An Odyssey: Echoes of War – Fight the sea god's wrath to reclaim your throne!

How do you keep Ajax alive?

I ended up saving the son instead of the husband and Ithaca, so in the end Ajax offered my MC and her son to move to his kingdom. You don’t have to lose your son, but you can’t have son, spouse, and Ithaca all well and kicking if you want to be with Ajax in the end.

@Mutantbeth
If Ajax is your RO, then he will die when confronted with Scylla and Charybdis. Same if Polyxena is your RO. If it’s neither, then someone else will die. You will get to visit the Underworld a bit later though, and perhaps return with one or two shades back to the world of living, if you know what I mean.

@Samael_Blackblade
As far as I know, you can only stay together with Polyxena and/or Calypso if you decide to go to Lotus Island with Calypso and take Polyxena there with you. You cannot return to Ithaca.

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There is a good and bad deification ending for each type of god parent. To get the good one, there’s a few things you can do. First, succeed at many tasks throughout the story. Later, when the gods ask you why you are worthy, each response is checking different things, and you need to pick the right answer based on what sort of accomplishments you had over the story. Alternatively, if Hades owes you a favor, you can bypass all that and get a good ending.

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how can you get hades to owe you a favor?

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Yep I just finished Ajax “good” ending without loosing my son. I really wanted to see it so I’m glad, but this game is really good. I can’t wait to get the others ending as well. Again thank you!

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I really enjoyed it! I was uncertain about it being a retelling of the Odyssey, since it’s been done quite a bit and the story has its expected plot points, but I was glad I picked it up.

Thoughts

The development of minor characters in the Epic Cycle (Eurylochus, first of Odysseus’ men; Polyxena, who doesn’t appear in anything by Homer to my understanding) especially put a new spin on it and definitely made it feel original. Odysseus’ crew became more than empty, oft-overlooked figures. There are elements that remained, though; Argus the dog is a story that I’ve always loved and I appreciate that being in there. Ajax surviving Troy was not something I was entirely sure on, but the use of his “canon” fate to torment the PC was well done. Even the mention of Philoctetes, too.

In general I like the exploration of what torment the PC endured in their years away from home. The Odyssey itself is in many ways about his emotional journey home, and even if PTSD wasn’t a word back then they knew about it. By placing the reader in Odysseus’ shoes that trauma is explored first-hand. It’s a fresh change, and done very vividly, but not stereotypically: there are ups and downs, moments of not being understood, and feeling foreign. The Erinyes both as the mythological tormentor and as trauma itself.

In much the same vein the crew all seem like fleshed out, rounded characters with their own agendas, never in the background and working as an actual crew, but also largely seen as shades of who they once were, changed by the war. I was surprised by how much Eurylochus’ death at the hands of Scylla affected me (and later, the meeting with Anticlea). I think they could have done with a bit more focus, especially as a group instead of as individuals, though.

The potential conversation with the sirens was thought-provoking, how it touched on choice in both a meta way, Fate as the Ancient Greeks understood it and in IRL. It was also rather touching, but not overtly so thanks to the sirens’ ambiguity. You could sympathise with the sirens, but still see them as dangerous. Whether their punishments was justified or not is never explained, again playing on various interpretations of them through the ages. A hint, too, of the treatment of women in Ancient Greece, which especially in the Epic Cycle itself is far, far from stellar.

The Heroes’ Mist was an unexpected and welcome divergence from the original tale. Though it was limited to feats done by other heroes, which limited the freshness of it, it was still a break from the well-trodden tale of the Odyssey, a moment of unpredictability. Alcinous being the one to stall the PC’s return home instead of Calypso, and the one to send the PC to the Underworld for Laodamas (his favoured son in the original tale) instead Circe sending Odysseus to find Tiresias was another nice twist, and a relatively believable one too. Calypso I wasn’t entirely fond of, showing up too late but potentially making a major impact, but it was another change from the original.

The world is also very immersive; much of that comes from the attention to detail of portraying classical Greece, the attitudes and temperament. The ways a pious PC shows piety – the fear of miasma, the detail given to the rites and sacrifices – in addition to how the concept of heroism has changed since. The importance of sacred hospitality (oft-overlooked, I think, in adaptations of the Odyssey) comes up with Polyphemus, Alcinous and Calypso, and considering the grave importance it was treated with by the Ancient Greeks (and how the encounter of Polyphemus actually goes), it was a welcome surprise to see you can actually get treated like proper guests under certain conditions. A shame you can’t try to get Demodocus to shut up even if you genuinely didn’t want to deceive Polyphemus (as a true guest would), but that would probably derail the story in all fairness, and he does at least feel guilty about it.

I appreciate the nods to the less well-known elements of the Odyssey/the Epic Cycle. I like the use of epithets, as Homer uses them so much, but I felt they could have been integrated a bit better, more consistently. There might be a paragraph with epithets, followed by one that is more “contemporary” in feel, without them; I’d have felt a more spread-out use of epithets would have made them stand out less. But I liked their inclusion nonetheless. In general it does feel like there’s some text (including dialogue) that doesn’t feel out of place from a translation of the Odyssey, and others which seem more “contemporary”, and that can be a bit jarring. But it’s not a major issue; the descriptions are still very evocative and colourful, especially the descriptions of the Garden of the Hesperides, and holding up the Sky. The bits of brevity here and there (the Hesperides trying to get Atlas to get rid of the tree, Hades being utterly confused after the PC tames Cerberus) kept the story from being too dry or dire, and were well-placed such that they weren’t disruptive to the tone.

One thing I wasn’t really fond of was how the PC had to have divine origin; part of my own attraction to the story of Odysseus was how he had diluted divine bloodline rather than direct divine bloodline like so many of his peers at the time. But you can potentially become a god yourself, so I guess it opens things up.

Another thing was that there was one RO that seemed to be “assigned” to you to the start and you were lightly shoehorned into interacting with them as much as possible: it would have been nice to see more of the other ROs, even if only interested them in a platonic manner. Also it’s a shame that the Nausicaa never shows up, Laodamas got killed off here, and Athena never really shows up, but I guess they would have gotten in the way of the plot.

I felt that the ending was a bit rushed, both in the lead-up to it and the actual ending chapter itself. Calypso does seem to come a little too late; aside from the matter of principle there wasn’t much to motivate myself to consider saving her. Unlike the Erinyes the thing with Poseidon is never resolved either. I liked the Ithaca ending, how the PC is still listless after so many years of adventure and it fits, but I felt you got really short-changed for interactions with your family if you stayed loyal to your spouse. Still, it was cathartic to finally make it back to Ithaca and kill all the suitors, in its own way and not just because that’s the “original” ending, and reunite with Penelope and Telemachus.

But all in all, it was nicely done!

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Awesome game!!!

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Can someone explain the stats to me those which concern the ship and your body/mind

So the ship stats are Meandering, Ship Damage, and Crew Morale.

Meandering means you are taking your sweet time to get home. It can have effects on the game endings available. Ship damage is how badly your ship is messed up, and crew morale is how well you are leading your crew. If crew morale gets low, they become morose, argumentative, and could perhaps even mutiny.

Not sure what other stats you want, but let .e know if you need more info!

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Being a lightning god is so awesome

How do you get that ending?

With speed and being good with my spear and being Zeus’s son and winning all my trials and then choosing to become a God and then choose the option that says you complete inhuman feats after inhuman feats or something like That I don’t remember much of what’s said in that option but that’s all

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So did everything work out for you?

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I’ll admit I’m a bit confused about which choices to pick to make Calypso feel sorry for us? It doesn’t feels like there is much opportunity to do that before the page where I could choose for my MC to spend the night with her.

you have to say that you went looking for a friend and thats all😁

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Has anyone managed to complete all the tasks I know three are required minimum but has anyone completed all of them

raises hand I relied on strongest trait (cunning) then either on the items I got along the way (hydras poison) or on the godly father, which for my MC was Bacchus (to tame the mad horses and to make the hesperides drunk).

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How do you get hades to owe you a favor

Give him a golden apple from the garden of the hesperides, at least that’s how I earned a favor from him.

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You can also intimidate him with your godly parentage.

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