What an appropriate name for a game. After finally completing the main story quest, my playtime with AC Odyssey clocked in at around 83.5 hours, and that’s leaving a handful of remaining cultists and a few mercenaries still wandering the Greek world. With still quite a bit left to do, I’m considering this one done, since the story is complete and all I really have left is some housecleaning to do.

As far as single player games go, this was probably the largest game I’ve ever experienced, and while it was a beautiful and densely packed world, sometimes it felt a bit gratuitous. The open-world fatigue is strong with this one, not only because of the traversal but the sheer amount of things you have to do. There are games like The Elder Scrolls series, specifically Skyrim, that are packed with hundreds upon hundreds of things to do, but the key there is that a large majority of them are optional. The fatigue here kicks in when an over-all storyline quest breaks into smaller quests, when then breaks into even more side quests.

An example of this is upgrading the Spear of Leonidas. In order to upgrade the spear, you need to have a certain number of artifact fragments. To get the fragments, you need to kill members of the Cult of Kosmos. In order to kill them, you first have to identify and/or find them. In order to identify them, you must do side quests in the region where they are prominent. Those side quests are sometimes broken down in to multiple questlines themselves and… well I’m sure you’re getting the picture by now. In short, it can take hours to discover a Cultist.

To be fair, sometimes the cultists fall into your lap by accident, and sometimes they’re just part of the main story. It’s nice when this happens, but they really only make up a small number of the overall cultist hierarchy. If you want to level up the spear all the way (which I haven’t done yet) you’ll need to put in some serious legwork. I have about thirteen still alive at the time of this writing.

I do think it’s a bit wonky how the story ends as well. Most people think of a game’s “proper” ending as being when the main story is wrapped up. While the hero’s story (I chose Kassandra) ends with her family re-uniting (or not, depending on your choices), I do think it was a weird place to stop. The story’s climax is more of a second act in a three part play, with the entire third act being the aforementioned housecleaning. And if someone were to put in the time and make sure that everything else was done before they wrapped up the story, it would make it much more of a letdown. For the entire game, your character’s main driving motivation is to end the Cult, but in wrapping up the story, I didn’t quite get the “now that we’re together, we’ll bring down the cult once and for all!” cliff-hanger type ending I was expecting. Perhaps I’m being a bit pre-mature and I will get true closure once the main leader of the Cult has been put down. We’ll see.

The game has a New Game + option, which frankly boggles my mind. By the time I’m done with this initial playthrough, I will probably be well past 100 hours. Why on earth would I want to do it again? This isn’t Skyrim; There aren’t multiple play styles and classes I could be that would change up the combat. You’d be the same no matter what. I suppose I could choose Alexios the second time around, but I’d still be doing the same things. And I’d have to look at Alexios butt crack every time he jumped off of something.

Speaking of, something I found pretty funny was that Kassandra’s butt/underwear texture was probably the ugliest modeling work I’ve seen in a long, long time, and I’m 90% sure it was intentional. With the amount of time I spent looking up her skirt while she climbed, swam, jumped, dived, rolled, etc., I can only imagine the conversations that went on in the Ubisoft lunch room. Surely upskirt screenshots were a concern, especially if they modeled her properly. I can totally see them agreeing to make Kassandra’s crotch shots the most visually unpleasing thing on the planet, specifically to avoid the hordes of screenshots that would have no doubt plastered the internet.

In all, I really enjoyed Odyssey, but I’m really glad to be done with it. I do plan on continuing to chip away at the Cult of Kosmos, and finish off the one remaining guardian on the island of Lesbos (seriously, how have I not been there yet?) to seal the gates to Atlantis. I’m going to take a bit of a break for it though, and possibly from large open-world games in general. Don’t be surprised to see my next few Backlog Barbecues being smaller, more linear games.

(Update: Shortly after this was written, the feeling that I had unfinished business was too much to bear. I went back in and systematically removed the remaining cultists, which then afforded me an extra skill point or two and a bit better gear. More importantly, it allowed me to buff up Kassandra in a few key categories, so that when I confronted Medusa again, I was able to finally defeat her. It wasn’t an easy (or quick) fight, but I was able to grind her down and eventually finish her off. In doing so, I retrieved the final artifact I needed to keep Atlantis from falling into the wrong hands and therefore get what I believe is the “real” ending to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.)

Quick Thoughts:

The mercenary bounty system got extremely irritating toward the end, when your bounty never goes away. At one point I had no less than six dead mercs scattered around me because they literally kept coming before I could complete the fort I was trying to clear. I went from tier 5 to tier 3 inside of a half an hour. At one point I had to abandon my quest objective and run away just to get the mercs to go away long enough for me to clear a fort.

The hunter tier was practically useless to me, even with most of the abilities leveled up. None of my arrows or special abilites really seemed to be very affective. More often than not, an attempted snipe of a tower guard or a key figure did little more than alert everyone in the area to my presence. It just wasn’t worth it.

There were no curvy women in Greece.

Seemingly every soldier you came across, even the run-of-the-mill bad guys, could launch a string of unblockable attacks, one right after another, no matter if you’re hacking them with a sword or not. Having to slowly chip away at some random dude because you can only get in a hit or two before having to roll away was bullshit.

Did I really have to watch Ikaros fly around in a circle every time?

Upgrade your Leap of Faith ability the first chance you get. Trust me.