. The second DLC, "The Fate of Atlantis," continues the game's storyline (specifically, the Atlantis arc), and has the Eagle Bearer exploring re-creations of realms where the Ancient Greek gods reside, including the afterlife. Season pass owners also get Updated Re-release versions of Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. Concurrently, a novelization written by Gordon Doherty was released featuring Kassandra as the canonical Eagle Bearer.

The game would receive a sequel, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, which takes place in The Viking Age and early 9th century Dark Age Europe.

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The base game features examples of:

Tropes # - C

• 20 Bear Asses:
  • Fetch Quests are a rarity, but it can't be a coincidence that one of the few that do exist tasks the Eagle Bearer with procuring a bear scrotum and deer tongue for a Love Potion.
  • Another fetch quest requires the player to hunt some bears which are only found on one specific island (Chios). On the plus side, the reward is a suit of armor which is apparently very snuggly.
  • A quest in Messara requires one shark fang. That doesn't sound so bad until it turns out that shark teeth are a rare item, sharks are far from an easy kill, and you can kill twenty sharks or more without getting one fang - in Real Life sharks not only have hundreds of teeth but regrow any teeth they lose all through life.
• 100% Completion: There isn't a Completion Meter like in previous titles but achievements are awarded for reaching major milestones. Notably you don't have to complete the majority of side-quests or conquer all the enemy-outposts to earn every achievement. Nonetheless, several objectives which the player can max out are as follows:
  • Completing the main storyline (i.e. everything indicated in the Quests menu as part of your odyssey).
  • Reaching the Level Cap of 50 (99 as of update 1.14).
  • Become the Rank 1 Mercenary (with four tiers above that being added through updates).
  • Fully upgrading the Adrestia.
  • Defeating the five Arena challenges.
  • Defeating the Cult of Kosmos and fully upgrading the Spear of Leonidas, the latter of which goes hand-in-hand with the former because the necessary upgrade components are obtained from each defeated Cultist.
  • Defeating the four major bonus bosses (Cyclops, Sphinx, Minotaur and Medusa) and returning their artifacts to Atlantis.
  • Completing the questlines involving Hippokrates, Markos, Xenia, and the Daughters of Artemis.
  • Setting foot in every region in Greece and exploring all the underwater ruins.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level is Lv. 99, whereas the recommended level for the final story mission is at Lv. 42.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The Atlantean Blade, a legendary dagger, provides +30% armor penetration as its unique perk, making it particularly powerful against heavily armored opponents. It also looks a lot like a modern, albeit somewhat oversized combat knife, which in combination with its name implies at least a partial Isu origin.
• Abusive Parents: Both times overlapping with Offing the Offspring:
  • Zigzagged with Nikoloas. Early flashbacks present him as a stern but generally good and loving father to both the young Player Character and their baby sibling. However, as the Eagle Bearer leaves Kephellonia, it's revealed through another flashback that he allowed for his younger child (the PC's sibling) to be sacrificed to the gods to fulfill an oracle's prophecy. When the PC intervened, toppling a Spartan elder and their sibling off a cliff in the process, Nikoloas himself threw them off afterward—heavily conflicted between his duty as a Spartan and his duty as a father, though ultimately the Spartan won out. When they meet again decades later, his Replacement Goldfish adopted son Stentor notes that his pater has always been somewhat withdrawn, implying that Nikoloas' decision that has always haunted him. If spared, he will admit that he lost his honor by not protecting his children and that he failed them as a father.
  • In the Valley of Olympia, the Eagle Bearer can agree to help the patriarchs of two feuding families track down and kill whoever broke into their shared treasure vault. Turns out the culprits were said patriarchs' young adult children who are in love and wanted to elope and start a new life elsewhere. The patriarchs' reaction? Fly in a rage and order the Eagle Bearer to kill the two lovebirds anyway, topped off with the particularly heartless argument that they have other children to continue their bloodlines. Worse, no matter how diplomatically the Eagle Bearer tries to resolves the situation, two people will be dead by the end of it — the lovers or the fathers, depending on player input.
  • An optional side-quest the player can get has a Spartan woman sending the Eagle Bearer out to find and kill her son for deserting.
  • Crysis will kill her own son in order to stop him from exposing her as a cultist.
• Ace Custom: A number of the Legendary Armor sets are shinier, more powerful versions of more common armor sets. For instance: Assassin set -> Athenian Hero set, Ares set -> Spartan Hero set, Persian Warrior set -> Immortal set, Mercenary set -> Pirate set, etc.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: A few are sprinkled in throughout the various campaigns, but the most notable has to come near the end when the Eagle Bearer finds Sokrates in the cemetery outside Athens and they quietly reflect on the lives lost in the shadow war against the Cult; Phoibe, Perikles, and Brasidas before joining the rest of their True Companions for a small victory celebration.
• Action Girl:
  • Kassandra, as the playable female protagonist.
  • Several of the love interests like Daphnae (head of the Daughters of Artemis), Kyra (Rebel Leader), Odessa (Adventurer), Roxanna (Gladiator) & Xenia (Pirate Leader).
  • Many of the Mercenaries, both custom-made and randomly generated, are women.
• Adapted Out: Queen Gorgo, the wife of King Leonidas, is nowhere to be seen in the game. Additionally, her only son Pleistarchus is completely absent and only alluded to by Leonidas in a conversation with Dienekes during the Battle of Thermopylae. Additionally, several important city-states of the period, such as Sikyon, are completely absent due to map size constraints.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Many mercenary contract titles on the notice board have this going on.
• Advanced Movement Technique: The Rush Assassination skill can be abused to cover large distances without actually having to walk there. Speedrunners take this to ludicrous levels, effectively flying over entire landmasses.
• A God Am I:
  • A sidequest deals with a guy who sincerely thinks he's a god, evidently thanks to finding an Isu artifact, which he believes is the key to Olympos itself. Brontes the Thunderer... "disabuses" him of this notion in a decidedly fatal way.
  • The Eagle Bearer themselves can do this from time to time, depending on dialogue options, particularly since many people, including friends, often refer to them as such.
    • One Lost Tales of Greece episode punishes you for this; upon completing a quest-line about a village that actively worships the Eagle Bearer as a god because of 3 priestesses taking advantage of them, if the player attempts to claim godhood the village rejects them, throwing them out of town, whereas humbly asserting that they are just human earn's the town's respect.
  • Deimos, without the hint of self-aware irony that their elder sibling claims it with, believes they are a god. To be fair, they were indoctrinated into this belief since they were a baby.
• A.I. Breaker: Enemies and minibosses all the way to the end of the game will easily fall for any push-back attack such as the Spartan Kick. Even highly leveled mercenaries will carelessly walk up to you waiting on top of a building so you can throw them off and inflict massive damage - and they will do it again and again. Granted, it doesn't work on all enemies, as at least some are immune to being pushed backwards.
• Alcohol-Induced Stupidity: Examining the incredibly rickety diving board over a shark-infested pit in the Pre-Trials of the Minotaur can have the Eagle Bearer ask if all the other contestants were drunk. Apparently, they were.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Almost. There's only a single punishment for the handful of crimes the Eagle Bearer can commit: death by mercenary. The only difference is how often you can commit them before the first merc goes on the hunt for you. Thieving is the most minor offense (20% bounty), followed by murder (33%), sinking a non-pirate ship (50%), assaulting a fort (200%) and finally, killing a nation leader in plain sight (500%, an instant full bar). However, one major exception exists: the Valley of Olympia in the Elis region. Any crime committed there is punished five times as harshly as elsewhere in Greece because of the Olympic Truce, so a single witnessed murder is worth almost two bounty levels.
• All for Nothing: One quest line in Boeotia has the Eagle Bearer assisting an archaeologist in recovering stelae from ruins to uncover some kind of message. When they do, the archaeologist is unable to see it, but the Eagle Bearer can (because of their Uneven Hybrid status). The guy is understandably upset at the thought of all his hard work being for nothing, while the Eagle Bearer can walk away with some nice Rare gear for their trouble.
• All Myths Are True: While this has applied to a certain extent throughout the franchise, in Odyssey the Eagle Bearer can encounter several Isu remnants that are direct inspirations for the myths of cyclopses, gorgons and more, which also lend direct credence to figures such as Theseus. Many of the other Isu elements feel "fresher" simply because the game's time period is so much closer to the Isu backstory than before, and many of the Greek populace's beliefs in the existence of gods is more justifiable as they did exist relatively recently.
• Almost Dead Guy: The game goes without the typical Assassin's Creed mechanism of the memory corridor, but this trope still manages to get in there.
  • Elpenor, despite taking a severe pounding from an angry Eagle Bearer, still manages to gasp out a few words before croaking for good.
  • A guy on Naxos working for the Phoenix, who was ambushed by the forces of Paros. He manages to last long enough for the Eagle Bearer to get to him, tell him they've abducted his boss and then immediately keels over.
  • A guy on Lesbos, who went hunting a wolf with his friend only to get ambushed and dragged off by its pissed-off mate. The Eagle Bearer finds him, and he manages to explain the whole situation. If the Eagle Bearer goes to fight the wolf, which is just next to him, he'll die by the time they're done.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Of the three independent yet relentlessly aggressive factions in the world, only the Daughters of Artemis can be reasoned with at all, and that requires completing a lengthy quest chain that spans the entire level range up to 49. Bandits/pirates and the Followers of Ares, however, invariably attack anything that isn't them on sight.
• Amazon Brigade:
  • The Daughters of Artemis are an all-female tribe of warriors that may be fought as enemies in the game - they're some of the toughest enemies around since they're all great archers and many are accompanied by wolves and bears, making them tough to assassinate.
  • You can build your own by recruiting female mercenaries as lieutenants for your ship. And your ship's crew (the rowers and archers) can also be all-female as well. You even get the "Wrath of the Amazons" achievement for cleaving a ship in half while having an all-woman crew.
  • The Cult of Kosmos's elite guards have a branch called Scions, all-female Lightning Bruisers that can wipe the floor with anyone and anything including the Eagle Bearer in shockingly short order if you fail to block or evade their extremely fast attacks.
• Ambiguous Situation: The mysterious woman the Eagle Bearer meets in one Lost Tale. She's heavily associated with Athena, seems to know an awful lot of things there's no way she should apparently know, and manages to touch up an ancient helmet after a moment's holding it. The Eagle Bearer can speculate that she is Athena, but the mysterious woman refuses to confirm or deny it. Exactly who she is goes unrevealed.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The Abstergo gear pack allows you to equip a misthios of Ancient Greece with 21st century arms and armor. The item descriptions are Layla snarking about how blatantly anachronistic it all is, and how Abstergo apparently added it to the Animus just 'cuz.
  • The legendary sword Blade of Yumminess is a bona fide katana. In Ancient Greece. Its item description also lampshades how out of place it is in this world, but unlike the example mentioned above, this one isn't stated to be the product of Abstergo's vanity.
  • The Ceremonial Helmet is based on a 1st century AD Roman parade helmet.
  • One of the many trade items the Eagle Bearer can collect are ears of corn. Corn wasn't introduced to Europe until 1493, after Christopher Columbus' arrival in North America.
  • The athletic garments worn by female Olympic athletes in the game are actually based on Roman murals found in Pompeii. Historically, none of the athletes would have been women and they would have competed in the nude.
  • While the Ancient Greeks did have dogs as companions and used them for hunting and herding, the ones seen in-game are modeled after modern breeds like Rottweilers and Labrador Retrievers, rather than the breeds they would have had at the time, such as the Molossus.
  • Some randomly generated Mercenaries' bios will mention Alexandria, which was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, a century after the game's starting year.
• Ancestral Weapon: The Spear of Leonidas that the Eagle Bearer carries was used in the Battle of Thermopylae by the legendary king himself. As it turns out, it was actually forged with Isu technology, and can be upgraded several times in an Isu forge. Even broken, it does an order of magnitude more damage than any other weapon and confers several supernatural abilities to its bearer, including visions of the past, a limited form of precognition, and magic-enhanced combat techniques.
• Ancient Grome: While the game avoids this in the names of the characters and locations, i.e. using K and pronouncing names with that sound rather than the C in the Latinized Greek names (e.g. Sokrates instead of Socrates), it plays it straight with the fact that most characters still call the land Greece instead of Hellas. Both Kassandra and Alexios frequently refer to the "Greek world" or Greece.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • The opening gameplay sequence has the player stepping into the shoes of none other than Leonidas himself at the Battle of Thermopylae.
  • The Heir of Memory quest momentarily has the player play as Deimos.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Aside from a 50:50 chance to receive armor pieces as rewards from questing or looting, you can also unlock additional skins for your Cool Horse, Cool Boat, or the latter's crew through various means.
  • Reaching certain level milestones unlocks new color schemes for common armor pieces.
  • The Transmog system turns obtaining weapons and armor into a Collection Sidequest, allowing you to use one item's appearance over an another without changing its stats.
• Animal Motifs: A predator/prey juxtaposition. The Cult of Kosmos uses serpentine imagery. The Eagle Bearer is so-called due to their companion animal, Ikaros the eagle, and the Eagle Bearer eventually will prey on the Cult's higher-ranking members and agents. A snake's natural predator is the eagle. The default sail pattern on the Adrestia depicts an eagle swooping in on a snake, in fact. Additionally, the Eagle Bearer's father Nikolaos is a legendary Spartan general known as "the Wolf of Sparta".
  • The Greek Hero armour set is based on Jason and the Argonauts, naturally, it has a ram motif. As shown by the various horn designs on the shoulder guards and gauntlets. There's also a ram head design on the chest piece.
• Anti-Armor: The Venomous Attacks ability from the Assassin tree weakens the target's armor significantly for as long as the effect lasts.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Legendary and pre-order items are impossible to disassemble or sell to prevent players from accidentally destroying irreplaceable gear. A storage box was added to the Adrestia soon after the game's release to prevent these items from clogging up the player's inventory.
  • Speaking of legendaries: finding the last piece of a legendary armor set automatically upgrades all other pieces to the level of the last one you got, which is invariably the highest-leveled one, which in turn makes the set competitive with your current gear in an instant without having to drop a crapton of cash and resources at a blacksmith first. Post-release updates also made it so that the prices will be adjusted.
  • An auto-crafting feature allows for normal arrows to be replenished without the player needing to constantly go into the inventory and interrupt gameplay.
  • In response to player feedback, the devs will be implementing a "Buy All" button for materials.
  • If you assassinate a target with the Death Veil ability active (thus making their body disappear), you can still confirm the kill on the spot they fell. The spot will also have the usual "loot glow" and objective marker (when applicable) so you know where to look.
  • As a loot-based game, the player has to switch their appearance constantly... until you start using the transmog system, which allows you to reskin any item into another item of the same class giving the player more control over their character's looks without sacrificing stat bonuses.
  • Mercenaries way above the player's level will ignore the Eagle Bearer even if you have a bounty or they see you commit crimes. This means that running into a bounty hunter 30 levels above you doesn't immediately end in a Curb-Stomp Battle. However, they will still retaliate if attacked. .
  • During story creator mode, the wanted system is disabled, preventing mercenaries from disrupting the quests.
  • If you buy a store-exclusive item from Oikos, it's removed from the store - this actually affects the price of whatever set it belongs to, so you won't waste Helix Credits on items you already own if you choose to buy the rest of the set.
  • Some locations have freeing captives as goals. Murdering them - accidental or not - still counts as "freeing" and allows you to complete the location.
• Anti-Grinding: Gaining quick levels doesn't really do that much for progress and isn't that easy either. First, killing enemies and clearing points of interest yields comparatively few XP, and so do the daily random quests. In comparision, main and important side quests yield a lot more. And even if you gain these levels, all your opponents level with you, and some of the most game-breaking abilities you could unlock early in the skill tree are locked behind story progression.
• Apathetic Citizens: Random townies and villagers don't seem to care much when there is a wild and supposedly free animal such as a bear or a lion in their streets. It's partly justified when it's clear that the animal is a companion, but they don't become any more alert if you decide to release your animal in the middle of a bustling town.
• Apple of Discord: One questline in Boetia has the Eagle Bearer looking to recover a relic from the tomb of Orion. By the time they get there, the bandits have turned on each other, apparently due to the relic "speaking" to them.
• Arc Symbol: In what turns out to be a fruitful coincidence, the capital lambda (Λ), the symbol of the ancient city-state of Sparta, just happens to look almost exactly like the Assassins' sigil, and a version of it appears in the game's logo in place of the traditional sigil. Lambda actually corresponds to L, and it refers to the founder of the Spartans, Lakaedaemon, with the Spartans also being commonly called Lakaedaemonians. More subtly, the Assassin's symbol is also present on the upgraded forms of the Spear of Leonidas, as well as on the Mercenary Helmet, implying the Assassins' connection with the Isu as established in this game.
• Arc Villain: It's safe to say that you'll come across at least one for every region or island you visit.
  • Hyrkanos, a minor mercenary in Megaris who's been causing problems for the Spartan forces. Until the Eagle Bearer comes along.
  • The Kingfisher, a small-time crook who's making trouble on Euobea.
  • Podarkes, who's been terrorizing Delos and Mykonos for decades.
  • Chrysis, who's been ruling the healing sanctuary in Argolis with an iron fist since she became head Priestess.
  • The Monger, who is the primary villain of the Korinth questline.
  • Pausanias, who is the source of the cult's corruption in Sparta.
  • Kleon, helms the cult's power in Athens.
  • Diona, who is revealed to be the actual threat the priestesses on Kythera were facing all along.
  • Deimos is ostensibly the villain of the Family Arc. Whether they are killed or redeemed is dependent on how much the player manages to convince them they're being used by the cult and that they're loved by their family.
• Armor of Invincibility: The legendary Greek Heroes armor set provides +30% to all resistances as its Set Bonus, coupled with additional resistance-boosting and damage-reducing engravings on its pieces. Combining this already prodigious protection with even more resistance engravings and the resistance-related Mastery skills makes a high-level Eagle Bearer virtually immune to melee damage, mostly immune to ranged damage, and quite resistant to elemental damage, at the cost of foregoing almost any damage boost.
• Artifact Title: The game doesn't even feature any Assassins whatsoever outside of the modern-day portion. The Templars or more specifically the Order of the Ancients don't even appear at all save for the DLC, with their role as the antagonists in the main story instead filled out by the Cult of Kosmos.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: Whenever you sync with a synchronization point, you are rewarded with a nice 360 degrees view over the landscape through the eyes of Ikaros. However, should your horse or a tamed animal be around, the scene becomes a little awkward instead, as you can watch your animals how they desparately try to reach you while running against a wall, or even running in circles at times.
• Artistic License – Geography: Comes with the territory regarding the Space Compression of Greece. Ignoring that however, a mountain range is added in the north to prevent the player from leaving Greece, and the land of Thrace (now the country of Turkey) is pushed very eastward to make it look like the player shouldn't sail there at all (to put this in context, Chios and Lesbos in real life are right on the coast of Turkey, and much closer to Turkey than to Greece). The Macedonian area is shifted south, the island of Kriti moved north into the game map, and many of the smaller islands in the Aegean Sea are removed. The island of Thera is also depicted with palatial ruins on its caldera, both within the Animus and in the modern-day segment which occurs there, when no such ruins have ever existed there. Applies to the underwater areas as well due to the number of submerged temples and palaces in places that have been submerged since before there was even a Greece, to begin with.
• Artistic License – History: franchise's page.
• Artistic License – Marine Biology: No, sharks don't just wait in a harbour to ruthlessly devour any human who falls off the port as they do with the Olympic champion Testikles. Granted, the whole scene wasn't exactly meant to be taken seriously.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • Battlefields are simply chaotic melees of small groups or one-on-one fighting. The only appearance of the famous phalanx formation is during the opening cinematic for the playable Battle of Thermopylae. Afterward, it cuts to the game's usual chaotic melee.
  • Downplayed with the Spartan navy: while modern historians believed that Sparta had a functional navy, portraying it as being on par with the Athenian fleet is an overcorrection.
  • The scale and timeline of the war is heavily condensed. While this might have otherwise been handwaved off as time passing off screen, certain indicators in the story suggest that the timeline doesn't match that of reality. Namely, the fact that Brasidas is shown nursing his still-bloody wound from the battle of Pylos during the Battle of Amphipolis—historically these two battles took place 3 years apart.
  • Lightning Bruisers use battle axes and clubs (some of the latter dual-wielding them, to boot) as their primary weapon. Axes and clubs (along with war hammers also available to the Eagle Bearer in the game) had long since fallen out of use as weapons of war by the time of the Peloponnesian War; with the exception of archers, javelin skirmishers, and slingers (the latter two of which aren't enemy types in the game), the spear was the primary weapon of all Greek infantry.
  • Horses are used almost entirely as battle taxis in the game; in real history, the Greeks had excellent (if low in number) cavalry troops.
• Artificial Stupidity: The game's AI has clearly been programmed with Can't Get Away with Nuthin' in mind; helping a soldier defend themselves against an aggressive animal — indeed, defending yourself against an animal in their eyesight — will cause them to immediately become hostile to you. Just being in their line of sight after a fight that had nothing to do with you can evoke a violent response, as if the player is being held responsible for anything that happens in the game world. Sometimes even random civilians join in the fray, rabidly attacking the protagonist until killed because they were clipped by the enemy! On the positive side, it's extremely easy for NPCs to end up fighting each other, as well, even ones ostensibly on the same side.
  • This can have hilarious, if unfortunate results. Accidentally getting increasing swarms of citizens involved in a fight in a town will simultaneously bring every single available Mercenary in the region in for a friendly visit.
• Ass Shove: Done by the player with the Cyclops' obsidian eye to an unfortunate goat, in order to spite said mercenary. After slaying him, the player can seek out that same goat and retrieve the eye for an achievement. In their reunion in Fate of Atlantis, a thoroughly pissed-off Eagle Bearer threatens to shove the other eye up his ass this time around.
• As You Know: When you first arrive in Sparta, Myrinne will give the Eagle Bearer a run down of Sparta's society and customs. This, despite the fact that the Eagle Bearer lived in Sparta for years as a child and should have already been familiar with such basic facts.
• A Taste of Power: The game starts with you playing as Leonidas I in the Battle of Thermopylae, who is a powerful warrior with skills you won't be seeing for a while.
• Athens and Sparta: The real deal. The game deals with the battle between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. In fact, your character interacts with and collaborates with both sides at various points of the conflict, since the Cult of Kosmos you target are also on both sides. You can however lend your sword to specifically back one side or another during particular quests. True to history, Athens is a bustling city-state, whereas Sparta is a drab mountainous land that looks like a giant barracks, run on slave labor.
• Atlantis: Atlantis is the MacGuffin of one of the three main storylines in the base game, and where the Isu Alethia is operating out of, buried under the island of Thera. The final episode of Fate of Atlantis allows the player to see it in its prime.
• Ax-Crazy: The Followers of Ares are a deranged cult of murderers seeking only to torture and kill in the name of the War God. If you see one, prepare for a fight and don't feel bad about killing them.
• Badass Bystander: If you're caught doing something illegal in a settlement, civilians in the area are quite likely to draw steel and go after you, and they deal just as much damage as the professional soldiers you're used to dealing with. Their only problem is that they're, well, unarmored civilians attacking a One-Man Army, so their vigilante career tends to be rather short-lived.
• Badass Family: The Eagle Bearer's family certainly qualifies. Their mother Myrrine is Archon of Naxos and carries a Heroic Lineage from her father, King Leonidas of Sparta. Their father Nikolaos is a famed and respected Spartan general nicknamed "The Wolf Of Sparta", who alongside his son Stentor (also a Spartan general), will lead Sparta to take Megaris and Boetia respectively. Their younger sibling Deimos is an inhumanly strong and skilled Super-Soldier who curbstomps their way through almost every fight and is widely feared in the Greek world. And then there's the Eagle Bearer themselves, who is a famed Mercenary with a hand in several key battles during the war, respected greatly on both the Athenian and Spartan side, and who basically single-handedly ended The Cult of Kosmos and their corruption in Greece. That's not even mentioning the fact that they're captain of a ship, an Olympic champion, possibly the leader of the Daughters of Artemis, Champion of the Arena, and the number 1 Mercenary in all of Greece.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The "competitors" in the Trials of the Minotaur Strength Trial, who all lie around clutching their non-existent wounds, declaring things like "my bones, they are incredibly broken!" Stand around long enough, and it's possible to hear them asking when they'll be paid.
• Batman Gambit: The "Trial of Sokrates" quest has the Oracle of Delphi state she's told Sokrates what she told him so as to help tear down current thinking.
• Bat Scare: Sometimes upon entering a cave or tomb, a startled flock of bats streams past the Eagle Bearer, which may provide a mild Jump Scare.
• Bears Are Bad News: Appear as a hostile predator animal, which you're likely to run into in the wild (or if you're unlucky, accompanying a mercenary or high-ranking Daughter of Artemis). Fortunately, they're relatively slow and not too powerful, but also have a ton of hit points.
• The Beastmaster:
  • If you nonlethally take down a predator animal, it can fight along with you via the Beast Master Hunter ability.
  • Many of the more powerful Daughters of Artemis fight alongside wolf or bear companions, making them a pain to assassinate. The most powerful Daughters are even called "Beastmasters".
• Beef Gate: Not as egregious as the last game, but still present: if you try to tackle a region above your suggested level, you'll get clobbered. So, you'll have to tackle the regions in a set order, which limits the freedom of a sandbox game.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • As per usual for the franchise. Besides affecting the Peloponnesian War, the Eagle Bearer's actions can shape many historical details, such as their action impacting Hippokrates and inspiring the Hippocratic oath, or being responsible for Pausinias's exile. The Eagle Bearer also becomes immortal after they take control of the Staff of Hermes from their father Pythagoras and thus they became a participant in numerous historical events.
  • Deimos is responsible for the death of Perikles in 429 BC.
  • Likewise, the Eagle Bearer and Deimos kill Kleon and Brasidas respectively during the Battle of Amphipolis.
• Betty and Veronica: Played with in one side-quest. A wealthy man in Keos has two suitors but it's the elitist and manipulative Jerkass who has loved him for years while the lovestruck impoverished girl has a more shallow physical attraction based relationship, and possibly other motives. As the witch points out, both were just as willing to cheat. She just did it better. You can still decide who to side with after all this is revealed.
• Berserk Button: Do not call the Cyclops of Kephellonia... the cyclops. In fact, don't even utter the word 'cyclops' in his general vicinity unless you want to be drowned in a pot.
• Big Bad Ensemble: How the Cult of Kosmos is organized, in stark contrast to the Big Bad-centric Order of the Ancients/Templar Order of past games. Its nine leaders operate autonomously for the most part, with each Sage assigned various roles in the overall agenda. The closest position they have to a central figure is the Ghost of Kosmos/Aspasia. The main storyline only unveils three of the Cult's leaders, which forces the player to track down five more as a separate arc before finally confronting the ninth figure. Even then, this final cultist will only appear after all the other 43 cultists have been dealt with.
• Big Brother Instinct:
  • The Eagle Bearer had this for their little sibling when they were a child, even killing a Spartan Elder in an effort to save them. Later, they can (if the player chooses) even attempt to save them from a burned fallen tree during the Battle of Pylos, despite the fact that Deimos had just been trying to kill them. Their revenge kills against Chrysis and Kleon are especially merciless for this reason as well.
    • They are additionally extremely protective of Phiobe, who they've adopted as a sort of surrogate younger sister. One of the quickest ways to rile them up is to threaten or kidnap her, and they had zero mercy for the cultist guards who killed her.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Bioluminescent algae, corals and jellyfish provide most of the illumination in the Hollywood Darkness at underwater locations.
• Bisexual Love Triangle: The player can create one by romancing either Kyra or Thaelas. Or, if they'd like to be the center of the triangle themselves, both.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The "worst" ending of the Family Arc. You've saved Greece from Deimos and the Cult and are regaled by the surviving characters as a hero, but you've lost your entire family in the process.
  • The Family ending where some survive is also very bittersweet. Yes, your character has made peace with their father but their mother and sibling are dead. Or maybe you lost everyone but your mother. Whatever the outcome, they are clearly happy to have some of their family back but wary over those absent.
  • Since Kassandra is the canonical Eagle Bearer, she loses her brother Alexios/Deimos via suicide after failing to convince him to turn back to the light and rejoin their family.
  • Regardless of how much of the Cult of Kosmos you dismantle or how much you try to help others, the Order of the Ancients still rises in Origins, necessitating the creation of the Hidden Ones (later known as the Assassin Brotherhood) and ensuring much suffering and death in the future.
• Blatant Lies: Obelia, a pirate the Eagle Bearer meets on Keos, grants them a key as part of a quest, which is covered in a mysterious, sticky substance she insists is pomegranate juice. Not blood. Definitely not blood.
• Bleak Level: Athens, when it's afflicted by the plague. The streets are filled with the sick and dying, the Followers of Ares are everywhere, and the sky is constantly grey. There's also the town of Aipeia in the Messenia region, which is engulfed in fog and has children forced into slavery, among other delights.
• Bling of War:
  • Many of the available armor sets are absolutely gorgeous to look at, and it's not difficult to walk around covered head to toe in gilded plating even with non-legendary gear. One particularly noteworthy example is the Pegasos armor set, easily the most finely detailed and generally flashiest piece of equipment in the game.
  • As the Adrestia gets more upgrades, she'll start getting gold paint added to her.
• Blood Knight:
  • Every fighter at the arena counts, as do a large majority of the mercenaries.
  • The one trait 100% consistent between Kassandra and Alexios, no matter who is the Eagle Bearer and who is Deimos, is loving a good fight.
  • One of the love interests Thaletas is one, in keeping with his Spartan upbringing. He even cites being In Love with Your Carnage as one of the things which attracted him to the Eagle Bearer in the first place.
• Blown Across the Room: There are several attacks that can launch human enemies for quite a distance, and even further if the hit dealt the killing blow. Highlights include some melee chain finishers, Overpower finishers, the Devastating Shot ability, and of course the always-popular Spartan Kick.
• Blunt "Yes": A common response in auto-generated quests is the quest giver responding to "you want me to kill [source of irritation]" with "yes". Sometimes they'll go all the way up to "well, yes."
• Boarding Party: Once a ship has lost all its health, you can choose to board it instead of ramming it, in which case the Eagle Bearer, their lieutenants, and some of the crew will board the ship to fight the enemy crew. This also has the added benefit of restoring the Adrestia's health, as well as giving the player some breathing room before resuming a naval skirmish.
• Book Ends:
  • The Family plot begins and ends on the cliff where the siblings nearly met their deaths by the hands of Nikolaos.
  • If you play the entire game including its DLC in the intended order (family arc, cult arc, mythical creatures arc, Fate of Atlantis DLC)^note the Legacy of the First Blade DLC is detached from the narrative structure, so it can be squeezed in at any point, it begins and ends on Kephallonia.
  • Barnabas is the Eagle Bearer's first ally before leaving Kephallonia for the rest of their odyssey across Greece, and as of the free crossover DLC, the final opponent they face before leaving Greece to secure Isu artifacts throughout history. Both times involve them departing on the Adrestia.
• Boom, Headshot!: Bow headhots always deal critical damage (before Patch 1.12) in addition to their considerable bonus damage from, well, being headshots, making them the most reliably powerful and versatile attacks at your disposal. There's even a dedicated engraving that increases headshot damage by up to 25%. Specialized archer builds that focus on Hunter damage and crit damage are the most broken builds in the game, capable of killing any basic mook with one headshot, elite mooks with two, and bosses with one to two Devastating Shots to the head. Even Jack of All Stats builds can get a lot of mileage out of this mechanic by softening up tough targets from a distance. Even the most powerful mercs lose most of their threat potential when they engage you in melee with but a sliver of their health left.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Spending one adrenaline slot to heal yourself a meager 25% might not sound like a big deal, certainly less than the more flashy abilities you can gain right from the start of the game. However, it's your only standard means of healing in a battle, and it has little cooldown, making it an absolute life-saver in plenty of situations.
  • Sniping your enemies at range may not look very cool (unless using Predator Shot), but it gets the job done quickly. Just as well when sniping isn't an option, walking up behind your target and just backstabbing them is equally painless, at least for you. Quick, quiet, easy. Bosses with just a sliver of health left after a Critical Assassination or a Hero Strike aren't very scary either.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • The Demigod armour set and Sword of Damokles, aka the armour and weapon of Deimos are a fairly powerful set of Warrior-focused gear that will turn you into an absolute close-combat monster, even before you get into engravings and the like, but as it is the reward for completing the Family questline, odds are good by the time you get them there's not going to be a lot of game left for you to use them in. This was eventually averted through the release of the three Atlantis DLC episodes, which are canonically set after the conclusion of the Family arc, and boy will you need the best equipment you can get there, seeing how nothing but extremely dangerous Elite Mooks populate these maps.
  • The final upgrade of the Leonidas' spear. You can only perform it once you kill the final cultist, which is locked behind the main quest line. If you did everything right, you will be fighting the last fight in the whole game to gain the final piece needed for the upgrade, making it entirely pointless to even bother with going to the Forge. On top of that, the upgrade between tier 5 and 6 is virtually cosmetic by itself, while it takes 22 pieces to pull it off - almost the same amount to get it from tier 1 to 5.
  • The same can be said of the potential Legendary-level Lieutenants you are capable of getting for the Adrestia after the completion of the questline as well depending on your actions taken, the rest of the player character's family, Myrrine, Nikolaos, Stentor, and possibly even Deimos. Deimos alone makes boarding actions a complete joke as none of their prowess or abilities from their boss fight have been lost, but once you have them, there's probably not much incentive left to upgrade the Adrestia if it isn't already completely upgraded, making having access to them little more than being able to put your family on deck with you. This can be somewhat mitigated by saving the cultists from the "Gods of the Aegean Sea" branch for last.
• Breather Episode: The Lost Tale quest "One Really, Really Bad Day", which was released shortly after the first episode of Fate of Atlantis, and is much more farcical than typical Assassin's Creed fare. Several other Lost Tales of Greece sidequests aren't as combat-heavy and provide story experiences which you can tailor based on the dialogue choices you make.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • Occasionally, there'll be a randomly generated quest which consists of nothing more than giving the quest-giver fifty drachmea, which is chump change.
  • The downloadable legendary weapons and armor sets play with it but ultimately avert it. They spawn in your inventory with your current character level when you unlock them, so they can give you a temporary edge until you level up again. However, they aren't more powerful overall than any of the other legendaries in the base game, and the usefulness of their unique perks, as well as the buffs they offer, comes down to player preference.
  • Played straight with the downloadable legendary ship lieutenants. While the usefulness of the buffs they offer depend on player preference, the buffs do continue to improve as you level, which meant that they will never become obsolete.
  • Parodied in the minotaur questline on Pephka. The whole thing is a scam, and all three of the "Pre-Trials" can be bypassed by bribing the trainers. The trainers themselves try their best to convince and/or intimidate the Eagle Bearer into bribing them instead of completing the trials, which aren't actually that hard.
  • One quest in the Legacy of the First Blade's second episode lets you skip a simple Fetch Quest by paying the recipient 50,000 drachmae instead. This is a huge amount of cash even in the late game, so you must be really lazy to even consider taking this path of action.
• Bullet Time: Quite a few mechanics exist that slow down time during combat for a few precious seconds.
  • Performing a perfect dodge almost freezes not only the dodged enemy but the entire battlefield, allowing you to get some good hits in with impunity or beat a quick retreat. At least one legendary weapon utilizes this mechanic for its unique perk.
  • Being fully spotted by an enemy while hidden. This window can be extended to a very generous six seconds with the Sixth Sense ability, which is enough to loose at least two charged arrows in the spotter's face before they can react, or even to run right up to said spotter and assassinate them before they can draw their weapons out at you.
  • The imaginatively-named Slow Time ability from the Assassin tree allows you to go into bullet time at your leisure with the press of a button.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • During the "Old Flames Burn Brighter" quest, the Eagle Bearer recounts a childhood story where they were bullied by older children on Kephellonia. Of course, since they're a renegade Spartan with magical powers and inhuman fighting prowess, this led to them cutting off the bullies' fingers in retaliation.
  • After the Battle of Pylos, Kleon will scold Deimos in a pretty harsh and condescending manner for trying to talk to their sibling in private without permission. This is obviously a very dumb move, seeing as Kleon is hardly a warrior and Deimos could kill him in seconds if they wanted to.
• Bury Your Gays: Especially painful as you get the quest in Lesbos of all places, which the title card even explicitly states is the "Land of Sapphic Love." The protagonist can step in and stop the execution of a woman accused of sacrificing her female lover to a monster. She begs you to please save her, and after the character has two unavoidable fights with some city guards then an old mercenary, and the option of slaughtering a tribe of female huntresses as you steal their sacred artifact, the woman you saved ends up being killed by her lover, who was transformed into a Medusa.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • For the questline added to foreshadow the Fate of Atlantis DLC, Otso Berg returns, in the form of voice mail.
  • After disappearing from the story after the Eagle Bearer passes through Delphi, the Oracle of Delphi returns in the "Trial of Sokrates" quest.
• But Thou Must!:
  • Many quests force you to kill certain characters to progress even if you knock them out, despite the fact that there's no real reason why simply knocking them out wouldn't let you complete your task, and not killing them would make things less complicated later on. One example of this is the quest Family Values on Lokris, in which you are tasked with retrieving a man's sword and shield to give to his parents for protection. You have no choice but to kill the bandit who stole his shield — the quest won't progress until you do, even if you knock her out — even though the man only told you to get his shield back, and it would be just as easy to take a shield from someone who's unconscious as someone who's dead. The bandit turns out to be his biological mother, and being required to kill her means that there's no way to get a truly good ending to the quest.
  • The Heir of Memories questline, when playing as Deimos, both in and out of universe. If Layla tries to opt out, the Animus forces her into repeating the choice, which is Deimos continuing to inflict violence on their target.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Nobody likes Brutes, if the war contracts are anything to go by. Repeatable side quests to kill ten Brutes of either side show up more often than any other on the job boards.
  • If his name wasn't proof enough, Testikles is basically one huge joke-character. His time in the story amounts to vomiting on the player's shoes then immediately dying the moment he steps foot on Elis.
• Cain and Abel:
  • The player can potentially kill Deimos and their adopted brother Stentor depending on your choices.
  • At the end of the Euboea questline, if the player makes the wrong choice, the Kingfisher will shove his brother over a cliff after the guy's tried to reconnect with him.
• Call-Back: The fact that an Animus user can have difficulty, both mental and physical, with it if they try to go against the ancestor's memories, something established in the Titan comics, comes up in a big way when Layla has to relive Deimos violently killing an innocent man.
• Camera Lock-On: Like in the predecessor, you can target enemies so that the camera is always centered on the enemy.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: A side-quest at Perikles' symposium is getting Euripides and Eumenides piss-drunk just so Sophokles can sneak out, after having made a scene arguing with them. Do so, and they'll start a singing competition.
• Cap: The Eagle Bearer's level is capped at 50, but reaching it doesn't help all that much due to the game's rampant Level Scaling. The 1.06 update increased the level cap to 70 while keeping it at 50 ^note Players continue to gain experience and ability points until they hit the invisible cap of 70, but their official character level remains at 50, probably to prevent the Level Scaling mechanic from running amok. Later updates changed it so that the level continues to increase until 99, with the level scaling following suit.
• Cash Gate: Xenia will only agree to help out the Eagle Bearer if they pay her 15,000 drachmae.
• Catchphrase: The Mysterious Woman in one of the Lost Tales likes using "very nearly".
• Central Theme: "Survival" comes up quite often, especially in impossible and pragmatic contexts. The Eagle Bearer of course survived getting thrown off a cliff, so did their sibling, slaves will often defend their situation by saying they do what they had to in order to survive, and the Eagle Bearer can use the exact same justification whenever someone questions their choices.
  • "Family" comes up pretty often as well: apart from their own family issues, the Eagle Bearer often encounters people who have issues (usually big ones) with their family members. Examples in the base game include Dolops and his mother Chrysis, Kyra and her father Podarkes; in episode 2 of Legacy, Kleta's issues with her daughter the Tempest and the resolution form the climax of the episode. Given the setting, Family being a major theme and issue isn't surprising.
• Chainmail Bikini: The downloadable Spartan Renegade armor set consists of little more than a bra, a short skirt, sandals and a few straps made from leather, with a red hood and Badass Cape for added flavor. Since it's a legendary set, it provides just as much protection as any full-metal plate armor you can don instead.
• Character Customization: In addition to being able to play as a male or female character, Odyssey has a more robust version of the customization seen in Origins.
  • The gear system is more like Unity's, with armor slots for your head, chest, waist, legs, and arms.
  • The transmogrification system lets you change the look of your equipment to any you have looted in the past while retaining its stats.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Phidias, a person mentioned as being a target of the Cult of Kosmos when the Eagle Bearer infiltrates their meeting. They meet him in Athens. And the "Heir of Memory" questline has him play a small but significant part.
• Collection Sidequest: With the transmog system, all weapons and armors are also added into a list of weapon/armor skins that can be applied over any other item. Getting rid of the item doesn't remove the reskin option.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Color-Coded Armies: Athenian soldiers, ships, flags and supplies are blue, while Spartan soldiers, ships and supplies are red. When a country switches hands the flags in forts change colour. This even extends to story-based NPCs - many Athenian politicians dress in blue while many Spartan politicians are red.
  • Equipment comes in four color-coded tiers of increasing power: common (grey), rare (blue), epic (purple), and legendary (golden). The same is true of lieutenants recruited for the Adrestia.
  • Iron ore nuggets work similarly. Grey/brown ones give a bit of iron and very rarely some obsidian. Blue ones give more iron and often some obsidian or precious gems. Finally, the sparkly purple ones give significant amounts of all three resources.
• Comically Inept Healing: Understandable, since Hippokrates has only just gotten started, so everyone else generally thinks healing people consists of sacrificing animals and hoping the gods take care of it. One quest at the Sanctuary of Asklepios involves one treatment being snakes. As in, someone is left in a room with snakes which... lick the illness out of people (though due to a mix-up, the scaly sods have gotten lose and taken over a bathhouse.)
• The Conspiracy: Wouldn't be an Assassin's Creed game without it. Since neither the Assassins nor the Templars exist yet, the Eagle Bearer gets to fight the sinister Cult of Kosmos instead. Tracking down and eliminating their numerous agents all over the Greek world constitutes one of the game's major story arcs. It is implied that the Cult will be replaced by the Templars.
• Continuity Nod:
  • While going over the abilities of Staff of Eden, Victoria Bibeau references the time Nikola Tesla blew up a Staff of Eden in Assassin's Creed: The Fall.
  • Layla compares Atlantis with the Isu vaults she saw in Egypt.
  • The modern day segments have a lot of characters recounting the events of Assassin's Creed: Uprising (specifically, the finale, and Charlotte de la Cruz's apparent death).
  • The Eye from Assassin's Creed III gets mentioned in the modern day stuff, and the Assassins figure it's (going to be) the cause of the unspecified disaster the Isu vaults from Origins were talking about.
  • At the end of the modern day segments, Layla compares the ruins of Atlantis to the Isu ruins found in Lisbon and the Arctic.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Most of the areas where you fight legendary animals are surrounded by high cliffs or foilage to hide in, the perfect spots from where to snipe them to death... if the beasts weren't immune to ranged damage from outside their boss arena (i.e. while their life bars aren't on display).
• Convection, Schmonvection: Greece is a volcanically active region, and some locations contain lava flows as an environmental hazard for the player to navigate. However, unless you get close enough to touch the stuff, none of it has any effect on the Eagle Bearer aside from occasional complaints about the heat. In reality, conditions like these would be unsurvivable for anyone without specialized protective equipment. This gets more absurd in one questline where you explore several caves and a locked tomb, all inside a volcano.
• Cool Boat:
  • The light trireme Adrestia, the mercenary war galley that the Eagle Bearer sails around the Aegean Sea on. At the outset, she's not in the best shape, but capability upgrade options exist to enhance her to the point where she can punch above her weight against elite heavy triremes. Exploring underwater locations and completing certain quest chains unlocks dozens of customization options to make it look even cooler, and of course there also exists a whole upgrade tree to make it more powerful in combat. Episode 2 of the Legacy DLC makes her even cooler, (somewhat ironically) by adding a flamethrower at her bow.
  • The twelve so-called Alpha Ships, unique warships with distinct looks and fighting styles that can be encountered all over the Aegean. Though not quite as awesome as the legendary ships from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag or Assassin's Creed Rogue, they still put up a fight and look pretty cool.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • Legendary gear is a tad more powerful than lower tier equipment, usually looks awesome, comes with unique perks, and complete armor sets confer a set bonus of varying usefulness when all five pieces are equipped. Unfortunately, legendaries lose their edge just as quickly as anything else as you level up. Even a difference of one or two levels is enough to make them fall behind epic and sometimes even rare gear, but upgrading legendaries is so hideously expensive that you'll have a hard time keeping up until well into the late game where resources become a lot more abundant. Chances are you'll be slumming it with a ragtag mix of non-uniques most of the time until you hit the level cap of 99.
  • Both the Warrior tree and the Assassin tree offer skills to buff your weapons with fire or poison, respectively. While slashing about with a Flaming Sword sure looks badass as all hell, the poison skill is much more useful overall because in addition to dealing damage over time, it weakens the target's own attacks and their armor significantly. Most enemies aren't tough because of an absurd health pool but because they have massive armor ratings, which makes poisoned weapons dish out much more damage than if you set them on fire instead. The fact that burning enemies don't panic or suffer similar drawbacks aside from DOT doesn't help (no matter how much your enemies complain about it loudly) the Flaming Weapons skill much.
• Cool Horse: Phobos, your faithful steed, starts out as your everyday horse but can be changed into a Unicorn, a Pegasus or a Hellish Horse with the appropriate, purely cosmetic skins.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: While the environment itself is mostly unique, military camps only come in two or three vaguely different layouts. Even the treasure chests and war supply crates are always at the exact same position, with the exact same looks. There's about a hundred of these camps scattered all over Greece, so if you happen to be a completionist who doesn't leave any location uncleared, you're liable to start groaning very soon every time you discover that a new location is yet another army camp. Even military standardization can't explain this level of identity, especially not in an era where modular prefab equipment didn't exist yet. On a smaller scale, many of the bandit camps (that is, the smaller ones not marked on the map) are also similarly scattered.
• The Corruption: A problem with the Staff of Hermes Trigemestus is that it corrupts anyone not sufficiently braced enough to hold it. Pythagoras becomes selfishly obsessed with keeping it, and may well try and kill his own child rather than part with it. Fate of Atlantis is about the Eagle Bearer and Layla building up a resistance to this.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: A big deal is made of the Peleponnesian War between Sparta and Athens for control of Greece, but which side controls which region, or how many of them, means precisely squat. Spartan and Athenian troops do have some minor variations in their equipment, but nowhere near enough to require adapted tactics to fight them effectively - what works for one works usually just as well for the other, assuming you have a reliable method to deal with shield-bearing enemies. There's also nothing to be gained nor lost when a region switches sides (apart from rulers and military strongholds resetting), so the whole thing essentially boils down to a plot vehicle for providing the player with an endless supply of mooks to murderize in creative ways.
• Covers Always Lie: The exact location depicted on the cover art is a composite of at least four different locations and thus doesn't exist in-game. For example, the Statue of Athena stands on its own in the background rather than accompanying the Parthenon in Athens, the statue of Poseidon is transposed from its spot on a small island in the middle of the ocean, and Mount Taygetos is visible in the distance, which is in Sparta.
• Crippling the Competition: A side-quest on Keos has a "witch" doing this in regards to a childhood friend. She tells a potential suitor that she can make a love potion from bad mushrooms and strong wine. The end result is all the unfortunate sap's hair falls out (which the rival hadn't actually intended, merely a nasty rash, but she's not about to complain with the results).
• Critical Hit Class: The game doesn't have classes per se, but the abundance of crit-boosting engravings allows you to build a character that can one-shot basic infantry and deal with anything stronger in hilariously short order. It's easiest to do with Hunter builds because bow headshots always crit ^note This auto-crit was removed in patch 1.12. As a slight compensation, the base damage of headshots is increased., enabling you to pick off entire fort garrisons from a distance without ever being discovered. Doing the whole thing wearing a Hunter-centric legendary armor set and wielding a legendary bow with buffs to your favorite ranged ability breaks most of the game's difficulty in half.
• Crosshair Aware: You get very visible indicators for incoming arrows, melee strikes and throwables that give you plenty of opportunity to avoid them. Best of all, this is actually an In-Universe example, too. It's revealed early on that the Spear of Leonidas gives its wielder brief visions of what their enemies are about to do next in combat, which in gameplay translates into the HUD indicators the player sees.
• Crouch and Prone: High grass and many small ledges will conceal the player character just fine when you put them into the crouch state. The noise of walking is likewise reduced.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Canonically speaking, Kassandra becomes immortal after she was forced to kill her brother Alexios because he felt so guilt-ridden over his actions as Deimos.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • Deimos tends to dominate anyone they fight but their elder sibling, who matches them:
    • They kill Brasidas, who was a famed Spartan general and no slouch on the battlefield, without breaking a sweat.
    • They will continue delivering these if convinced to defect from the cult and made a Lieutenant on the Adrestia. Not only do naval boardings get a hell of a lot quicker with their help, using the "Call to Arms" ability while fully upgraded, they can wipe out a room of guards all on their own.
  • In gameplay, this can be invoked when fighting in the arena. Unlike every other fight in the game, the five main battles here have a fixed level, the lowest being at Lv. 22. If you go there on a level beyond the 40s, you're just one-hitting every enemy in your side, and even the boss of the first challenge goes down in a handful of hits.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • Boars are powerful enough when they just take a swipe at you, but what really makes them so reviled among the player community is their charge attack that knocks the victim down in addition to dealing heavy damage. They have almost no cooldown on this ability, so even one boar can stunlock the Eagle Bearer to death in a matter of seconds. Needless to say, it gets a whole lot worse when several boars are present, and they almost never come alone. There's a reason why of all the legendary animals, the Kalydonian Boar (the very first one that introduces the whole quest line) is so reviled, as after a certain amount of damage, it will call out several smaller boars to swarm you.
  • The Eagle Bearer can inflict this in kind on enemies that get knocked over by Charged Heavy Attacks, after the third upgrade shortens the wind-up time. Wallop them, move to where they landed, wind up before they get back up, repeat.

Tropes D - I

• Dark Action Girl:
  • Champion of Beotia and cultist Deianeira and her cousin Astra are seasoned warriors and quite tough to take down—especially together.
  • Sage of the Eyes of Kosmos, Nyx the Shadow. While she looks mundane and blends in well enough in Athens' crowds, engaging her in battle will reveal her pretty impressive prowess with a dagger.
  • If playing as Alexios, Kassandra as Deimos also counts, as she's every bit the terrifyingly brutal warrior as her male counterpart.
  • Several of the female mercenaries count as well. While the blurb describing many of them will suggest they are no more morally gray than the Eagle Bearer themselves, there is the occasional one that reads a little more sinister.
  • The Cult's Scions. They're among the higher-level enemies and of course, serve the cult as Elite Mooks.
• Dead Guy on Display: Bandits and especially the Followers of Ares have quite the visceral taste in interior and exterior decoration.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Non-lethally dispatching enemies allows you to recruit them as lieutenants aboard the Adrestia. Nearly every human enemy in the game other than story bosses (and even a few of those) can be recruited this way, up to and including Strategoi and Polemarchoi (high-ranking military officers) and bounty hunter minibosses.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Like the game before it, daggers are most useful for their speed, not their striking power. Killing most Elite enemies and Bounty Hunters with daggers will usually wind up being this trope.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Averted for the Eagle Bearer, who could lose a lot of progress if they die in a restricted area. However, played straight for Phobos in a rare non-player character example. if Phobos dies, for instance owing to a fall from great height, he'll respawn just fine a couple of seconds later.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • The Aversion of Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil - especially when opposing slavery has been a common trait of all protagonists of the franchise so far. As slavery is a huge part of Ancient Greek culture and the backbone of the Athenian and Spartan economies, there's precious few places for the main character to oppose slavery. At best you can express that slaves deserve to be treated fairly, because treating slaves badly means they can't work, and should have the right to earn their freedom, because it's an incentive to work harder. You can also express that if there's a problem, it's the master and not the slaves' fault, because the master is responsible for the slaves.
    • Two characters who are unambiguously heroic and allies of the Eagle Bearer, as Spartans, vehemently and vocally support Sparta's intensive slavery and the repression of the helotes. Brasidas will even charge the main character with suppressing a helot rebellion (admittedly it is being provoked by Cultists).
  • While the rampant sexism of the time generally goes unmentioned, there is one quest in the Olympics where the Eagle Bearer has to save a woman from being executed for the crime of... trying to watch the Games while being a woman. There were no Women's Olympics back then.
• Department of Redundancy Department: When you pick up a metal nugget, you don't get "iron" but "iron metal", which is about as redundant as it gets. "Iron ore" would've been much more appropriate instead.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Should the player accidentally complete part of a quest without ever having actually begun it, such as killing a weekly quest target while just wandering around Greece, the game will still count it as completion of a quest objective, after which you can simply find the Quest Giver and collect the reward.
  • Some plot-relevant cult members can be found and killed in the overworld long before their respective quests have started. If you do so, the Eagle Bearer will comment that they've already dealt with that person, immediately finishing the quest.
  • Certain quests play out differently depending on the order taken. For example, completing the Minotaur quest before doing the Pre-Trials of the Minotaur one will result in the addition of the Eagle Bearer trying to claim they've killed a minotaur already, which no-one believes. Doing "The Elixir" after finishing the Medusa fight has the Eagle Bearer try to point out that finding a cure for Medusa-related petrification isn't necessary, but the questgiver insists.
  • Finishing the Battle of a Hundred Hands questline adds a momentary extra bit to "They Just Want Cruelty" where Maion, owner of the arena, will note he's heard of the Eagle Bearer from their efforts there. Likewise, romancing Roxana during that quest means Alkibediades will (naturally) bring it up in the Lost Tale of Greece quest "Praxilla's Legacy".
  • Doing the Olympics questline before going to Thasos means during the athlete school quest, one of the students will recognise the Eagle Bearer and start hero-worshipping them.
  • Some missions command the Eagle Bearer to go into a place without getting spotted and retrieve something. If the player for whatever reason has already done so, even if they got caught and had to slaughter their way out, the game won't count this as getting caught.
  • If you get it into your head to try and change history by conquering the entire Greek world for one side or the other, rest assured the developers anticipated this and will not let you do it. First, regions will switch their allegiances without your participation — devote a couple hours to conquering a territory, leave the game, come back the next day and there's a good chance the territory will have flipped back already. Second, no matter how hard you try, you'll never be able to conquer Lakonia or Attika, the home territories of Sparta and Athens respectively — you can kill as many soldiers or burn as many war supplies as you want, but the territory strength will never actually fall and you'll never be able to trigger a conquest battle. So, sorry, no raising the Athenian flag over Sparta.
  • If you put off Hippokrates' quest to retrieve his notes from a nearby fortress and instead choose to pursue the priests' half for the Aroglis quest chain, not only will Hippokrates call you out for it but his patient will die and you'll be tasked with an extra quest to find out more about Chrysis.
  • If you manage to sneak into the Pythia's home without killing any of the guards, she won't be later kidnapped and threatened by the Monger during the Cultist meeting.
  • During the 'Ostracized' quest there is a slightly different dialogue for the voting official if you manage to sneak into the Logismos Building undetected/without killing any guards. If you were detected, you'll earn a level 2 bounty. However, if you're detected but you kill the witnesses in secret, the official will still comment that there was evidence of tampering, but you'll avoid the bounty.
• Die, Chair, Die!: In camps and fortresses, many objects can be destroyed. Some of them, like the weapon stands, result in a reduction of the nation power.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In real life, Perikles succumbed to the Plague of Athens along with several relatives. In Odyssey, he is killed by Deimos at the Partheon.
• Dirty Coward: The Eagle Bearer has this low regard of the city of Thebes, as they surrendered to King Xerxes during his invasion a generation ago.
  Eagle Bearer: Thebians. Cowards that surrendered to Xerxes.
• Disc-One Nuke: While extremely difficult, it's entirely possible to whittle down the health of a mercenary way above your level. While the loot they drop is tied to their level and thus unusable for quite a while, any legendary effects the weapon has will be added to your inventory, and can be added to any weapon at any blacksmith. For example, some mercenaries carry legendary gear that always deals fire/poison damage - with patience, time, and luck, you can take them down, grab their weapon, and copy the elemental effect to your current one.
• Distinction Without a Difference:
  • Markos, the Eagle Bearer's caretaker and boss, is fond of this. Him sending you out to collect the money he owes you from a different merchant isn't him giving you more work, it's your money "waiting for you" in that town!
  • Barnabas does this during the recruitment tutorial. It's not "knocking them out", it's "pacifying" them. By knocking them out.
• Distant Sequel: Inverted, as the game is set over 400 years before the events of Origins and all other AC installments.
• Dolphins, Dolphins Everywhere: You can see dolphins jumping through the waves when you sail on your ship.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You:
  • The Eagle Bearer frequently has this exchange with Deimos whenever they fight.
  • After hunting all of the Legendary Beasts, Daphnae will reveal she has chosen the Eagle Bearer to take her place as the Leader of the Daughters of Artemis, which is all well and fine until she reveals that they also must Duel to the Death with her for the position. While you can agree without complaint, another option is for the Eagle Bearer to refuse to kill someone they love and respect.
• Double-Meaning Title: The game itself is called Odyssey for a reason. The massive map of Greece gives you plenty to do and many different locales to explore. You'll end up logging a lot of hours into this game even if you just follow the three main storylines. It's also a reference to The Odyssey by Homer, one of the most famous Ancient Greek epics in Western literature.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Even mercenaries significantly under your current tier will talk down to you as if you're a scrub.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: Quest rewards have horrible level scaling especially in the late game. Regular side quest at the level cap of 99, where additional mastery levels require XP in the millions, only give 45,000 to 75,000 XP, barely moving your experience bar at all. Even worse, cash rewards range between 3,000 and 5,000 drachmae at a point where selling an average piece of gear nets you about 20,000 drachmae, and the items you may get are also useless since you're bound to be decked out in legendary gear by then. At least you can sell/dismantle the latter for a decent amount of cash/resources. Main quests are slightly better at this, but not by much, which makes questing by far the least efficient method of character improvement in the late game.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The main Big Bad antagonist of the Cult of Kosmos, the "Ghost of Kosmos" who is revealed later in the game after all the cult members and cult sages have been defeated, turns out to be Aspasia, the wife of Perikles, who is an Athenian political leader whom she ultimately sets up with the conspiracy that murders him partially causing the collapse of Athens and a partial, temporary victory for Sparta over Athens. She is treated throughout most of the game as a very minor character who only appears in a few small parts in the game at first. Once the protagonist exposes her, she explains that she became the Ghost of Kosmos specifically because she was the least conspicuous person above suspicion in Athens who could be the leader of the Cult without raising any alarms in the Peloponnessian War, and still control the war on both sides through her relationships with different political and military leaders throughout Greece.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • Most forts and similar large strongholds have hidden side entrances that can get you close to the important assets inside (nation treasure chests, commanders, prisoners, quest items, whatever) without having to sneak past dozens of guards first.
  • The Ghost Arrows of Artemis ability is an insanely useful weaponized example for any situation that involves killing something. Most high-value targets are difficult to get a bead on when they're hiding behind fortress walls or deep inside cave systems. Once you have Ghost Arrows, all you need to do is tag the target, get in range and shoot them for massive damage. Nation leaders in particular are hilariously easy to kill this way no matter where they are or how many elite bodyguards they might have.
• Durable Death Trap: Tombs are littered with floor plate-triggered spike traps. Not only are the damn things still fully functional after centuries without maintenance, they also rearm themselves automatically and indefinitely a few seconds after someone steps on them.
• Easily Forgiven: Even with a max level bounty on their heads, the Eagle Bearer can receive a waiver when they win a conquest battle. Presumably, one side thinks their assistance is enough to offset the bounty, while the other side decided that the bounty was not worth the trouble after the display of might in the battle.
• Easy Level Trick: Six of the eight legendary beasts can be slain safely and easily by dodging their charge attacks and pelting them with arrows while they recover. Arrows on Fire make it even easier and faster to pull off, assuming you have access to them. The tactic can also be used on the two remaining beasts, but their Flunky Boss status tends to make it a tad more challenging, although definitely not impossible (and it's still safer than trying to get into melee, especially with the Kalydonian Boar).
• Eldritch Location: All of the legendary monster fights from the Atlantis questline take place in one of these, but the Petrified Temple where Medusa dwells takes the cake; situated in the wilds of the Island of Lesbos, the entire area is covered in a thick mist that obscures most of the land when viewed from Ikaros' perspective. As you enter the forest, the colour becomes more and more desaturated and gray, and that's before you begin walking through the enormous, twisted, stone trees and winding paths through the mist. It's also eerily silent and devoid of any animal life. When you reach the temple itself, you find an enormous, alien-looking precursor structure with numerous "statues" of men and women fleeing from the entrance. It's one of the spookiest places in the game, and even killing Medusa does nothing to alleviate the area; the mist, trees, statues, and temple all remain afterward.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Both Greek factions eventually deploy Strategoi (Sparta) and Marksmen (Athens), the undisputed masters of melee and ranged combat, respectively. The Strategoi in particular easily turn into a Boss in Mook Clothing when they spawn as elites due to combining the best traits of all other melee units, with heavy armor, tons of health, a shield, a spear or heavy polearm, powerful abilities and the agility to follow you everywhere. And woe betide you when they spawn as Polemarchs^note fort commanders or field generals during conquest battles, which they will once you reach a high level. Marksmen? They shoot no mere Annoying Arrows, and will use special ability shots on you as well.
  • On the sea, a given Athenian and Spartan war galley may have (most prominently at a distance) a more ornate and vibrantly color-saturated sail; these are Elite versions of each galley weight class.
• Enemy Mine: You're capable of getting members of the Cult of Kosmos to crew the Adrestia if you recover them from shipwrecks; in addition to the masked and hooded Cultists, you can also get a crew of their Guards, as well as the all-female Scions. The descriptions of each invoke the idea of them teaming up with the Eagle Bearer as a matter of desperation, or a matter of profit, though they're purely cosmetic anyway and have no bearing on the plot.
• Environmental Symbolism: When the plague ravages first (possibly) Kephallonia and then Athens, the sky in both areas is perpetually gray and rainy, and the environment's normally vibrant color is desaturated to highlight the sense of despair.
• Epic Fail:
  • One quest has the Eagle Bearer recover Gozartes, a pirate captain, after he crashes his ship on an island, having failed to notice the shore while he was fighting. His crew are understandably pissed off at him for stranding them, while he insists it's not his fault. Should the Eagle Bearer rescue him, his sister Xenia chews him out for being a dumbass.
  • A quest for Markos on Kos has him send the Eagle Bearer to burn down the farm of some local gangsters. Should they do this (or if the player has already burnt the silos ahead of time), it'll turn out that wasn't their farm after all.
  • One randomly generated quest has a sailor request the Eagle Bearer's help sinking ships because they lied to get a job about how many ships they've sunk, the grand total of which is one. And it was their own. While they were on it.
  • Near-everything the Eagle Bearer does in the "One Really, Really Bad Day" quest line ends in death and misery. Clear out some pirates? Those weren't pirates, they were reinforcements disguised as pirates. Try to help a blacksmith? He gets crushed by his own tools. Rescue a horse? Its breeder rides it off a cliff. Try to get a man who'll rally the local villagers? He insists you set him on fire (and if you don't, picks a fight with you).
• Escort Mission: If you free a prisoner in an enemy stronghold without eliminating all the guards, the prisoner is likely to run away with no regard for stealth, aggroing every enemy they pass.
• Everybody Lives: Depending on your choices, you can avoid the usual Greek Tragedy trope of people dying from personal character flaws, or forces outside of their control, from ship lieutenants to your family—your younger sibling "Deimos," your mother Myrrine, your adopted step-brother Stentor, and even your Archnemesis Dad Nikolaos himself.
• Everyone Is Bi: All of the romance options are available regardless of who you're playing as.
• Evil Wears Black: Pirate ships are easily recognized by their black sails adorned with a whitish serpent symbol.
• Evolving Weapon: The Spear of Leonidas stands in as this game's Hidden Blade for assassination kills. It's the only weapon that can't be switched out for another one, but it grows more powerful with every level you gain, so it never becomes obsolete. Once you reach a certain point in the story, you can also take it to a secret location and use special items to upgrade it up to five times. Each time you do so, the Eagle Bearer gains an additional adrenaline segment, regains more health by using adrenaline abilities, and eventually unlocks the final tier for all their abilities (hidden inner potential, anyone?). The spear itself visually changes as well, going from a plain iron spearhead with a broken wooden handle to a shiny blade of gold and silver with an actual, finely wrought metal handle.
• Expecting Someone Taller: The Eagle Bearer hears this in one of the Lost Tales of Greece missions. Bear in mind, both Kassandra and Alexios are easily six feet tall.
• The Extremist Was Right: An early-game quest deals with a priest who had burned down a village infected with a plague and is in the process of killing the last of the plague victims, who are a family that includes two children. If you choose to kill the priest and save the family the island of Kephallonia will later be devastated by the plague.
• Fall Damage: This is the one damage type that consistently works in the player's favor. Enemies take massive damage from falling even moderate heights (kicking a healthy mercenary down a slope can be enough to kill them) while the Eagle Bearer first becomes unkillable through fall damage, then outright immune to it fairly quickly. Since it's a passive skill that's acquired automatically, you don't even need to invest any ability points in it.
• Fantastic Nuke: In a game (and historical era) almost completely lacking in explosive ordnance, the Overpower Bow Strike ability effectively turns your bow into a rocket launcher. It has a huge AoE and deals up to 1500% Hunter damage at maximum level, the highest multiplier in the game, enough to wipe out whole squads of mooks instantly and seriously wound elites and bosses. Fun fact: it's still considered a normal bow shot for detection purposes, so as long as nobody saw what you did, you can gleefully blow up shit while the guy on the other side of the thin wooden wall right next to the impact point remains blissfully unaware.
• Fartillery: The Erymanthian boar farts clouds of poison gas. If the battle extends for too long, it can turn the entire arena poisonous. Of course, it's immune to its own poison.
• Fed to Pigs:
  • On Andros, it's possible to hear how Podarkes the Cruel did this to a farmer's children.
  • Nearly happens to the Eagle Bearer in one quest, provided the player falls for some Schmuck Bait. Fortunately, the baiter is stupid (or crazy) enough to not relieve them of their weapons beforehand.
• Field Promotion: This seems to happen all the time in conquest battles. Every time you kill an enemy captain, a random mook in the area gets promoted a few seconds later, presumably taking over as the closest ranking officer.
• Final Boss: Odyssey has three major storylines and therefore multiple encounters worthy of the title. They are also all quite optional.
  • Family arc: Your own sibling, brainwashed by the Cult of Kosmos.
  • Cult arc: The former leader of the cult herself, who turns out to be Aspasia. While a great thinker and manipulator, she is not at all prepared to face you directly and is really an Anticlimax Boss if you choose to kill her.
  • The final arc: Your true father, Pythagoras himself, and an immortal wielding powers from Those Who Came Before. He is by far the most difficult of the three Final Bosses, being able to Teleport Spam and shoot Frickin' Laser Beams.
• Finishing Move: It's an Assassin's Creed game, so naturally. Whenever you defeat the *last* enemy in close vicinity with a melee weapon, the Eagle Bearer finishes them off in a rather flashy and cinematic way, and the exact animation playing varies heavily depending on the weapon you've been using.
• First Town: The quaint town of Kephallonia, where the Eagle Bearer lived prior to the events of this game with their caretaker Marcos and her young friend Phoebe. Here, you can engage in some sidequests and the first main quest, before you get your ship and the rest of the game world opens.
• Fishing for Mooks:
  • The whole point of the "Whistle" button is to hide in a safe spot, wait for an enemy to walk by, and lure them away from their buddies for a stealth kill. If you do it right, whole forts can be cleared out without any mook being the wiser. No matter how many are in the group, only one will come at a time. If you whistle a Daughter of Artemis, she will leave her wolf behind. Remain in the bush and you can remain hidden even as the mook screams and gurgles around. Even with the tough mooks, upgrade your skills right and you can even turn a Critical Assassination into a guaranteed kill.
  • This technique is borderline mandatory in naval combat. The Adrestia isn't nearly as powerful and resilient as the Jackdaw or the Morrigan, so charging straight at an enemy fleet usually ends in disaster. It's much safer to aggro only one or two ships, then turn around and lure them away from the rest of the fleet until they can be engaged individually.
• Flaming Sword: The Flaming Attacks skill from the Warrior tree allows any weapon to be set on fire for a limited time. There's also the unique perk carried by the legendary Mallet of Everlasting Flame that, once unlocked, can be applied to any weapon to make it Wreathed in Flames permanently. Fittingly, this is best done with the legendary Prometheus's Sika sword due to its inherent bonuses to fire damage.
• Flash Forward: At the end of the Cult arc, the Pyramid shows the Eagle Bearer visions of how the cycle of violence will continue for thousands of years with Egypt, the Holy Land, Italy, America, the West Indies, France and England.
• Flunky Boss:
  • The infamous Kalydonian Boar constantly summons smaller boars to its aid. If you kill these reinforcements, it immediately summons replacements.
  • The Lykaon Wolf also summons regular wolves. Unlike the boars, he will keep summoning wolves even if the previous batch is alive. And unlike the boar he does not hang back for a bit after summoning his wolves, immediately joining them in the attack.
  • The Nemean Lion has three normal lions by its side at the start and will summon more if you don't kill it quick enough.
  • The Medusa summons three waves of reanimated petrified victims of hers at 75%, 50% and 25% of her health bar, respectively.
  • Alpha Ships are almost always encountered with half a dozen pirate ships backing them up.
• Forced Level-Grinding: Present in the game in the form of minimum level requirements for main story quests. In addition, enemy power scales up with level significantly, so enemies that are one or two levels above your character are extremely challenging to fight, while enemies three levels higher are downright impossible. This requires players to grind side content in order to reach the necessary level to progress.
• Forced Transformation: The Olympos, the mythological beasts of yore, are humans corrupted by a Piece of Eden. Once the Eagle Bearer retrieves the Pieces of Eden from their bodies, all that's left behind are empty human-shaped husks.
• Foreign Cuss Word: The game continues the series tradition of characters occasionally shouting profanity in their original languages, with the protagonists being prone to saying maláka (which literally means "wanker" or "jerk").
• Foreshadowing:
  • In their conversation with Elpenor in Phokis, he can note his disappointment that the Eagle Bearer's temper is "similar". It's not until the run-in with Deimos we learn what he meant by this.
  • Myrrine presses Aspasia a bit during the symposium on Naxos as to how she knows so much about a Cultist assassination threat to Myrrine. It's because Aspasia is actually the disillusioned and constrained leader of the Cult of Kosmos, trying to subtly thwart the organization she's secretly given up on. Aspasia can also curiously decipher the encoded orders that the Eagle Bearer pilfers from the Cult assassins' bodies. She can't outright say who the king is without blowing her own cover, but the contents of the deciphered orders are enough to send the Eagle Bearer and their mother to Sparta on the hunt for who she knows to be the Sage of the Peloponnesian League branch.
  • It is possible to collect a piece of the Armor of Theseus dozens of hours before the Eagle Bearer is informed that it's required to stand a chance of defeating the Minotaur. And even then, the armor is not an absolute necessity for the actual confrontation.
  • A more subtle one, but the equipment gained from killing members of the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League are the Athenian War Hero set and the Spartan War Hero set respectively. This is a direct reference to the identity of their Sages.
  • The Eagle Bearer helps a priest at the Sanctuary of Asklepios as part of the Argolis questline. The priest notes an influx of sick Athenian refugees, most of whom pass away of illness despite the priests' best efforts. An early sign of the Plague of Athens, which ravages the city in the next chapter.
  • Listening carefully to the Cultists during the meeting under the Sanctuary Of Delphi, you can identify a few of them by voice and/or cross-refrencing details in their description. The female cultist who greets the player is Iokaste, while the cultist who introduces you to the Artifact is Chrysis. The large male cultist who threatens to brand another cultist turns out to be the Monger, while the cultist being threatened is Brison. The female cultist debating with another cultist about whether they should pursue "the mother or the father" is Diona. The Cultist complaining about giving blood is Hermippos, while the other cultist in the back room being threatened is Lagos. You will eventually hunt down each and every one of them during the Cultist questline.
    • If you linger long enough in the main foyer of the meeting place, you'll additionally overhear a couple of cultists wagering over the upcoming Olympics—foreshadowing both the fact that your character will later enter the Olympics as part of the main campaign, and that one of the cultists—Killias—is involved in them.
  • During Perikles' Symposium, Aspasia warns the Eagle Bearer to be careful with their words as others will be listening in on their conversation. In the background, Hermippos can be seen lingering nearby. Hermippos is later revealed to be a Cultist and almost certainly exactly who Aspasia was warning the Eagle Bearer about.
• Forest of Perpetual Autumn: The region of Malis is covered in colorful autumn trees.
• Forever War: The Real Life Peloponnesian War lasted for almost thirty years, from 431 BCE to 404 BCE, which in itself qualifies it for anyone forced to live through it. In-game it truly never ends even after you wrap up the story. You can continue to assassinate leaders, participate in conquest battles and bring down nations for as long as you feel like it. The story takes place in the first phase of the war, from 431 BCE to 421 BCE ending in the brief Peace of Nisias, which lasted until hostilities began in the second phase of the war.
• Fragile Speedster: In terms of naval war galley strength balancing, Pentaconters (single triangular sail) are this. They're nimble, small (meaning much of an arrow or spear volley might miss) and quick, but if you nail one with a good ram attack, half or more of their max health disappears; if they've already taken significant damage, they could easily just get cleaved on impact.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • Thankfully, you cannot accidentally damage any of the hundred other soldiers on your side in a Conquest Battle, which is great, seeing as you're constantly surrounded by enemies and have a number of wide-reaching moves that also knock down or stagger (but not damage) your allies. Similarly, your crew on the Adrestia are also immune when engaging in boarding action against an enemy ship.
    • This can lead to some hilarious incidents of chopping at an opponent for 10+ strikes, wondering why he's not affected (nor does he seem to notice), then realizing he's on YOUR side!
  • Unfortunately, in the rare case that civilians fight alongside the Eagle Bearer, any Status Effects you have on your weapons (mostly poison or fire) do affect them enough to turn them hostile, which tends to complicate things quite a lot.
• Friend to All Children:
  • The Eagle Bearer has a soft spot for children in general and a very quick way to set them off is to hurt or threaten a child. They even have a specific kneeling animation to speak to child npcs.
  • According to the children pickpockets in Elis, the one adult beggar who helps them rob people takes it upon himself to care for the children the best he can.
• From Bad to Worse: Played for Laughs in the "A Really, Really Bad Day" quest chain. The Eagle Bearer arrives in a small town where someone else pretending to be the famous Eagle Bearer made a mess of the place while a band of pirates is inbound for some good ol' pillaging. Offering their help to set things right, they're tasked to procure weapons, horses and inspiration for the villagers to fight back. A couple hours later the Eagle Bearer has accidentally sunk the ships bearing reinforcements and supplies because the local general failed to mention they even existed, and that they masqueraded as pirates to sneak past the bad guys. The town smith has had an unfortunate accident that resulted in him being squashed flat under his own tools. The horse breeder has ridden said local general's stallion off of a cliff because she thought it would magically turn into Pegasus (It Makes Sense in Context). Finally, the guy meant to galvanize the villagers - the self-proclaimed reincarnation of famed hero Ajax - is left either a smoldering corpse after his proof of his invincibility went horribly wrong) or just a regular corpse if the Eagle Bearer refused to set him on fire. The Eagle Bearer is predictably disturbed by this weirdness but ultimately saves the town anyway and deals with their impersonator according to the player's mindset.
• Futureshadowing: Makedonia, located in the North of the map has the subtitle "Rise of an Empire" attached to it, and the Eagle Bearer remarks when they enter Amphipolis (an Athenian colony and settlement) that it has the makings of a future empire. This is largely to Lampshade the role that Makedonia, under its most famous son Alexander, would ultimately claim for Greece. Within the game, Makedonia is mostly just shown as large forests with military camps and no native Makedonians anywhere, when in history Makedonians while minor did play behind-the-scenes roles in the conflict.
  • When sailing, a conversation the Eagle-Bearer can have with Barnabas is about the night sky, with the Eagle-Bearer theorising that every star could be a sun, much to Barnabas' joy... until Hetrodotos points out that it's a theory a few credible philosophers and astronomers hold.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The plot of the game requires the protagonist to befriend leading figures in both Sparta and Athens and help bring a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War. However, in actual practice, the game requires you to instigate massive battles between Spartan and Athenian forces, involving you killing countless Spartan and Athenian soldiers based on which side you decided to pick for that particular battle. Only one quest ever actually points this out, one unlocked after you complete two questlines where you kill high-ranking soldiers for the commander in the opposing army. You can choose which side to support in this final quest and the commander will call out you playing both sides, but that's as far as it goes.
  • Herodotos will mention how the island of Andros is famous for the marble it exports. In game, Andros has no city, quarry or port on the island to do said exporting.
  • At the end of the main questline on Kythera, you receive information pointing you to a cultist in Pephka, even if you've already been through Pephka and killed the cultist in question.
  • Once you complete the game, you'll get your surviving family members as Lieutenants on the Adrestia, meaning they can assist in boarding crippled ships. While Deimos will have no problems considering his backstory, it's very strange seeing Myrrine, Nikolaos and Stentor board Spartan vessels to kill the crew, especially given that My Country, Right or Wrong is a significant part of their characters.
  • When they meet up, the Eagle Bearer tells Layla they gave their spear to Herodotus as a parting gift. When Herodotus does leave the Eagle Bearer's company in "Every Story Has An Ending", the Eagle Bearer keeps a hold of their spear. In fairness, this would otherwise mean the player wouldn't have their primary weapon for assassinating folk.
  • Before a patch addressed it, if you accused the Cultist Spartan King without sufficient proof, you and your mother were banished from Sparta, you were marked for death and you were physically dragged outside the borders of the city. At which point you could just pay to erase the bounty (you likely had plenty of money by that point in the game), the Cultist was marked on the map and you could stroll right back into the city and kill him. And then you could stroll right up to the surviving king and tell him what you just did. A later update tweaked the quest so that the bounty couldn't be paid off and would remain until the King was killed.
  • The player may upgrade the Spear of Leonidas several times, which transforms the broken shaft into a more-stylized handle. However, the spear will revert to its original appearance in important story cutscenes.
  • The fights with Roxana and Thaletas are explicitly friendly sparring matches, and both are against potential lovers. The former is training for an upcoming battle which requires you both to vouch for one another, and the latter is Thaletas' way of trying to woo you. Yet if you lose either match, they perform a brutal finisher and run you through while you're helpless on the ground, and you desynchronize.
  • The "Clothes Make the Daughter" sidequest has you help a young woman join the Daughters of Artemis after being rejected, by disguising her as one of them so she can live among them. You can advise her to either risk being found out and killed, or give up her scheme and pursue a more peaceful path. However, if you've completed the Daughters of Artemis questline, it's entirely likely you're their leader. There is no option to use your authority and simply declare her a member (perhaps giving her non-combat-related duties).
  • On a series-wide scale, the RPG choice mechanics that allow you to choose dialogue, determine which family members live or die, and even whether you play as Kassandra or Alexios simply do not work in the world of Assassin's Creed. While the Animus does give its user freedom in how they relive someone's genetic memories, there is a limit to how much freedom the user has and they ultimately must follow a linear path; straying too far from how a memory happened causes desynchronization. Either the memory happened and the Animus can relive it or it didn't, there's no in-between. Someone lived or died at a specific time, and a set of memories can only be relived through the DNA of one person, not applied to two separate people. The game attempts to justify this by explaining that the two sets of DNA (belonging to Kassandra and Alexios) uploaded into the Animus are heavily decayed and information from Herodotus's texts is used to fill the gaps.
  • Mercenaries and other characters, like Odessa and Deimos, with unique weapons/armor who can be assigned as Lieutenants on the Adrestia will continue using their weapon/armor despite the fact that the Eagle Bearer pilfered them for themselves.
  • Regardless of if you refused to fight Daphnae to the death and thus didn't actually become the leader of the Daughters of Artemis, you'll unlock their crew skin for your ship.
  • Since the Legacy of the First Blade DLC is available before having finished the main Family story arc, the two storylines are entirely separate from each other to avoid any continuity issues. However, depending on where you are in the Family storyline, it comes across as very strange that the Eagle Bearer wouldn't include Myrrine and Deimos (if they've survived and switched sides) in what's going on—as they would also be likely targets of The Order, and considered "Tainted Ones".
• Gang Up on the Human: Predatory animals of different species will attack each other on sight, but they'll drop everything to kill you instead if you happen to wander too close. Nothing like being mauled by an angry bear while a lynx is trying to eat your face off.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The PC version has an awful tendency to crash to desktop every time you do something that requires a Loading Screen, like fast-travelling or reloading a savegame after dying.
  • Naval conquest battles may occasionally fail to give you NPC ship support. While it's still possible to win the battle, it sure gets one hell of a lot more difficult. Reloading the autosave at the battle's start usually fixes this.
  • On the PS4 version, simply trying to go back to the main menu from the game can cause the game to crash. This was eventually patched.
  • If you have multiple save files (for example, if you're using New Game +) where each one uses a different protagonist and you swap between them without closing the game in between, the game will sometimes play the wrong version of the Eagle Bearer and Deimos' lines—leading to Kassandra speaking with Alexios' voice and/or Alexios speaking with Kassandra's voice.
• Gender-Inclusive Writing: Since the player character can be male or female, other characters usually refer to them as "misthios", "mercenary", "Eagle Bearer," or just "you" so the voice actors don't have to record the same script twice.
• Geo Effects: As usual, the availability and specific layout of foliage to hide in plays a huge role for stealth-centric approaches into enemy territory. In naval combat, taking waves head-on slows a ship down to a crawl, if it doesn't stop them outright, which can be devastating if it happens while a Rain of Arrows or a full-speed ram attack is incoming.
• Get on the Boat: The first main quest on Kephallonia centers around Kassandra's search for a boat. Only once you obtain it is when the rest of Greece opens up for you.
• Get Out!:
  • Obelia, a lying pirate who scams the Eagle Bearer into doing her dirty work, will tell them to "get the fuck off" her ship once she's done using them... assuming the player lets the conversation end without violence.
  • A mean old woman in Sparta can tell the Eagle Bearer this at the end of her questline, if the Eagle Bearer informs her that the problems her farm's been facing aren't the fault of the helots, but the local river being polluted.
• Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: The Eagle Bearer runs into a guy trying to cross-breed animals into fantastical creatures as one of these. His efforts to breed cockatrices has only resulted in a farm of really angry roosters (and judging by what he says afterwards, he's learned nothing, and might be considering trying to breed goats and lions to make a manticore...)
• Giant Mook: Brute type enemies and Polemarchs tower over the Eagle Bearer, who is themselves a good 6 feet tall.
• Gladiator Subquest: There's an arena, where you engage in several rounds of combat against mooks such as soldiers or wild animals before fighting against a boss enemy. Some mercenaries can only be fought there. Interestingly, it is the only place in the whole game that doesn't have Level Scaling.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Archers, and especially their elite versions, are the squishiest humans in the game aside from civilians, but even one of them can absolutely wreck you if they spot you at long range.
  • Snakes, usually found in tombs, will die to one hit from any weapon, but take off a full third of your health when they attack.
  • The legendary dagger The Greek Hello increases all your damage ratings by 15% while reducing your health by the same amount. Another weapon, the legendary spear Falx of Olympos, takes it even further with a 100% damage buff in return for capping your health at 25% for as long as it is equipped, which turns you into a terrifying murder machine that will die from one good hit.
• Golden Ending: Although it's impossible to avoid a bunch of tragedies along the way, it is possible to end the game on a high note by limiting the casualties and keeping the Eagle Bearer's entire family alive to reunite them at the end. However, getting there requires making a lot of correct choices whose consequences you often can't predict at all until much later in the narrative.
  • There's also a Golden Ending of sorts in a side quest chain, specifically the one involving Neleus. To obtain this ending, the Eagle Bearer must have recruited Roxana, asked Barnabas to go easy on Neleus, and inform the village elder that they would be attacking the fortress alone. With all that, casualties are lowered to the minimum and the Eagle Bearer gets to spend more time with Roxana.
  • Another sidequest involves a shadowy group called The Dagger forcing a pair of theater operators to create propaganda and extracting exorbitant taxes. While you're off assassinating the tax collector, his thugs capture the theater operators and when you come back, in a cutscene they force you to make a Sadistic Choice of which one will die. If you refuse or try to save them both, they're both killed before you regain control of your character. But if you engage them with your bow before the cutscene triggers and you kill the thugs quickly enough, you can save them both.
• Gorgeous Greek: A lot of the Greek characters tend to be beautiful, including the protagonist(s), given the setting.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: One of the Lost Tales of Greece has a group of priestesses tricking a town into worshipping the Eagle Bearer as a god, for their own reasons. They never expected the actual thing to show up on their doorstep.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: There's a huge variety of armor designs to be found, most of which come in up to a dozen Palette Swaps on top of that. The majority will be picked up randomly over the course of the game, but it can be frustratingly difficult to identify and acquire the few that remain greyed out in your transmogrification menus. Fortunately, completing the collection is not required for anything other than personal satisfaction.
• Ghost City: The first sign something is horribly wrong on the Eagle Bearer's return to Athens, after learning where their mom might be, is that the streets are completely empty.
• Grand Finale: The Crossover Stories questline is effectively the conclusion of the Eagle Bearer's story arc within the Greek world. By the end of the questline the Spear of Leonidas is drained of its power and the Eagle Bearer is tasked with seeking out Isu artifacts across the world for the rest of their immortal lifespan.
• Gratuitous Greek: Given the setting, is this really surprising? Greek letters can be seen carved into the walls of some buildings and ruins, and like all AC games since II, some words aren't translated to add to the ambiance, including chaire, a general greeting or farewell, and malakas, a curse word generally meaning idiot.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Although King Leonidas I of Sparta is long dead by the events of the game, he was responsible for not only saving Greece from Xerxes and the Persian Empire but he is the grandfather of Alexios and Kassandra through his daughter Myrrine and her husband Nikolaos / The Wolf of Sparta. Additionally, his spear becomes the primary weapon of the Eagle Bearer.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: This time, there's no good Assassins or evil Templars to make the lines clear, Athenians and Spartans are both gray entities, and the players' choices aren't that cut and dried. Many choices that seem unambigiuously "good" or "bad" can have quite the opposite consequences than what the player hoped.
  Alexios: In this world, there are no wrong paths, no wrong decisions, only who you choose to become.
• Groin Attack: Half the stealth kill animations end with the victim Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, usually through the neck or the head. The other half shows the Eagle Bearer shanking the target in the crotch. Sleeping enemies are at particular risk because they often sleep in tight spaces with their legs pointing at the only entrance.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: As is the rule for the franchise.
  • Guards can't see the Eagle Bearer when they're hiding in foliage despite two-thirds of their body clearly peeking out of cover.
  • Whistling only ever lures a single guard to your location even if there's half a dozen in earshot. The others merely turn around to look at the source of the sound, but even then they'll rarely notice you shanking their buddy from within a bush or something, and even if they do notice, they'll just come over to get shanked themselves.
  • They never seem to notice the rapidly dwindling numbers of their buddies when you attack a military camp or fort, assuming you hide the dead bodies well enough. Otherwise, any hint of attack (e.g. conspicuous corpses or burning war supplies near an enemy) will prompt one soldier to light the brazier and call in reinforcements.
  • Sometimes guards do come across some of the dead bodies you hid, only for them to leisurely carry them towards the "official" body dumping spot within the fort. Apparently, discovering the corpse of, say, the local fort Polemarch—slashed to ribbons, riddled with arrows and lying somewhere in a bush in a corner of the fort—happens often enough that it isn't cause for alarm.
  • Very rarely, shooting an arrow at a powerful guard (say, a captain) from outside the yellow/red zones they're guarding merely results in the guy shouting at you to cut it out and get lost.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • While skipping the battles against the end-game bosses Aspasia and Pythagoras in the Cult and Atlantis arcs respectively is done via a simple moral choice, skipping the battle with Deimos at the end of the Family arc is much more convoluted. Instead of a simple choice at the very end, you instead have to choose very specific dialogue choices in your various interactions with them throughout the arc. Make just one wrong choice, and not only will they refuse to surrender, they will outright kill your mother when she tries to intervene in the fight. Fortunately, there are two verbal cues in their dialogues which inform you if you're on the right track.
  • Identifying which Spartan king is the cultist requires you to choose Brasidas's path in Arkadia, then convincing the Archon to give up his clue. Otherwise, it's a guessing game. Nothing in the game hints that this is the case. All other sages are revealed by killing their underlings. This is the only one with a special requirement.
    • To make this worse, if you don't manage to convince the Archon to give up this clue and ended up killing him, the game gives zero indication that the clue is Permanently Missable Content and that unlocking it is now impossible. Meaning, you may spend ages confusedly trying to unlock this clue, totally unaware that it's impossible and that you're just meant to guess which king is the Cultist to proceed in the main questline.
  • The artifact hunt. The game gives you the region you need to look in for each artifact, but doesn't tell you that each artifact is tied to a specific side quest in the region, with no hint of which one it is. For what it's worth, most of these locations are accessible via fast travel after you've uncovered them on the map.
  • The game never tells you how to switch arrow types when you unlock Trick Arrows one way or another, and if you aren't lucky enough to get the random Loading Screen tip that does contain the info by chance, all you can do is try out every button while aiming (easier done on consoles, natch) or look it up online.
  • For the victory party at the end of the Mykonos liberation quest chain, it is possible for the Eagle Bearer to find a partner for Barnabas. But, if the required quest is done out of order, said partner will be unobtainable. She is Iola, the smuggler who asked the Eagle Bearer to kill the alpha bear on Delos. If she appears during the party, the Eagle Bearer can invite her to join the crew as a lieutenant.
  • Another one involving romance and Barnabas: If you romanced Roxanna, recruited her as an lieutenant for the Adrestia, didn't dismiss her later and advised Barnabas to go easy on his nephew Neleus, she'll be part of the crew rescuing Neleus from Cult guards. After the rescue, the Eagle Bearer can opt to have another round of sex with her, making her the only romance partner with this distinction.
  • Before getting the Death Veil ability from Legacy of the First Blade (which makes assassinated enemies disappear after death), Assassin players will spend a large amount of their stealth time hiding the bodies of their kills. Placing them in bushes and throwing them over walls is exceedingly difficult... unless you happen to see the random tool tip explaining how to throw them (it's just like using your bow). The game otherwise never tells you how to do this.
  • EVERYTHING to do with the Delos Islands quest chain. To wit; Podarkes is like any other leader and can be killed almost immediately. Killing him in this way cuts off almost all of the related sidequests AND will pretty much lock you into the worst ending for the quest chain. Likewise, many of the quests have unexpected outcomes or consequences that won't come back to haunt you until much later in the quest chain - and some can't be predicted at all! For instance, who would have guessed that rescuing that random rebel extremist on the western island and letting him live would lead to him randomly murdering Thaletas during the celebration party... but ONLY if you opted to make a farewell speech? To be fair, Sokrates himself comments on that last one, regarding how the smallest actions can have unpredictable outcomes.
  • Buying equipment from blacksmiths is both hideously expensive and unnecessary, so you can be forgiven for never realizing that their stock actually contains a few legendary items. One of these has a unique perk that turns most of the combat system on its head.
  • After defeating every opponent in the Pephka arena, you can fight them again at a higher level. This doesn't make logical sense (you killed them, after all), so it can come as a bit of a surprise to discover that the second round has a whole bunch of additional equipment attached as rewards, including some legendary armor pieces to complete the Arena Fighter set.
  • It's entirely possible to get a pair of maps pointing to the Flute of Pan and Lyre of Apollo many hours before getting the quest they go with, simply by shanking the man holding them in the midst of other business (like, say, looting the fort he's in). Problem is, the two items won't appear in the locations marked until you activate the quest.
  • The easiest way to find epic or even legendary level lieutenants is by reqruiting fellow mercs after defeating them non-fatally. The game, however, gives you no indication this is even possible, leaving many players to stick with recruiting random mooks instead—which almost never spawn as anything above the rare level, particularly in early gameplay.
• Happiness in Slavery:
  • In the "Once a Slave" quest, a slave will request from the protagonist that they blame him for the theft the slave's master has recently suffered. When asked why, the slave explains that his master plans to free him soon, and that the slave would rather live as a slave where he has purpose, shelter and food, than free where such things are uncertain. Ironically, if the Eagle Bearer does as requested, the master banishes the slave in anger. If they refuse to lie for him, the protagonist can instead just bring the matter up to the master, who will talk to his slave and just decide to keep him in his service.
  • Agapios on Euboea. He tells you he is a slave at the end of the first quest you do for him. Answer that one needs to do what must be done to survive and he'll agree. He says he doesn't hate his late father for selling him into slavery as it provided him with food, shelter and a certain degree of protection from the corruption on the island. If he survives the quest chain, his master frees him and he has trouble accepting it, but is ultimately happy to be free — and continues working for the well-being of the island, regardless of his status.
• Hate Sink: The nameless Dagger Mook Lieutenant you encounter at the end of the quest Dagger to the Heart. He's a sadistic Smug Snake par excellence, who forces the Eagle Bearer to make a Sadistic Choice between the lives of two innocent people for the sake of a terrible joke. He's also really damn annoying, given that he spends most of his time on screen cackling his head off like the nutjob he presumably is. Luckily, you are able to beat seven kinds of crap out of him regardless of what happens, and you can also attack him and his goons from range, triggering the battle early and bypassing your interaction with him altogether.
• Heal Thyself: The Second Wind ability from the Warrior tree restores 25%, 33% or 50% of health, depending on its level, at the cost of one adrenaline segment. The third tier also removes any poison or fire effects on the Eagle Bearer on top of the healing. It's generally considered the must-have ability in the game and should be taken the moment it becomes available.
• Heroic Build: Alexios as well as most of the male npcs sport the classic cut physique of a hero—it's almost more remarkable when you come across a character who's instead a little scrawny or pudgy.
• Heroic Lineage: The player character is on their mother's side, a descendant of Leonidas and their father is Pythagoras, the mathematician/philosopher/cult leader who in the game became an immortal living in the ruins of Atlantis.
• Hired Guns:
  • Alexios and Kassandra work as mercenaries, or rather as they are called, misthios throughout the game. Message boards throughout the Greek world offer them work ranging from simple errands to subverting entire regions for Athens or Sparta.
  • Enemy mercenaries are a major threat in the game: they are out to collect on your bounty should you misbehave, or you might instead take a job to collect a kill bounty on another mercenary. You can also kill those ranked above you to increase your own mercenary ranking.
• Historical Domain Character: There are quite a few famous, and some obscure, figures from Ancient Greece featured in the game, such as Sokrates, Hippokrates, Herodotus, Alkibiades, Perikles, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Phidias, Kleon, Brasidas, Pausanias, Archidamos. King Leonidas of Sparta is the (late) maternal grandfather of the protagonist and is playable in the prologue. Aspasia is one of the leaders of the Cult of Kosmos, and Pythagoras is the biological father of the protagonist.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Boars are absurdly difficult to hit with arrows while lynxes escape most melee attacks because their hitboxes seem to be much smaller than the actual model. Scoring a headshot on a boar even when it's standing still only a few meters away is quite the accomplishment.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: One of the options for dealing with the "witch" on Keos. The Eagle Bearer can yell at the guards that she's just called herself a witch, at which point they'll attack her, and even kill her. Notably, her new hubby isn't that surprised at this "news".
• Hollywood Darkness:
  • Averted in caves and especially tombs. It's usually pitch-black down there without a torch in hand, and even the inhabited ones with braziers burning here and there are pretty gloomy outside the lit areas.
  • Played straight in underwater caves since you obviously can't just light a torch here. The devs did place some bioluminescent plants and animals to keep it from becoming completely unrealistic, but the lighting is still much brighter than it should be.
• Hollywood Tactics: Likely due to the nature of the game engine, any large-scale conflict devolves quickly into a chaotic mess of one-on-one melee fights. This includes the "Conquest Battles" between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League for control of a region, as well as the Battle of Thermopylai in the intro sequence. Particularly egregious given that possibly the most famous infantry formation in history, the phalanx, originated in Ancient Greece, and when that line broke, they fled, knowing it was all over.
• Home Field Advantage: Invoked. Whenever there's a nation battle taking place, you can pick between aiding the defending or the attacking side. Fighting for the defending side will always have "normal" difficulty, whereas fighting for the attacking side will always have "hard" difficulty.
• Homing Boulders: Arrows have slight homing capabilities if they were aimed at someone's/something's head before they're loosed. Makes just as much sense as it sounds like, but is hilarious to watch and most definitely quite helpful for long-range sniping moving targets.
• Honor-Related Abuse:
  • Nikoloas allowed for his children to be killed in order to uphold his honor as a Spartan. Decades later he'll admit that in truth, he lost his honor when he failed to protect his children.
  • A sidequest in Phokis has a local healer who is convinced he needs to kill his grandmother because she used to give out false prophecies while she was the Pythia, even though it was against her will. Whether the Eagle Bearer lets her live or not is up to the player.
• Hope Spot:
  • During the Abantis Islands questline, the player has the oppertunity to allow Agapios to attempt to reason with his brother about leaving behind The Dagger. For a few seconds, the two long-lost brothers reminisce fondly and it seems like Agapios may have managed to get through to his brother...until his brother pushes him off of the cliff they're standing on to his death.
  • During the final confrontation between the Eagle Bearer, Deimos, and Myrrine atop Mount Taygetos, Myrrine will attempt to talk her youngest child down from a fight and begs them to come home to their family. For a moment, she seems to be getting through to them...until they burst out laughing and declare their sword is their family and the battlefield is their home. If you haven't chosen the correct dialogue up until that point, the Eagle Bearer and Deimos will proceed to have a Duel to the Death.
• Hub City: Athens is by far the biggest and most populous city in the game. After you reach this place for the first time, many main and side quests center around it and you will keep on coming back to the city on various occasions, while most other places in the game are visited only once during the main story.
• Hypocritical Humor: The game takes some jabs towards Microtransactions... While being a single-player game that allows purchasing them.^note Although considering that MTAs are often a result of Executive Meddling, it may be a small Writer Revolt.
• I Am Spartacus: The "The Show Must Go On" sidequest chain in the Elis region eventually sets the Eagle Bearer on the hunt for three missing actors. One has joined a cult where every member renounces their given name and takes on the name of Hedone^note the origin of the modern term "hedonist" instead. After completing two simple tasks for their spokeswoman to get initiated into the cult themselves, the Eagle Bearer eventually has to pick out the actor from among five cult members with little to go on except for a few lines of dialogue.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • There is a sidequest chain whose first mission involves you infiltrating an Athenian fort and retrieving a sword for an old friend of the Eagle Bearer's, Heitor. He calls "her" Harpe.
  • Another sidequest chain involving the poet Praxilla has you retrieving her lyre, Achaikos. Which was a gift from her ex-husband... also called Achaikos.
• Idiot Ball:
  • If the Eagle Bearer got exiled from Sparta for failing to identify which Spartan King is a cultist, Pausanias just had to gloat he is the one to them. Plot then immediatly correct itself to the Eagle Bearer killing him, become a champion for the Spartan army and immediately sailing for the next idiot ball event, which...
  • After Kleon crushed the Spartan army, revealed himself as a cult member and captured the Eagle Bearer, he tried to kill the Eagle Bearer by leaving them alone with two unarmed guards in a private jail cell... except by then the Eagle Bearer is already a famous Olympic champion in pankration, with the cult having watched the game no less. Naturally, the Eagle Bearer breaks out of jail in 5 minutes and continues their revenge against the cult.
    • Perhaps even more foolishly, before this he stumbles across Deimos and the Eagle Bearer talking through the cell door. According to him, Deimos is not supposed to do such a thing without permission and clearance from the cult—suggesting they may have some growing reservations about the cult and snuck out to see if they might have been valid. His solution? Scold and yell at the unstoppable, unhinged Super-Soldier who could break his back over their knee in three seconds if they wanted to, thereby proving the point the Eagle Bearer was just making about Deimos being the cult's puppet.
• If Only You Knew: During the accusatory ranting between the two family patriarchs in the quest "The Drachmae of Romance", Makar (who's Dorian in ethnicity like the Spartans) may retort at the Eagle Bearer; "Spoken like a true Ionian!" when they give equal weight to the austere warrior ethic of Dorians and the philosophical and artistic tastes of Ionians. The Eagle Bearer is born Spartan and thus is Dorian... but only half-so. Pythagoras, their birth father, is Ionian, making the Eagle Bearer half-Ionian.
• I Have No Son!: A woman in Sparta says as much on learning one of her sons would rather not be a warrior, and ran off.
• Immortality Inducer: The Staff of Hermes Trismegistus grants its wielder immortality, as seen with Pythagoras and later the Eagle Bearer, to the point where they will meet Layla in person to pass the baton, as it were.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
  • Melee finishers with swords, daggers or spears often end in the Eagle Bearer goring the victim in some gruesome fashion.
  • Most stealth kills involve the Eagle Bearer not only shanking the target with the Spear of Leonidas, but pushing/ramming it through the body in its entirety, finished by ripping it out from the opposite side.
  • Disabling an enemy ship with javelins often triggers a short slow-motion cutscene of some hapless mook being impaled and hurled off their feet by a javelin in a welter of blood.
  • Strongholds of bandits and Followers of Ares are generally decorated with lots of dead people impaled on spears and spikes.
• I'm Standing Right Here: General Demosthenes voices his low opinion on Spartan intelligence, comparing them to dogs, and that some exhibit a "low cunning". The Eagle Bearer can point out that they were born Spartan in a moderately offended response. They get a You Are a Credit to Your Race in response.
• I Never Said It Was Poison:
  • If you choose to lie to Sokrates about the result of the ostracism in Athens, you claim that even if you knew who rigged the vote, you wouldn't tell him. Socrates responds by saying he never mentioned anything about the vote being rigged.
  • While asking around for the Eagle Bearer's mother at the Sanctuary of Asklepios, one of the priests rudely brushes them off and says he was ordered not to talk to mercenaries, especially not ones that ask about Spartan women with a wounded baby. The Eagle Bearer immediately points out that they never mentioned a wounded baby.
• Inevitable Tournament: Around halfway into the game, you will learn about The upcoming Olympic games in Eris. Guess who is going to participate there as a main story quest.
• Informed Equipment: Mostly averted, but it can be invoked when it comes to the Eagle Bearer's helmet. There is a triggerable option that disables the helmet display, so that the Eagle Bearer's face and head is always visible unobstructed. This does not affect the armor stat, which will still factor in the worn helmet.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Playing online litters the world map with screenshots taken by other players. Since most people tend to shoot particularly spectacular scenes, many of these shots spoil the surprise of what's at unexplored locations, like boss battles or story reveals.
  • After discovering the Cult of Kosmos, you may find random civilians with the prompt to Assassinate suddenly coming up over them. This means they are cultists, up to the Sage level. Similarly, if you beat up a random civilian and they happen to have an Elite's gold health bar...
  • Many quest names hint at, or outright spoil, what said quest is about or how it will play out.
  • Similarly, the achievement list spoils more or less every major twist in the game, like the fights against the mythical monsters, the existence of Atlantis and who resides there, and a whole bunch of main plot points.
  • The astute may match up the loot declared on the Sage of the Heroes of the Cult cell in the Cult of Kosmos gallery by matching it to the loot of the singular Tier 1 Mercenary in the Mercenary gallery: Exekias the Legend. Compounding this is that one of the Cultist Clues mentions that the sage is nicknamed "The Legend." Guess who is the only person in the game to carry that title.
  • Dedicated explorers and wreck-divers can discover higher-rarity crews for the Adrestia that are members of the Cult of Kosmos; one wreck off of Messara especially will flat out mention Kleon being a member of the Cult in its description, possibly hours before this is ever revealed in-game.
  • The quest-giver of the download exclusive quest "Prince of Persia" has their identity obscured... unless you have a look at him with Ikaros, revealing he's Artaxerxes ahead of schedule. Also, if you sync with all the five viewpoints without ever talking to him again in the meantime, the quest marker will just outright tell you "return to Artaxerxes, even though you shouldn't know about this.
  • Once you finally killed all the sages of Kosmos, you can reveal the identity of the Ghost of Kosmos just as you could with all other sages. However, the following cutscene treats it as if the sage's identity is a huge surprise.
• In the Blood: Elpenor speculates this about the Eagle Bearer a la Deimos, implying he thinks both are angry, violent Dumb Muscle despite being estranged for 20+ years.
• In the Hood: You can equip hoods if you're favoring a stealth oriented gameplay. Darius is shown wearing these in footage in "Legacy of the First Blade."
• In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: Practically everyone the player character meets is a "who's who?" of the Ancient Greek world.
• Intoxication Ensues: The quest "Odyssey into the Past" begins with Barnabas wandering into a bandit camp where all the occupants are high as kites. He then drinks the lotus juice they've been drinking, and spends the ensuing fight tripping balls... including having a vision that kicks off the quest.
• Irony: The Pilgrim Armor is a legendary armor set themed around the poor and humble wearer going on a pilgrimage to honor the gods. You get it by looting the reliquaries of the largest, most heavily guarded temples all across Ancient Greece.
• I Want My Mommy!: Played for Drama. During one main quest, you can choose to interfere in a training of some Spartan soldiers against a group of wolves. If you choose to do so, one dying soldier will call for his mother. Kassandra can lie and pretend to be his mother, helping him pass more easily to the afterlife.

Tropes J - P

• Jack of All Stats:
  • While your basic damage rating scales equally as you gain levels, it's ultimately your equipment that determines your effectiveness at sneaking, archery or open combat. All three are equally important and useful, so spreading your damage buffs out evenly means you won't be able to deliver a lot of One-Hit Kills in the late game without some clever use of your abilities, but you'll never be caught off-guard either when the game puts you in a situation ill-suited for your preferred play style.
    • That being said, you only have a limited number of slots for active abilities, which make up a majority of the trees. While early levels will result in the above, later in the game, most builds will lean closer towards Master of All with a handful of preferred active abilities from amongst the three trees.
  • As far as weapons are concerned, spears generally combine the best traits of all other weapon classes without excelling in anything particular. They have good speed, good damage and excellent range, coupled with a devastating AoE Overpower attack. A good spear is almost always the best choice for fighting animals of any sort, especially the legendary ones, whenever archery isn't a more viable option.
  • In terms of war galley strength matchups, Biremes (quadrilateral sails with a slanted top) and Light Triremes (rectangular sails) fill this niche. Biremes tend to be a bit more on the quick side (though not to the degree of pentaconters) and Light Triremes are heavier and more durable (but not to the degree of the ponderously moving Heavy Triremes). The Eagle Bearer's galley, the Adrestia, classes as a Light Trireme formerly from the Athenian Navy (who were historically known for their naval expertise), though she can be subject to many upgrades not available to the standard issue Athenian or Spartan navy galleys or to pirate ships.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Lysander, a really bad-tempered Spartan general, can accuse the Eagle Bearer of playing both sides of the war, and while he's not phrasing it very politely, it is true.
• Joke Item:
  • You may find the occasional sun hat in merchant inventories or as loot, a piece of headwear that offers absolutely no benefits at all. Ubisoft eventually doubled down on this by introducing an epic-level sun hat that bears the legendary Sunscreen engraving (99% Sunburn Resistance), which does... absolutely nothing because you don't get sunburned in this game.
  • The July 2019 patch added some new legendary items to merchant pools. One was the glorious return of the sunhat, just as useless as ever, but now more expensive. Two others were the "bare-chested" and "bare-chested with oil" outfits, now equippable as armor. They not only have predictably terrible armor ratings, but they even come with unique engravings that are either detrimental or highly situational. Bare-chested has "-50% all resistances" and the oiled version has "+500% all damage when covered in oil"^note only achievable by destroying the large red-and-white oil amphoras while standing directly next to them. These aren't all that common, the effect only lasts a few seconds, and the oil makes you significantly more susceptible to fire damage.
  • The Lost Tales of Greece sidequest "One Really, Really Bad Day" features the Poorly-Crafted Helmet worn by the man claiming to be Ajax (and made by the blind blacksmith who suffers a whimsical accidental death in the same quest line). While its item level is equivalent to yours at the time of acquisition, it confers no armor bonus whatsoever.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Generally speaking, the game's open dialogue system enables a wide range of characterization for your Eagle Bearer, and more ruthless players have plenty of options to roleplay as a cynical, cold-hearted bastard that indulges in plenty of this.
  • There're a lot of dogs in Greece. There's also the famous Spartan Kick ability. Dogs are valid targets just like any other animal. You do the math. However, as the Loading Screen occasionally points out, Ancient Greeks were rabid dog fans, which means in gameplay terms that killing a dog carries the same punishment as murdering a human.
  • A priestess on Kythera bludgeons a man to death for worshipping a false god. A bystander comments that if they're going to be like that, he'd take his chances with the false god.
  • On Thasos, the Cult slaughters an entire mine of brain-damaged slaves, whose condition they are responsible for, simply because the Eagle Bearer was nosing around.
  • If the Eagle Bearer attempts to redeem Deimos but doesn't take the right dialogue paths, then they'll reject the proposed Heel–Face Turn at the end of the story by murdering their mother in cold blood.
  • During Barnabas' Lost Tales of Greece quest, you'll come across a lone Brute with an eyepatch and some facial scarring living in a cave on the Volcanic Islands. The guy is entirely harmless and never once attempts to hurt the player, he even writes poetry. Yet at every single dialogue prompt, the player has the option of calling him ugly and killing him for no reason whatsoever.
• Killer Rabbit: Greece's aggressive fauna includes all the usual lovely suspects like wolves, lynxes, sharks, bears and... roosters? There's even an alpha on a tiny island that'll probably make you think you just found an Easter Egg until the little bugger takes off half your health bar in a single hit.
• Kill It with Fire: There are a lot of ways to do this: a Warrior skill that gives you a Flaming Sword, skills that unlock Arrows on Fire for the Eagle Bearer^note there's even an upgraded version that explodes on impact and their ship, or simply hitting enemies with a torch. Then the Legacy of the First Blade DLC's second episode came along and added a bona-fide twin flamethrower, the Chimera's Breath, to the Adrestia's prow. All it takes to install the thing on your ship is completing a simple Fetch Quest, although the weapon's short range and rather meager damage tends to put it squarely in Awesome, but Impractical territory.
• Klingon Promotion: You improve your mercenary rank by murdering your way up the ladder.
• Last Stand: The legendary Battle of Thermopylae serves as the Action Prologue, with you playing as Leonidas himself.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: On the map are the regions of Makedonia, Achaia and Messenia. Aside from a brief story mission and a Season Pass-exclusive quest, these nations aren't used for anything in the story or have any side-quests, despite being as fully fleshed out as all the other regions. This is because they're used for each Part of the Legacy of the First Blade DLC. Each of these regions also have areas that invoke this: some cave ruins in Macedonia, a house on a hill overlooking a town and a fort filled with Cultists in Achaia, and the smoggy town of Aipeia and the nearby mines below the Temple of Zeus. Their uses range from being the location of the final battle of the DLC to where the Eagle Bearer will raise their family.
  • In general, if you start exploring a region before tackling the story missions/quests, you'll often find yourself wandering into caves that are much more expansive than normal, so it comes as no surprise that these will have side-quests and missions that send you there.
• Leitmotif: The game's main theme song is a reoccurring tune both in the soundtrack and diegetically hummed by characters such as Myrrine and the Eagle Bearer. It's representative of the Eagle Bearer and their family and tends to play during relevant scenes.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • You can find or loot a wooden sword on occasion, a common-rated weapon that, while lacking in special attributes, is otherwise just as deadly as any other sword of the same level.
  • The "Blade of Yumminess", a seemingly out-of-place katana that causes all damage types to be +250%... but disables all activated powers. All of them, not just the ones mapped to keys or buttons on the Abilities screen.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Animal and patrol spawns are almost completely random, so it's not unheard of to reach a heavily defended location and find it already under attack by an enemy patrol or, even better, a pack of bears or a pride of lions. Pass the Popcorn while you watch them whittle each other down, then move in with minimal resistance; effective even against the legendary boars whose pelts you need to hunt. You'll also encounter randomly-spawned skirmishes between Athenians, Spartans and Bandits, which you can totally observe from the side-lines.
  • Many enemy camps, forts and other restricted locations will often have several predators, ranging from wolves to lions, imprisoned in flimsy wooden cages, and hence the Eagle Bearer can invoke this by opening or breaking the cages, allowing the animal to cause havoc amongst its captors and possibly kill off one or two unlucky Mooks.
  • This even extends to Mercenaries and Legendary Beasts, fights between which can be easily arranged by a crafty Eagle Bearer wanting to have their most dangerous foes eliminate each other.
• Level Scaling: While you level up, so do your surroundings; wherever you go, even in the starting area of Kephallonia, every enemy will rarely be more than 2-3 levels below you.
• Load-Bearing Boss: In the fight against Brontes, the creature has an attack where he smashes his weapon on the floor so strongly that the ceiling collapses upon you.
• Loading Screen: Gives both gameplay hints, and after you discover and start assassinating the members of the Cult of Kosmos, their masks start appearing on the floor. There's also a different loading screen for when Layla transitions in and out of the Animus.
• Long-Lost Relative: Comes up frequently in the game:
  • The Eagle Bearer's whole family has been estranged for the past 20+ years and one of the main storylines follows them either reforming the family, or most of them dying.
  • The main storyline on Euboua follows that of an enslaved man finding out that the local crime boss is actually his long-lost brother.
  • Barnabas' Lost Tales Of Greece quest involves him trying to reconnect with his long-lost wife. Turns out, however, that he ends up reunited with his long-lost daughter instead, the wife having passed away years prior.
• Loophole Abuse: Killing state soldiers in front of their comrades raises the notoriety bar... unless you knock them over a ledge, in which case gravity does all the work, and the notoriety bar doesn't go up.
• Lovable Sex Maniac:
  • Auxesia, of the "Age is Just a Number" quest. She brags proudly and happily, to the protagonist's clear and audible protests, about her sexual exploits, and the entirety of the quest proper is attempting to make a virility potion for her husband, in order to satisfy her needs. He refuses, and should the protagonist choose to attempt to satisfy her themselves instead, days pass before they emerge.
  • The young Alkibiades, future Wild Card of the second phase of the Peloponnesian War, shows up in his early phase as Sokrates' student, where he more or less flirts with and has sex with women and men whenever he can. If the player is being a nice guy, taking him up on his offers of courtship is a fantastic way to land the Eagle Bearer into this category as well.
• Luck-Based Mission: Advancing through the mercenary ranks requires a certain amount of luck, especially once you reach the S1-S4 tiers. You can't advance just by killing any merc. Only the ones ranked above you count, and their spawning is almost completely randomized aside from a handful of scripted encounters. You can get hints to previously unknown mercs from the ones you defeated, but these are just as random and also don't pop up every time. Long story short: unless you obsessively murder every single merc you come across, reaching the highest mercenary rank can take a very long time if you're unlucky.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shield-bearing enemies return with a vengeance from Assassin's Creed Origins, and they're at least as annoying as they were there. Strangely, Athenian forces put much more emphasis on shields than Sparta does despite Sparta's famous reliance on the phalanx formation. Made doubly strange by the Player Character's inability to even equip a shield, which - being Spartan themselves - should be a crucial part of their wargear (probably a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, seeing how a shield would interfere with the Eagle Bearer Dual Wielding the Spear of Leonidas). "Shield Breaker" is a Warrior ability used specifically for the player to remove this defensive option from an enemy, making them more susceptible to dodges and parries.
• Macguffin: The Isu Pyramid thing the Cult uses, shown prominently in the loading screens. It can predict the future, and each of the Cult is carrying a piece of its workings, but how it works is unclear. And at the end of the game, the Eagle Bearer smashes it into pieces.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: Utilized for all of the procedurally-generated side-quests, including those found in the open world or accepted via the bulletin board. It works... up until you do more than three of them and realize they follow the same structure and have a very small dialogue pool. They usually goes like this:
  Eagle Bearer: [Greeting], I saw you/do you need help?
  Quest Giver: [Mentions they have trouble]
  Eagle Bearer: Let me guess, you need me to [solution to trouble].
  Quest Giver: Yes, [solution must happen].
  *Eagle Bearer returns victorious*
  Quest Giver: [asks if they were successful]
  Eagle Bearer: [confirms that they were]
  Quest Giver: Thank you!
  Eagle Bearer: Chaire.
• Magic Skirt: Thoroughly Averted. All of the Eagle Bearer's skirts are able to move completely free, and and if they're swimming, you will be staring directly up their skirt the whole time.
• Magikarp Power: The "+X% All Damage" engraving is leveled up by killing nation leaders, starts out at +1% and tops out at +5%. Doesn't sound like much, what with the specialized bonuses reaching +10% much more easily, but with up to eight equipment pieces capable of bearing this engraving simultaneously, maxing out its power results in a whopping +40% to all damage ratings (for a sum total of +120%) without any drawbacks. For reference: specialized bonuses can only amass up to +80% spread out across all three damage types, which makes the "to all damage" the perfect tool for Jack of All Stats builds. Thing is, getting it to level 5 requires killing a total of 75 leaders, and although this can be cheesed to some extent, it's still a massive investment in time and effort.
• Make Sure He's Dead: Once you complete a targeted hit (like, say, a Kosmos cultist you tracked down), the Eagle Bearer will be prompted to "Confirm Kill" when standing over the corpse, which when carried out results in them plunging the Spear of Leonidas into the corpse.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The Cult of Kosmos, a mysterious group opposed to the protagonist. Much of the Cult arc is spent unmasking, then murdering them, especially once you learn that your character's younger sibling is working for them, under the name Deimos.
• Matchmaker Quest: A wealthy man in Keos has many suitors, and you can help one of them (who claims to be the only one to love him honestly and isn't just after his money) to gain his affection. Although the means to receive this are rather immoral, and back-fire horribly.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Several of the Legendary weapons and armor are possibly Isu artifacts, with their perks being a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, but only the Spear of Leonidas and the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus are explicitly stated as being so. Deimos' Sword of Damokles is the only one verifiably Isu in origin, as its forge socket is noted by the Eagle Bearer when visiting the Ancient Forge. Additionally, Medusa and The Minotaur were created by the Olympos Project.
• Meaningful Background Event: Early on in "The Legacy of Praxilla", you can see a young man breaking into Praxilla's tent while she's speaking to the Eagle Bearer.
• Meaningful Name: The Adrestia is named after the Greek goddess of (among other things) revolt and just retribution, fitting for one on a quest to avenge their family. Adrestia the goddess was also sister to the god Deimos, which is the alias of the Eagle Bearer's sibling.
  • Phobos, the horse the Eagle Bearer rides throughout the game, is also named after the mythological god and brother to Deimos.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Alexios and Kassandra's mother Myrrine started to go by the name Pheonix after settling on Naxos. As she puts it; she rebuilt her life from ashes.
  • At some point, though it's unclear when, the Eagle Bearer's sibling was renamed "Deimos", after the mythological son of the God of War and the God of Dread and Terror—a fitting name for the role they play within the cult.
• Medusa: You fight the gorgon in a late-game sidequest. It turns out to be the lover of the quest-giver cursed by a corrupted Piece of Eden.
• Metaphorically True: The claims of the mercenary encountered during the Medusa hunt. He (or rather his party) did kill the Medusa; the problem was that the Medusa refused to stay dead.
• Mighty Glacier: In terms of war galley strength matchups, Heavy Triremes (two rectangular sails, secondary sail is smaller) are this. They're huge, ponderous to maneuver, but can absorb huge amounts of damage compared to similar-ranked war galleys (i.e. Elite Mooks or not), and can lay down witheringly large volleys of spears and arrows.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Characters in this game have very... enthusiastic body language that can feel sorely out of place when they gesture wildly during somber moments or while discussing serious topics. The gorgeously armored Athenian generals who act as your liaison for conquest battles may actually cut a caper when you agree to fight for them, right in the middle of their bombastic speech about how they'll kick the Spartans' asses down to Hades.
• Min-Maxing: With three combat styles utilizing three principal damage types (Hunter, Warrior, Assassin), you're free to either play a Jack of All Stats or focus on one play style instead while underperforming in the others. This mostly comes down to your choice in equipment since that's the only consistent option you have for putting on damage buffs, aside from one passive skill in each tree that works similarly but is of limited use. Legendary armor sets complement this mechanic - some provide balanced buffs to all three damage types while others revolve solely around a single one. In addition, the blacksmith's engraving service allows you to either alleviate the shortcomings of specialized sets or specialize them even more.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: On Thasos, a little girl looking for her missing big brother - the Cult abducting and drugging athletes to turn into their minions.
• Misplaced Vegetation: Prickly pear cactus can be found growing on some of the islands. While that's accurate for modern Greece, prickly pears are native to the US and Mexico and wouldn't be introduced to Europe for more than two thousand years after the game.
• Misplaced Wildlife:
  • Greece is just barely, debatably part of the range of the Eurasian lynx, and even then it's restricted mostly to mountainous interior areas. It certainly isn't found in anywhere near the concentrations lynxes in the game spawn at, nor was it ever found in the southern parts of Greece (at least, not since the last ice age).
  • The Krokottas Hyena, a target in The Goddesses' Hunt side quest, is also pretty far from home. Lampshaded as soon as you find it, as your character immediately notes that whatever the beast is, it's not native to Greece.
• Modesty Shorts: Despite the fact that such a thing hadn't been invented yet, the Eagle Bearer wears a set of tight-fitting underwear to prevent their free-moving skirts from exposing them.
• Money for Nothing: A franchise tradition in the late game, particularly once you've fully upgraded your ship and legendary gear. Selling high-level equipment nets several thousand drachmae apiece, so even one visit to the blacksmith after a bunch of battles is usually enough to fatten your purse by about 100,000 drachmae or more at a point in the game where there's nothing meaningful left to spend it on. On the upside, you'll never have to worry about bounty hunters again. However, see Money Sink below.
• Money Sink:
  • Patch 1.12 introduced Hephaistos, a unique blacksmith who can teach you additional tiers for all weapon and armor perks that you already have at tier 5. It costs 30,000 drachmae to upgrade to tier 6 alone, and upgrading all the way to tier 10 costs a combined 530,000 drachmae per perk. The price can be reduced by 20% if you make it all the way to the final mercenary tier of S4, but that's still a lot of cash. Granted, there're a lot more perks than you could ever utilize at once, but even upgrading only the most important ones can bankrupt an end-game character if you aren't careful.
  • The new ship upgrades added in 1.14 require colossal amounts of money and materials.
  • Unlocking the fourth and fifth gear set slots on the inventory screen takes a drastic jump in drachmae needed over the third (200,000 and 1,000,000 drachmae, to be specific).
• Mood Whiplash: The mission "My Kingdom for a Horse" has the Eagle Bearer carrying a soldier home after he's spent a night with Alkibiades. It's an easy, lighthearted mission of just carrying him to his door... until you get there and the armed thugs appear to kill him. It's later revealed that the guy was a political rival of Alkibiades, and whether you manage to keep him alive or not, he gets dealt with eventually. For that matter, most of Alkibiades's quests tend to have a more serious, almost sinister ulterior motive to them.
• Mook Chivalry: Like in the naval era games, initiating a boarding sequence will cause the enemy ships to stop attacking and politely hang back as you slaughter their buddies and steal their stuff. Averted for ground combat.
• More Dakka: There are two upgrade paths to increase ranged damage in naval combat. One simply increases the damage of arrows and/or javelins. The other raises the number of salvoes the Adrestia can fire in a row before the archers need to "reload", with a maximum of four consecutive rains of arrows being at your disposal when fully upgraded.
• More Predators Than Prey: Some areas, especially islands, are crawling with wolves, lions, or lynxes lack so much as a single goat or other herbivore.
• Multiple Endings: Again, for the first time in the series, there are multiple storylines to choose from, each leading to a different ending.
• Multi-Track Drifting: You can drift with your ship. Yes, you read that right: steering while holding down the deceleration button results in the Adrestia practically turning on the spot extremely quickly, which is invaluable for avoiding an incoming ram attack or getting yourself in the right position to initiate one yourself. This notably has some basis in reality. Ships of this era could perform quite rapid course changes by lowering the oars on one side while continuing to row on the other (similar to how a tank can turn by stopping only one track), although the game still takes some liberties in how effective it was, all for the Rule of Fun.
• Multishot: Multiple hunter skills allow various versions of this. One skill enables a spread shot consisting of several arrows, while another enables multiple-targeting with each target being hit simultaneously upon loosing the arrows.
• Mundane Solution: Need to assassinate that Leader who is holed up in the fortress? You could carefully sneak into the compound, edging closer and closer, carefully taking down guards... or you could just run right in, ignore the pursuing guards and incoming arrows, zero in on the guy and quickly kill him and then simply flee the area.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Explosive arrows are primarily a weapon of war, but they tend to be much more useful for hunting instead. A single arrow can slay an entire herd of deer or ibex as a quick and efficient source of soft leather.
  • The Staff of Hermes Trismegistus is an immensely powerful Isu artifact that plays an important role in the story. It's capable of making its wielder immortal and putting up Deflector Shields around them, but when you get it it's just another legendary weapon that the Eagle Bearer can use to bash some heads in and you can still get desynchronized while wielding it.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • The Ancient Greek in this game live (and die) by this trope. Aside from delivery quests, most radiant Message Board quests come down to client explaining who has crossed them, the Eagle Bearer guessing they need that person dead, and the client heartily agreeing.
  • Also applies to the Eagle Bearer themselves. Have a bounty on your head? Just go kill the sponsor. The game helpfully marks him/them on the map, and although they always spawn in military installations, getting to them is rarely a problem. Becomes less pronounced in later game stages where you're so filthy rich that paying off the bounty doesn't affect your budget anymore, but even then some players prefer going after the sponsor as a form of Self-Imposed Challenge.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • Any fire or poison attacks the Eagle Bearer can use need a few hits on the same target to take effect. When an enemy uses poison or fire against you, a single hit is all it takes to poison the Eagle Bearer or set them on fire. Hostile DOT effects also deal significantly more damage to the Eagle Bearer than the other way around, to the point that player-inflicted burn damage is so insignificant it might as well be a purely cosmetic graphics effect.
  • An example that helps the player is being knocked off a boat in a naval battle. The Eagle Bearer can just climb back on board, but for any enemy, including elites and bosses, it's a one hit kill.
  • Another example that benefits the player is the arena fights (or at least the rematch version). The bosses and mooks are capped at level fifty, but no such restriction applies to the Eagle Bearer.
  • Melee damage resistance works against all animals but one: snakes. Even if your melee resistance is at 100+%, making you immune to anything that attacks in melee, snakes still take off ~40% of your health bar with each hit. This seems to caused by the game treating snakes as traps instead of "real" animals, and trap damage ignores all resistances.
• Mystery Cult: The Cult of Kosmos to the hilt. They wear special masks and gather in absolute secrecy in order to further their agenda of trying the conquer the Greek world of the time using a mysterious Isu artifact.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • "The Cyclops," one of the first major antagonists in the beginning of the game. Though not as strong nor as dangerous as the actual cyclops you can fight late in the game, he still very much is violent, brutal, and all too willing to kill humans who earn his ire.
  • Belos The Beast of Sparta. Considering Sparta is itself a pretty brutal and militaristic culture, being considered "beastly" among even them is a pretty daunting implication. And given that he's a Cultist who fights in the Arena, he most definitely lives up to the name.
  • Several of the randomly assigned Mercenary monikers qualify. "The Butcher", "The Twirling Blade", "The Man-Eater". There's even one, "The Clay-Fingered", which implies in its blurb that the Mercenary likes to hide bodies in lifelike clay sculptures.
  • Deimos. It doesn't seem all that frightening on the surface, but to the characters in the story with everyday knowledge of the Greek Pantheon, it's an imposing name. It's taken from the ancient Greek god—and son of Ares, the god of War—of dread and terror, specifically dread and terror before battle. It suits them perfectly.
• Naval Blockade: The Athenian navy has blockaded the Megaris harbor when the Eagle Bearer gets there, and they must break through it to dock. Along the way, the Eagle Bearer helps clear yet another blockade for the Spartan archon Phoenix. Near the end of the story, a desperate Kleon blockades Mykonos, and again it's up to the Adrestia to remove a bunch of ships from Poseidon's domain.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence: A minor example: If you don't perform certain sidequests before facing The two Spartan Kings, they will request that you do three lengthy tasks for them instead of only two.
• New Game Plus: Added in a February 2019 patch. It skips the Action Prologue and goes right to the player selection. The player restarts the game with their previous level, their inventory, and any upgrades to the Adrestia save any non-store exclusive lieutenants, and any ostraka they've completed already done.
• New Old Flame: The quest "Old Flames Burn Bright" introduces a new love interest for the Eagle Bearer, an old friend from Kephallonia who had, up until the player meets them at the beginning of the quest, never been mentioned before.
• News Travels Fast: To an implausible level for the Eagle Bearer. Sunk a military ship? As the ship goes down, a sponsor has placed a bounty on them. Burnt down a silo even if with a fire arrow from far away and there are no witnesses? Bounty. Guards in forts investigating incidents like dead comrades or burnt supplies without spotting the Eagle Bearer? If someone lights the signal fire, that's a bounty on their heads.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Many decisions that seem clear-cut "good" choices tend to have some very unfortunate, unexpected consequences in reality. For example, sparing the last surviving family of a village being burnt down and slaughtered for plague will cause the disease to spread again, killing off most of the island.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia:
  • Zig-Zagged. Armors and outfits will remain consistent, but some cutscenes such as Brasidas' introduction will give the Eagle Bearer a kopis, even if they have none equipped at the time. Some cutscenes (such as the Eagle Bearer's reunion with Myrrine) also revert the Spear Of Leonidas to its non-upgraded form, regardless of how much the player has upgraded it.
  • Played very straight with headgear, which is always disabled during cutscenes. While it's understandable for bulky helmets that obscure the face, most hoods and in particular headbands don't cover the face at all, making it strange that they're turned off.
• No Ending: The credits never roll in Ancient Greece. Even the main quest lines only receive slightly more elaborate ending cinematics than the lesser ones, and then it's right back to business in the Wide-Open Sandbox. After all, there's still a Forever War going on between two factions that're always happy to enlist the Eagle Bearer's support.
• No Fair Cheating: If you try to save-scum your way to legendary gear at the Oikos of the Olympos shop, you'll quickly come to notice that your orichalcum stash is bound to your account, not any specific savegame. The result? You lose the orichalcum and the item(s) you got before you reloaded, leaving you with absolutely nothing for your efforts. Thankfully, any store items you get are also account-bound, so they'll retroactively be given to older saves.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: At the end of "Old Flames Burn Bright", should the Eagle Bearer have taught their old friend/lover's son how to fight, rather than how to farm as his mother insisted, they get read the riot act and told to go away, even though teaching the kid how to fight allowed him to drive off some bandits who'd come while mom was out at the market.
• No Kill like Overkill:
  • Some of the melee finishers and stealth kills are spectacularly brutal. Case in point: the Eagle Bearer stabs the victim in the upper back with the Spear of Leonidas (which would already be fatal), then snaps their neck, then pushes the spear all the way through the torso to rip out of their chest.
  • Nothing's stopping you from unleashing your tier-3 Overpower attack with a sword on a basic mook. The poor dude usually dies after the first two or three hits, only for the Eagle Bearer to continue brutalizing them with at least a dozen more slashes long after their health bar has hit zero.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Should you ask Markos how to deal with an uncollected debt, he tells you to please not have a repeat of the olive oil venture. Details aren't given, beyond the Eagle Bearer being sent to gather some money from him, which somehow ended in bloodshed.
  • Meeting the quest giver Heitor has him recount a time back on Kephallonia where he and the Eagle Bearer wound up pulling off a Back-to-Back Badasses moment on another job for Markos.
• No-Sell: Resistances can be stacked all the way to 100% and above, making the Eagle Bearer completely immune to the respective damage type. A properly engraved Greek Heroes Armor set for instance can make the wearer immune to melee damage^note and also ~80% resistant to ranged damage and ~70% resistant to elemental damage in a world where most damage is dealt in melee. Needless to say that this drops the challenge of even Nightmare difficulty to near zero.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Kephallonia, the protagonist's starting home island, is far off enough from the rest of the Greek world that all the Eagle Bearer has to worry about is the local small-time gangster and rather small odd jobs. No military locations and no allegiance to either Athens or Sparta. Then, they get sucked into the much bigger conflict of the Peloponnesian War and the game is on. Subverted as, depending on your choices, it becomes ground zero for one of the deadliest and most destructive plague outbreaks in Greece's history.
• Notice This:
  • Orichalcum seams will hum gently, once the Eagle Bearer gets near them.
  • Unopened treasure chests will have a subtle but noticable trail of white sparkles flowing from them to indicate they're lootable.
• Not Quite the Right Thing:
  • The Eagle Bearer can end up doing many things which end up screwing them over (and the gameworld) later down the line—all for the best of reasons.
  • Saving the family about to be killed by the local priests to contain the plague they carry will result in it raging out of control all over the island of Kephallonia.
• Not the Intended Use: During the Olympic Games, you have to face an opponent heads-on in a ring, with only your fists and without access to any adrenaline abilities. Should you have an animal tamed, it cannot walk inside the circle. However, should your opponent be unfortunate enough to go too close to the outside of the ring, a bear can still kill them with a single blow. And yes, this counts as a legitimate win for you.
• Not Worth Killing: Fortunately, high-level mercenaries ignore the Eagle Bearer even if they see them committing crimes (unless they attack them).
• The Oath-Breaker: In order to achieve the best ending for the Family storyline, the Eagle Bearer must promise their mother Myrrine that they will bring their sibling home from the cult. Should you choose to instead fight Deimos on the top of the mountain at the end of the plotline, Myrrine, shell-shocked from her youngest child's death, will call you out on breaking your promise. She'll then order you to leave Sparta, saying that all she sees is death when she looks at you. This is the only ending in the game where Myrrine survives to the end but does not remain part of the family.
• Occupiers Out of Our Country: A sidequest on the Silver Islands has the Eagle Bearer run into someone who holds these opinions on Athenians, Spartans, and anyone who isn't actually from his island. Including the heavily armed mercenary who just rescued him. Should they mention this little detail, he will try to kill them.
• Oddball in the Series: Of all the installments in the Assassin's Creed franchise, Odyssey is the only one that doesn't focus on the Assassin-Templar conflict since it is chronologically set 400 years before the formation of the Assassin Brotherhood in Origins and even the proto-Templar Order of the Ancients don't appear in the base game with their role as the antagonists instead filled out by the Cult of Kosmos.^*Though as made clear in the Legacy of the First Blade DLC, the Cult is affiliated with the Order. Additionally, it's the only game in the series where there are multiple endings and the protagonist(s) don't use the Hidden Blade as their main weapon.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: The Oracle of Delphi's reaction to meeting the Eagle Bearer again in "The Trial of Sokrates", assuming the player's actions got her tortured by the Cult.
• One-Hit Polykill: Ghost Arrows of Artemis are basically the Ancient Greek version of a railgun, capable of punching through any obstacle and damaging everything organic they pass through. This, coupled with the ability's obscene damage, makes it entirely possible to kill any number of enemies with a single shot, assuming they're lined up right.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. This is a given for Mooks like bandits and soldiers who have random names. While there is a big pool of names to draw from, the sheer amount of them will make it impossible to give everyone a unique name. It doesn't end there, however, as bandits and even mercenaries can have the same names as Cult of Kosmos members, like Zoisme, or even characters that are very important to the story, for example Nikolaos.
• Optional Boss: A nice and varied selection of them in the base game. Eight legendary animals, four mythical monsters, six arena champions and an unknown number of legendary ships can be fought for fun and powerful equipment without any of them tying into the main plot.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: The protagonist gets opportunities to have flings with people all over the Greek world regardless of gender.
• Optional Stealth: No mission can be failed by being spotted, and since the Eagle Bearer is a seasoned front-line warrior at home in open combat, skipping stealth in favor of just charging through the front door is always a viable option. However, you should get rid of those pesky archers before you do so; if charging into Athenian or Spartan soldiers, you should be prepared to deal with multiple bounty hunters very soon due to all the witnessed murders you're about to commit.
• Order vs. Chaos: As always in Assassin's Creed, but the game promises to make the choices grey and more difficult rather than a simple morality system, and doesn't seem to favor one or the other, compared to previous games which almost unanimously chose freedom over order. Of course, the Assassins and Templars didn't exist at this point.
  • Layla Hassan, the new present-day protagonist, says to the immortal Eagle Bearer in Atlantis she used to serve order but has since chosen chaos.
• Orichalcum: Shows up as a rare currency accepted by only one merchant.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: The mythological Minotaur is fought as a secret boss. Appropriately, it's fought in a labyrinth ruin fitted with Theseus' string, which the mythological hero used in order to find his way around. There's also the Kretan Bull, a legendary animal which can be found and fought on the same island.
• Pacifist Run: After several games without any restrictions on how to approach your targets, the Fields of Elysium DLC for Odyssey finally contained two quests with the optional target of not killing anyone, once even coupled with not getting spotted on top of that. It doesn't make much of a difference whether you pull it off nor not, but it's certainly a nice Call-Back to the franchise's roots.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: Depending on the skills you select on the Eagle Bearer and the selected difficulty, certain boss battles can feel like this, most notably against the legendary beasts. You have little timeframes to actually attack them, but their attacks are likewise easy to telegraph and with the healing skill, you'll just very slowly wear their health down.
• Papa Wolf:
  • A literal example serves as the subject of a sidequest that tasks the Eagle Bearer with finding a missing hunter and his friend. Turns out the hunters killed an alpha wolf's pregnant mate. By the time you find the guys, one has been torn to shreds by the rampaging alpha, and the other doesn't last long, either.
  • Alexios functionally becomes this when the cult guards killed Phiobe. Kassandra as well, though obviously, she was a Mama Bear instead.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • If playing as Kassandra, her cultist disguise during the meeting in Delphi is pretty unconvincing due to her being the only cultist there whose gender doesn't match her mask—as she's using Elpenor's mask, as opposed to the rest of the female cultists' feminine masks. It's a wonder she wasn't immediately spotted by the other cultists...
    • On top of this, Elpenor's mask will have a large crack in the forehead, alluding to the fact that it was taken by force.
• The Paralyzer: The Eagle Bearer has many tools as their disposal to non-lethally eliminate an opponent, such as knocking them out with a fist blow against their heads. It's even spelled out for the paralyzing arrows.
• Paranoia Fuel: The Ghost Arrows of Artemis ability is an In-Universe example. Aside from the sheer paranoia factor of someone being able to shoot arrows through massive stone walls, enemy AI can't handle arrow bombardment that doesn't conform to the normal line-of-sight restrictions. They can't determine where the shot came from, so they'll gradually search the entire area, not just the one where you actually are, for a very long time before they return to an uneasy at-ease mode.
• Parental Sexuality Squick:
  • Twice by the Eagle Bearer with their mother, Myrinne.
    • The Eagle Bearer gets uncomfortable when General Timo gives Myrinne a traditional Spartan valediction before leaving for battle in front of them, given by a warrior's wife: "With your shield, or on it." The exact nature of their relationship is never revealed because Timo never appears nor is mentioned again.
    • When arriving in port in Lakonia, they can bring up that their birth father Pythagoras is of an age where he should be ancient and decrepit looking and not even alive (instead of late-middle-age as he is), and gets squeamish about saying the words when inquiring about what he looked like when the Eagle Bearer's parents conceived them.
  • The quest "Family Values" also features this, depending on your choices. The Eagle Bearer can choose to seduce the town Blacksmith in return for a sword he has in his possession that belongs to a local boy, Supideo. As it turns out, the Blacksmith is the biological father of Supideo, and when he finds out that the Eagle Bearer "fucked his pater", he's so horrified he blinds himself.
• Parrying Bullets: You get an ominous red marker on screen for every archer about to turn you into a pincushion, but if you're quick enough, have the right timing and are facing the right direction, you can deflect the incoming arrow with your melee weapon(s). This is a lot harder than melee blocks to pull off consistently, so while it is possible to neutralize one or maybe two archers this way, it should be considered a last resort in case you overlooked an archer while clearing house before you launched an open assault.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • By initiating a conquest battle early, or as a consequence of your earlier decisions, certain quests and rewards will be locked out.
  • Choosing not to follow Brasidas's advice in Korinth used to have a domino effect which resulted in one of the clues for the Sage of the Peloponnesian League being unable to be obtained. This was fixed in a patch later, and now you can simply buy the hint at the blacksmith in Korinth for 50 Drachmae.
  • Finding a cultist clue/killing a cultist unknowingly early will often cut off the attached quest (if there is one), though you will be rewarded with the experience points regardless. For example, Hermippos can be exposed as a cultist in multiple ways. One way is through a lengthy quest chain given by the player's Athenian allies, the other requires the player to kill a specific general in a nearby fort. Doing the latter before the former will cut you off from doing the Athens questline.
• Perpetual Molt: The Pegasos armor set has a strong Feather Motif going on, so the devs went all out and also gave it a unique graphics effect that leaves a trail of white feathers in the air behind the Eagle Bearer while on the move. Phobos does the same if you give him the Pegasos skin.
• Personal Space Invader: Lynxes are the smallest aggressive species in the game world, but they deal just as much damage as lions and have a devastating grab attack that sees them jump on the Eagle Bearer's back to try and bite their neck in half. This inflicts extreme damage in short ticks while you're trying to literally get the raging cat off your back.
• Pirate Girl:
  • Gelon, a pirate captain whom the Eagle Bearer meets in Phokis. Only she's lost her ship and crew to a mix of sharks and bandits. The Eagle Bearer can offer her a place on the Adrestia, though.
  • Xenia, who is the leader of the pirates on the Pirate Islands.
  • Obelia, an npc also found on the pirate islands, who enlists the Eagle Bearer in helping her recover some treasure from a sunken Minoan ruin. Of course, the Eagle Bearer didn't know she was one until she attempts to skimp them on their share of the treasure and orders her crew to kill them.
  • Kassandra and Alexios' mother Myrrine was one for a while, as she was once a part of Xenia's crew.
• Politically Correct History: On account of the choice system and mechanic, a given playthough can either play this straight or averted.
  • Averted in general with regards to Sparta. The game does emphasize and clarify that the Spartans were a brutal, casteist society of aristocrats who terrorized the helots. Even sympathetic Spartan characters (like Myrrine) are indifferent to the system, and Alexios/Kassandra can choose to aid the suppression of a slave revolt. Myrrine also chastizes Alexios/Kassandra for choosing to interrupt the agoge, the Spartan Training from Hell whereby a Spartan boy was about to die for failing the test.
  • The game quickly glosses over what the kryptea is, likely because players would not want to get involved if they knew what it was, and to make Sparta less unsympathetic. ^Note While Myrrine describes them as both "protecting" and keeping the helots from uprising, it was actually much more brutal than that. Once a year, Spartan citizens had the right to murder helots with impunity, as a way of population control. Women and children included. If the player was aware of this detail, they would be much less willing to complete the story mission where you have to suppress a helot uprising.
  • When you play as Kassandra, the game more or less ignores the strictly enforced gender roles of Ancient Greece, especially Athens; by modern standards these would be considered nothing less than misogynistic. A woman was seen as more or less property of her "oikos" (family unit), and wouldn't have been able to make any decisions for herself. Notably, there's also no difference between interacting with men in Athenian controlled regions vs. Spartan controlled regions, even though the two city-state cultures differed significantly in their treatment of women. Sparta came the closest to modern standards of gender equality, with women being able to own land, receive education and physical training, run businesses and even socialize with men. However, Spartan society placed the heaviest importance on women bearing strong offspring, and aren't known to have ever sent them into battle. Furthermore, Spartan women were completely excluded from participating in politics much like other Greek women. Similarly, both Alexios and Kassandra would have been maligned in Athens as foreigners and would've had their movement and social standing heavily restricted.
  • On a more subtle gender issue, the game's constant celebration of "warrior women" over more feminine women with Aspasia being made the Big Bad despite being presented for much of the game as the most feminine and girly of the game's supporting characters ignores the fact that in Ancient Greek, such women, whether in myth or in drama, would always be referred to with masculine pronouns in the Greek language. This was done, as Mary Beard pointed out, to especially highlight and segregate such women from what the male population understood as the norm. As such, the conventional "strong female characters" seen in this game would be falling in line with the Greek misogynistic norms.
  • The practice of pederasty, common among Greeks of the time, goes obviously unmentioned. It was especially prevalent in Sparta and enforced with older generals and officers allowed to claim as catamites younger officers and this was seen as a manly rite of passage. Athens likewise celebrated this wholly, and Sokrates was even claimed by Xenophon to be a kind of pimp for young tricks.
  • The Greek practices regarding prostitution are included in the game, but the game glosses them over by using the ancient Greek terms and never defining them for the audience (though it's pretty easy to figure out if you just pay attention). ^note Hetaerae were concubines/prostitutes, generally dedicated to a single or small number of clients. As opposed a pornai (from which the word "pornography" is derived) who was seen as lower class and would take any client.
• Poor Communication Kills: During "One Really, Really Bad Day", the Eagle Bearer goes out to attack some pirate ships hanging around Lokris that the general Megakles has told them are about to attack. Only once they've destroyed the suspiciously weak ships and gotten back does Megakles inform them those weren't pirates, but merchants disguised as pirates, on his suggestion.
• Powder Keg Crowd: One late-game main quest requires you to kill three Krypteia (elite Spartan soldiers). One of them is currently in front of an angry crowd. You can steer them up with provoking comments, and if you are successful, the crowd will kill the Krypteia for you.
• The Power of Family: This is a major theme in the main campaign, which details the Eagle Bearer's familial bond with their mother, father, newly obtained step-brother and long-presumed-dead sibling, after decades of estrangement. The Golden Ending plays this completely straight, showing the whole family coming back together after everything and becoming a Badass Family travelling the Greek world together on the Eagle Bearer's ship. Other endings will subvert and zigzag this trope in various ways.
• Precursor Heroes: The Eagle Bearer predates nearly every other proto-Assassin, Hidden One and Assassin by over a century.
• Prequel: The game is set over 400 years before the formation of the Assassin Brotherhood by Bayek of Siwa and his wife Aya in Origins.
• Prophetic Fallacy: May occur in the quest "Family Values", depending on dialogue choices and a few other factors. Supideo has locked himself up in a cage, after an oracle has told him that his "mother's blood will stain the earth, and his father will scream to the gods in agony. (Note that both parents are begging him to please come out, and get the silly prophecy out of his head.) He tasks the protagonist with acquiring a sword and shield with which his parents will protect themselves from his supposed wrath, and by the end of it, you learn that Supideo was adopted by his supposed parents, you killed his birth mother to get his shield, and you may or may not have had sex with his birth father to get his sword, who the protagonist notes was screaming to the gods, but not in agony. Supideo frees himself from his cage, runs to the beach screaming from the revelations, and proceeds to go blind, cursing the protagonist. However, the quest can also be finished without ever learning any of that. It seems chancing upon the shield's current owner while exploring the island skips The Reveal, Supideo's parents quickly brush off any inconsistencies in their story and pay the Eagle Bearer when they return both items, Supideo comes out of his cage, and the quest gets a more or less happy ending. You can also get this ending by simply not sleeping with the blacksmith.
• Proud Scholar Race: Athens, given that it's the center of education in the Greek world.
• Proud Warrior Race: Sparta naturally. The protagonist is also a Spartan misthios so the character takes a lot of pride in their warrior-based culture.

Tropes Q - Z

• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The scorched village on Kephallonia was razed because a plague had beset it. The Eagle Bearer may choose to stand aside in the last cleanup by a priest planning to execute a family that is suspected to not yet be symptomatic... Or you can kill the priest and free the family, and the plague will resurge and devastate Kephallonia if you revisit the isle.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: Every bounty level you gain sets an additional merc on your trail, and multiple bounty hunters usually travel in a single pack. Since every merc is a Mini-Boss in their own right, with random combinations of classes, abilities, strengths and weaknesses, weapons and potentially animal companions, having to fight several simultaneously tends to get nasty fast. It's not uncommon for such encounters to become the most difficult fights in the game, especially if you somehow managed to get to bounty level 5.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Atlantis zig-zags it. It's definitely taken a beating after several thousand years, but most of the systems are still working when the Eagle Bearer passes through, despite being underneath an active volcano. Two thousand and four hundred years onward, it's still largely intact.
• Ramming Always Works: This is one of the main ways to give and take damage in naval combat, and unlike 3-era naval battles, actually historically accurate to ancient naval warfare.
• Rain of Arrows: One of the Hunter skills lets the player do this. It's also the primary means of dealing damage at range in naval combat.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: In all enemy camps, caves or fortresses, the captains or leaders are always substantially stronger than the smaller mooks. In the fortresses, the Polemarch is another step stronger than the captains or leaders. The trope is averted with some cult members though, who go down laughably easy.
• Really Gets Around: The protagonists have the option of being this, alongside a woman named Ausexia bragging about it, during her sidequest "Age is Just a Number." You also have Alkibiades.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Brasidas, a Historical Domain Character loyal to Sparta. He not once but twice acts as the rational discretionary option to someone else who wants to go off hot-loaded on the bad guys.
  • The nameless magistrate on Euboea who, unlike most other officials on the island, isn't a Corrupt Corporate Executive and instead tries to bring down the crime syndicate terrorizing the island. He even fights on the frontlines alongside his men when the final push against the syndicate is made.
  • Of the two Kings of Sparta, Pausanias is the more level-headed, progressive leader, as opposed to the traditional and obstinate Archidamos. He's also the Cultist out of the two.
• Red Herring: While on the quest to find the key for the ruins where the Medusa is, the Eagle Bearer is also given a quest to visit a mercenary to find out what he knows about the creature. Visiting him just fills in some gaps in the lore (namely, the true nature of the Medusa), and doesn't help in the fight itself.
  • Similarly, while investigating the Minotaur, the Eagle Bearer is told to speak with three persons; only one is required to reveal the whereabouts of the key.
  • When first meeting the two Kings of Sparta, Pausanias and Archidamos, Pausanias comes across as more reasonable and personable while Archidamos already seems to loathe the Eagle Bearer and Myrrine, which seems to suggest he's the Cultist. However, the Cultist is actually Pausanias.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Brasidas is the Blue Oni compared to two Red Oni counterparts, both women: Anthousa in Korinth when contending with the Monger, and the Eagle Bearer's own mother, Myrinne, when contending with the Kosmos cultist who's the ruler of the state of Arkadia. If you enact his cooler-headed, more reasoned recommendation over the more vindicative recommendations of his counterpart, certain events go more smoothly later on.
  • The Eagle Bearer's two closest companions, Herodotos and Barnabas. Herodotos is calm and softly-spoken and Agent Scully blue oni to Barnabas' boisterous and excitable Agent Mulder red oni.
• Remember the New Guy?: Done for laughs in "The Trial of Sokrates", the last Lost Tale of Greece added to the game, where after knowing him for several years, the Eagle Bearer actually meets Sokrates's wife, who he has never mentioned, much less hinted at, in all the time he's been philosophizing his way across Greece, something the Eagle Bearer even points out. ^note though this might be less of a surprise to anyone who'd read up on Soky before then.
• The Remnant: One of the Lost Tales of Greece deals with the Sons of Darius, a group of Persian warriors who stayed in Greece since the Battle of Thermopylae, apparently cruising around the countryside attacking anywhere they find. The Eagle Bearer has to help drive them away from a village.
• Retcon:
  • The modern-day segments imply Layla was familiar with Charlotte de la Cruz, the protagonist of the Titan Assassin's Creed comics, despite never having been mentioned during them (due to the fact the comics began in 2016, and Layla didn't appear until Origins, which was released in 2017).
  • Also, the segments detailing the Isu messages from Origins claims the person recording them changed into Aletheia (which isn't true - each segment had a different person speaking, and none of them ever gave a name).
• The Reveal: Plot twists and world-shaking revelations are abundant.
  • Barnabas reveals that the general Elpenor wants the protagonist to kill is Nikolaos, their father.
  • Nikolaos is not the protagonist's father. It's actually Pythagoras.
  • That the Eagle Bearer's infant sibling seen in flashbacks, whose death kickstarted the main plotline, also survived their fall and has grown up to become a brutal and terrifying warrior for the Cult.
  • The mythological monsters are actually part of an Isu project that "got out of hand," called "Olympos."
  • Pythagoras is rendered effectively immortal by carrying around Hermes' Staff. Once he hands it to the protagonist, they too survive till the modern day, and meet Layla in person.
  • Skoura, the main quest giver for the Arena, is a Death Seeker, and his daughter has been dead for nine years. He's just been waiting for a new champion to duel one-on-one to the death, so he may go to her as a proud man.
  • The end of one of the Lost Tales has the Eagle Bearer find Leda, Barnabas' missing wife who he's apparently had a vision of. She turns out to be Barnabas' daughter who was simply given the same name.
  • Several of the cultist reveals are this, as a few of them will be encountered by the player before they're revealed to be cultists. Examples include: Hermippos, Chrysis, Diona, Killias, Pausanias, Kleon, and Aspasia.
• Riddling Sphinx: The Sphinx appears in the game, and you have the option of answering all three of her riddles rather than fighting her head-on.
• "Risk"-Style Map: The map is divided into "regions" which are either aligned with Sparta or with Attika (with the exception of the starter area Kephallonia). After lowering the Nation Power enough, you can incite a "Nation Battle" between these two factions and the goal of either defending the region against the attackers, or conquering the region for the attacker.
• Rule of Three: The Seal of Atlantis quest requires the Eagle Bearer and Layla to find three symbols in hidden tombs across Greece.
• Sadistic Choice: The game is fond of these:
  • In Argolis, Hippokrates requests that the player retrieve his notes in order to save a quickly dying patient he's tending to before he'll agree to talk about Myrrine to them. However, once you go to a nearby military fortress for them, the doctor on site will admit they were burned in a recent scuffle, though he has most of the information memorized. He can return with you to assist Hippokrates, however, since he has his own patient who will die without him, he refuses to do so without a price—meaning you can either pay him off or forcibly take him back with you, which will lead to his patient being left to die. You can wait with him until he's finished with his patient, but doing so will leave Hippokrates' patient to die. No matter what you do, an innocent patient will not survive the quest chain.
  • Also in Argolis, the player is tasked by a priest to find a white bull for sacrifice in order to save the lives of the plague victims he's treating. However, when you find the bull, bandits have already killed it. As a result, the priest claims the sacrifice will only be enough to save one person. The player then has to choose who will receive that sacrifice; a farmer who claims to feed much of the region with his farm, a rich woman with children she has to care for, or a young child who selflessly insists the player choose the other two. No matter who is chosen, the other two are (at least in their minds) condemned to death.
  • In Kephallonia, the player has to choose between allowing an innocent family with the plague to be killed by priests, or defending them and potentially allowing the plague to spread. If the player chooses to save the family, Kephellonia does in fact become devastated by the plague, but when the other option is being complicit in the murder of a family (with children, no less), there isn't exactly a good choice to be made no matter what.
• Save Scumming: The game actually encourages this, suggesting the player use the Quick Save feature before conversations to try out different choices.
• Scenery Gorn: Despite the overwhelmingly beautiful landscapes everywhere, you'll run into your fair share of gruesome vistas, not least of all the devastated, corpse-littered battlefields you'll be seeing by the dozens. And then there's the Valley of Aristomenes in the Messenia region, a perpetually gloomy, smog-choked hell where most of Sparta's war materiel is being manufactured.
• Scenery Porn: Go to Lakonia. Climb to the highest peak in the south of the Taygetos mountain range. Marvel at the sight of the whole of Greece stretching out at your feet for as far as your system can render the world. Don't forget to pick up your jaw before you leave. As Kassandra puts it: "The gods can keep Olympos. This is the best view in all of Greece". And it's not just this particular view. The entire game world is full of colors, life and awe-inspiring sights wherever your journey takes you. Well, everywhere but the Valley of Aristomenes in Messenia mentioned above.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • All settlements in the game have the same symbol on the HUD and the map, and most are home to harmless civilians, quest givers, blacksmiths and other helpful folks. "Most" being the operative word. You wouldn't be the first to ride into a newly discovered village, only for two dozen "incoming arrow" indicators to light up everywhere around you because you just waltzed into a large stronghold of the Daughters of Artemis.
  • Quest chains often have steep jumps in their level requirements between one quest and the next, but you won't know that unless you check your quest log every time you accept a new quest. While it can be tempting to keep the subplot rolling without interruption, it's quite likely to get you into conflict with seriously overleveled enemies that'll kill the Eagle Bearer in one to two hits. The mythical monster quest chains are particularly dangerous examples because there's no chance of escape once you're committed.
  • On meeting Hippokrate's assistant, he mentions that the Eagle Bearer not bring up his baldness (he's a little sensitive). They can do so anyway. And unlock a spare quest if they do so.
  • A mission on the Silver Islands has the player, on Sokrates's advice, free a man who makes it clear he despises any and all foreigners on the islands, which includes Athenians and Spartans. Let the obvious nutjob run free, and he repays the Eagle Bearer by showing up at a party when the Silver Islands plotline ends and killing someone.
  • A mission for Markos has him make the Eagle Bearer take a jug of wine over to a person he owes money to. By this point, the player should definitely know not to drink it... doing so earns them a nasty poisoning.
  • During one of the Lost Tales of Greece, the Eagle Bearer runs into a woman named Circe, who lives alone in a ruined temple, surrounded by pigs... and is quite clearly out of her tree. If the player decides not to attack her, she'll offer them a drink. You can probably see where this is heading. It's drugged.
    • Falling for this bait is actually beneficial, at least to the player. If you attack Circe immediately, you fight her surrounded by a dozen boars and lions that can wreck you in short order. Accepting the drink instead results in the Eagle Bearer waking up in a nearby cave from where they can sneak back to Circe to fight her on their own terms, like putting a Ghost Arrow in her head without alerting her animal companions.
  • A horse-breeder in the quest "A Horse, Of Course" believes the word of a person who made off with her prize horse, and feeds it some fruit she's been told will turn it into a pegasus. Her justification? "It has to work after I paid so much money for it!" She then proceeds to immediately ride it off a cliff.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Cultist clues have no hierarchy in terms of which ones will reveal the identity of the cultists; the Sage of each branch will only be revealed once all of their Cult Adepts have been eliminated, no matter which order the player does so. Likewise, the Ghost of Kosmos is only revealed once every Sage has been eliminated—the order of which is also irrelevant.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: You can commit any number of crimes without consequences, as long as you have the funds to pay off the bounty. It doesn't take too long before you can openly murder your way through forts, shell out a negligible amount of cash and be on your merry way.
• Sdrawkcab Name: The main character of the quest "Family Values" is named Supideo, which is Oedipus backwards. The quest parodies Oedipus's story.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: As befitting the tradition of Greek tragedies, Nikolaos attempts to murder both of his children in order to keep them from destroying Sparta, but his actions end up setting up its downfall.
• Sequence Breaking: Encouraged. It's possible to complete quest objectives before accepting the quest from the quest giver, and doing so often results in completely different dialogue and resolutions.
  • Many of the Cultists in the open world can be killed without unveiling their identity first. Often you won't even realize you're fighting a cultist until you see the golden loot sparkle and the "Confirm Cultist Kill" prompt appears over the corpse.
  • In particular, sneaking into his home to kill Podarkes the Cruel will cause the player to instantly get 4 "Quest Completed" notices (and all the attached XP rewards) as this automatically finishes all but one of Kyra's quests. It's important to note however that resolving the Delos Islands quest chain this way will lock you into the worst ending for it, since you never resolved Kyra or Thaleta's issues, and it's highly likely they'll both end up dead.
  • The Elpenor questline in Phokis is meant to go with the Eagle Bearer meeting the Oracle, then hunting Elpenor, searching through the local fortress in the Valley of the Nymph before finding his hiding place... unless the player finds his hiding place while exploring the map, in which case they can kill him anyhow. Doing so changes the Eagle Bearer's chat with the Oracle in her house, noting that mysterious cloak and mask they decided to loot from his corpse.
  • One example that can work against the player, specifically their immersion, is the fact that you can finish the three main story lines in any order. However, the ending of the Atlantis arc wraps up the Eagle Bearer's story for good and is therefore generally considered the true ending for the game at large, so if you finish that arc somewhere in between the others, the whole narrative gets thrown into disarray.
  • New Game Plus is highly susceptible because the various level-locked assets from the base game no longer matter all that much. It often results in the player coming across enemies and events completely out of the intended order. For instance, Exekias the Legend, Sage of the Heroes of the Cult and normally the top-ranked mercenary, becomes a bog-standard merc in the roster, to the point that he can be the second bounty hunter that goes after you (and probably ends up dead in short order).
• Set Bonus: Equipping all five pieces of a legendary armor set activates its unique perk, which is often a powerful buff tailored to the play style the set is meant to enhance.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Potentially everything the player does on Kephallonia. You can help the locals with their problems, kill the local crime lord, improve the lot of the local temple, even give a couple the chance to move somewhere better... and have it all come to naught by allowing a horrific plague to devastate the island.
  • One of Alkibiades' quests involves taking a general home, then defending him from hired thugs. Due to the mission, it's pretty easy for the thugs to get him anyway. Should the Eagle Bearer save him, they'll tell Alkabiades, who was the one who hired the thugs in the first place, and it's heavily implied he just tries again and eliminates him for good.
• Shockwave Stomp: The Ring of Chaos ability in the Warrior skill list. All three levels of it involve some forceful downward gesture, ranging from just clasping hands together and "throwing" the shockwave into the ground to momentarily stagger anyone immediately next to you, to the top tier's motion of stabbing the sky with the energized Spear of Leonidas and plunging it into the ground, sending foes a fair distance from you flying away.
• Shop Fodder: Many items that you can collect on your journey are collectively grouped as "Trade Goods" - they serve no other purpose than to be sold for some Drachmae.
• Shout-Out:
  • The War Sword is modeled after the Spider Sword in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
  • Nikolaus's sword is based heavily on the Spartan swords in 300.
  • The Adrestia's ability to perform Multi-Track Drifting is not just an entertaining gameplay gimmick. Greek triremes really were capable of performing a broadly similar stunt in battle, albeit not quite as efficiently.
  • Though there is some Rule of Cool at play, hammerfists are a large part of unarmed striking in the game, which were the main sorts of hand blows in ancient Greek combat sports.^note Based on artistic depictions of boxing and pankration.
  • Historically, Aristophanes did mock Kleon in his plays.
  • During the course of "The Trial of Sokrates", the eponymous philosopher demonstrates a dislike of writing down his words. This is true of the actual Sokrates. He also compares his wife to a horse. He did that, too.
  • Chrysis, the Head Priestess and cultist in Argolis who will be encountered as part of the Family questline was a real, somewhat obscure historical figure who supposedly really did have a hand in a fire which destroyed one of the temples—though historically it was an accident, rather than being very much on purpose in the game.
  • The ruins sprinkled throughout the game incorporate actual surviving Mycenean and Minoan Frescos into the environments. Specifically the "Bull-Leaping Fresco", which actually was found by archeologists in the real-life Palace on Knossos—which also happens to be a location in-game, though it funnily enough doesn't use that particular texture.
  • Discovery Mode is basically one huge display of this trope, as it is pretty much a virtual museum where the devs have laid out all of their research for players to explore in-game.
  • One of the Eagle Bearer's finishing moves is a running strike where they leap into the air and stab the target through the neck with the Spear of Leonidas, which is very similar to how Achilles dispatches Boagreas in Troy.
  • During one sidequest, the Eagle Bearer needs to protect a citizen from snakes, after which they'll gasp: "Why did it have to be snakes?"
  • One of the sidequests from the message board is called "To save a mockingbird".
• Shown Their Work: The Greek columns and some statues are actually painted as they would've been back then as opposed to the exposed white marble we see today.
• Simple Rescue Mechanic: You just need to free hostages from their cages to have a location's clear condition set to complete. It doesn't matter if the hostage runs away and is promptly killed by watchful guards in the same location. Oh, and if the hostage is a soldier, you can immediately kill or knock him out as well.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Sparta Kick is just a basic front heel kick and is one of the first skills you can get, but it remains useful all throughout the game as a knockback, a cheap means to get an enemy out of the fight for a few seconds, or non-lethally take them down for recruitment; kill powerful enemies by kicking them off cliffs, high ledges, and into the sea, especially at lower levels; and all enemies are affected by it, with few exceptions—even then, it's only the dramatic knockback they're immune to. It also only costs one adrenaline bar with an extremely short cooldown, has long invincibility frames which is excellent in a crowded melee, and can interrupt unblockable attacks by enemies. And finally, it is visually and audibly impressive, and never really stops being entertaining.
• Skull for a Head: The Followers of Ares wear white face paint that gives them this aesthetic. Just one more indicator that they're completely bonkers.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Surprisingly Zig-Zagged for the franchise. The protagonist can be opposed to slavery, though they will rarely condemn the entire system, more support individual slaves when the opportunity arises. Several heroic characters are ardent supporters of slavery, as it is seen as culturally acceptable by the ancient Greeks. It's entirely possible to play the main character as perfectly fine with slavery.
  • Xenia, however, is one of the few characters who does fervently oppose slavery and openly condemns those who profit off of it.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: Should you retrieve the Cyclops' obsidian glass eye after dealing with him, you CAN in fact sell it for an astoundingly high price at a vendor. Markos really wasn't exaggerating.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Thespis, a playwright the Eagle Bearer befriends and assists, is convinced he's a brilliant writer and gets huffy if the Eagle Bearer corrects his badly-written dialogue on stage.
• Smarter Than You Look: In an easy-to-miss bit of ambient dialogue with Barnabas, the Eagle Bearer speculates that the stars might just be many faraway suns. Herodotos corroborates that some people had already theorized this at their time as well.
• Snake Oil Salesman: A kid running a scam operation in Pephka sells "Minotaur Hoof Elixir", made from genuine minotaur hooves.
• Space Compression: The game map is the entire geographical area of Greece, but is much smaller to allow for fun gameplay and bearable travel times. For example, the three arms of Macedonia are 1km in-game but are 20-30km in real life (the entire world map in Odyssey is barely half that across).
• Spot the Impostor: Occurs during the penultimate mission of the Kythera main quests, where the Eagle Bearer has to discern which of the twin sisters Diona and Eritha are the Cultist. You can try to guess which is which when you confront them, or use Ikaros to identify them before approaching. For what it's worth, a certain phrase that repeatedly appears throughout the quest line (including the quest names) provides a helpful hint.
• Stealth Pun: For finishing his sidequest, the philosopher Demokritos rewards the Eagle Bearer with the rare armor Inventor's Helmet. A thinking cap, if you will.
• Story Difficulty Setting: The game features a "Discovery Mode" which eliminates combat and allows players to explore the environment without threats.
• Straight for the Commander: Subverted. Nothing lowers a nation's strength more than killing its leader, with a whopping -200 points when the dude bites it. However, assassinating the head of state alone is never enough to force a conquest battle, so unless the nation in question was already weakened by outside forces (or by you) when you notched the kill, you'll still have to wreak some havoc before the region becomes vulnerable.
  • Enforced for Conquest Battles. While you can slaughter the Mooks all day, it won't be enough to swing the battle in your faction's favor unless you aim for the (conveniently indicated) enemy Captains, Polemarchs, or the occasional Mercenary.
• Sudden Downer Ending: As a testament to its Guide Dang It! nature, the Delos Islands story arc can potentially end this way depending on the player's decisions. It can end with the Eagle Bearer, Kyra, and Thaletas celebrating their victory over Podarkes, with Kyra having found new purpose after fulfilling her vengeance and accepting her father's passing, and Thaletas being reunited with his father's helmet and having found the glory he was looking for. All is well, everyone is happy...and then Thaletas is murdered by a random rebel you happened to rescue in a sidequest earlier. While it can be prevented, the specific path to doing so is non-obvious and somewhat counter-intuitive (the rebel won't kill Thaletas if you choose to leave ASAP rather than stay and celebrate, or if you either killed the rebel or never rescued him in the first place.) Even worse if you romanced Thaletas and promised to meet him again someday.
• Super Drowning Skills: Everyone who isn't the Eagle Bearer has this, meaning punting tough enemies into large bodies of water (especially on ship battles) is a quick, easy way to get rid of them. To compensate for this, most Elite enemies like Mercenaries and Cultists can No-Sell most (but not all) forms of knockback or ragdolling.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: The Eagle Bearer can hold their breath for an impressive time to explore underwater locations, and it only gets better with every level you gain. You can also find and equip the Trident of Poseidon, a legendary spear that lets you breathe underwater.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Predatory animals will give chase over huge distances for the grievous offense of coming vaguely near them. The gods have mercy on you if a lynx pack catches you on foot while you're ill-prepared to fight them. They'll even follow you smack-dab into the middle of crowded, guarded settlements (and promptly get slaughtered by the soldiers there.))
• Super-Soldier:
  • The Cult Guards are as close as something in this setting can get. "Recruited" from roofied Olympian athletes, then juiced up with a mysterious serum that pushes their physical attributes to their absolute limits, they're faster, stronger, and more resilient than any other human opponent in the game. Even the most basic cult guard is roughly on par with Greek elite soldiers (with the added perk of being able to block anything with their oversized shields, including attacks enemies normally can't block), and the all-female Scions with their She-Fu are Lightning Bruisers that make even Greek army captains look like wimps in comparison.
  • Deimos was kidnapped by the cult to become this. They were brought up under a strict regiment of what Chrysis calls "strength" and the Eagle Bearer calls "torture", turning them into a brutal, unstoppable force to be reckoned with. Their Isu blood grants them superior strength, resilience, and power to other human beings, and they often end up cutting down even seasoned warriors on the battlefield with little effort.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: The Eagle Bearer's bow combines virtually the entire range of FPS-style weaponry in one compact package. Its base utility resembles a battle rifle (good damage, medium rate of fire), but the appropriate abilities turn it into a shotgun, a sniper rifle, a machine gun, a mortar, a rocket launcher, or a stun gun of sorts. And that's not even getting into the selection of Trick Arrows at their disposal.
• Sword and Sandal: The game is set in Ancient Greece amidst the political turmoil and chaos of the Peloponnesian War. Additionally, the Eagle Bearer and every armed participant in the conflict uses swords, spears, and other weapons in addition to wearing sandals on their feet. The game certainly qualifies as a non-Roman example of this trope.
• Sword Sparks: Every successful parry in melee combat produces a spectacular light show of these, regardless of the weapons involved (even barehanded).
• Take a Third Option: Sometimes there are other ways to deal with the Sadistic Choices the game likes to present you. An example is the theatre sidequest on Euboea. The quest concludes with the owners being threatened by a group of thugs. If you initiate the cutscene you're ultimately forced to choose who will die: the husband or the wife. But if you instead attack the thugs from afar, and keep the couple safe, another cutscene will trigger after the thugs' deaths with both husband and wife injured but alive. The game doesn't tell you about this option at any point, so it's up to the player to discover when and if this trope applies.
• Take That!: If the player tries to outright buy one of the challenge tokens for the Minotaur challenge, one of the challenge givers will outright admonish the Eagle Bearer for wanting to "Pay to Win", asking them where their "Sense of pride and accomplishment" is... and outright mocking some of the practices in the game itself.
• Talk to the Fist: In the opening, a Persian soldier's bragging about the imminent slaughter of the Spartans is interrupted by Leonidas introducing him to the pointy end of his spear — right through the mouth.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Once again, an Isu addresses the Animus operator instead of the simulation subject. Aletheia, the maverick Isu scientist speaking through time, addresses Layla directly through the Animus simulation in her final missive after the fourth Project Olympos artifact is delivered to Atlantis. It leaves the Eagle Bearer scratching their head over its meaning, and Pythagoras rants about the nonsense of it.
• Thicker Than Water: Played with with the protagonist's family. Depending on the player's choice, the Eagle Bearer can believe this as wholeheartedly as Myrrine does, and the story can follow suit—with their estranged sibling rejoining the family. However, the opposite can also be true, with the Eagle Bearer forsaking their sibling and their sibling doing the same—ultimately ending in a Duel to the Death.
• Techno Babble: Upgrading the Spear of Leonidas at the Ancient Forge is always preceded by the AI announcing "Forge activated. Synchronizing retransmission chronocity^note "chronicity" in the subtitles... Contact engaged." One of the first things Aletheia does when the Eagle Bearer starts sealing Atlantis is to mock this sort of pretentious Isu lingo.
• Tempting Fate: "Surely, he can swim." said the Eagle Bearer after Sparta's Olympic pankration champion, Testikles, accidentally falls off a dock and into the sea. He ends up getting eaten by a shark.
• That Man Is Dead: The sibling you don't choose for your avatar is renamed Deimos by the cult and refuses to acknowledge their birth name.
  Deimos: You use that name as if it means something to me... The one you love is dead.
• Third Line, Some Waiting: Instead of a single campaign, there are three separate but deeply connected story arcs to complete in the game.
  • The Family arc is the primary campaign, but not the last one.
  • The Cult arc is stretched out all over Greece.
  • The final arc involves Atlantis and your true father as well as leading to the true ending of the main game.
• Threatening Shark: Great white sharks are an enemy type you can encounter while swimming.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Your character can accuse a woman of this in one of the sidequests of Lesbos, after learning she and her lover were secretly meeting at the edge of a forbidden, petrified forest haunted by a dangerous monster, which has killed dozens if not hundreds of adventurers and mercenaries before, and that the allegedly combat-capable one of the pair got captured. Sure enough, she ends up dead by the end of the storyline, alongside her lover.
  • The Kosmos Cultist known as "The Master" takes the cake, however; first, he tells the Eagle Bearer to their face that he's a Cultist, then brags that they can't kill him because he's the only one with the authority to free a certain slave that the Eagle Bearer wants freed, all while acting like a complete jerkass and mistreating everyone within ten feet of him, including the Eagle Bearer themselves. And then he tries to use his authority to leverage the Eagle Bearer into killing someone for the Cult. Should the Eagle Bearer accept, he keeps to his word and frees the slave, but if the Eagle Bearer refuses, he cuts ties with them and, just to twist the knife, says he will have the slave in question beaten for even daring to request his freedom. Either way, however, the man literally wilfully gives up the one thing keeping a spear out of his chest and then turns his back on the Eagle Bearer. It doesn't even take three guesses to figure out what is meant to happen next.
  • Freed captives tend to celebrate their release by sprinting laps around the camp they were held, for no apparent reason other than to aggro all the remaining guards and get their unarmed selves killed.
• Tournament Arc: The Battle of a Hundred Hands arc is a serious version. The Pre-Trials of the Minotaur is decidedly not.
• Trail of Bread Crumbs: In the Labyrinth under Knossos, you can find the string left there by Theseus, which leads you straight to the body of the last person to enter the Labyrinth before the Eagle Bearer.
• Treasure Map: Xenia's quests involve the Eagle Bearer hunting down a specific treasure for her from one of three possible locations that can be found by matching up treasure maps that she gives you with the correct part of the world map.
• Trick Arrow: Odyssey takes a leaf out of the rebooted Tomb Raider series' book and gives you access to non-lethal paralyzing arrows, fire arrows, poison arrows, explosive arrows ^note essentially fire arrows with a splash radius and death arrows^note like normal arrows, but travel faster and deal more damage. All but the death arrows can be unlocked through a Hunter tree ability, and all special arrows must be crafted from the inventory menu if you don't want to rely on very rare drops from Elite Mooks or arrow racks. Additionally, you can also use the Fire or Poison Weapon skills to temporarily add the respective effect to ALL of your arrows for a short time, or find Legendary Bows.
• True Companions: The Eagle Bearer forms one with Barnabas, Herodotus, Sokrates, Hippokrates, Aristophanes, and Alkibiades. Not only do the others become some of the player character's biggest supporters and friends, but they also work to help discredit Kleon in the eyes of Athens after he takes over following Perikles' death.
• Turns Red: A lot of enemies become more dangerous once their health drops low enough, usually by activating special abilities or entering the "Enraged" mode that increases their speed and damage output. This includes not only Elite Mooks and bosses but also numerous types of Mooks, although it tends to be one hell of a lot more dangerous when a boss gets angry, naturally.
• *Twang* Hello: Upon reaching the hideout of the Delian rebels, the Eagle Bearer is met with the spears of several rebels just before their leader, Kyra, makes her presence known with a throwing knife.
  Eagle Bearer: I've come in response to a call for help.
  (knife whizzes by their face and hits the wooden beam right next to them)
  Eagle Bearer: (mildly annoyed) You missed.
• Unblockable Attack:
  • When you see an enemy glow red all of a sudden, get the hell out of the way before they finish - they're winding up a particularly powerful attack that can't be blocked, only dodged. Some enemies only do this rarely, others when they Turn Red, and a few do nothing but.
  • The ultimate Hunter ability, Ghost Arrows of Artemis, lets arrows slip cleanly through shields, other enemies, and even walls. It doesn't matter how many obstacles are between you and your target - if you've tagged it and thus can see it, you can hit it, even if it means shooting through several meters worth of fortress walls. The legendary Athenian War Hero Armor set gives all arrows a weaker version of this ability that can "merely" pierce shields as its unique Set Bonus.
• Underestimating Badassery: Drakios severely underestimates the Eagle Bearer. The first time is somewhat understandable, as the Battle of 100 Hands (a giant, 50-competitor melee specifically conceived as a trap for the Eagle-Bearer) would make short work of any lesser warrior. But after you come out on top in the battle, he really should know better. He and a few of his thugs try to murder you on behalf of the Cult of Kosmos after witnessing your fighting prowess firsthand, and depending on your choices you might have Roxana fighting alongside you. The two of you will probably wipe the floor with him without breaking a sweat.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The game's combat system is heavily focused on the Eagle Bearer's vast array of abilities, so most encounters are given a new spin when you equip the Blade of Yumminess, a legendary sword that increases all damage ratings by +250% while disabling the use of active abilities (passive perks still work). Yes, this includes the Second Wind ability, so no quick healing for you if things go south. Players have compared the new playstyle to that of Dark Souls, especially on the higher difficulty settings where the Eagle Bearer more or less turns into a One Hitpoint Wonder.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • If you're hiding in a bush and try to aim a bow with flaming arrows, you will catch the bush and yourself on fire, revealing your location to the enemies you wanted to shoot (this also happens if you equip flaming arrows and the Eagle Bearer lowers the arrowhead to the ground). The same happens if you start a fire near them. This also occurs sometimes when you stealth-kill an enemy and the torch they were carrying falls into the bushes, landing you in all sorts of trouble. Especially irritating because the Stealth Master ability means your Assassination damage is increased at night, which is when half the guards will be carrying torches.
  • During the original quest that Hippocrates sends the player on to retrieve his notes from a nearby fort, he will warn the Eagle Bearer to be fast, as the man he's trying to heal is on borrowed time. If you disregard this and decide to follow the Priest quest chain instead and/or wait with the military doctor until he finishes with his own patient (rather than threatening or paying him off) Hippocrates' patient does actually die and he will scold the player lightly for not prioritizing the man's life.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • The Eagle Bearer can chose to spare the two thugs sent to their house at the beginning of the game. Do so, and they'll try to ambush them the minute they go out on the road.
  • A pair of exiled Athenians the Eagle Bearer meets on Kephallonia. Despite being saved, they'll grumble about how Kephallonias are all thieves. Of course, it doesn't help if you raided the bandit camp before saving the captured brother, and acquired their loot (not that the game gives you an option of just handing it back to them).
• The Unreveal: In the modern-day stuff, Layla tries asking the Assassins who were present at the conclusion of Uprising just how they got out of an exploding lab and away from Otso Berg without dying. They refuse to answer because they're still getting over the events in question.
• Uriah Gambit: When the Eagle Bearer encounters Stentor in Boeotia, he blames them for the death of the Wolf of Sparta^note whether this is true depends on your choice, and makes no attempt to disguise that he's sending them to eliminate the region's most powerful warriors in the hopes that they'll die in the attempt. He's pretty miffed when the Eagle Bearer succeeds and decides to just kill them himself.
• Vagueness Is Coming: Continuing on from Origins, the Assassins and Aletheia are convinced that something bad yet astoundingly vague is coming down the pipe. At the end of the game, the Eagle Bearer gets a vision of Pythagoras telling them to use the Staff of Hermes to fix a rift in the fabric of reality... which is promptly never brought up again.
• Videogame Caring Potential: The player has the option of going out of their way to be kind and helpful to other people, such as going through the trouble of sparing their own cash to buy medicine for someone's ill father, or choosing to do a mission with little to no violence and death, if they can help it. Though a mercenary through and through, and they have done more than their fair share of illegal acts, the protagonist has the potential to be quite classically heroic.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The player also has the option of going out of their way to be as cruel and evil as possible, such as outright murdering merchants for refusal to pay their debts or their exorbitant prices, kidnapping a doctor and letting their patient die, or going around rampaging and killing innocent civilians to attract mercenaries for loot and infamy.
  • Freeing captives from bandit strongholds is normally a nice thing to do unless you deliberately use them as a distraction because any surviving bandits they come across will attack them on sight, which usually results in the entire bandit garrison leaving their valuables undefended for your looting pleasure at the cost of the lives of the poor shmucks you just "freed".
  • Saving a random NPC from an aggressive wolf or boar sure seems like a deed expected of a hero... but since The Eagle Bearer's attacks cover a large range, and often have an Area of Effect... you'll end up hitting the NPC. Who will then attack you. And killing said NPC will hit you with a bounty. After a few times of this, you'll just ignore these attacks and let the terrified villager die.
  • There are quite a few ways to deal with non-lethally knocked out enemies. Sure, you can recruit most of them for your ship, but some quests require that you actually kill them and you'll not be able to recruit them. There are quite some creative ways to deal with these helpless opponents: you can drown them, throw them off cliffs, use them as bait for wild animals, or light them on fire before finishing them off with another assassinate ability.
• Visible Invisibility: Any "invisible" characters turn into a semitransparent ghost that slightly distorts the view of what's behind them, leaving them just barely visible to the watchful player. The Eagle Bearer is of course easy to see while under the effect of the Shadow of Nyx ability due to always taking up the center of the screen, but you'll come to hate this effect when you encounter the few enemies that are capable of doing the same thing. The Huntsman, Arc Villain of the first Legacy of the First Blade episode, is a particularly dangerous example.
• Vocal Dissonance: King Leonidas of Sparta is one of the most badass warriors in the game. In fact, when he joins the Eagle Bearer in their battle against Persephone in Elysium, Physical Goddess Persephone herself has a major Oh, Crap! moment. However, all this badass cred of his is undercut by his incredibly serene voice that makes him sound heavily sedated whenever he opens his mouth.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Cyclops can be this, especially on Nightmare difficulty. If you intend to assassinate him stealthily, you're in for a nasty surprise, because as soon as you get in range, a cutscene triggers where the Eagle Bearer confronts him openly. Not only is he a massive brute who hits like a truck, with a ton of health compared to what you've been fighting so far, he has two mooks with him, one of whom will double-team you with the Cyclops in melee while the other pelts you with arrows from afar. On top of that, the fight takes place in a bandit stronghold, and if you haven't cleared it out ahead of time, you'll aggro every single one of them, so you're very quickly fighting a battle royale against a dozen enemies at once. If you haven't mastered the fighting mechanics and invested in some decent Warrior skills, you're in for a world of hurt.
• War Is Hell: It's made clear several times through the game that the war is rough on the Greek world. Several cities are surrounded by devastation and deprivation, and Megaris, being right between Athens and Sparta, gets some of the worst of it. The Eagle Bearer even notes war isn't as fun as they'd heard the first time they pass through Megaris.
  Eagle Bearer: So this is what war looks like. Not what the stories made it out to be.
• The War Sequence: As many as you want thanks to the Conquest Battle mechanic. Weaken a faction's hold on any region enough and a conquest battle becomes available, allowing you to partake in a massive battle for control of the region. Help your side win and you receive huge amounts of money and XP plus some epic gear for your assistance.
• Wham Shot: The "Heir of Memory" questline begins with one: the Eagle Bearer travels to an isolated island to meet a contact, and sees Alethia, projecting herself so she can talk to them.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: One side quest involves the Eagle Bearer waking up on a beach with some Spartan soldiers after a night of wine and mushroon-fueled revels, and discovering a full-scale Trojan horse replica that they don't remember building. It turns out to be an Athenian ambush.
  Eagle Bearer: Surely this is the after-effects of the mushrooms. I remember the chicken coop. I remember the farmer's field. I do not remember building a Trojan horse.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: One of Aletheia's recorded messages in Atlanis mentions she has a group of Isu with her. But curiously, when she's met in "The Heir of Memory", these other Isu go unseen, unheard and unmentioned.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Let the plague village be quarantined on Kephallonia, and on visiting the Oracle of Delphi, she'll read the Eagle Bearer the riot act for it. On the other hand, that was the right decision from a purely pragmatic standpoint. If you rescue the last family, Kephallonia is devastated by the plague.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: With every shipyard in Greece churning out warships for the Peleponnesian War, the countless pirate fleets roaming around everywhere can make one wonder where the bad guys are getting their materiel from. Most higher-level pirate ships are top-of-the-line warships identical to the ones the official navies deploy, so there might be a number of deserter captains among them, but that alone can't account for their sheer numbers.
• Where It All Began: The final confrontation with Deimos takes place at the very mountain where the Eagle Bearer's family was first sundered. For good measure, the trope is even invoked in the quest name.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Family arc, mainly where Alexios and Kassandra are concerned, bears a striking resemblance to the Andros/Karone arc of Power Rangers in Space. Against the backdrop of a war, two siblings, separated as children, find themselves on opposing sides after the main hero learns their sibling was abducted by the villains and brainwashed to serve evil. The hero faces the dilemma through both stories in trying to save their sibling or stopping them with lethal force.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The whole of Greece plus the Aegean Sea is explorable, though compressed into 100 square miles. It's also the largest open world of any Assassin's Creed game so far.^note Until Valhalla came out in 2020 with England, Norway and Vinland/Saint Brendan's Island as explorable locations spanning two continents.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • The Kingfisher is a monstrous bastard, but his backstory is rough. When he was a kid, he and his brother got separated in a storm, and he nearly drowned. By the time he recovered and got home, he found his father had died of grief, and his brother had become a slave.
  • Deimos. While they've become a rather terrifying, volatile Tyke-Bomb, they've had an intensely terrible upbringing. They were thrown off a cliff as an infant and brought up under the "care" of a dangerously insane cultist, who fed them propaganda about their family hating them, and twisted their worldview so they'd view themselves as a god. There aren't many specific details about their upbringing, but Chrysis describes it as "giving them pain" and their older sibling calls it "torture". In the final confrontation, they describe a time from their childhood when they watched a friend get torn apart by a lion. They don't seem to have any real friends or support, and even their delusions of being worshipped are only that; delusion. The cult merely fears and uses them, seeing them as little more than a disposable weapon. The worst part? They're so indoctrinated they don't even realize how miserable they are anymore.
• Would Hit a Girl: In combat, enemies treat Kassandra no differently than they would Alexios. For instance, one of the first things to happen to either character in the game is to get slugged square in the face by one of Cyclops's goons.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The protagonists' father, Nikolaos, and Podarkes, the cruel leader of Delos who murdered the sons of a family who was late on their tributes to the gods, and attempted to murder his own daughter, Kyra. Nikolaos regrets it, at least, and will try to atone if the player spares him. Podarkes...well, he's a member of the Cult, so...
  • The Cult Guards waste no time murdering Phoibe when they run into each other.
  • Chrysis. Tortures Deimos from infancy to indoctrinate them, and she'll set a temple with a baby in it on fire to cover her escape when you track her down.
• Wrecked Weapon: Instead of a Hidden Blade, the main weapon is the Spear of Leonidas, an Isu artifact that has various powers. However, the spear only has its spearhead left, so it's used more like a knife or short spear as opposed to a full polearm. Averted after the first upgrade at the Ancient Forge, where a more proper short spear shaft is fashioned for it.
• Wretched Hive:
  • Kephallonia, the island the player starts the game on, is described unfavorably by the protagonist (Barnabas, who is only visiting, agrees with the assessment; considering you find him held captive by the Cyclops on that visit). It's a poor island, filled to the brim with bandits, and under the iron fist of an Evil Debt Collector leading a band of goons. One of the two poor villages had to be burned down to stop the spread of the plague. And depending on your actions, said plague ends up wiping out nearly the entire island, leaving only small pockets of survivors as the plague ravages the island unchecked. The place is so backward that neither Athens nor Sparta is interested in running the place.
  • The general populace of Euboea is terrorized by a ruthless crime syndicate, who has (almost) all officials and guards on the island under their thumb. The central quest chain on the island has the Eagle Bearer do something about it. Also, before the Eagle Bearer comes along, the nation's leader is a Cultist.
  • Korinthia, at least in the Eagle Bearer's opinion. It's being run by a vicious crime lord with a fondness for killing and fornicating (not necessarily in that order), and who's gotten into a war with the local courtesans, who wish to de-wretch the place.
  • Pepkha, where everyone, the children included, is a lying, scamming asshole. The first thing the Eagle Bearer does on arrival is make a note to keep an eye on their purse.
• You Can't Fight Fate: As to be expected from a work heavily influenced by Greek tragedies. Although the choice mechanic means that you can significantly alter and affect the outcome of some quests.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: During the "Trial of Sokrates", the Oracle of Delphi seems convinced that while the Eagle Bearer has by that point burnt through the Cult of Kosmos, they haven't and never will get rid of them completely.
• Young Future Famous People: During the "Trial of Sokrates" quest, the Eagle Bearer runs into a young Plato, hanging around the symposium at Delphi, and already showing some of the philosophical chops he'll be known for... much to the Eagle Bearer's exasperation.
• You All Look Familiar: As is standard for games of this scale, there's a pool of NPC facial sculpts/body types/hairstyles that are mixed and matched among NPCs—even fairly story-relevant ones, like the player's Athenian allies and most Love Interest options. Only Kassandra, Alexios, Myrrine, and a few very key figures will have a fully unique face not used by any other NPCs. The various hairstyles and clothing options do help conceal this fairly well, however.

Legacy of the First Blade

• 20 Bear Asses: One quest in the first chapter requires you to bring five bear pelts to a blacksmith in Makedonia to find an Order member.
• A God Am I: One side-quest has the Eagle Bearer do this to get an ungrateful jerk to stop complaining about their being constantly saved by the Eagle Bearer, but for a good reason. Since the guy hates being in debt, which he feels obligated to repay regardless of how much his debtor insists it's unnecessary, the Eagle Bearer claims they're a god, and since gods can waive debt, they're waiving it for him.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Killing Order goons causes the Wanted meter to rise, but if you get into a boss fight, such as with the Tempest or the Immortals, the meter is cleared so you don't have to worry about a bounty hunter butting in.
• Arc Villain: The Huntsman for Chapter 1, and the Tempest for Chapter 2.
• Artistic License – History: The montage of Elpidios' life shows the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza under construction although both structures were built thousands of years before the Peloponnesian War.
• Awesome Mccoolname: A sidequest in Messenia has a bunch of children discussing their nicknames, which are cool-sounding except for poor Chickenrain. They decide the Eagle Bearer should be called "Eaglethunder."
  Pebble: A hero name is a code name only the greatest, bestest heroes have. It's usually a combination of a cool animal and the weather.
• Badass Pacifist: The Eagle Bearer can be this when facing a group of angry family members of people whom they have killed, by refusing to attack them. Even the Huntsman is impressed.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Sort of... by the end of Chapter 3, though the Eagle Bearer and Darius have killed off most of the Order, Amorges' efforts mean they've wormed their way into Sparta, and his eventual end goal of Sparta winning the Peloponnesian War will happen eventually.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: Near the start of Chapter 2, after discovering the existence of the Tempest, The Eagle Bearer and Natakas/Neema want to help the people who were in danger because of the Tempest and are trying to convince Darius, who is still planning on leaving, to avoid the order catching up to them. Eventually, he states that there's nothing they can do to help the people... without first weakening the Tempest's hold on the region.
• Battle in the Rain: The fight with the Tempest, first against her fleet, then on the beach she washes up on. Curiously, the latter does nothing to stop her setting her sword on fire.
• Big First Choice: Whether you kill the Wolf of Sparta in chapter 2 or not has a big impact on the rest of the story, all the way to the end of the game.
• Bittersweet Ending: Amorges and the Order are stopped, at least in Greece, but the Eagle Bearer has lost their partner, and must give up their child, because the Order will never stop hunting them.
• But Thou Must!:
  • In order to finish the Tempest storyline, you have to kill her, with no option of sparing her. Even if you just punch her into oblivion, the game won't recognize the fight as over until you stab her.
  • Regardless of your relationship with Natakas/Neema and whether not not you chose to bid them and Darius farewell, the ending of episode 2 still has you forming a family and having a child with them.
• Call-Back: The pre-fight dialogue with the Tempest is similar to the one with Deimos, complete with the same verbal cue indicating whether they are too far gone: "The X is my family." (Order for Phila, Cult for Deimos)
• Call-Forward: Before sending their child off with Darius, the Eagle Bearer gives them a red rag. The montage at the end of chapter 3 shows the kid wears it all through their life, passing it through their kids, all the way to their eventual descendant, Aya.
• The Cameo: Aya from Assassin's Creed Origins appears in the last few scenes of the DLC which reveals that she is the descendant of the Eagle Bearer through their son Elpidos.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': For whatever reason, stabbing Order goons will raise the bounty meter, no matter where you stab them. Even if you didn't get spotted, or they're the only one around, the meter will rise.
• Chekhov's Gun: The medallions the Eagle Bearer gathers from the Order members pay off in a post-story quest, when the blacksmith at the Oikos uses them to fix Amorges' blade.
• Conspicuously Public Assassination: Darius' murder of Xerxes I had him stab the man in broad daylight, in front of his guards (who were distracted by an ambush).
• Continuing is Painful: The game prevents saving within hostile areas, so should you die at any point inside the area, all your progress is lost - even though you might have already cleared 99% of a fortress in the last 20 minutes. Leaving the area for a second and returning will autosave though.
• Continuity Nod: The Order repeats the same mantra as the ones Bayek encountered in Origins ("the Order is eternal."). Late in the game, the Eagle Bearer can find a note mentioning their origins in Ancient Egypt.
• Cue the Sun: After finishing Episode 3, the sun finally starts to shine in Messania.
• Dead Guy on Display: The Huntsman covers a tree in a swamp with lots of corpses, of people the Eagle Bearer's killed.
• Defeat Means Friendship: When you meet Darius for the first time, you need to defeat him before his child interrupts the fight and he becomes an ally of yours.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Darius and his kid's hideout in Makedonia has a small one to their family.
  • In chapter 3, the Eagle Bearer is led by one of the Order to a small site on the coast of Messania where they've set up a memorial to the Huntsman, the Tempest and the Immortals.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: In chapter 2, the Eagle Bearer finds evidence the Order and the Cult have worked together in the past. Dialogue in chapter 3 indicates they've been working together since at least the time of Xerxes, but the Cult causing the Peloponnesian War has strained the relationship.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Order believes any and all Tainted Ones (people with Isu DNA in them) are inherently destructive and violent, and have to be destroyed. Unless they can be brainwashed into serving the Order, of course.
  • Some Isu in Atlantis feel the same way about human/Isu hybrids like the Eagle Bearer.
• Foreshadowing: Eagle-eyed players will note Orontas, a contact the player meets in chapter 2, has a bandage over his left hand, which turns out to be covering the scar Darius gave him when they last met.
• Futureshadowing: The Order's scheme in Greece is to infiltrate Sparta and use them to end the war. Anyone who's read up on the actual Peloponnesian War will know that, outside the ancient conspiracy part, this is (more or less) what actually happened.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Artabanus/Darius is the very first proto-Assassin in existence in addition to being the inventor of the Hidden Blade which killed Xerxes. He also raises the Eagle Bearer's son Elpidios, the ancestor of Hidden Ones co-founder Aya (otherwise known as Amunet).
• Happy Ending Override: Episode 2 ends with the Eagle Bearer settling down with Darius and his child and bears a child. Episode 3 begins with their quiet life being destroyed by the Order of the Ancients with their spouse being murdered. Even after the Order is defeated, the Eagle Bearer still has to be separated from their child, knowing that they will never be safe in Greece.
• Heroic Lineage: A big one in the Assassin's Creed universe. Elpidos isn't just the descendant of Leonidas, Pythagoras and Darius, he's also the ancestor of Assassin Brotherhood co-founder Aya and her son Khemu.
• Historical Domain Character: Darius was either the vizier or chief bodyguard of Xerxes I of Persia. He was responsible for killing him and later served as Regent of the Persian Empire for two years.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Discussed. When the Eagle Bearer is confronted with the corpses of the people they have killed, as well as with the relatives of the dead, they can argue that they "had no choice, because they would have otherwise killed me".
• Irony: One of the Order members you can assassinate is essentially The Fixer in Messenia, cleaning up the dead bodies the Order leaves behind in their various operations. Her bio says she's actually pretty amused by the irony of having to clean up the chaos the Order leaves in their wake, since the Order is allegedly so hostile to such disorder.
• Kick the Dog: The soldiers who wash up with the Tempest after her ship's sunk run a guy through merely for asking if the injured woman needs help. Depending on the player's choices, they might stab the Tempest's mother for getting too close as well. If they do, the Tempest kills them in response.
• Kill It with Fire: The Order likes burning villages down for the sake of drawing folk out. The Huntsman threatens to burn down all of Makedonia to get at the Eagle Bearer. Episode 3 begins with them burning down the village the Eagle Bearer has retired to.
• Mood Whiplash: The beginning of Episode 3. Just as the Eagle Bearer and Darius are having a nice conversation, the Eagle Bearer notices smoke coming from the nearby village.
• More Dakka: The aptly named Rapid Fire ability, added with the Legacy of the First Blade DLC's second episode, lets you rapid-fire arrows at a rate of 4-5 shots per second. Naturally, this burns through ammo at an alarming rate, and it consumes adrenaline frighteningly fast, to boot. It's also fairly tricky to use effectively at anything beyond close range (which means, enemies will already be charging you in melee when you're that close), so while it's definitely fun to use, its combat value is dubious.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • A bad-tempered old lady asks the Eagle Bearer to kill some mercenaries simply because they were loitering near her favorite drinking spot, and ruining the view.
  • The reason Darius and Amorges came to blows. Darius felt murdering anyone associated with the Order was the better idea, while Amorges felt joining them was the way to go, rather than killing Xerxes' son. So he did.
• No Body Left Behind: The Death Veil ability introduced alongside episode 1 makes the bodies of all enemies killed via assassination disappear completely, removing the need to hide your stealth kills. Needless to say this is a huge help whenever a sneaky approach is needed, especially since it only costs one single ability point.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Several times, the player comes across some of Darius's handiwork - dead mooks, and plenty of them, including one instance where he's found surrounded by Cultist soldiers.
• One-Steve Limit: Can get a little confusing, with Darius (the Tainted One), Darius (long-dead king of Persia), and Darius, Crown Prince of Persia.
• Order Versus Chaos: The Order see themselves as order (fancy that) against the inherent chaos of the Tainted Ones. They're also not particularly crazy about the mess the Peloponnesian War is causing. And they're prepared to kill as many innocents as needed to bring about that order.
• Precursor Heroes: Artabanus/Darius, the Assassin responsible for the death of Xerxes.
• The Reveal:
  • Darius used to be friends with the Huntsman, and Amorges, the current head of the Order of Ancients.
  • The mysterious man Amorges has guarding the Eagle Bearer's son turns out to be Darius, grandson of Xerxes.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • One sidequest ends with the Eagle Bearer going after the mercenary who killed an old lady they'd met.
  • The entirety of chapter 3 is the Eagle Bearer and Darius going on one against the Order.
• Rule of Three: A sidequest, "Thinning out the Competition" has the Eagle Bearer go after three mercenaries.
• Secret Test of Character: Darius puts the Eagle Bearer through one of these when sending them against the Recruiter.
• Shout-Out: Two more to Prince of Persia': the Dagger of Time and King's Sword appear as the "Edge of Time" and "The Sword of Kings" legendary weapons (with the latter being one of, if not the, best sword for a warrior build).
• Shoo the Dog: A quest in Messania has the Eagle Bearer try to persuade a mother to let her daughter go, rather than keep her in Messania, where her mother is a rebelling slave.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Darius likes pulling this on the Eagle Bearer, even managing to do one in the middle of a crowded symposium. At the beginning of chapter 2, he manages to do so when the Eagle Bearer looks away for just a second. When they're standing on a cliff. His child just shrugs in a "go with it" sort of way.
• The Stinger: Orontas, one of the Eagle Bearer's allies in episode 2, is revealed to be Amorges. He then instructs a minion to send word back to Persia to bring in the metaphorical artillery to handle the Eagle Bearer, setting up episode 3.
• Take a Third Option: When the Huntsman tries to sic the relatives of people the Eagle Bearer's killed on them, the player can try to talk their way out, or threaten to attack. There is another option: let the timer run out. The Eagle Bearer neither justifies nor defends themselves, nor threatens the innocent people, much to the Huntsman's surprise.
• Taking You with Me: After being shot with a barrage of arrows, Leonidas falls to his knees and sees a Persian soldier who looks alot like him arrive on the scene, and the soldier stabs him, only for Leonidas to stab him in return.
• Take Your Time: Invoked by this DLC onto the main campaign. The end of Episode 2 includes a Time Skip of about a year. This is a problem if you've started the DLC in the middle of the main story, where you could theoretically, say, take an entire year to meet up with Stentor in Boeotia and capture the region. In just about any situation it also means that Barnabas and Herodotos are on the Adrestria doing nothing the entire time.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The usual Assassin sigil is replaced by a lambda comprised of two pillars and a Greek helmet, representing the game taking place during Classical Greece, the protagonist being from Sparta (The lambda being the city's traditional symbol), and the fact that the Assassins as we know them don't even exist yet.
• Time Skip: There's one of about a year at the end of the DLC's second episode. The Eagle Bearer and their love interest use the time to have a child and found a family.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Inverted. A side-quest has a man write a note to the Eagle Bearer complaining about their saving his life—he can barely afford to reward the Eagle Bearer! A later side-quest has him then complain about them saving his brother's farm as well—how dare they continue to help him! And then there's a third quest, after which he declares that he owes the Eagle Bearer something most precious of all: a favor. Of course, by that point, there's nothing he can possibly do to help the Eagle Bearer. So you'll have to settle for either recruiting him for your ship or one more priceless treasure.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Some of the Order members you confront are just greedy sadists, but there are those who believe the Order's mission of limiting the chaos presented by the Eagle Bearer and other human-Isu hybrids. Amorges is one of these, and makes a good point to Darius that his ideals led him to nearly kill Xerxes' successor before he had done anything, good or bad.
• Would Hurt a Child: A Persian commander the Eagle Bearer runs into in episode 3 likes using them for slave labor, and it's implied that if he kills the Eagle Bearer, he's going to mutilate the kids afterward.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: Both the Herald and Amorges tell the Eagle Bearer they cannot truly kill off the Order because of this. And as Origins proves, they're right.

The Fate of Atlantis

• Alien Sky: The sky in Elysium looks normal at first glance... aside from the constant aurora, and what looks an awful lot like a gas giant hanging in it.
• All for Nothing: One of Adonis' quests in Elysium is to recruit King Leonidas himself for the rebellion, and one of Persephone's quests slightly later is to kill that same person for that very reason. If you actually do the latter, the Eagle Bearer not only suffers a major My God, What Have I Done? moment for just having sent their own grandfather from paradise to hell, Persephone also stiffs them of their promised reward, making the whole thing entirely pointless both In-Universe and out. Also, attempting to Take a Third Option by offering up a different person results in Persephone still dicking the Eagle Bearer over, with the added guilt of betraying someone who thought the Eagle Bearer was their friend. For extra points, the next episode reveals Persephone's offer to resurrect either Phoibe or Brasidas was pointless anyway - Phoibe was already in Elysium, and Brasidas is stuck in Tartaros.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Isu troops all have deep blue skin. It's a side-effect of their brainwashing, wearing off if the Eagle Bearer liberates them.
• Amazon Brigade:
  • All of the spear-wielding Elysian Wardens are female.
  • All three of Persephone's captains are famous women from Greek mythology.
• Anti-Magic: Isu troops have multiple abilities that freeze or outright sap the Eagle Bearer's adrenaline bar, making it considerably more challenging for the player to use special abilities in combat.
• Artifact of Doom: The Staff of Hermes Trismegistus, retrieved both by the Eagle Bearer in their time, and by Layla in the present, possesses dangerous powers; besides being a Reality Warper in its own right, it amplifies the battle rage of its wielder, as poor Dr. Victoria Bibeau found out. The simulations were created to help the Staff's wielders deal with its power.
• Artistic License – Biology: Throughout the story, there's a lot of talk about the Staff "corrupting" Layla's DNA as the explanation for why her mood's taking a southern turn.
• Atlantis: The third episode allows the player to see the city in its prime.
• Attack Reflector: Parrying an Elysian Colossus' Hand Blast sends the energy beam right back to sender, staggers the Living Statue and deals a nice amount of damage.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Assuming the player has done everything in Hekate's questline properly, they can turn Persephone against her by using Hekate's favored weapon - lies and plenty of them, painting Hekate as the guilty party.
• Bleak Level:
  • All of Tartaros. In fairness, it's the afterlife for the dishonoured dead. It isn't supposed to be nice.
  • One portion of Atlantis, thanks to a horrific plague running rampant. If the Eagle Bearer helps cure it, it's lifted, and the area lights up again.
• Body Horror: Abounds during the final quests of the Judgment of Atlantis DLC episode. Some of the Isu (namely, Aita and Juno) were up to some seriously messed-up shit back then. If you know anything about the mentioned characters from previous titles, none of that should come as a surprise.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Several in Judgement of Atlantis, who look like regular Elite Mooks... right up until you try to shank them, at which point they turn out to be much tougher.
• Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous: The point Alethia is trying to impress on the Eagle Bearer in Fate of Atlantis, first by showing Persephone's oppressive rule (order) leading to rebellion, and Hades' lack of concern leading to madness.
• Bowdlerization: In the modern day segments of Fate of Atlantis, Layla's files include entries on the old Greek legends of the gods, albeit leaving out certain details such as the vast amounts of incest going on.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: All those Isu soldiers are brainwashed humans. A quest in Elysium has the Eagle Bearer using the Staff to de-brainwash them.
• But Thou Must!:
  • The Fields of Elysium episode gives you countless options to ingratiate yourself with Persephone, implying a peaceful path to leaving Elysium exists in the narrative. All it does is not turning Persephone's Akropolis into a hostile zone after your verbal showdown with her and Hekate, and since this doesn't happen until right before the Final Battle, it's virtually meaningless. Supporting Adonis' violent uprising is thus the only way to finish the episode.
  • Pretty much every major quest in Elysium. You cannot tell Hecate to piss off, refuse Persephone's offer or leave Adonis to his own devices. You have to help all three, no choice whatsoever.
  • One of Atlantis' districts is being ravaged by a plague, so the local archon sends you to get him the prototype of Consus' Shroud of Eden (yes, that one) to heal the afflicted. If you choose to suggest purging the infected instead like you did in Athens before, he angrily rebukes you and lets you fetch the Shroud anyway.
• Call-Forward:
  • One of the Isu armor pieces the Eagle Bearer can get their hands on notes it will one day be found by the Hidden Ones co-founder Bayek.
  • As Pythagoras tells The Eagle Bearer (canonically Kassandra) about the origins of the Cult of Kosmos and the Greco-Persian Wars, they see visions of the future conflict between the Assassins and the Templars that will span for millennia as well as their encounter with Layla Hassan in the present day.
• The Cameo: Ezio Auditore briefly appears in a vision of the future seen by the Eagle Bearer.
• Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of Torments of Hades, the Eagle Bearer retrieves an Apple from Cerberos after killing him, which goes unmentioned for the rest of the episode. It's at the end of the next one that Poseidon reveals what it was for - activating Atlantis's self-destruct mechanism.
• Chekhov's Gunman: An early sidequest in Throne of Atlantis deals with the Eagle Bearer assisting a woman named Lyra, who has somehow been forcibly turned into a werewolf. She later reappears in the main quest-line, where it turns out she's one of Aita's test subjects.
• Clairvoyant Security Force: Whenever guards become alert to you, even though they haven't physically seen you yet, they always know exactly whether you are a man or a woman (they'll say phrases like "I'll find her" or "I'll find him", respectively).
• Clear My Name: A quest in Atlantis has the Eagle Bearer do this for Lyra, who's been accused of some savage murders. It turns out she is both innocent and guilty... she's one of Aita's experiments, turned into a pseudo-werewolf, and has been mauling people in wolf form, unable to control her actions.
• Complexity Addiction: There's a scientist in Atlantis that asks you to solve a Light and Mirrors Puzzle for him so that a couple of light beams power up a large crystal in the center of the area. Thing is, all light sources have a clear line of sight on that crystal, making the whole setup needlessly complicated for no discernible reason.
• Continuity Nod:
  • At the beginning of Fate of Atlantis, in the modern day section, the Altair II crew note Berg's following them, figuring he must've gotten bored "playing Black Cross" and hunting Juno's worshipers, as he was doing in Uprising.
  • One of Layla's notes on the Staff of Hermes Trigemestus notes with its power that it's a damn lucky thing for everyone that Alistair Crowley's attempt to find it, from Project Legacy, never panned out.
  • Charon's design, aside from lacking the helmet, is a dead-ringer for the Helix store version. Hades, meanwhile, is wearing the chest piece of the store exclusive Dusk's Blood armor, and the belt of the Spartan Renegade set.
  • The third episode of Fate of Atlantis is chock-full of these, including temples apparently dedicated to big-named Isu throughout the series.
  • Through the third episode, the Eagle Bearer has to scan numerous Precursor boxes, of the kind the Assassins and Templars spent a lot of Rogue tussling over.
  • One of the Codexices deals with the origins of Eve.
• Cool Crown: All three Isu rulers the Eagle Bearer runs into have snazzy crowns, which also function like Apples of Eden... except when you, the player, get them, of course.
• Crapsaccharine World: Atlantis in its prime is gorgeous... but hiding some nasty problems. Some of its rulers are colossal jerks, there's a plague going about, and humans are going "missing".
• Crystal Spires and Togas: In Episode 3, Atlantis is the epitome of Isu society in the ancient world, complete with... well, the name of the trope! All is not well, however, as Poseidon needs help wrangling his son Atlas, who also needs help with his brothers...
• Deal with the Devil: In Fate of Atlantis's "A Life for a Life" quest, the Eagle Bearer is told by Persephone she will revive one of their loved ones (either Phoibe or Brasidas) if they kill Leonidas, their grandfather. If the Eagle Bearer tries to take another option, Persephone reneges on her end of the deal. Of course, even if the Eagle Bearer takes it, Persephone screws them over anyhow.
• Discontinuity Nod: One of the archives in Atlantis is dedicated to Horus, from the not-entirely in continuity comic Accipiter.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, is actually a fairly nice guy who genuinely seems to care about his passengers.
• Elite Mooks: The Isu troops universally combine the resilience of mortal elite troops with a whole array of special abilities that even most bosses don't have, including Teleport Spam, Frickin' Laser Beams, Stuff Blowing Up and Anti-Magic. There's not a single enemy type in Elysium that could be considered harmless.
• Escort Mission: Two in Tartaros, with the escortees being mortal and very easily killed. And naturally, they've got no way of defending themselves.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Zombies (or some kind of undead-like humans) show up in Throne of Atlantis. They're mercifully weak, but explode into poisonous gas clouds if they get too close. They're the result of Aita and Juno's experiments on humans.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Tartarus simulation in Fate of Atlantis has Tartaros, Hades' home, a giant towering black fortress surrounded by an un-scalable wall (in black, natch) that looks amazingly like Barad-dur. All the Eagle Bearer visits is the basement, which is filled with titan corpses.
• Final Boss:
  • In the Atlantis simulation, the Hekatoncheire. See more about him in Nightmare Fuel.
  • Wrapping up this arc, and the Odyssey as a whole, Juhani Otso Berg of Abstergo returns. Unfortunately for him, he's no match for a simulated-battle-hardened Layla and the powered-up Staff of Hermes Trismegistus.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: In Episode 2, The Underworld/Tartaros is this, though its ruler, Hades, has less control over it as he'd like especially since the Eagle Bearer defeated Cerberos. So he enlists them to find four new Guardians of the Underworld and recruit them.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Comms between Layla and her team are interrupted at times; Aletheia makes mention of an interloper. Come the end of the final episode, we find out who it is: Juhani Otso Berg!
  • In Throne of Atlantis, as the Eagle Bearer explores the kidnapping ring going on, they can find a note mentioning the person behind it is called "Hera". Anyone remotely familiar with Greek / Roman mythology can immediately peg from there just who is responsible what's going on.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: A quest in Fate of Atlantis has a woman trying to make herself part-Isu via their genetic engineering tech. She succeeds.
• Genre Shift: Assassin's Creed has, by and large, been broadly historical. The first two episodes of this DLC go straight to fantasy, with gods and characters from mythology while traipsing around the Greek afterlives.
• The Ghost:
  • Aphrodite and Hypnos play a part in Episode 1, Aphrodite being the primary motivator of Adonis and his rebellion, and Hypnos being the guy who invented the torches.
  • In Throne of Atlantis, it's mentioned that ten of Poseidon's kids serve as Archons to Atlantis. In the course of the Eagle Bearer's quest, they meet four, but the remaining six go unseen.
  • Eve, who gets a whole line of codex entries devoted to her origins, but never makes an appearance.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: The Eagle Bearer may or may not become a major benefactor to the Hidden Ones/Assassin Brotherhood since they took possession of the Staff of Hermes from their real father Pythagoras. It's even alluded a bit in a conversation with Layla Hassan in Atlantis where they tell her that they've seen "too many wars" and saw "too many people die".
• Gilded Cage: In Episode 1, Persephone believes Elysium is this, and wishes to exercise as much control over its populace as she can, despite a growing rebellion.
• Hell Hound: The second episode of Fate of Atlantis begins with the Eagle Bearer having to fight Cerberus. Yes, that Cerberus. And he breathes fire. Also scattered around the rest of the episode are smaller, much less dangerous hell-hounds, who like to eat anyone they find.
• Hellish Horse: One quest in Elysium has the Eagle Bearer recovering one of Hades's horses, who has escaped Tartarus and gone walkabout. However, despite the glowing red eyes, and the blood covering his muzzle, he actually turns out to be a gentle horse.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The legendary Dikastes Armor set comes closest to being the ultimate armor set due to its "Isu Enhanced" Set Bonus. It triggers the moment the Eagle Bearer takes any hit (even a parried or evaded one), lasts for 15 seconds, makes them immune to absolutely anything and increases their damage and melee range while it lasts. Its cooldown of 60 seconds is also fairly short, allowing it to trigger multiple times per battle. The armor's other warrior-themed bonuses are nothing to sneeze at, either. Its only downside is the fact that you need the complete Atlantis DLC to acquire it.
  • The engravings you unlock by fashioning a mace at the Forge of Atlantis give basic melee, ranged and assassin attacks a quite decently sized area of effect, making it so that every enemy around the initial target takes the same damage. Not much use in a Boss Battle, but depending on your playstyle and ability setup, this can multiply your damage output in almost any other situation. Unsurprisingly, these engravings are also restricted to owners of the Atlantis DLC.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Played for Laughs in the Judgment of Atlantis DLC episode when the Eagle Bearer uses a rare moment of peace and introspection to address all of Atlantis in a mock speech as if they were their regent. A little boy then appears behind the Eagle Bearer and tells them how much he liked their speech. He does this even if the player chose to order the Atlantean populace to tear off their clothes and make love all night long.
• Jerkass Ball: In the modern day segments, Victoria Bibeau is extremely distrustful of Aletheia from the off (not entirely without cause - the things Aletheia's made Layla do are already taking a physical toll on her).
• Joke Item: Finishing the Torments of Hades episode of the Fate of Atlantis DLC rewards you with Hades' wicked-looking crown, a legendary item that doubles the damage dealt with... torches.
• Just Before the End: The third episode of Fate of Atlantis is set in Atlantis, an Isu city just as they're noticing the sun is getting a little funny all of a sudden. At the climax, Poseidon and the Eagle Bearer have to sink the city to stop Juno.
• Kick the Dog: The end of one quest in Elysium has the Eagle Bearer threaten the stable boy of Elysium to keep quiet about a horse he may or may not have. There's no option to be nice to him.
• Laser Blade: They're still using physical blades, but two of the three legendary weapons the Eagle Bearer can craft at the Forge of Atlantis sport brightly glowing edges that give off this vibe.
• Living Statue: Most locations in the simulations have spear-wielding bronze statues standing around on plinths. Starting a fight near them may awaken them, which turns them into miniboss-level enemies with an impressive list of unique attacks. If they don't wake up on their own, attacking them deliberately works just as well (a critical assassination can often one-shot them), and the huge amount of XP, money and resources they drop makes it well worth the risk.
• Loading Screen: The Layla transition screen changes slightly, now jolting and shifting erratically, to represent Layla's increasingly worsening condition.
• Loony Fan: A mission in Elysium has the Eagle Bearer sent to infiltrate a gathering of Persephone worshippers, who Hekate swears are rabid monsters, and tells them to poison the lot. Once there, however, they see that, while the loony part definitely applies, they're not exactly threatening.
• Love Dodecahedron: Mostly in Elysium. Hades forced Persephone into marriage, and in her words has "attempted to bond" with her as a proper husband in the past. Persephone herself holds a one-sided infatuation for Adonis, who she is keeping captive away from his love, Aphrodite. Aphrodite is likewise also married to Hesphestis, though given that neither ever actually appear in the game, it's anyone's guess if their marriage is in any way reciprocal. Then there's Persephone's Ignored Enamored Underling Hermes, and if Persephone has even noticed his affections, they go wholly unrequited. The Eagle Bearer can also join in on the fun by romancing Adonis, who can potientially reciprocate, further twisting up the overlapping love triangles.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Fate of Atlantis shows what happens when squishy humans are mixed with an untested Shroud prototype. SPLAT.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Pythagoras reveals to the Eagle Bearer that he is in fact their real father.
• Metal Slime: Don't leave any of those spear-wielding bronze statues standing. They're powerful and dangerous opponents for sure, but they drop obscene amounts of XP, money and other items upon destruction.
• Mind-Control Eyes: The hypnotized minions of Persephone in the Elysium simulation have glowing eyes and dark gray skin. They're lifted should the Eagle Bearer KO and release them with the Staff of Hermes instead of killing them.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The Eagle Bearer investigating the disappearance of some humans in Atlantis uncovers a truly nightmarish plot of Juno and Aita's to subvert Poseidon's rule by turning humans into living weapons.
• Mundane Utility: The Staff of the Dikastes, acquired in the third episode, is a Staff of Eden with an Apple on top of it. What does the Eagle Bearer do an item that has been shown in prior works to give a person invisiblity, the ability to generate holograms and take control of other people's minds? Mostly just whack people upside the head with it.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Should you fail one of the three riddles of the Sphinx (which are randomised at each attempt), you're killed by a laser beam in a cutscene.
• Not Brainwashed: The Isu mooks in Elysium are brainwashed. The region overseers are not.
• Oh, Crap!: A late quest in the first Fields of Elysium episode requires the Eagle Bearer to sneak what's basically an Isu bomb into the fortress that manufactures Persephone's Colossus armies. Succeeding triggers a cutscene that shows one of the inactive Colossi turn its head to look at the bomb right before it goes off, and its facial expression practically screams Oh, Crap!... which is an impressive feat for a Living Statue whose face is almost literally set in stone.
• Only Smart People May Pass: The riddles of the Sphinx, which are necessary to beat in order to gain access to Atlantis. If you only fail one of her three riddles (which are randomised at each attempt), you're directly killed.
• Only the Knowledgable May Pass: Not the player, but the character. Certain areas in Atlantis are locked off until the Eagle Bearer's Sixth Sense is raised, and the only way to raise it is by studying Isu artifacts dotted about the city.
• Optional Boss: Elysian Colossi serve as optional minibosses of sorts to stealthy players. Colossi are always encountered just standing around on pedestals, and they stay that way until you either start combat in their vicinity, do something special (destroying a Marble Maiden statue, interacting with Keeper's Secrets, etc.), or actively attack them first. Stealthing around them is usually not difficult to do, so most battles with them will only happen because the player triggered them on purpose.
• Optional Stealth:
  • One mission in Elysium for Hermes has him ask the Eagle Bearer not get seen or kill anyone while doing it, in case the humans retaliate against him. However, failing to do so has no consequences.
  • "The Beacons are Lit" is much the same, Adonis asking the Eagle Bearer not get caught delivering a bomb.
• Palette Swap: The legendary weapons acquired from recruiting the mythological heroes in Tartaros are altered versions of ones acquired in the base game, with a sickly green tint and altered stats.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: A mission for Hermes in Elysium requires the Eagle Bearer to sneak into a rebel fort and get out with a guy Hermes wants. He suggests the Eagle Bearer disguise themselves - a single Isu helmet is apparently sufficient. Of course, rescue the guy and it turns out the rebels wanted him to escape and join Persephone's service.
• Personalized Afterlife: The simulations Alethia puts the Eagle Bearer through in The Fate of Atlantis, themed on the Greek afterlife.
  • Elysium is a perpetually sunlit land of farms and temples, filled with statues dedicated to Persephone. It should be peaceful and calm, but various conditions mean it is not.
    • There's a specific area in Elysium called "The Bloodline's Home" which is modelled after the Eagle Bearer's family home in Sparta, and seems to be where Leonidas has spent his afterlife peacefully.
  • Tartarus is a grey, smoke-choked land of misery and despair, surrounded by a black and red wall to stop anyone getting out (not that there's anywhere to get out to). There's very little greenery or sunlight, and what there is of the latter is, as the Eagle Bearer notes, not actually warm.
  • At one point during their stay in the later, the Eagle Bearer visits a smaller portion of Elysium, designed to look like their house on Kephallonia, mixed with the place in Athens Phoibe was killed in.
• Proverbial Wisdom: Hermes engages in some of this after the Eagle Bearer explores a tomb for him. Basically, he's saying "what you just found rewrote your DNA", for the benefit of someone who has no idea what DNA is.
• Psychological Torment Zone: Brasidas' experience in Tartaros is Hades doing everything to make him suffer for killing a married couple in life, including making him fight endless battles, setting him against a copy of himself based on Deimos, and putting duplicates of his corpse everywhere.
• Recursive Reality: Aletheia, an Isu sympathetic to humans, created the simulations of this DLC to prepare the Keeper of the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus to deal with its power as for as long as it is in the Keeper's hands; she also created them for the user of the Animus technology in the present, the Heir of Memories, to witness and partake in them simultaneously for the same purpose.
• The Reveal:
  • The one kidnapping humans in Fate of Atlantis, and the one responsible for the Olympus Project? Aita and Juno.
  • At the end of Throne of Atlantis, Otso Berg mentions he's been following Layla since before the DLC started. In fact, he's been tailing her since the beginning of the game.
  • Also, Aletheia reveals that at least some of the simulations has been based on her own memories.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Adonis's rebellion against Persephone is largely because he wants to be with his girlfriend. Despite this, it's portrayed as default good.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Absent in the base game except for one early-game quest, then turned up to eleven in the Fields of Elysium DLC where destroying the roughly two dozen Marble Maiden statues of Persephone rewards one very easy ability point. Apiece.
• Rule of Three: The Eagle Bearer must find three tombs across each of the simulations in order to gain new powers.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • In Elyisum, Persephone orders the Eagle Bearer to kill their own grandfather, Leonidas, ostensibly sending him from heaven to hell, because she's threatened by him joining Adonis' rebellion. She sweetens the deal by offering to bring back either Phiobe or Brasidas in exchange. When confronted, he'll reveal he knows they're there to kill him. If the Eagle Bearer still hesitates, he'll suggest they bring down a bigger threat of Persephone in his place to placate her. Said bigger threat is a human hero Hermes recently had them recruit as Persephone's bodyguard—who, unbeknownst to them, is actually working as a spy for the rebellion. He has also been nothing but kind to the Eagle Bearer, as he knew Pythagoras, and considers them family. It's up to the player to decide which one to take to Persephone, but either way someone is going to die and regardless Persephone convientently comes up with a reason as to why she won't fulfill her offer to bring back Phiobe/Brasidas, even if you followed her orders to a T.
  • In the arena in Atlantis, the Eagle Bearer is told to kill the reigning champion after beating him in a fight. They're informed if they don't, the arena's owner will not be happy. Spare him, and the guy tries to kill everyone present.
  • Aita offers one to the Eagle Bearer: They can step through a door behind them, and supposedly learn their true destiny, in which case he will kill all the humans being held captive... or free the humans and not learn their "destiny". Naturally, going with him is a trap.
• Scenery Gorn: Tartaros, in Fate of Atlantis. In fairness, it's the place the average and dishonored dead go when they die. It's not supposed to look nice.
• Scenery Porn:
  • As gorgeous as Greece is, it can't hold a candle to the Fields of Elysium. Justified, of course, by Elysium being the Greek version of paradise.
  • The Judgment of Atlantis DLC episode finally gives us Atlantis itself at the height of its glory, and with it the most breathtaking city map in Assassin's Creed history.
• Schmuck Bait: In the meeting with Aita in Fate of Atlantis, they offer to show the Eagle Bearer their "true destiny" if they agree to come with him. Anyone remotely familiar with the character, ignoring the fact they've just walked through a lab filled with horrific experiments, should know going with them is a bad idea.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: A side-quest in Atlantis has the Eagle Bearer assist a human woman in gaining Isu abilities. When they succeed, she takes over from Atlas and promises to bring reform to the city. Then, a short while later, the city is sunk anyway.
• Sharpened to a Single Atom: Two of the three legendary weapons the Eagle Bearer can craft at the Forge of Atlantis are stated to have monomolecular edges that enable them to cut through pretty much anything. It's just flavor text, though; they aren't more powerful than other legendaries of the same type and level.
• Shipper on Deck: Parodied by Persephone's Loony Fans. One of the more common talking points of the group is musing whether Persephone's "soulmate" is Hermes or Adonis. Hilariously, her own husband is not at all considered an option.
• Shoot the Dog: At the end of Judgement of Atlantis, Poseidon and the Eagle Bearer sink Atlantis, killing all the Isu living there, because the alternative is letting Juno's sick experiments run free.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: The game reframes a lot of the base game's major mechanics to fit within the story of the DLC. The "war" and "ship recruitment" mechanics are reframed as bolstering and recruiting for Adonis' rebellion during the Elysium chapter, whereas the "Mercenary" mechanics are reframed as a way to track The Fallen for the Underworld chapter.
• Sword Beam: Elysian Wardens of all stripes have an ability that multiplies the reach of their melee weapons for a short time, which to the onlooker appears as beams of bright golden light extending from the blade/tip for a moment. Thankfully, these attacks can still be parried like regular melee swings.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: In order to explore everywhere in Tartaros, the Eagle Bearer must find a full set of armor. Four of the pieces can be gathered by killing the holders, spread across the area. The fifth is acquired at the end of a quest.
• Talk to the Fist: The end of episode 2 of Fate of Atlantis has the Eagle Bearer and Layla trying to punch the Hades simulation (the simulation glitching out at they do so), rather than listen to his gloating. Bibeau forcibly disconnects Layla before the punch connects.
• Technobabble: A minor quest in Fate of Atlantis has an Isu named Neokles using this, much to the confusion of the Eagle Bearer (who, as a mercenary from 4th century BCE Greece, has no idea what the hell he's on about). He has to repeatedly stop and dumb down his explanations for them.
• Wham Shot:
  • At the end of "Gates of Elysium", Persephone, cornered, reveals she has an Apple. Which she then throws down a hole, sending her dog after, before knocking the Eagle Bearer down the hole too. On landing, the Eagle Bearer finds themselves face to face with three sets of glowing eyes...
  • Assuming the player didn't take Aita's offer in Throne of Atlantis and leaves their lab, as they turn away it's possible to see a very familiar woman in white standing behind them: Juno.
• "What Now?" Ending: Fate of Atlantis for Layla. She's still got the Staff, her connection's stronger... but Aletheia's refusing to speak to her, Victoria's dead, the rest of the Assassins can't get to her easily, and Juhani Otso Berg is in the room, badly injured but still alive. She decides to go back into the Animus for one last lap.
• What the Hell, Hero?: At the end of Fate of Atlantis's first episode, Victoria Bibeau gives one of these to Layla for killing a few Abstergo goons. It falls a little flat since they're freaking Abstergo.

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