I’m definitely in the minority here but this is just my opinion. If you like the campaigns, I’m happy for you.
I don’t give a crap about Arkantos or Amanra or any other OC, and the fact that they’re even in the Obsidian Mirror campaign makes me not want to play it at all. It would be much cooler if they followed in the tradition of Age of Empires where every civ has its own separate campaign based on their stories. A Trojan War campaign for the Greeks, a Saga of the Volsungs campaign for the Norse, a Ramesses the Great campaign for Egyptians, etc. Imagine if the campaigns were a way for kids to learn about the actual myths like how the AoE2 campaigns taught us about history?
Nice dissonance between the title and the contents.
The campaigns do teach you about the myths of each specific civ. You just get to see it through the eyes of ajax.
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Myths are rarely about armies and mostly just about heroes themselves. Also myths usually only include very little myth units. Like an entire Heracles adventure usually only includes one myth unit and I do think there wasn’t even a single myth unit in the entire Trojan war. AoM is not really suited to retell most myths.
Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like an actual Trojan war campaign that tells the entire story without adding any OC characters. That could be pretty cool. But there aren’t many other myths that could work well that way. Though I don’t really like to portrait the Trojans as Greeks but I don’t think AoM will ever have the Hittites as a pantheon and no other civ that could represent the Trojans. So you either have Greeks fighting Greeks or you make Trojans something unfitting like Egyptians or Atlanteans.
Also most myths only include people from the same pantheon so it would just be a series of mirror matches again. The Obsidian Mirror campaign has some deviations from the actual Aztec myths but those deviations allow them to include other pantheons so you don’t just fight Aztecs with Aztecs in every single scenario.
Ramesses is pretty much a historical character with lots of written documents and archaeological evidence so he could easily just get an Age of Empires campaign.
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Why not? What we have about Troy is the mostly mythological version, and that represents a civil war between Olympian Greek Gods, so pretty fitting that they are Greeks. We have little historical evidence of the conflict other than they were called “Wilusa” and might have been related to Hittites (other people which we barely have sources about)
The fact that Willusa is Troy and also part of the Hittite empire is pretty much universally accepted by historians nowadays. There is a lot of evidence that the Hittites were in contact with the Mycenaeans.
Even in the Iliad the Trojans are not represented as Greeks. They do have Greek gods but in their interpretation pretty much everyone had Greek gods. They thought the Egyptians mostly had the same Gods too, just with different names.
The Trojans were actually the ones that introduced the Greeks to Apollo. In both the Iliad and in archaeological findings Apollo was the main god of Troy. He is also on of the view gods that Romans just directly adopted from the Greeks without equating him to any of their gods.
So I think the Trojans or Hittites could be a cool Pantheon for AoM. They would have to fill a few gaps with speculations or with stuff they just simply make up, but in the end they would be a lot more Historical then the Atlanteans.
You’re thinking “I don’t care about the campaigns”
When someone says they don’t care FOR something, it means they don’t like it.
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If you don’t care for the campaigns what’s the point of talking about whether Amanra is in it or not? You are not going to like it regardless.
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As I age I find more faults with some of the campaigns, but I love playing them and occasionally chang up the missions in the editor. If you don’t like the campaigns, then that’s fine. Now… Do you want changes or just to complain?
There’s nothing wrong with complaining, I’m not here to sing the game’s praises. If you want change either compile a list of what you want changed and what other campaigns, one off missions, game modes, etc. you want to see in the possible future. Better yet, you could make your own custom campaigns to better fit historical and mythological narratives and ask around the community for pointers.