The screams of naysayers are already pouring in from the rafters, but it’s time to face the truth - Kassandra is the best protagonist in the Assassin’s Creed series. At the beginning of 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the audience is given a choice: play as the male protagonist, Alexios, or the female protagonist, Kassandra. A few months after the game’s launch, Ubisoft revealed that two-thirds of players chose Alexios, and unfortunately for those people, they truly missed out.

Set in ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey presents a version of that world which is designed more for fun than strict historical accuracy. Kassandra is the perfect lens with which to explore this landscape. To start, Kassandra is the game’s canonical protagonist; Alexios was added later due to Ubisoft executives fearing that games with female protagonists don’t sell. In reality, there’s not one quality that makes Alexios special, nothing that sets him apart from the legions of male action game heroes that have come before. He’s just another bland character in a world that already has too many.

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From the game’s first scene with Kassandra, however, it becomes clear that the player is in for something different. Assassin's Creed Odyssey doesn’t pull any punches (narratively or literally) just because the protagonist is female. Since Alexios and Kassandra experience the exact same story, the scenarios were written to work with either character, and so Kassandra gets to experience something denied to many women - that is, she is taken seriously by men. She’s neither a damsel to be saved, nor a hypersexualized fantasy to be objectified. She is a character who just happens to be a woman (rather than the other way around), and in a world where female protagonists still have to justify their existence to old men in boardrooms, the importance of this cannot be understated.

Kassandra Is Assassin's Creed's Most Well-Rounded Character

As for Kassandra’s personality, some of that is left to the player to decide (for example, does Kassandra forgive characters like Nikolaos and Deimos, or does she take her revenge?), yet she’s far from a blank slate avatar. Thanks to childhood tragedy, Kassandra can be blunt and short-tempered, yet she’s also witty, kind, and loyal. She may scold Markus for his schemes, but she also makes sure to save him from the consequences of his actions. Her interactions with Phoibe, especially in The Fate of Atlantis DLC, are especially touching. Naturally Kassandra has complicated views on laws and government, and while the player gets to decide her actions in numerous moral dilemmas, throughout it all, Kassandra maintains the desire to do what’s right, even in the face of only wrong answers.

Those who played through The Fate of Atlantis DLC will know the extent to which Kassandra sacrifices herself for the good of the world. Yet even in the end, she stays funny, level-headed, and gracious (unlike her predecessor Pythagoras, who descended into obsession and selfishness). Despite the fact that only one-third of players chose Kassandra, she remains the best protagonist, not only in AC Odyssey, but the Assassin’s Creed series as a whole.

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