A family bond can cut through any problem

When I first started playing video games, the franchise I got into pretty much immediately was Assassins Creed.
Since I’m also a bit of an ancient Greece nerd, I was excited for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which is set around 430 BCE during the Peloponnesian War.
The Peloponnesian War was between Athens, which gave us the whole concept of democracy, and Sparta, which was mostly known for military might.
They’d fought before, there was a tentative peace treaty both were breaking and now they’re fighting again.
Despite taking place during the Peloponnesian War and that definitely being a large point in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, it isn’t the main story.
At the beginning of the game, you can pick between playing as Kassandra or Alexios, who are siblings. As far as I can figure, which one you pick basically just changes their roles in the story. I played as Kassandra, so I’ll just go with that.
They’re Spartan. There’s a prophecy that Alexios would bring about the fall of Sparta so the elders decide to drop him off a cliff. Kassandra protests and kills an elder, so she gets dropped off a cliff.
Odyssey deviated from other Assassins Creed games by adding an element of choice to how the story develops.
One is to side with Sparta or Athens and I really struggled with the idea of siding with people who threw me off a cliff even though historically Sparta won the war and it felt like the game pushed me in that direction.
The game actually picks up about 15 years later, when Kassandra is a young adult and working as a mercenary on the island of Kephallonia.
She’s hired to assassinate “The Wolf of Sparta,” named Nikolaos, who turns out to be her father and the man who dropped her off a cliff.
Kassandra finds out her family is still alive and goes on a mission to find them. First her mother, Myrrine, her birth father — who doesn’t play a major role, but he’s there — and her little brother.
Really, the war kind of just gets in the way.
What really shows that the story is about reuniting the family is simply that the game “ends” when Alexios returns. I put ends in quotes there because it keeps going. There is still a war going on, major side quests to complete, relationships to build, etc.
However, that’s when the game gives you the option to “go back to the beginning” and start the game over with the experience and levels you have.
The scene right before that message pops up? The family hugging and crying on the very cliff you were thrown off of.
It comes full circle and illustrates the ability to heal and grow and come together after trauma. It shows how a family bond can cut through anything.
That being said, Nikolaos showed no remorse for what he did letting both of his kids supposedly die, and has no place in this family that I have put a lot of effort into rebuilding.
Now, Kassandra is trying to get into Atlantis and has a gorgon to take care of.
Michael Shine is a contributing writer for the Daily American Republic.