YMMV / Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The reveal that Aspasia is the Ghost of Kosmos leaves a lot of ambiguity to Aspasia's character:
  • How genuine is Aspasia's motivation? On one hand, she sounded genuine when she confronts the Eagle Bearer at the end after the cult has been destroyed. On the other hand, it's a confirmed fact in the game that Aspasia is a Consummate Liar and therefore should not be taken at her word. She could very well be making it all up so that the Eagle Bearer would spare her life.
    • And even if she is genuine, does that make her worthy of being spared anyways? Even if you agree with her stances on certain topics, she still wants to be supreme ruler over everything and was willing to start a violent war that will last thirty years to achieve that goal. She still sent Phiobe out during the siege on Athens, knowing full and well what the cult is capable of. She worked alongside Complete Monsters like Chrysis and The Monger, and sat by as tens or hundreds of children were brainwashed by the cult to be soldiers. Just because it all blew up in her face, does that undo all the harm she directly took part in? Do her intentions alone really erase the effect of her actions? Especially since she never actually does much of anything to fix it and remains unapologetic in her goals?
  • On a similar note, did Deimos really betray Aspasia and steal the cult from her? Keep in mind that not only is our only source on this Aspasia herself, but the sages also kept in contact with the Ghost the entire time.
    • What makes this particular point very fishy is that there is several obvious points where it's clear Deimos isn't in charge during the family arc. In just the first scene they appear in multiple cultists comment that while they may think they're the leader, they aren't, and that the fact that their family is being hunted is a secret from them—something they later confirm during a conversation on Andros. They have to cover for their elder sibling by killing another cultist and declaring him the traitor instead. Why would that be necessary if they could just order the others to arrest the Eagle Bearer instead?
    • Later, Kleon will even scold them for coming to talk to the Eagle Bearer in prison without permission. Kleon is a Dirty Coward, so this being his instinct heavily implies he's used to being able to order Deimos around without losing a hand.
    • Moreover, the cult continues to function just the same without Deimos around—as it's entirely possible to kill/redeem them with most of the cult still alive and active. But you know who is still around at that time? Aspasia.
  • Did Aspasia truly love Perikles like she said? Or was she using him to gain power in the Athenian government? Once again while she sounded genuine, she was also fully aware that the cult planned on killing Perikles, yet she did nothing to warn him about it. The fact that she knew that Kleon is also a cultist, only adds further ambiguity.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The main storyline of the game has two interconnecting arcs, the "family" arc and the "Cult of Kosmos" arc. The family arc culminates with the Eagle Bearer facing an antagonist who you don't need to fight if you've made the correct choices, and avoiding the fight is actually required for the Golden Ending. This means that the last boss you absolutely do need to fight in the family arc is Kleon, who turns out to be much easier to defeat than any of the other Cult leaders. As for the Cult of Kosmos arc, you can avoid fighting the Final Boss of that arc as well, and even if you do choose fight them, they turn out to be a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • The Hekatonchires at the end of The Fate of Atlantis is hyped up to be a world-destroying Eldritch Abomination engineered to defeat the Eagle-Bearer... and while it can be decently challenging due its exploding minions, with the decent critical hit build you should conceivably have by the endgame it's also possible to demolish the creature in mere minutes with a few Overpower Strikes on difficulties as high as Nightmare.
  • At the end of the Daughters of Artemis questline, which has some of the hardest fights in the game, including a couple listed under That One Boss below, the final boss Daphnae is not even an elite class enemy and goes down in a few hits.
• Awesome Art: What did you expect from an Assassin's Creed game? This game can give the player a great view of Ancient Greece. In particular, the sync points at the Parthenon and the Olympia provide gorgeous views.
• Broken Base:
  • Kassandra being the canonical protagonist. Some appreciate a strong female character, and simply find her more interesting than Alexios. There are also quite a few people who just find her voice acting to be better than his. However, a real Greek woman of the period wouldn't have the freedom and status Kassandra enjoys; this is most obvious in a questline where Kassandra is able to compete in the Olympics while another woman faces execution for merely trying to spectate. The game's producer Marc-Alexis Côté admitted in a June 2019 interview at Kotaku that two-thirds of their entire player base chose Alexios over Kassandra as the Player Character, which means that the majority of gamers who finished the game didn't play the canonical version that Ubisoft intended.
  • Ubisoft banning all player-made missions that only exist to give players lots of XP for little work. One side thinks the missions are banned because they interfere with the sale of microtransactions, while others agree with the decision as all player-made content that is actually worth playing is buried under thousands of XP grinding missions and such low-effort missions can be considered as cheating.
  • The game in general has caught flak for not feeling like a true Assassin’s Creed game, due to having multiple endings (given the series's concept, this would typically be impossible), having no mention of the Assassins/Templars conflict outside of modern-day portions (though the Legacy of the First Blade expansion deals with the first hidden blade-user and an early Order of the Ancients) and making stealth and parkour far less mechanically complex than previous games.
  • Speaking of endings, fans still debate whether the "bad" ending is actually better than the "good" ending, at least when it comes to writing. In the good ending, Deimos is talked into leaving the Cult and reuniting with the Eagle Bearer's family, despite having absolutely no relationship with them whatsoever, as (s)he was taken away from them as an infant and raised by the Cult to be a remorseless, unstoppable killing machine. In the bad ending, however, the Eagle Bearer has no choice but to put down Deimos- an ending which fans see as more believable and not as far-fetched and silly as the good ending. Then there's the worst ending, which is like the bad ending, but Myrrine is killed, since you naively promised to save Deimos. There’s also the secret ending, where Deimos is killed after the Eagle Bearer swears to save him/her, resulting in Myrrine disowning her surviving child for breaking his/her promise. The bad ending is the one which is officially canon.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Finally getting to beat the everloving shit out of Otso Berg at the end of the Fate of Atlantis DLC feels immensely satisfying. The smug bastard is so full of himself that he actually comes alone, armed with nothing but a sword and no special abilities whatsoever, and he's about as resilient as you can expect a human to be when up against a fully trained Assassin (read: Layla) wielding the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus. Curb-Stomp Battle doesn't begin to describe it, and he deserves every millisecond of it. The fact that he survives, ends up paralyzed from the waist down and at the mercy of his worst enemies makes it even sweeter.
  • Considering all the horrible atrocities she committed, including brainwashing a young Alexios/Kassandra into becoming Deimos, it is very satisfying when Chrysis finally meets her end at the hands of the Eagle Bearer.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Several skills and engravings are considered essential to certain builds:
    • Universally, the skills which grant healing, slows down time when detected and refill for partial adrenaline segments are almost always taken. For engravings, "Chance to reduce damage taken by 50%" is considered a must-have at higher difficulties.
    • Non-Hunter builds should invest in Heroic Strike - even if you focus on Assassins, it's a great move to interrupt special attacks and take out those enemies that can't be Assassinated - like Mercenaries.
    • For Hunter builds, Devastating Shot (for its massive damage and bonus to status effect buildup), Rain of Destruction (high-damage aoe that can benefit from Trick Arrows at higher levels, letting you wreak havok amongst whole crowds at once), and Ghost Arrows (infinite range, can pierce shields and cover, can hit through walls for an unlimited distance, and it's also an A.I. Breaker so the enemies won't effectively search for you); all three are invaluable for their sheer destructive potential.
    • Assassins will enjoy Rush Assassinate as it's the only skill which allows Assassin Damage to be dealt at range AND is the only assassin skill you can use while sneaking up on animals. It also ensures that for two enemies with high hitpoints who are near each other, both will be severely injured or dead after the ability. Critical Assassinate is also vital, as it's the only way to effectively assassinate tougher enemies. Equipment-wise, assassins will very likely use the Pilgrim's Set as a crutch as it offers great freedom of movement, making it easier to set up ambushes or assassinations and escaping after the deed is done.
  • One of the later Elite Mercenaries (released as post-launch weekly content) dropped a helmet that let players become completely immune to melee damage.
  • The Call To Arms ability, especially when combined with a Ubisoft Store lieutenant (Assassins from other games,) effectively allows you to double-team and stun-lock any enemy you get the drop on, making large fights and even bosses far more manageable.
  • Due to the staggering difference in difficulty between Thaletas' and Kyra's plans, many players would likely side with Kyra. Not surprising, when you consider that sabotage is frequently easier than fighting an outnumbered naval battle.
  • Abilities in general, come the later stages of the game. Fully upgraded abilities like Hero Strike and Overpower can take off massive chunks of health, and later stage enemies have enough health that even fully leveled up legendary weapons can only chip away. So combat essentially becomes hitting the enemy with your abilities, then killing time until they become available again.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Contested Sequel: Critical reception was even more positive than that of Assassin's Creed Origins, which was hailed as a turnaround for the franchise after years of Sequelitis. In particular, many critics praised Odyssey's expansion of the RPG mechanics introduced in Origins. However, many also criticized the increased reliance on microtransactions to skip the grinding that pads the game out for non-paying customers, the story, and some felt that even with the new changes and additions, it still feels too similar to past games. Later patches eased the difficulty and grind, somewhat alleviating those concerns, but the game still bears a lot of similarities to previous games, especially ''Origins''.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Testikles' death. After traveling across Sparta to get him, and taking him to the Olympics, he slips off the pier just after docking as he runs at the Eagle Bearer, wanting to give them a hug. As the Eagle Bearer looks on, they comment, "Surely, he can swim." Cut to blood in the water and a shark swimming away. At this point Alkabiades tells the Eagle Bearer that it seems they've just gotten promoted to Olympic Athlete. Cruel, but also funny.
  • "One Really, Really, Really Bad Day." Finagle would have a field day with this one. The sheer up to eleven nature of how much simple tasks keep going horribly wrong is so absurd it crosses over and becomes hilarious - and it just keeps happening! For example, the death of the horse-breeder in "A Horse, Of Course." Having fallen hook, line and sinker for some obvious Schmuck Bait, she's convinced that the horse you just had to rescue from bandits is now a Pegasus, and tries to make it fly. By riding it off a cliff, complete with a big, wide shot of her and the horse falling silently to their death. While all the Eagle Bearer can do is watch.
• Critical Dissonance: Go to Metacritic and look up the reviews. The metascore is very good. The userscore on the other hand, is more negative, mostly due to the presence of microtransactions, which some believe are responsible for slowing down the natural character progression. It should be noted that these weren't present during the review window.
• Death of the Author: Given the game’s multiple choice options and different endings, a lot of fans were upset by the fact that there’s a canonical version of the events at all. The fact that Aspasia is canonically spared by Kassandra is notably divisive among the fanbase.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Wild Boars are just the worst. They hit for similar damage as bears, and are much faster and more agile. They're easier to miss because they're smaller and quieter, their attacks are less telegraphed, they attack in twos and threes, and have slightly less health but not enough to take out in a single flurry, so you have to waste a Heroic Strike or you'll lose half your energy. The sole saving grace is that their head hitbox is rather large for the avenue of killing them via marksmanship.
  • Lynxes, mostly thanks to their devastating grab attack that deals horrendous DoT very quickly and also leaves you open to other enemies while you're busy getting the raging cat off your back. The fact that, for some reason, melee attacks on lynxes very often simply don't hit although they should just makes them all the more groan-inducing. They're also the most relentless Super-Persistent Predator in the game, and they're fast, so escaping from them is damn near impossible unless you find something to climb on. Their relatively small size (which makes them very easy to miss with melee attacks too) also means they have a tendency to show up out of nowhere and announce their presence with said grab attack. It's enough to give one Red Dead Redemption flashbacks.
  • Sharks. They are the default enemy for any shipwreck or submerged temple and they are horribly hard to hit because they're so fast. Plus you're underwater. You could stay up top and hope your bow is good enough (they're also immune to poison and burning), but sooner or later you'll have to go down there, and if they get their teeth into you, it's perfectly possible to drown before you're eaten. That said, the long reach of a Spear can do wonders against sharks, as it's swung around orbitally around the player character (which isn't really like how spears work when on land).
  • Among the Elysian soldiers, the spear-wielding Wardens are easily the most annoying because they're basically a caster-type of enemy that tends to hang back while utterly bombarding the Eagle Bearer with abilities that either deal damage in a small area and freeze their adrenaline bar, or deal a crapton of damage in a huge area. Their cooldown hovers somewhere around five seconds, and multiple spear carriers work in tandem to blanket the battlefield in explosive discharges while the Eagle Bearer can't escape because they're locked in close combat with other Elysians. To make matters even worse, these girls are anything but squishy, and they certainly know how to use those spears of theirs, so even if you manage to get to them, getting rid of them is a totally different matter.
  • The enemies created by the Tartaros Rifts can be this if you have to take on two Rifts at the same time. The reason for this is that these enemies are invulnerable until you enter their respective Rift, and since you can only activate one Rift at a time, if you enter combat one half of the enemies will be invulnerable until you kill the enemies of the first Rift and enter the second. Combine this with entering the Rift cutting your max health in half and the fact the enemies are almost universally Elite Mooks, getting spotted and entering combat can get dicey very quickly.
  • Atlantis gives us the Isu Commanders, who are not only super tanky but have access to wild, unblockable spear combos and a souped-up version of the Warden's explosive discharge attack that covers a huge area, does massive damage and freezes your stamina bar. They're arguably tougher than the majority of the bosses in the game, yet they litter Atlantis like simple Elite Mooks. On Hard and above, you're often better off trying to assassinate them instead of taking them head-on.
• Designated Villain: The Pythia, the famous Oracle of Apollo, is actually a puppet being controlled by the Cult of Kosmos to spread chaos and ensure events happen as the Cult wishes. She is portrayed as being just as responsible, reprehensible and receives just as much vitriol from the Eagle Bearer as the Cult themselves for all of the bad things that happen as a result, despite the fact that the Cult almost literally has her at spear-point (in fact, when infiltrating the Cult's hideout, you can find her being tortured for the mere possibility that she told you something actually useful^note This depends on whether the Eagle Bearer killed one of her guards in The Truth Will Out quest. If they did, she gets tortured. If they didn't, the Pythia manages to flee to Argolis and the Eagle Bearer can actually help her as she starts a new life away from the Cult). There's also a sidequest where you can find the son of the previous Pythia who was in the same situation, and the quest's resolution boils down to either "let the son kill his mother to ease his shame", "kill her yourself", or "let her live with the guilt of what she's done." Never once is "she was being coerced and it wasn't her fault" brought up as a possible point.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Barnabas, your ship captain. Keeping up the series tradition, Barnabas is a salty, spirited old sea dog who soon establishes Undying Loyalty to the Eagle Bearer, and his mannerisms and unbridled support of you, no matter what you do, make him hard not to like. Acknowledged by Ubisoft themselves, as there are a handful of post-release sidequests specifically giving him the spotlight.
• Fake Difficulty: For whatever reason, assassination is limited if enemies are searching for you, and the game doesn't really explain why. For example, if you are spotted but manage to escape and hide, you can't take out the guy who ran after you for a while because the button prompt to assassinate them just won't appear regardless of where you try it.
  • Gang Up on the Human and Can't Get Away with Nuthin' are in full effect here, to frustrating degree. If there's any conflict that breaks out and the Eagle Bearer is involved in any way, expect everyone to immediately target them. This can result in situations such as Spartan soldiers teaming up with a pack of wolves and boars to kill you because you had the audacity to defend yourself against a wolf attack in their line of sight, or a Mercenary taking a swing at you in a crowded street (without you retaliating!) and clipping a civilian, resulting in every guard, wild animal, and civilian in earshot to immediately team up with the Mercenary to kill you. This makes any fights in a city a dangerous affair, as even carefully taking out a Merc with well-aimed shots can still lead to hordes of peasants with swords trying to take you out, and your bounty skyrocketing as a result.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • A character-specific example happens with the Eagle Bearer's canonical identity. Two-thirds of players selected Alexios over Kassandra, and some pretend that he is a Spartan mercenary instead of his sister.
  • The fact that Aspasia is canonically spared is also a hard pill to swallow for many fans, due to their perceiving many holes and inconsistencies in her story that call it into question, if not outright refuting it. With that in mind, to many, this ending being canon feels like The Big Bad of the Kosmos storyline got off scot-free and that The Bad Guys Win.
    • And since this is combined with Deimos having canonically not been spared, to many it seems like Alexios was successfully scapegoated by his manipulators and abusers as the ultimate evil while the person who used him got to walk away free and alive. As such, plenty of fans prefer to pretend there is a different ending for the Cult storyline.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Canonically, Kassandra lives until the present day and ends her story after relinquishing ownership of the Staff of Hermes to Layla Hassan. While the series seems to indicate they kept themselves anonymous and disappeared into history, this creates a lot of avenues for them to have met and befriended pretty much every Assassin in the franchise (as Odyssey is chronologically set in the earliest period), if not position them as the true Big Good and Greater-Scope Paragon of the Assassin Brotherhood. This was given some official reinforcement from Ubisoft when a Valhalla DLC has Kassandra meet Eivor.
  • What did Deimos see from the Spear of Leonidas that convinced them to side against the cult?
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Goddamned Bats: Cultist soldiers. While they're not as dangerous as Mercenaries, Polemarchs, and Cultist leaders, they're still annoying to fight; the rank-and-file have heavy shields that resist even Heavy Attacks (which normally overpower them) and Abilities (which normally go right through them), meaning that, unless you have the upgraded Shield Breaker, your only option is to dodge and counter their attacks. Scions are worse, as they're very fast, will dodge arrows, can easily avoid your attacks if you swing at them recklessly, and their flurries of quick attacks are hard to dodge, can't be broken out of if they hit you, and do a lot of damage. Their archers are just as bad as the factions' Marksmen, with the added perk of making heavy use of Poison or Fire arrows to further erode your health. While none of these are especially dangerous on their own, you'll almost always encounter these guys in packs, and if you can't stealthily assassinate a majority of them, can be in for a long, annoying battle.
  • Civilians. Thanks to the bastard combination of Gang Up on the Human and Can't Get Away with Nuthin', civilians who witness you in combat, regardless of circumstances, are like as not to grab weapons and start swinging at you themselves. While they don't do much damage and are easily killed, the game still counts it as murdering innocents, and will sharply raise your bounty. They love to blindside you while you're fighting Mercenaries, Spartan/Athenian soldiers, or wild animals, and if the fight drags on more and more will just keep joining in. It can lead to frustration as you either send your bounty to unreasonably-high levels, or else are forced to run away and abandon the Mercenary/treasure/leather you were after.
  • Mercenaries. When your bounty gets high enough, Mercenaries will simply spawn into the region you're in, and then will aggressively pursue you everywhere you go. While they won't follow you step-for-step, they'll always gravitate towards the general area you're in, and will follow you anywhere; middle of a Fort infiltration in the middle of the night? Middle of a rebel base underground, surrounded by your allies? Romantic, playful one-on-one duel with your Love Interest? Deep underground in a secret volcano base on a remote island, surrounded by active lava floes?! Doesn't matter; they'll show up and attack you on sight, and will even stand around in the background during cutscenes to attack the moment it ends. While they aren't a huge threat to a skilled and/or well equipped player, the buggers are persistent and ever-present, and at higher bounty levels, not only will they attack in groups, they'll start getting level bonuses on top of that! The only reprieve is that you can pay off your bounty at literally any time by going to the map screen, which is all well and good - except there are two instances in the game where your bounty is locked, meaning you'll be pursued no matter what!
• Good Bad Bugs: Killing a mercenary onboard their ship and letting the ship sail off spawns a featureless white mannequin as a replacement captain. These mannequins can be recruited as lieutenants, though they have no weapons except for bombs.
  • For a time, the drop system was heavily weighed toward purple bows. This worked out great for players, since they're the most valuable gear types. Sadly, it was inevitably patched.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Long before release, there was a leak about a man named Testikles. It turns out he's actually in the game.
  • Legacy of the First Blade's villain poses as a nobody, becomes a minor ally of the Eagle Bearer to earn their trust, and then reveals himself to be an impostor. His name is pronounced almost identically to "amogus".
• Informed Wrongness: At the end of Fate of Atlantis, Layla skewering Berg is played as a dark moment of her going over the line... except this guy's the leader of Abstergo's black-ops team, who has tried to kill the Assassins repeatedly, actually did kill Layla's best friend, and has been following Layla since the game began with the intention of either killing her as well or dragging her back to the Templars. Killing him (or trying to) isn't an unforgivable act, it's just basic common sense.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: One criticism some fans have with Odyssey's parkour system is that it's far too forgiving, allowing the player character to climb practically any surface with zero limitation. This essentially makes scaling large structures less memorable and infiltrating secure areas much simpler. An automatic upgrade even removes all fall damage, meaning you don't have to scale down walls and cliffs either.
  • The game itself can reach this point, too. While combat can be somewhat unforgiving, the level scaling can still screw the player over if they don't tone it down, and certain enemies are very dangerous, it's easily-possible to stack equipment bonuses, abilities, upgrades, and engravings to end up with completely overpowered combinations that can trivialize the game.
• LGBT Fanbase: Play as Male or Female, with little to no difference in story and exactly the same practical/impractical armour models? No gender restrictions for Love Interests, and can romance several or ALL of them in the course of a single playthrough, with two of them being a huge focus of pre-release content? Incredibly muscular and powerful men and women who are treated as equals? It's no surprise that LGBT fans latched onto this game, and happily.
  • Not surprising, considering the game is set in Ancient Greece, which was famously accepting of (male) homosexuality.
• Les Yay: Myrrine and her female general Timo seem to have a very close relationship. Myrrine refers to her as "my sweet" early on, and Timo is notably present by her side during the symposium even though the other generals are nowhere to be seen. Before the Eagle Bearer and Timo leave to fight through Paros' blockade, Myrrine and Timo share a moment, and Timo tells Myrrine, "With your shield, or on it," which is very reminiscent of how Spartan wives would tell their husbands to only return home with their shields or on them (i.e. to only return victorious or having died heroically) before they left for battle. When Myrrine and the Eagle Bearer discuss returning to Sparta to begin hunting down the rest of the Cult of Kosmos, Myrrine looks sadly at Timo standing at a distance before saying that she still has a few things left to do before leaving.
• Magnificent Bastard: Has its own page.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "My friendship with Bioware is over. Now Ubisoft is my friend". ^Explanation  The announcement that Ubisoft would feature romance sidequests in this game (including same-sex ones), while Bioware (who gained popularity with the LGBT Fanbase for including same-sex romances in their games) stated that their project Anthem (2019) wouldn't feature them, made some Bioware fans coin this meme.
  • "New Location Discovered - Prison" ^Explanation  An image macro used as a response to people confessing to committing taboo or outright illegal actions online, most often pedophilia, similar to "Kirby’s calling the police."
  • Jokingly comparing the game's title to Super Mario Odyssey has become somewhat popular online.
  • Spartan Soldier Alarm Clock. ^Explanation  Ubisoft made a cross-promotional video with Amazon due to how similar the names ‘Alexa’ and ‘Alexios’ are, with Alexios literally taking the place of an Amazon speaker. At one point, the mother asks Alexios to wake the kids in the morning, which he does - by blasting a war horn in a sleeping child’s ear.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Deimos crosses it in the "worst" ending by killing Myrrine - their own mother - in cold blood.
  • If Chrysis hasn't already crossed it long before the game began, by torturing Deimos as an infant to break them into the Cult's mindset, she certainly crosses it during the game by setting fire to a temple with a baby inside as a distraction to make her escape (and if you take the bait, she later murders an innocent man to set a trap for you!)
  • While long-time Assassin's Creed players knew the characters were already monstrous bastards to begin with, Juno and Aita are shown to have merrily blasted across the line by abducting dozens, if not thousands of humans, fatally experimenting on them to create the Olympos creatures, in Juno's case out of sheer fanatic racism.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The chord of ascending/descending jingles that plays when Revelation picks up multiple signatures. You either found a lot of lootables triggering your magpie instinct, or got the heads-up on a bunch of enemies. The bounty hunter horn can also become this if you actively enjoy seeking them out to loot their gear (assuming you aren't currently in a fortress).
  • The "roar" and horn that sounds whenever you kill a Mercenary or Cultist; you've just earned a ton of great loot, XP and, in the latter case, made Ancient Greece a slightly-better place.
• Narm:
  • Since the game introduces and places importance on dialogue choices and trees, some conversations are overly extended past the point of credulity; the finale of the Cult of Kosmos story for instance has a long conversation with Aspasia where she blathers on about her justifications and motivations, which takes away from the drama of the two characters.
  • Odessa's romance is extremely poorly written, such as the protagonist flirting with her constantly even as her father is dying from some sickness, or she just got attacked and almost killed by mercenaries after their home. Odessa calls the player out some for their poor timing, but attempting to be a decent person and not flirting with her until all is said and done has Odessa rejecting the Eagle Bearer's advances by the end of it.
    • In a broader sense, while the game allows you to romance anybody, unless more than one option is available in the same quest line, they don't interact or intersect at all. This means that every romance arc is self-contained as if the others never existed, allowing the Eagle Bearer to sleep their way across Ancient Greece without consequence, with their partners being none the wiser. This includes the Legacy of the First Blade DLC, where it's entirely possible to get into a committed relationship, have a child, then in the middle of it all sail off for side quests and enter another romance.
  • The Eagle Bearer's reaction to being on fire basically consists of shouting at the fire to stop burning them. They sound more like an annoyed parent chiding their child for bad behavior instead of, you know, a person who's rapidly burning to death.
  • As pants weren't really a thing back when the game takes place, any underwater scene or lengthy Leap of Faith turns into an extended panty shot.^note Although both of our main characters are very good-looking, so staring at their butt may not be a bad thing. Thank Zeus the Eagle Bearer is wearing underwear.
  • The timeskip that occurs in Legacy of the First Blade can directly invoke this. The skip will be at least nine months, yet if you still have story or sidequest arcs in progress, the people involved won't admonish you for disappearing for nearly a year.^note  This only applies to a Real Life perspective, as the memories relived in-universe do not necessarily follow the same chronological order of events in the Assassin’s Creed universe’s history. For example, the homestead missions in Assassin's Creed III are unlocked in their in-universe chronological order, but can be played any time during or after the main story.
  • The repeatable side quests make use of full-sentence Mad Libs Dialogue. The individual lines themselves don't sound bad, but can lead to absurd scenarios; a hetarae who is also apparently a musician wants you to kill a random Spartan because he insulted her music? How about the priestess of Hera who was attacked by wolves... so wants you to kill some unrelated bandits instead? Or how about the merchant who can't sell his goods to a neighboring city because of hostile Mercenaries after him, so he... asks you for a handout? Made worse because some of these will also have arbitrary dialogue choices that mean nothing and have no impact on the quest, making the whole thing feel even less natural. Most players will probably skip the dialogue in these quests after finishing them once or twice.
  • At the end of episode 2 of The Fate of Atlantis, Layla killing Victoria in a sudden fit of rage is supposed to be her edging dangerously close to the MEH... but given Victoria's behaviour, stealing the item Layla apparently needs to save the world from destruction, and demanding Layla chose between her or it, the whole comes across more like Victoria just being a childish idiot throwing a strop.
  • During the cultist meeting, from certain angles the white masks combined with the characters' dark eyes often has the effect of making everyone there, the protagonist included, look cross-eyed—which quite undercuts the serious tone of the mission.
  • Since the fire physics effect not just the player, but npcs as well, it's very possible for enemies or npcs to set themselves on fire because they stood too close to a brazier. This is an especially big issue in Elis, which features several large open braziers scattered around the two larger cities in the region. It's a frequent sight to waltz into town and watch a bunch of civilians burning to death in the streets.
  • During the cultist meeting where the player is introduced to Deimos, their scabbard is missing the Sword of Demokles. This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that the Eagle Bearer will note at the Great Forge that one of the slots resembles the sword Deimos was carrying at the cult meeting—which of course, they weren't actually carrying. Later, during the Battle of Amphipolis, Deimos is seen fighting with the sword... with another identical Sword of Demokles sheathed in their belt. Curiously, the version of Deimos' character model with and without the sword seems to have been switched in these two cutscenes.
• Narm Charm:
  • The climax of the side quest 'Family Values' is quite ham-fisted, complete with Supideo giving a Big "NO!" and blinding himself with some nearby salt. It is also hilarious.
  • Enemies who have been set on fire during fights will frequently scream "I'M ON FUCKING FIRE!", which is silly but absolutely hilarious.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Through the marketing, you'd be led to believe that this is the first game with a female protagonist. There have been female Assassin characters in the franchise like Aveline de Grandpre in Liberation, Shao Jun in Chronicles, Evie Frye in Syndicate and Aya in Origins. Evie is even in the game as a Lieutenant for your ship via the Ubisoft Club rewards. Likewise, if we consider minor console releases, the first playable female character was Aveline de Grandpre in 2012. Her game, Assassin's Creed: Liberation was originally on the PS Vita. However, Kassandra is the first playable female character you can play from beginning to end in a major console release unlike Evie (a few of the main story missions has to be done as Jacob, her brother) or Aya in Origins (only playable in naval battles and her personal assassination segment).
  • Some players are complaining about the parkour mechanics making the game too easy because you can scale pretty much anything with next to no restrictions. However, this system is barely any different from the one in Assassin's Creed Origins, where no such complaints arose for some reason.
• Padding: One of the biggest criticisms of the game is that it feels very long and progressing through the story can drag on. The biggest culprit is the sharp level scaling in the main story missions, which necessitate Level Grinding the side content (or Bribing Your Way to Victory, if that's your thing.)
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Many consider the story rather disjointed at best, if not outright bad, since it's incredibly easy to have multiple hours between major story missions thanks to side quests and just plain long travel times. The gameplay seems to fare better. That being said, the story itself isn't bad, per se, just has a lot of time spread across it and can come across as a bit cliche at times.
• Player Punch:
  • Some of your consequences can be quite dire, and unexpected. An early example is learning that the family you've saved from being executed for Blood Fever went on to infect and kill most of the island of Kephallonia.
  • The return to Athens certainly counts. If you're not well-versed in history, the Athens plague will take you completely off-guard, where the city looks more like Silent Hill than the shining beacon of democracy, with corpses everywhere and the populace in despair while Hippokrates is powerless to do anything about it. This is also the section where Deimos kills Pericles and the Cult murders Phoibe.
    • Speaking of. Phoibe's death counts regardless of how you treated her. If you were overprotective of her, it comes off as her defying you and getting killed for it; if you were supportive of her desires to help, it comes off as you directly putting her in harm's way. Either way, it definitely feels shitty.
  • By the end game, it's possible that your sibling, your love interest and your biological father are revealed to be evil forcing you to kill them.
  • Save a rebel on Delos Islands who shows no gratitude and open hostility to all outsiders (including you?) He'll repay you by murdering your Spartan ally (and possibly your lover) during the victory celebration.
  • In the Fields of Elysium DLC episode, the Eagle Bearer is first tasked with recruiting King Leonidas himself for Adonis' rebellion, only for Persephone to demand that same person's death a bit later. Going through with the latter not only means literally stabbing one of Ancient Greek's most badass heroes In the Back, followed by the Eagle Bearer suffering a massive My God, What Have I Done? moment for good reason (they just sent their own grandfather from heaven to hell, after all), it's also completely pointless in every respect. Persephone postpones giving you your promised reward indefinitely, so you don't get anything out of killing a very popular character in cold blood, and the whole affair isn't even mentioned again at any point that follows, thus having no impact on anything whatsoever despite the severity of the deed. Good luck with not feeling horrible after going through that.
  • At the end of the Sisters of Artemis quest line, it's revealed that Daphnae has chosen you to replace herself as the leader of the Huntresses... which means you have to beat her in mortal combat. Depending on how long it took you to hunt down each sacred beast, Daphnae may have been a part of your playthrough for a very long time as an occasional lover and/or friend, so the realization you have to kill her is a tough pill to swallow. While you can refuse to, it will still cut off your relationship from her and make it impossible to turn the Huntresses into your allies.
    • If you do go through with it (and had previously romanced her), her dying words will be that she's happy to leave her people under the care of someone she loved.
  • If you killed The Monger publicly instead of following Brasidas' advice to do it privately and quickly, you'll also be forced to kill the Cult's Token Good Teammate, as he will refuse to work with you out of fear that you'll kill him the same way.
    • This has further consequences beyond even that, as it will lead to Brasidas being angry with you during the battle he'll end up being killed in, meaning you'll never get the chance to make up with your friend.
• Polished Port: In August of 2021, Ubisoft released a patch for the console versions of the game to run it at 60FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, leading the game to be much more fluid and responsive overall on those systems.
• The Scrappy: Some like Markos' bumbling mannerisms. Others hate his guts for being an idiot and an exploitative jackass who abuses the one act of kindness he performed in his life to guilt-trip the Player Character into a lifetime of servitude as his Hypercompetent Sidekick. It takes far too long until you can finally tell him to shove it when he comes up with yet another stupid plan to save his worthless life after he screwed himself over... again. Fortunately, a side-quest does exist where you bump into him again, which at the end explicitly lets you abstain from helping him so he can be killed by his own hubris.
  • The only options when saying goodbye to him are "Hug him" or "Shake his hand". "Punch Markos in the face" is never presented as a farewell option, disappointing those who consider him this game's version of Cousin Roman.
    • And then the Discovery Tour mode brought the delusional idiot back to host several of its tours...
  • Alkibiades, to some. At first glance, he comes off as a flighty, perverted drunk who hits on absolutely everyone, regardless of gender or orientation, and can feel pretty Squicky to a player with Incompatible Orientation, or just for his deviant tastes. Then you see his deceitful and manipulative side, and his willingness to use you as essentially a tool to deal with his problems (despite his assurances that he only does so because he trusts you), and it can be pretty hard to like the guy. ^note Which is actually fairly fitting, considering the man had a tendency to make enemies where ever he went in real life, resulting in him fleeing Athens to fight for Sparta, then fleeing Sparta to fight for Persia, then being invited back to fight for Athens again, then being forced to retire after suffering a minor defeat (alongside several other skilled generals who made the mistake of being his ally) despite being one of the greatest generals of his time.
  • Good luck finding a Legacy of the First Blade player who has anything positive to say about Natakas/Neema. While they're not so much detestible, they're fairly boring and it seems like there was way more attention in the game's writing put towards making their father Darius seem cool and interesting instead of them—despite the fact that they are the one the game's plot ostensibly forces the player to have a child with to move the story forward. While none of the game's romances are much to write home about, most of the other Love Interest options have a more developed personality and a least a bit of chemistry with the Eagle Bearer. And of course, a game which gave players previously the choice on Kassandra/Alexios' sexuality suddenly pivoting and forcing the player into a heterosexual relationship rubbed much of the game's LGBT Fanbase the wrong way.
  • In the real-world segments of the Atlantis DLC, Victoria quickly becomes incredibly annoying because, although she certainly means well and cares for Layla's wellbeing, her action constantly get in the way of Layla's work and, most importantly, the player's attempt at playing the game. Few tears were shed when Layla accidentally kills her at the end of the second episode.
  • Ikaros, though only when he starts becoming an attack animal for the Eagle Bearer. He basically ruins assassination missions by attacking random enemy soldiers in the area, who would have been unaware of the Eagle Bearer's whereabouts otherwise.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Animal attacks have a habit of occurring at extremely inconvenient times. You can be lurking in some bushes, waiting for an opportunity to assassinate a target, when suddenly a wolf or wild boar will jump out of nowhere and attack you, most likely taking a big chunk out of your health and alerting every enemy in the area to your presence.
    • If an animal can't derail your carefully crafted attack plan, it'll happily kill the mood instead. It's depressingly common to be en route to a romantic spot with your current Love Interest, exchanging playful banter along the way, only for a pack of boars or wolves to appear out of nowhere and force you into combat mode, which interrupts the banter. Also, nothing like a bunch of rabid wildlife crashing your solemn trip to Athens' cemetery to honour your fallen friends at the end of the main story.
    • Animals attacking quest-related NPCs. Especially since they have a habit of doing it just as you're getting close, and killing them. Or, if you try to help these people shake off whatever animal is attacking them, you'll most likely hit them by accident, result in them turning on you for trying to save them.
    • Killing sharks. If you try to fight them underwater, you'll have a really annoying time of it. You can only really hit them right before they bite you, and timing your swings for that quarter-second window is not all that easy. If you miss, they'll take roughly a third of your health off. You can shoot them with your bow from above the water (something the game never indicates is possible), but while you're safe this way, actually hitting the constantly-moving targets is a real pain.
  • The Bounty System. Mercenaries just simply, instantly teleport to your position as soon as someone posts a bounty, and they can come in up to five at once. That the mercenaries are challenging mini-bosses alone makes them utterly lethal in groups. Somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can always go into the map and pay off your notoriety instantly, the effect is immediate, and drachmae becomes extremely abundant in the late-game. An additional mitigation is their (surprising) effectiveness against the two legendary boars whose pelts you need to acquire.
    • Even players who don't mind the bounty system in general occasionally take offence when a quest sics a horde of enemies at you and then slaps you with a hefty fine for murder despite acting in self-defence. A single fight like this can easily kick you from anonymous to a level 3 or 4 bounty in a matter of seconds, and the more bounty hunters are after you at the same time, the higher their levels gets until they seriously out-level you. Prepare for a Curbstomp Battle brought on you by something completely beyond your control.
  • Strict level requirements on main story missions are a particular sore point among players who just want to focus on the plot and not waste time on the side content, but are forced to grind the side missions anyways in order to reach the minimum required level.
  • Sailing north. Waves always travel from north to south, and since taking waves head-on slows the Adrestia to a crawl, sailing north takes at least twice as long as going any other direction.
  • The level scaling in the game is rather aggressive. Unlike in Origins where only a few locations were top-level by the time the player reached top level, in Odyssey every location scales with you, meaning by the time you're level 50 the entire map is level 47 and up. This means that a player who isn't specifically kitted out to prioritize Assassin damage can only actually assassinate archers and light infantry, with other infantry requiring a Critical Assassinate to one-hit kill from stealth and any elite can only be damaged but not killed outright from stealth, starting combat. Nearly every actual named non-random enemy in the game, such as cultists and other targets, are elites with large health pools. It's fair to say that this is the first Assassin's Creed game where you can't actually assassinate anyone important, at least not by the in-game assassination move. It's nearly always destined to be a boss fight, even for characters who don't really make sense as boss fights, such as politicians.
    • For players who just want to play the story, the strict (and often inconsistent) level scaling slows it down to a snail pace. It can be especially frustrating when a larger string of missions are all under one story that is within your level, but the actual missions are above your level. The game essentially tricks you into starting new missions, only to be hit with multiple road blocks when the actual missions start.
  • In Origins players could easily cheese the boss AI by using the assassinate move (taking off a large chunk of their HP), and then break line-of-sight, putting the boss into "Search mode." Rinse, repeat until boss is dead. In Odyssey, an opponent searching for you can't be assassinated until some time has passed, so even if you hide and sneak behind them again, you can't take them out because the prompt fails to even show up. However thanks to the aforementioned level scaling, higher difficulties can be frustrating, as assassination is almost never a One-Hit Kill on high level officers, and melee combat can be extremely dangerous.
  • For players who value efficiency and like to do everything, some of the randomly-generated sidequests taken from the Message Board arbitrarily ask you to talk to a random NPC somewhere in the world before starting the quest itself. Annoying because other, identical quests DON'T ask you to do this, and instead just point you to the objective, so it can add needless busywork, especially when the quest's ending can require you to turn it in to the same NPC, who can be quite far from the objective.
  • One mission requires the player to burn plague infected bodies, by throwing them in a pyre. Except, throwing the bodies requires holding down both triggers at the same time, which is very difficult to do without triggering either an attack or drawing out your bow, both of which makes you drop the bodies. It may take you several attempts just to burn one body. What's especially frustrating is that the mission doesn't let you burn the bodies with your torch, which you use to burn literally everything else in the game, so the sloppy mechanic just comes off as unnecessary.
  • Horses, though welcome in general for crossing long distances, still suffer from several annoying flaws that can disincentivize some players from using them. They have notoriously bad pathfinding abilities in rough terrain, often getting stuck in insignificant obstacles that a character on foot can just walk through. They also really don't like climbing moderately steep slopes that pose no obstacle on foot, often forcing lengthy detours. Worst of all, coming anywhere near a settlement or fort slows their normally high speed down to barely above walking pace, making them next to useless in many, many areas of the game world.
  • Ikaros attacking enemy NPCs, whether you want him to or not. It makes escaping soldiers if you've been spotted harder, since it makes them more alert. This is especially frustrating if you are trying to kill one particular enemy without others noticing, as Ikaros will alert them. It also can't be controlled, can't be turned off, and can't be unassigned.
  • The constant "You have better equipment than what you have currently equipped" messages that come up whenever you collect new weapons and bits of gear. The game doesn't make it obvious which bit of equipment it wants you to change, and it'll start constantly throwing the message at you the minute you collect a bit of gear that's better than any of the close to a dozen bits of gear you can have equipped at any one time. Worse, the game uses a very simplistic method of determining which gear is "better" without taking your play style into account, so if it decides it wants you to swap out a piece of gear even if the supposedly better one will tank the key stat for your play style, it'll keep nagging you unless you either upgrade your current equipment or disable all tips and hints.
  • Ancient Tablets turn the act of upgrading your ship into a chore. You need a variety of resources to upgrade your ship, almost all of which you can easily earn by playing the game. You get them from resource nodes the wild, salvaging them at sea, and dismantling your gear. Ancient Tablets are the sole exception to this. You require multiple tablets per upgrade, and the only way to get them is to either loot them from Ruins or buy them from Blacksmiths (there's no way of telling which of the dozens of blacksmiths in the game sell them). Ancient Tablets will very quickly become the bottleneck that prevents you from being able to upgrade your ship.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It is set during a major conflict in the history of Ancient Greece that includes King Leonidas as a key character in the story and depicts the Battle of Thermopylae with even a pre-battle speech and a rather anachronistic portrayal of tactics used by the Spartans and the Persians (led by Xerxes). The result? The best 300 game ever made and it goes even further to embrace the connections with Alexios and Kassandra as Leonidas' grandchildren who can perform a move called the Sparta Kick just like their grandfather coupled with the Hot Gates as one of the locations that can be visited by the siblings, a sidequest called Dining in Hell and even an achievement simply called "This is Sparta!" all of which are lifted directly from Zack Snyder's 2006 movie adaptation as one blogger has noted in his review of the game. Alternatively, it could be seen as a better sequel to 300 than the actual sequel that was made only this time it focuses on the descendants of Leonidas during The Peloponnesian War.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There are countless ways to make this game harder without changing the difficulty or level scaling settings, but abstaining from the use of legendary items/perks and never paying off a bounty seem to be among the most popular ones.
• Signature Scene:
  • The prologue flashback scene with King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans vs. the Persian Army at the Battle of Thermopylae.
  • The Goat Scene.
• Squick: The quest "Age is Just a Number," where an elderly woman, Ausexia... vividly recounts her passionate sex life. Made particularly bad if the protagonist tells her not to expound on it, and she does so anyway.
  • Alkibiades can fall here. His introductory scene is an orgy with both men, women, and a goat... which he invites the player to, regardless of gender. (He insists the goat was just watching, though.) Every appearance is filled with innuendos and flirtations directed at everything that moves, which can be pretty uncomfortable for some players.
• Spoiled by the Format: The twist that the protagonist's younger sibling is Deimos will be obvious the moment Deimos first appears. It's revealed early on that the name of the infant sibling matches that of the protagonist you didn't choose to play as, and it's immediately clear that Deimos shares their appearance—which you would have seen during the beginning character-select— so it isn't difficult to put two and two together. Though to be fair, The Reveal officially doesn't follow too far behind.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Pretty much all romance options are incredibly rushed, with it taking not even 3 dialogues until both parties confess their eternal love to each other.
    • Odessa's is perhaps the worst one, as the protagonist's relationship with her is almost better if you don't romance her. When you romance her, the protagonist basically just endlessly badgers her for sex while mostly ignoring everything else going on, whereas keeping things platonic will allow for better conversations.
  • At the end of the Shadow Heritage DLC, regardless of your final choice regarding Natakas/Neema as well as your relationship with them, the game still ends with your character having a child with them.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Stink Eye" requires you to reacquire the eye of the Cyclops which you stuff into the goat's rear end in the cutscene on Kephallonia. It involves randomly hunting down a multitude of goats on the island until you just manage to land on the goat with the eye by random accident. The only upside is that the obsidian eye actually does raise the price of the trade goods.
  • "Top of the Food Chain" is another luck and grind based achievement that needs you to reach Mercenary Tier-I. Going up the mercenary tiers (which can only be done by steadily killing mercenaries on a higher level than your current position) can only be done when you find and locate mercenaries by randomly stumbling across them in the game world while also picking up mercenary clues from fallen foes. This isn't a problem if you find the mercenary names on a tier, but it's a pain when you are one step to Number 1 trying to find clues on the one randomly processed mercenary who's escaped your part. To make things worse, if you kill or recruit mercs it takes them out of the food chain, leading to new names to be added, further adding hay on to the pile as you find the one mercenary out of a constantly updating random stream of new and unknown names.
• That One Boss:
  • The Kalydonian Boar, the first of the Daughters of Artemis sidequest line. Many a thread has been dedicated to raging about how many times they've died to it. It's not really its own attacks that are the problem, but it being a Flunky Boss who summons mooks that hit just as hard as it, charge from out of the view of the camera, and constantly. This can be mitigated somewhat by hanging around on its cave and sniping it, or alternatively, knocking out the summoned boars by Sparta Kick, Paralyzing Arrows, or bare-handed strikes to keep them from respawning. It is also quite early in the game, when the player is relatively underpowered.
  • The Erymanthian Boar. This time, instead of being a Flunky Boss, it drops poisonous clouds that can easily kill the Eagle Bearer in moments, the frequency of the attack making even the highest level of the heal skill a means to just buy you more time to try and kill it quickly. That said, the fight can be won without ever taking damage by simply evading the boar's charges while pelting it with arrows until it drops (it spawns the gas cloud only when attacked in melee). Takes a while, but is safe and easy to pull off.
  • The third episode of the Legacy of the First Blade DLC introduces another one: the Immortals, a pair of Persian elite warriors with ludicrous amounts of health and many extremely dangerous abilities. One is a rogue-type enemy, quick in melee and even more lethal with his bow. The other is a shield-bearing Brute^note who's immune to the Shield Breaker skill, to boot with all that entails. You first fight the rogue down to half his health, then the Brute takes over until he's down to half health, and then you must fight both simultaneously. The Brute in particular spends the entire third part of the battle unleashing nothing but devastating, unblockable attacks with considerable area of effect, making it very hard to get even a single hit in without taking heavy damage. He's also fairly fast and has very quick pounce attacks that are hard to dodge, so taking him down with arrows isn't particularly viable either. This comes after a long string of much easier battles (in fact, the entire base game doesn't put you up against anything this difficult) and right at the beginning of the DLC episode, so you can be forgiven for getting your ass handed to you simply because you didn't expect such a ridiculous difficulty spike out of nowhere.
  • The Medusa in the Atlantis questline is often regarded as the hardest fight in the entire game. She starts the fight with an invincible shield, has laser eyes that slow you if they hit (making you easier to hit) and send pulses that damage you, forcing you to get behind a pillar. After she fires this, she uses a blast attack that comes straight from the sky, meaning you can't just stand still - but if you're too far she'll use the blast attack multiple times. Get up close and she uses a grab that can take away a huge amount of health, and a knockback. Oh, and she teleports A LOT, and so is easy to lose track of. Oh, and at each third of her battle, she summons six heavy-hitting stone warriors while surrounding herself in an invincible shield and alternating her range attacks. Your ONLY approach is a medium range strategy, so that she alternates her attacks predictably and you can take out those stone soldiers - but if you try to melee them you'll be surrounded and die. While occasionally dashing in with Overpower or Hero Strike is not out of the question, are you good with status arrows? You will be by the end of this fight.
• That One Component: Ancient Tablets are required for most ship upgrades, but they're also the only resource you can't just pick up in the wild everywhere, or get from disassembling equipment. They're found in ancient ruins all over the Greek world instead, a measly four pieces at a time, and since most of them are locked behind a Beef Gate of some sort, you won't be able to fully upgrade the Adrestia until well into the late game no matter how much leather, wood or iron you've stockpiled. They can also very rarely be bought from blacksmiths in limited quantities.
• That One Level: Near the end of the game there are two (potentially three, depending on your choices) sections of the main questline during which the Eagle Bearer has an unclearable bounty on their head for as long as they are in an entire country until a certain cultist is eliminated during the story. This can make completing quests considerably more challenging, and very frustrating, because you are constantly being tracked by multiple bounty hunters, who always seem to figure out exactly where you need to be doing things and decide to patrol that exact area, and killing them only briefly relieves the pressure since the bounty can't be paid off and doesn't decay over time. On the plus side, there's no down side to killing Mercenaries... Unless you have to deal with three at once.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "Free Their Minds, The Rest Will Follow" from the Fields of Elysium DLC requires the Eagle Bearer to recruit eight new resistance members from each of the map's three main regions. In other words: you're forced to non-lethally take down 24 Elite Mooks, followed by going through the animation of the Eagle Bearer freeing them from Persephone's mind control with the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus every time. It's not particularly dangerous nor difficult with the right tactics, but very tedious to pull off. At least you get an achievement for it, and the conquest battle right before the Final Battle becomes a lot easier thanks to all the manpower on your side.
    • At this time, any mooks recruited prior to the sidequest don't count towards the numbers in the sidequest itself. Which is irritating since you can learn about liberating Elysian soldiers from the loading screen long before you get the sidequest itself (and there's an achievement that outright mentions it).
  • The base game has something similar, only worse: the Polemarch Seals quest chains handed out by Lysander in Sparta and Demosthenes in Athens. Both send you to kill the polemarchs commanding enemy forts, three times per quest, and both give out five of these quests before they're content. In other words, you have to infiltrate the most heavily defended locations on the map to kill and loot the most powerful enemy within, a total of 30 times, all for negligible rewards (although the XP gain isn't bad for fresh characters). This is especially painful in a fresh game because the quest givers are located in level-locked regions you won't be able to get to for a while, and polemarchs don't drop their seals unless these quests are active. So, if you OCD'd the entire map before you start doing sidequests, prepare for a terribly boring grind. New Game Plus players have it slightly better if they knew/remembered to pick up the quests before clearing the whole map because the seals stack indefinitely, allowing you to collect them all during regular exploration.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: An example that overlaps quite a bit with It's the Same, Now It Sucks!. Odyssey doubles down on the new formula of leveled enemies and equipment introduced with Origins, meaning those fans who enjoyed the gameplay of the older games in the franchise and didn't like the inclusion of additional RPG mechanics and lowered emphasis on stealth in Origins are not going to like Odyssey either.
  • They also went into RPG territory quite hard, but some fans hating this direction overshadowed the positives of this approach.
  • A small but vocal minority felt the canonical female protagonist was not right for the series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Eagle Bearer, having become immortal proceeds to spend the next 2500 years doing fuck all and not at all being involved in the Assassin/Templar war or in the later periods of Greek histoy. While that at least could be justified due to either a lack of knowledge or lack of interest, their rather abrupt death after giving Layla the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus can not. You have a being with well over two thousand years of life and combat experience fall over themselves praising the newcomer in a rather OOC fashion and then handing them their artifact. The fact that the Eagle Bearer was in a position to witness and participate in later events of Greek history, such as the Trial of Sokrates and the Rise of Alexander, and presumably did nothing also beggars disbelief. However, Kassandra does mention having participated in 'too many wars', and this could be taken as an indication that she was active throughout history. It would make sense to do so anonymously as well.
  • In Legacy of the First Blade, the child of Darius is effectively there for no further purpose than to be the breeding stock for the infamous child, then gets Stuffed in the Fridge a short ways into the final episode, all to explain why the Eagle Bearer is giving up their child.
  • In The Torment of Hades, you get to fight four legendary Greek heroes, and recruit them as Hades' Guardians, the gates of which they can be found guarding afterward. Wouldn't it be awesome to just head over and have a quick chat with the likes of Herakles, Achilles, Perseus, and Agamemnon? Too bad, they're completely uninteractable once recruited.
  • Deimos is a fairly wasted character, despite their large role in the Main storyline. There is little hints of redemptive qualities in many of their early interactions with their elder sibling—particularly their introduction scene, where they cover for the Eagle Bearer during the Cult of Kosmos meeting and allow them to escape unharmed. It's later revealed that they were kidnapped in infancy and brainwashed and tortured for the past 30 or so years, turning them into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with terrible god and abandonment complexes. However, Deimos' appearances are fairly scarce and they remain almost wholly antagonistic until the very end of the main questline, after which they exit the story all together in one way or the other. If the player doesn't manage to talk them into leaving the cult, they will end up being killed in the final battle with their elder sibling (possibly after having also killed their mother). As a result, leaving the story off on a bit of a depressing bum note, with none of their potential as a character having been explored. If the player does manage to talk them into rejoining the family and leaving the cult, there's no time left in the questline for a proper redemption arc and the happy ending feels almost unbelievable and tacked on. While they can become a Lieutenant on the Adressia (and can be called to help in stealth with the Call to Arms ability), they don't really help hunt down any of the rest of the Cultists. Despite how much they were built up in the story, the player never actually gets to know them at all.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Sparta, and by extension, Myrrine, can be this to some when she and the Eagle-Bearer return to Sparta. Even after everything that happened to her family, Myrrine still fully accepts the cruel aspects of Spartan society, like slavery and the agogé. She even reprimands the Eagle-Bearer if they help a group of Spartan boys being attacked by wolves, claiming he made them weaker, even though one was killed during the "training". While Alexios/Kassandra are angry about this, especially since she neglects that they already fully understand the consequences of breaking Spartan law, it never comes up again, making it seem like Myrrine was in the right for defending Spartan customs. ^Note  The Spartans were essentially Fascists by modern standards, practicing eugenics, slavery (who they would often abuse and murder), and turning children into psychologically damaged killers. Their abuse of the helots in particular led to a destructive uprising, and most historical analysis agrees that Sparta did not last long precisely because of their overly militaristic practices.
    • Brasidas can have a similar issue if you chose to kill The Monger publicly, as it will down the line lead to him accusing Alexios/Kassandra of "only being in for themselves" and not being loyal to Sparta. They had good reasons to kill the Monger that way, namely that he's a Complete Monster who deserves it and pressingly, they did so under the instructions of Anthousa, who has information about their mother's whereabouts. While the player can decide to instead follow Brasidas' advice and kill the Monger privately without penalty, there's no reason in-universe for Kassandra/Alexios to assume Anthousa would still give them the info they seek if they don't follow her instructions. More importantly: they simply don't owe Sparta that loyalty in the first place, given that they were sentenced to death by Sparta for the grave sin of... trying to save their literal infant sibling from being thrown off a cliff. All things considered, it makes Brasidas' sudden turning on them in the second-to-last quest in the Family Arc seem totally irrational and unreasonable.
  • Lagos, who is posed to be the only decent Cultist and whom Nice Guy Brasidas vouches for. True, he was a part of the cult because his family was being threatened, and is one of only a few Cultists it's possible to remove non-fatally. However, if your character decided to kill the Monger publicly, Lagos will flatly refuse to leave the cult and help you even though you've already freed his captive family and brought them to safety. The fact that he refuses to stop partaking in an evil cult despite the leverage keeping him there being resolved doesn't particularly bode well for his morals, and suggests he might be a bit more selfish (or at least, cowardly) than as presented.

---