If it’s not clear already, Legacy of the First Blade is one for the fans. It’s the story of Darius, the first to wield the legendary Hidden Blade, and the one to use it on the preening Persian ruler Xerxes. But it’s also another saga for your Assassin’s Creed Odyssey main character (AKA, Kassandra), who meets Darius as he arrives in the main game’s Greek region.
Legacy of the First Blade is unusual in that it doesn’t add any new playable space to the game. It is reminiscent of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins DLC The Hidden Ones – a side-story concerned with the founding of an established Assassin concept – and yet that added a new region to poke about in as well. But where the Hidden Ones ended up fairly light on story, Legacy of the First Blade seems to be putting this first – with several peeks at Darius’ past in cutscene flashbacks, and a promise from Ubisoft of a new storyline to make Odyssey fans wonder, laugh and cry again.
This week brings the first episode of the DLC, Hunted, with episodes two and three to follow monthly next year. It’s hard, then, to appraise Ubisoft’s new story arc fully – especially as Odyssey’s main campaign often paid off its branching narrative with different feeling quest outcomes when you finally got to their conclusion. As a first episode, Hunted has some nice moments, but nothing I felt like everyone else wouldn’t see too regardless of their choices. Darius himself is kept mysterious – and while fans will know his name from references made many, many games ago, his story has been kept untold until now. The question of whether you trust the hooded figure who knows a little too much about his enemies comes up repeatedly for you to answer – and I’m curious to see whether my early suspicions of him make any difference in the long run.
