Hello everyone!
In a slight departure from my usual reading material I'm diving into something else entirely tonight.
A little while ago, as I was watching a gameplay on Youtube, the channel suggested a different gameplay by the same person, and if you've looked at my blog post since you'll have seen that there are a couple of videos on here by him.
The Beaver does, after all, do AMAZING gameplays!
So when Assassin's Creed showed up on my feed, I was like ... it has Sparta? Wait, is it about Ancient Greece?
Sign me up!
So after getting into the whole gameplay thing I discovered that there is an actual, official novelization to the game proper. I grabbed the book ASAP.
Which means, assassins, it's time to pull down the hoods. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey awaits!
I do have it. I just ... haven't gotten to it yet.
This one was cool in the sense that it was written by a different author, Gordon Doherty, and it didn't seem to fit into the regular timeline for the rest of the books, so I could read it out of order and still feel like I wasn't doing any damage anywhere.
I WILL get to the rest of the series. Eventually.
In the meantime, however ...
If you've looked at Odyssey AT ALL, you'll know that in the game you get to choose to play as either a male or female character, which affects the storyline in that the bad guy is also flipped, depending on your choice. It also seems that Kassandra, the female lead, was chosen as the canon character as opposed to Alexios, which is interesting considering Assassin's Creed and its history, and I'm also a little bummed because I kind of prefer the guy. LOL.
But hey, you can't have it all!
Another thing just before we start, the whole animus/Creed situation is cut from the book entirely, as opposed to how the game begins and the little inserts you get of Layla throughout.
Here, it's only Kassandra, with the Spear of Leonidas.
Orphaned as a child and washed up on the island of Kephallonia, Kassandra is a misthios, a mercenary for hire who does whatever job she can get her hand on. In contrast to the game, the other orphan, Phoibe, is a lot more co-dependent on Kassandra than in the game, where the kid frolicks about and doesn't really bother too much even when she gets kidnapped.
Anyway, Kassandra generally works for Markos, the man who rescued her when she was a child, but that doesn't mean their relationship is always cordial.
She does, however, rid Kephallonia of the tyrant that's held it in his thrall for years, the Cyclops, and there's a neat trick there which we don't get to see in the game where she switches the precious item of the Cyclops's to a rock so she can gift the item to Phoibe later.
In dealing with the Cyclops, Kassandra rescues Barnabas and his crew, who swear an oath of loyalty to her, and she gets recruited by one Elpenor to go and hunt down the Wolf of Sparta.
Only problem here: the Wolf is her father, Nikolaos.
Alright, so Kassandra's backstory: born and raised in Sparta for all her tender years, to Myrrine and Nikolaos, she had a younger brother, Alexios, and was trained in the art of war by her father. This all came to a halt when the Oracle of Delphi prophesied that Alexios would bring about the downfall of Sparta, and so had to be chucked off the mountain like the other Spartan children deemed too weak or deformed to survive. In an effort to rescue her brother, Kassandra accidentally kicked off both him AND the ephor holding him, which resulted in Nikolaos throwing her off the mountain as well.
So you can see how this family reunion might be a little bit awkward, yes?
It gets worse when she arrives at Megaris and finds that she now has a stepbrother, Stentor, who denies her access to the Wolf, but she works around him and manages to procure food for his men when the army's pretty much starving, so he allows her to come fight with the Spartiates against the Athenian forces.
Sparta wins, and the Wolf comes face-to-face with his daughter, explaining to her his regret and shame of that night on the mountain, that her mother is still alive, and that she needs to be wary of snakes in the grass.
In the game. this is the first major choice the player faces: whether or not to kill Nikolaos, who also reveals he isn't Kassandra and Alexios's biological father, despite loving them as his own.
We don't know which path Kassandra takes other than she brings the bloody helmet to Elpenor, and ends up killing Elpenor, though not before he tells her about the Cult of Kosmos who are hunting her family.
She hears the same thing from the Oracle in Delphi, and from Herodotos who Barnabas introduces her to, and Herodotos explains that the Cult seems to be standing behind every single ruling decision in Greece, holding it in its grasp. They have to do something, which is how Kassandra ends up in a Cult meeting, and has her second big shock.
Her brother is alive.
No longer called Alexios, but Deimos, he seems to be the Cult's prime weapon, although he doesn't expose Kassandra when push comes to shove, and she makes it out of there alive. They end up speaking later where Deimos tells Kassandra one of them will die, since his past is dead to him.
Herodotos takes Kassandra to Athens to help Perikles and to find clues about her mother so she would know where to begin her search, but Athens is slowly crumbling because Kleon is opposing Perikles and wants the seat the man occupies. Here she is also reunited with Phoibe and introduced to Aspasia, among others, and while it seems like they could turn the tide, the story doesn't end well:
Deimos gets to Perikles and kills him, and the Cult kills Phoibe. Kassandra and the others barely manage to escape, leaving behind Sokrates to help Athens in dire need.
For them, it's time to actually follow the clues to Naxos, an island which seems to be the home of Kassandra's mother - and it is. The pair is reunited and Myrrine decides they'll try and save Deimos as well, although Kassandra is skeptical about that.
A lot of the passage of time is brushed over in this book to make the main storyline move further, simply explaining that Kassandra and Barnabas evade the Cultists, kill them, and continue sailing up and down to aid Sparta in her push against Athens.
There is a section devoted to the women's return to Sparta proper, where they want their estate back, which is being held for Stentor, away in the war, and in doing so they expose one of the two Spartan kings as a Cultist. Kassandra also ends up participating in the Olympics for Sparta since its actual contestant ends up being shark chow after trying to hug her and falling over the rail into the sea.
Yes, interestingly enough this was one subplot the author decided to keep in the book, probably for a little levity and humour.
But the war effort is where Kassandra is needed most, and her second run-in with Stentor might have ended badly for her while she's on a mission from the Spartan kings if not for Nikolaos and his reappearance, where we finally learn she spared his life, but he went into exile to come to peace with what he'd done in the past. The book omits the other meeting between father and daughter where Kassandra tells Nikolaos that Stentor needs him to be a father, not a general, which is a bit of a shame really, but it can't be helped.
Another key player that emerges out of the pages is Brasidas, a Spartan hero, who is one of the fan favourites from the game and ends up fighting with only a fraction of actual Spartans and an army of Helots, beating back the Athenian forces right before dying at the hand of Deimos. Of course he manages to escape death once before during a similar altercation, but this time he isn't so lucky.
Kassandra hadn't been so lucky that first time when she ended up in the Athenian prison after attempting to take Deimos back to their mother, but the plus side of this is that Deimos seems to be faltering in his allegiance to the Cult because of what she tells him of their shared past.
Not that it matters much, as I've said, given he continues to fight for the Cult and kills Brasidas.
Kassandra does, however, end up killing Kleon in retaliation, which to her signals the end of the Cult.
Returning to Sparta to finally lick her wounds and heal, she comes face to face with Deimos on top of the mountain where it all began, and in the game this is again the player's choice, and a big one: do you spare your sibling, or kill them?
Doherty goes for the killing blow in the book, reuniting the family when Stentor and Nikolaos come to attend Alexios' funeral, though it'll still take some time for old wounds to heal, obviously, but Kassandra is at least home.
She was also lucky enough to meet her actual father, Pythagoras, who explained during their meeting that the reason she was even born was because the Leonidas bloodline (oh yeah, she's descendant of THAT Spartan king) possesses some powerful abilities that people will always covet. And after burying her father (the longevity is explained a bit better in the game), Kassandra returns to the place of the original Cult meeting, where she runs into Aspasia.
And Aspasia is a Cultist.
It's a sign to Kassandra, who was warned about this by her actual father (that white cannot exist without black and evil needs to be allowed to balance against good), that her fight, which she thought finished, is only just beginning, since Aspasia is intent on burning Greece and rebuilding from the ashes.
Can anyone say bring it on?
The book ends here, and skips several side-plots from the game entirely, which is understandable given the fact that the game itself is MASSIVE. It also more-or-less erases the mythical creatures quests from its pages which are some of the more fun ones of the game itself, and also the ones where the character hunts wild beasts for Artemis, and several others.
In fact, I was slightly disappointed in the book because it glossed over so many things that seem so rich and detailed in the game proper.
Obviously you can't cover it ALL in a book that's a regular sort of length, but the glossing over of things led to blank spaces and disconnects from the characters, and often times Kassandra came across as a whiny, spoiled brat in contrast to the character who emerges through her tribulations in the game.
The main plotline is followed to a T, but in attempting to bring the story from point A to point B, I feel like the author sacrificed a lot of the personal connections Kassandra makes along the way, and those enrich the story so much there seems to be something missing from the book, or you have characters doing something which you don't understand entirely because of a subplot that never got explained.
So all in all, this is an okay book to read, but it speeds through certain things and misses out on others, erasing them completely, so I'd suggest either playing the game yourself (I'm seriously debating it!) or finding a gameplay to watch through. There are a bunch available on Youtube, all of them spectacular.
And of course, don't forget to feed Ikaros every once in a while. That bird gets pretty cranky if you forget about him!
xx
*images not mine
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