A Thorough Look At God of War [Spoilers]

[Music] one of the more famous Greek myths is one where the great and mighty Zeus first among the gods turns into a big old bird and gets busy with the Queen of Sparta her husband tin Darris king of Sparta has to just roll with that and for a little time is spent examining why Queen Lleida might have found a swan sexier than him so now we've been talking about Zeus for less than 30 seconds and we're already into bird [ __ ] king you serpent demigod burthen territories there are a lot of ways a person can approach Greek mythology from the elevated intellectual approach of a classics major to the release the Kraken nonsense of pop culture reimagining like Clash of the Titans Greek mythology serves its purpose for both is the thing even in ancient Greece it had the same dichotomy the Pantheon was at the heart of religious and philosophical discourse but it was also at the heart of many a drunken conversation between regular folks where the salaciousness pettiness and folly of both men and gods were the more pressing concerns compared to the on fallible god of modern monotheism the Greek gods were all tremendous [ __ ] shows and it's that characterization of them as being more powerful than humans but by no means better than humans that's carried them along through so many twists and turns of history it's no coincidence that the Art Deco movement of the early 20th century was somewhat obsessive with Greek iconography we were expanding what the human animal was capable of doing capable of being modernity was making gods out of all of us art deco is an aspirational style but the pessimism of the Greek gods is true there too we had become more powerful but we hadn't all become any more just or good the Greek pantheon can suit highbrow culture or lowbrow culture optimism or pessimism because more than most religious figures they're also relatedly fallible maybe not with the bird [ __ ] but in how short sightedness selfishness and cruelty are major drivers of history and how one bad turn can cause another echoing down through generations the God of War series of video games is a take on Greek mythology that latches on to the most pessimistic sensationalistic parts of those myths and then weaves them into a backdrop for an action puzzle platformer I had heard a lot about God of War childish or dumb or rooted in a kind of permanent middle-school mindset and sometimes the games candy but after playing the whole original lineup the PSP title is the reboot but surprised me the most was God of worse fidelity to the tone of the myths that it's riffing on I think there's a reflexive instinct to think that classical subjects have to be treated with classical reverence with God of War that's not remotely the case with God of War the whole Pantheon are at their dislikable worst a bunch of entitled bickering scheming bird [ __ ] the lot of them and into this mix we introduced Kratos The Ghost of Sparta a new figure born from that spirit of spectacular selfish dislike ability Kratos is a modern answer to an ancient question if the gods are so terrible why abide by them in ages past the world kicked our ass God and nature could not be defined now we live in an era of fracking nuclear war ocean acidification we're our own gods now and it's the world that we shape to suit ourselves and we are equally as big of dumb shits about it as Zeus and his friends fate is for suckers obedience is for cowards if the gods have done us wrong then why do we lack the power to punish them right once things are set into motion Kratos will take those events in that perspective far far past it's reasonable conclusion to a climax more extreme than anything else I've seen in games or movies or books dealing with Greek myths God of War is a campy grindhouse experience that takes the old myths and interrogate them in the most modern possible way what's cleverest about God of War is how it's chosen this frame to support and intensify the most basic thing about itself it's a button measure the game's fun lies in sitting there and hammering out combo after combo hour after hour the original god of a war is very deliberately a kind of a contrarian riff on some of the tropes of the old Tomb Raider games and it does quite a bit to distinguish one franchise from the other right away both would borrow artistic and thematic flourishes from antiquity and myth tomb Raider's past tense god of war would be present tense both involve third-person platforming and and puzzle-solving Tomb Raider was more abstract more strategic to the point of needing to hold down the shift-key to walk Lara right up to the edge of a platform and line up a jump it was a PC game more than a console one that way slower paced more complex in the control scheme God of War leans in to the real advantage of a controller over mouse and keyboard which is a greater sense of immediacy I've been a mouse and keyboard person all my life until very recently and there's something just much more reflexive and tactile in the use of a controller over a mouse and keyboard so God wars puzzles are much less about unlocking and pathfinding and much more about instinct and impulse you run run run and jump now Oh too bad try again two murders third-person camera was fixed to lara god of wars third-person camera is more environmental panning around to make the most of every environment and to maximize the sense of scale tomb Raider's emphasis was unpack ssin where the action was often somewhat clunky God abhors emphasis is strongly on action over puzzles where it's action is one of the smoothest and most enjoyable elements of the entire game this is also where Kratos comes in is kind of a genius protagonist for this sort of experience as mythic figure he can be supernaturally burly and aggressive as a participant in a Grecian tragedy he can follow the linear path provided to him and have that be thematically justified as a fictional addition to the Greek pantheon he can be just as much of a bastard as they were so when you the player are frantically smashing triangle triangle squares screaming why won't you die and on screen Kratos is also yelling and whipping his preposterous train blades around in the literal whirlwind of violence there is absolutely no disconnect God of War is much less about plot than it is about impulse the sky is on a hell of a rampage and it feels [ __ ] great it reaches deep into the animal brain and keeps on hitting the big red buttons that say danger and triumph over and over for hours like a drum solo at a Grateful Dead show the animations are out of control and how fluid they are the only times they aren't is during QuickTime events where the speed of the animation is tied to how quickly you're pressing the button furthermore the blades of chaos with their half screen reach keep you engaged with up to a half-dozen enemies at a time maybe more necessitating that the player has zero down I'm between actions and combos there is never a moment where you're threatened in just one single direction during combat in this way the play experience becomes narrative and characterization for Kratos who is he he's the feeling of rage after the boss monsters killed you 12 times and you finally disemboweled him on the 13th attempt he's the underdog who fights against overwhelming odds hundreds and then thousands of blades and arrows line up against him and they all go clattering down he's the mad man who delights in fountains of blood that erupt from enemies and the river of gore that flows over his sandals I am all those things too in the play experience this game got me seriously angry at it more than a few times and I'm positive that that is how it wanted me to be it wanted me the player to want the monsters as dead as Kratos the protagonist does the lethality of its challenges makes triumphing over them feel meaningful and the completely over-the-top approach to Gore is one of the things that I often enjoy about horror Media and action media in general lets us confront something heavy and sad and gross in a context where no one has really hurt and none of it means as much as it ought to real warm I never want to be in a position where I'm supposed to kill another person in this particular forgivingly cartoonish context I am the chain twirlin spell cast and puzzle-solving God of War and don't you forget it when people try to make movies about video games this is one of the biggest challenges a good video game protagonist can excuse themselves from a lot of relatability or believability as a character if mechanically they can still sympathetically resonate with the player through the simple act of mashing the buttons a lot of God of War status is an all-time classic comes from how bold a production it was when it was first released in 2005 David Jeff Santa Monica Studios was given a complete creative control over the title by Sony any time the studio has a vision a large budget and no creative oversight the result is usually pretty cohesive and worthwhile in this case it led to a kind of stem to stern tightness of production that often feels missing from a lot of modern titles like the meandering open-world of days gone a modern PlayStation exclusive in the first God of War pretty much every encounter is and crafted and somewhat unique rather than the open world approach we're in different interactive systems overlap to create more randomized chaotic moments of play the opening level does a huge amount to set the tone pace and scale of encounter for the rest of the game with very little setup the game places you with Kratos on the deck of a Grecian ship on a storm-tossed sea enemies immediately attack not underpowered tutorial dudes but the regular strength foot soldiers you'll be fighting for most of the rest of the game they come at you in waves dozens of them no warning no concession to lack of skill or coordination just a ton of danger right away and then escalating from there every level for the rest of the game the first save point not an automatic checkpoint but the old-fashioned manual save Waypoint style is a solid 15 to 20 minutes of deathless play from the game's first fight demanding that the player establish a solid baseline of competence before allowing them to really play the game today that's common blood-borne and the souls likes all do that bigger better and more when it comes to using save coins this way of increasing the stakes of the action but for 2005 this is kind of ahead of its time stuff god of War's world is savage and mean its combat is demanding heavy and towards the end of the game exhausting getting the players dander up and making them hungry to challenge those demands as one of the game's strongest skills the game rarely waits so long to provide a safe point as it does the first time that first time is for getting the player hooked on a feeling the feeling of wanting to beat the system's the game the gods the combats the first part of the tutorial once you reach that first safe point the game gives you your first major puzzle and it's one of the absolute worst in the entire franchise need to kick a destructible box across the ship's deck before the arrows from above kill you or destroy the box like many of the games reflex based puzzles I had to try upwards of a dozen times to get it right it's a mean-ass touchy [ __ ] excuse and timing patience and perseverance compared to this puzzle little in the rest of the game or the rest of the franchise even is truly unfair with a couple of extremely notable exceptions having this puzzle here at the very beginning is important though you can't ever say you weren't warned about how it's gonna be and if you can make it through this you can make it through pretty much any other reflux puzzle - the game throws of you then the third part of the tutorial the boss monster the Hydra the boss fights are the most truly iconic part of God of War not just this title but as a whole franchise this is where all the systems come together they are both combat and puzzle at the same time with a large nough Civ size and Menace that warps Kratos and anything else he encounters on a regular basis for the Hydra you have to survive long enough to damage one head pin it with a falling spike do that again to another head and then impale its main head on the mast of the ship otherwise it'll just regenerate in classic Hydra fashion it is so much more fun than the puzzle before it and so much more exciting than the combat before it Plus this is simply the level sub climax the first hour of the game God of War has a tutorial level more breathlessly exciting and meaningfully challenging than the very last levels of some lesser action titles and I say that in 2019 in 2005 God of War was a game it was impossible to ignore unless you were a PC gamer like I was I guess in which case I have found it pretty easy to ignore God of War for 14 years straight but the thing was I did miss out by doing it that way games have so much to say with presentation narrative nematic content and I approach games most often from that perspective of how real I feel their worlds are how well they articulate their imaginative elements getting into console gaming I am coming to appreciate mechanical aspects more god of war taught me a lot about platforming but it taught me much much more than that about appreciating controls and physicality is a pillar of game design when god of war does a QuickTime event they randomize the inputs each time there's no memorization there is simply reaction the symbol flashes the thumb comes down the less actual thought you put into it and the more reflexive it becomes the more satisfying it actually is it's funny to say all this because in 2005 this was a lot of my parents argument for how I was wasting my time playing video games that they were devoid of intellectual merit and operated solely in the realm of your lizard brain leveraging very old fight-or-flight responses to hit your since eight seratonin centers like a goddamn pinata 14 years later and my argument is not that this is untrue it is completely true but instead I argue that it's actually harder to trick the brain this way than you might think there is serious craftsmanship that goes into something that uses light sound and a funny plastic remote control to make the brain feel like it's hunting or fighting or running to take you off the couch and place you directly into these other where's the first God of War is almost an ideal example of the kind of game an intellectual scold would use to paint the medium as classless excessive and devoid of cultural merit at moments it's all of these things it's often hugely excessive and it's Gore in its masculinity and its stakes it is sometimes totally classless like a mini game where Kratos hops up onto the bed like a horny bunny and has a QuickTime event for banging it takes the most salacious parts of Greek mythology and leaves out the philosophically intriguing points it's about mashing buttons and reflex response in 2005 thousands on thousands of teenagers sat in their living rooms driving swords into the mouths of minotaurs with their eyes glazed over while thousands more parents hollered at them to turn that crap down from the kitchen the thing is a bad game doesn't do that if a game can't hook you your eyes never do glaze over do they the trick of turning a player into a couch a zombie is not a fundamental function of video games it's the mark of an especially good video game exactly how a good book will often use dust-jacket quotes like I couldn't put it down or a real page-turner bin jabal television is the thing streaming companies paid big money for God of War was never part of high culture but high culture can't be everything popular culture is popular because it resonates with people often without them quite even knowing why the thrill of high intellectualism is almost always contextual seeing the big picture putting the thing within its history within its four knowing what makes it different or special or unique take mine I guess it's knowing vineyards vintages and flavor profiles that wine people care about the context popularly speaking wine simply has to taste good to be good you can put it in a bottle or put it in a box the flavor is what matters the experiential elements I've always particularly enjoyed the eyes glazed over cliche about video games because of how fundamental and misunderstanding it is of what's going on the judgment at play is that the brain is off nothing is going on the game has made you a blank this isn't the case when that happens to you if the game has made your mind a blank you turn the game off and you do something else it's a bad game or a boring one if you are so into a game that you don't notice or care about what's going on in the room around you it's because your brain is so occupied and involved it simply doesn't have time for that [ __ ] God of War hooks you in the extreme present tense and the swing of blades and the bursts of blood and the shifting of danger from enemy to enemy had never plateaus it's a non-stop escalation from the deck of that boat to the top of Mount Olympus what elevates god of war from good to great is more than just the fluidity and satisfaction of its combat animations and rhythms though they constitute a large part of all of that it's the omnipresent sense of spectacle I mentioned the camera difference between God of War and tomato before but it is a massive part of the game's personality across the whole franchise too massive not to get more into without ever taking control away from the player the camera can pan way out to best highlight a Vista and pull tight to Kratos in a claustrophobic moment it can do all the things a cinematic camera can do in a passive media environment to frame a shot while relying on the area of effect magic and unusually long reach of the blades of chaos to perpetuate the rhythms of combat and platforming no matter how the camera frames the moment even if the frame changes while the combat is ongoing a huge part of gameplay is even in what the camera doesn't frame by doing things that challenge the given perspective like running towards the camera or jumping down into what may appear to be a pit sometimes the camera will adapt to that choice and reveal a little hidden something most often are chests but sometimes a bonus Hall with a few different treasures there's even an entire bonus room unlocked with two Mews keys that for his 25% more health and mana than Kratos would ordinarily be able to acquire it's not hard to find either key I did it without even really trying to just by following my nose around the level that's another major way God award differentiates itself from Tomb Raider puzzles are usually contained to a single room or area and secrets are often sniffed out and over in the span of about 30 seconds or so like everything else in the game it's about impulse to train the player to take their time combing everything over from some miss colored block or another would cause havoc with the pacing the relentless forward driving action so the game's design instead rewards a more casual kind of interrogation of the space just a feeling like there ought to be a few missing feet of hallway just outside of the frame and it takes very little time and very little effort to test those hunches health and mana are upgraded by finding sets of hidden items each time around for a quarter bar boost your durability in the game literally depends on indulging this secret hunting behavior but impressed me though is that they've hidden across all difficulties more of these items than you strictly need you can miss five or six upgrade items and still be able to max your bars out there is so much in this game that's designed to be aggressively cruel but in this one particular area they've given the players in critical slack that's important because more than skill with combat which can be adjusted across many difficulties the level design is fixed and not everyone has an eye for that sort of thing puzzle design is bitterly pass-fail it's also unaffected by the choice of difficulty level many of the puzzles are designed with an ideal solution in mind a certain very specific series of jumps or actions in an extremely short amount of time with no space for fumbling you get it a hundred percent correct or you die there is a lot of prime examples the most severe of which is going to be this lace this late game box puzzle you got to kick the box precisely three times in double jump off it with a confusing camera correction halfway through you have to do this without losing a single second reorient and to the perspective shift I was stuck here on this puzzle for so long that I found it easier to memorize a series of moves to glitch on top of the ledge you're trying to get to rather than to solve normally I was also stuck for nearly an hour on this beam balancing puzzle where you have to avoid spinning blades and maintain laser focus on your directional stick through three separate sets of twisting beams and rotating blades with no save point until you've cleared the whole set coming into any sort of casual contact with any blade kills you instantly by knocking you off and a single errant twitch of the finger sends you off the side of the beam and it takes so long to get back up that you're done for anyway the blades are coming for you perfection or death nothing else will do none of the other games in the entire franchise are quite as severe with their puzzles is here in the first game most don't even come close it's a design that does work though for the theme they're going for kratos ought not to succeed his quest should be doomed but he does it anyway even if the player has to die a hundred times to get it right the puzzles are the hardest thing in the entire game to overcome the combat even helpfully offers to bump you down too easy if you get your ass kicked too many times in a row in a single room if you're prideful you can always refuse but this game is a brutal ass uphill battle and if I'm dying every room on Normal difficulty halfway into the game I knew that I did not have a prayer for the late-game if I didn't take the downgrade to easy mode the upgrades the combat they have elements of forgiveness the puzzles never do it's a balance that makes for a truly challenging experience that offers enough rewards and enough lulz to make up for its sometimes intense frustrations the environments escalate to the Hydra and the sea giveaway to an Athens on fire which is pretty good but eventually you set out after Pandora's box and then things seriously ramped up it's at this point one of the most unique design decisions becomes clear the entire game is a connected area it will set out from Athens through the desert and make that journey in a completely linear way one foot after another even more impressive is that the dungeon which holds Pandora's box is this huge massive area chained to the back of the Titan Chronos who wanders with it through the wastes while navigating the temple it shakes and shifts along with the Titan as he moves and vistas where you can look down over the Titan shoulders to the desert floor below not to mention the fact that the temple comprises 1/3 of the entire game the middle third there are three massive wings that have to be oriented to allow beam to pass through an unlock a route to go even higher in the temple where more deadly traps and more difficult challenges await the imaginative nests of the environment is matched only by its cohesiveness once I unlocked the final architectural tumbler I was stunned by how well all its massive disparate pieces ended up fitting together into the true path it's a labyrinth in the most outrageous impossible of ways the pacing of a myth or a movie would get completely bogged down by hours of combat and puzzles one after another after another after another after another but video games exist so much in the prison tense that these things accumulate into the whole without a player much realizing that it's happening I mean sure after a while there's a certain feeling of being exhausted by the scale of the dungeon but that is else oh the thrill it's an impossible space utterly unrealistic but totally consistent with the excess of everything else in the game so it barrels past a believability with ease there's a trapped soul outside advising you that every Mortal to try and test the dungeon has died the whole structure every hour you spend in it is a one-shot attempt to stop you from doing what you're doing right now if you're a tree of Pandora's box and the whole temple becomes a useless spent thing so even in the nonviolent elements of progression Kratos is doing damage and bringing things to their end it's a spectacular kind of mythic fatalism the one right person at the right place designed for this singularly destined encounter the dungeon has a personality to it that's just bursting at the seams and it's difficulty runs along such a rapidly escalating curve that beating it fulfilling that singular destiny is about as memorable gaming moment as I've ever had even playing 14 years after its release so how to top it by killing Kratos of course Ares the God of War tosses a mass sized spear all the way from Athens and pins Kratos to the temple doors right in his moment of greatest triumph it's a fantastic way to pivot immediately away from Viktor to further danger now Kratos falls into Hades itself Souls rain from the ceiling into an ocean of blood kratos claws his way onto the fleshy platforms floating above the blood ocean figures continue to rain down from above it's dressed about the most god damned metal thing on the playstation 2 the puzzles are also impossibly gnarly in this segment and it is a massive segment a huge environment you go through many many phases of hell each nastier and meaner than the last that box kickin room is here along with many more beam balancing puzzles and a pillar of rotating blades that is just absolutely [ __ ] devious to solve devious but not entirely unfair or impossible although I vastly prefer doing the puzzles in later titles there's no denying that these buttons stick out in my mind more than what came after it's not just the huge amount of time I spent trying to solve some of them it's the wonder and appreciation for the sick son-of-a-bitch who came up with them they're grueling and maddening when you're doing them but when you're through and can't appreciate the how of it it's hard not to admire the craft of them most games these days want you to be able to see the end this first god of war dares you to quit when you clawed your way out of hell you open Pandora's box grow to the size of a skyscraper and fight Ares with a sword that was formerly an environmental object it's fight a long time coming to the motivations teased out and cutscene flashbacks throughout the game Kratos a long time ago was up north fighting the Gaul being a soldier when he was defeated by the Barbarian King Ares came to him and offered turned tide of battle in exchange for his everlasting soul like any devil's bargain that has some complications further down the line Kratos was goaded into killing his own wife and child and their ashes now coat his body and fight his fight with Ares then is very very personal later games will continue to fixate on dry-out and revisit this story but here in the first title it takes all game long to sprinkle the backstory in allowing the sub climaxes like finding Pandora's box or climbing out of hell to take narrative priority so many of the ups and downs the player experiences over the course of the game are mechanical and environmental the narrative payoffs build slowly instead until the game is ready for them and then it makes them as epic as anything else see them here as tall as buildings the ocean coming up only to their ankles absolute balls-out Clash the Titans [ __ ] everything loops around from the opening seconds of the intro cinematic to Kratos his personal history to the ocean on which you mash to our first button closing the loop so emphatically in Title II is what makes the climax really work it seems impossible to take it any further than that and then it does an epilogue that has you running Kratos up the golden steps to the top of Mount Olympus where he becomes the new god of war while the credits hinted Kratos will return the first game didn't seem to envision itself as part of the franchise or series very much it escalates the way it does because ascending to godhood actually is the final possible plateau in most story circumstances the final cutscene for example talks about how for the rest of eternity Kratos would guide any hand who picked up a sword or a gun there's a suggestion that Kratos as God of War changed things that the increasing brutality of war into the modern era was partly because of how indiscriminately bloodthirsty he was he's a collateral damage kind of guy it's become a collateral damage kind of world it's a notable tone shift because while it is triumphant in some way for the player at least it also casts Kratos as a force of evil and extremists of sorts not just a wronged man out for revenge this is also the split path that lies ahead for Kratos generally speaking to be something different he would first have to become something lesser he's no longer a man now he's a god he's part of what he's hated and in many ways he's been the subject of his own hatred ever since the day he killed his family sure Ares arranged the situation but Kratos swung the blades he always swings the blades that's who he is that's what makes him the God of War his first impulse is violence and that pretty much always works so he never tries anything else he's rage personified within this single game his rage is focused contained and then left to fester over the millennia in an epilogue to keep going with an actual direct participant or a narrative arc I guess you'd have to take that rage to an even more extreme conclusion than godhood God of War 2 is an even better game than the first it's not a very different game but it has a laser sharp understanding of why the first was so enjoyable and how to top itself by degrees David Jeff stepped down his creative lead and Corey bar logged lead animator stepped up bar logwood from then on become the creative custodians from much of the franchise from writing the scripts of the PSP prequels to crafting the rebooted God of War when the time came for the series to pivot or die God of War 2 was one of the last major titles released for PlayStation 2 coming out in early 2007 after the PlayStation 3 was already released it was an interesting choice that I think may have actually contributed to the popularity of the game rather than detracting from it there's always a high cost barrier to entry for any new console generation people simply had more PS 2's than ps3s the ps3 was less than six months old on the market by pushing the ps2 s hardware to its limit by making the older system sing as sweetly as it could one last time God of War 2 was at the apex of memorable visuals for the PlayStation 2 and would stay there more or less permanently the ps3 xbox360 era has a completely different kind of 3d aesthetic than the older platforms keeping God of War 2 within the older systems look and feel also kept it more artistically cohesive with the previous title I'm used to high fidelity modern graphics but god of War's art architecture and background skyboxes are so well done and have such a painting like quality to them that I found myself dropping my jaw son and muttering a little Wow anyway despite their low res graphics God of War 2 is a masterclass and creating a robust sense of a broader environment in a linear game God of War one was compact tight God of War 2 is a much more sprawling truly mythic experience it begins with the friction between Kratos and the rest of the Pantheon to put it simply Kratos is not enough of a human to fit in his rage is unquenchable he longs for neither power nor wealth all he wants is eternal revenge so having killed Ares he's in a bit of a post godhood of funk kratos says back to the armies of Sparta as they Rab the rest of Greece Zeus has decided to stop Kratos and the Spartans at Rhodes before they completely destroy the land you begin with most of your top-level powers of the last game your bar is maxed out as Zeus shrinks you to mortal sighs and tries to fight you with the iron Colossus again here we have a first level more exciting than many games climaxes it's also a direct continuation from the last game in terms of power and spectacle both it's only after an hour or more of fighting the Colossus that Zeus comes down to offer Kratos a gift of sorts the Blade of Olympus a big old sword with tremendous power when Kratos picks it up it drains his godhood from him Zeus stabs him and Kratos goes tumbling down to hell again it takes little time this time to claw your way back out but now here there he meets Gaia the exiled Titan who's narrated much of the story so far she asks him to rebel against the gods to free the Titans and to set them against the gods for a new crack and an old war there's just one little thing in the way fate itself so mechanically it's a full reset down to a stub of health no magic no skills just a massive grudge in terms of the stakes the game though we're gonna keep going with the escalation the enemy this time is no mere god but the natural order itself the environments of the game are much larger much more outdoor oriented not just the vast featureless desert of the first game but somewhere even more strange and secretive the island of creation it's an island that's functionally one single slowly unlocking dungeon like the temple that held Pandora's box in the previous game it takes some time to wind up to that though first you've got to conspire with another Titan who actually knows where the island is and then get on the back of your trusty Pegasus to get there oh yes it is time for horse aerial combat minigames this is a lot of the brilliance of something like God of War 2 it's doing with action what a movie like airplane might be doing with jokes it's trying every absurd thing you can think of and as rapid a succession as possible so that if you're enjoying one thing it's easier to enjoy the next thing and if something loses you well just wait 30 seconds far something entirely different the biggest sequence is completely unnecessary unexpected and unforgettable just goes ahead and rolls with it with the same utilitarian scowl that he greets everything else with and the player hasn't got any other time to say anything besides me hi guess as they saddle up for a sky showdown you'll eventually get into an extended boss battle up there one of the more ridiculously choreographed fights I've seen in an action game and this guy is just a throw away boss the whole sequence up here is just an excuse to watch Kratos do all this ridiculous midair combat since you don't have your regular attacks and your regular range of motion it's mostly done via QuickTime events these days cuties are a little out of fashion it's god of War's stylish application that made them a fad in the first place the idea that these spectat the idea is that these spectacular monsters deserve spectacular deaths something more fluid and cinematic than players clumsy inputs can manage even if the player input combos are animated with an incredible skill a cutscene is not interactive enough god of war might have plenty of cutscenes but they're only used for exposition QuickTime events are a compromise you're responding along with Kratos not directly controlling him and your inputs need to be rhythmic to the animations that rhythmic input is enough to fool you into feeling like you're helping even if all you're doing is allowing the animation to continue uninterrupted the randomization of inputs in the extremely slim time window given to the player to hit the buttons makes it feel so urgent that the urgency completely bypasses the fact that it's an element of play roughly independent from skill plus it's always at the climax of damaging a creature in a more direct player controlled way it's that final sprint to the finish where both of your mortalities are neck-and-neck and the camera bulbs are flashing of course the games also got another sex minigame this time much more ridiculous in the spirit of escalation in which the whole franchise follows if you break down a barrier during the seed roads you know with a war on and everything Kratos can invite himself into a hot tub with two busty ladies who babble VHS era porno commands the camera pans to a statue of a cherub taking a piss and you have to respond to button prompts that become increasingly suggestive as you rub your joysticks and little circles and quickly tap buttons and rhythm with a video girl fake sex noises there's a lot of criticisms about sexism lobbed at God of War and there's things dragged on franchise there is more and more merit to those arguments but early on here the whole thing is just so absolutely over the top and deliberately Juvenal that I don't see any way to read it as a legitimate attempt at titillation it's a joke where the setup is being goaded into increasingly stupid QuickTime prompts and the punchline is that you actually went along with it I'm sitting there twiddling as directed and thinking this has got to be the goddamn dumbest gaming moment of my life and then later realizing that was the intent that if the developers were right there at that moment they'd just be laughing and saying yeah it is it's pretty stupid while giving each other casual low fives most of the time these QuickTime events are meant to make the player feel badass but in this particular case it's meant to make you feel like a little bit of a dumbass instead it's a major piece of evidence in the argument that says that the God of War games are just cheese trash the moment certainly qualifies as cheese and trash but I think it's an interesting little window into what works and what doesn't when it comes to cuties as a whole kind of general thing that it could be so effective in conveying the impression that there's something rude and crude going on when all you're really looking at is a pink cherub plus as dumb as that is as base the impulses that the game indulges are it's still a sophisticated work in many areas it's visual art is just one of those arenas the level design of the island of creation is where the game is at its most complex the whole thing is a puzzle box and not a playground in contrast to an island map like the first Far Cry had when you first arrived have got to find the system mine leashing the steeds of time a trio of gigantic horse statues who after an hour so is puzzling and fighting do begin to gallop into a new position and extend to the wings the dungeons behind there's a great cohesion to each step of that process each part of the island the only clean break comes when you've gone beyond the main temple and the swamps and come across a columned walkway from one canyons edge to the other it's unstable and begins to collapse just about the moment you set foot on it leaving to a breathless sequence of tiny jumps it's an example of improved puzzle design in the second game even though I had to try a good half a dozen times to get it right it was exciting each time and the timing that I had to follow was well telegraphed by the environment the puzzles are easier this time around but I have a hard time imagining that many people will mistake the greater margins of forgiveness for a weaker design rather than learn and execute a certain pattern of actions and inputs absolutely perfectly a little leeway increases the likelihood that a player will get it right when they first encounter it or soon after letting the momentum of action continue to build without awkwardly falling off the edge of the screen every 30 seconds in a difficult puzzle the puzzles are fewer locked rooms and more active actions with the environment though when the game does do locked rooms it does them with style here for example you reach the high temple of the fates only to find it time locked an appetizer puzzle before the main puzzle of finding your way out of the room the solution isn't about twitch reflexes but careful study of the environment and letting curiosity be your guide there's a few hidden chests in the room as well if you align the upper beams to where they face out of the frame diagonally and then jump backwards off of them toward the camera experimentation is a major part of any puzzle solving game but in the original God of War that probing to find a solution was often very fatal here that that kind of death happens much less often instead they've made the mechanisms of the puzzles more complex made of the picking of the great in ancient locks more important than the anxiety of fatal consequence God of War 2 differentiates better between what's a puzzle and what's a trap the traps are as murder as it as they've ever been but there's so much shorter than they were before take that beam balancing act with the spinning blades in the first game is that a puzzle or a trap it's kind of an unfair to long blend of the two if you asked me the rhythm here is improved greatly by having puzzles act as brief rest zones a time to relax and let the tension M before the next wave of monsters in the next set of murder spikes the island of creation gets more and more surreal as you approach the end as well the final temple of the fates is a beautiful impossible thing grand and neat human not meant for a mortal that we can be this many hours deep into the series and still be escalating the art the combat everything is a hell of a thing but the combat the style in the nefarious architecture is still have a long way to go yet before they begin to grow stale there's a steady significant shift into seeing Kratos as a villainous character as well and that is where he fits best into setting God of War one had elements of that cruelty we could kill innocents for health Horeb and at one point in solve a puzzle by roasting a fellow Spartan alive but from the very beginning of the second game Kratos is bad [ __ ] news he's killing Greece literally killing it with the armies of Sparta who benefit from his divine favour the gods are terrible yes but there's no constructive element and Kratos his quest for revenge no plan for an afterwards just rage pure impulsive rage people are absolutely terrified of Kratos except for the hot tub ladies I guess and why not be terrified he's become exactly what he hated even if Zeus stripped him of his powers he still no mortal late in the game there's a very cool very short boss fight all done in shadow against a mystery figure the figure is quick and skilled a worthy opponent when the light reveals what you've done you find that Kratos has killed the most loyal of his Spartan generals someone who may have been an actual friend to Kratos and his older soldiering days Zeus as punishment for what Kratos did has destroyed the Spartan nation killed him to a man this soldier came to do what Kratos is doing roll back time and fate because the world right now is ruined and lost already just the second game in a seven-game franchise Kratos addition to the Pantheon has broken history many of the bosses you face throughout the game are mythic figures like prissiest whose personal myth is also the plot to Clash of the Titans every figure that Kratos encounters dies often quite horribly for example there's an incredible QuickTime event where you steal the wings of Icarus right off his back while the two of you tumble down an abyssal trench towards hell you fall so deep that you have to ask atlas to let you out again though he is helpfully inclined to do so since you're on a titans errand anyway every time Kratos encounters some element of Greek myth that element becomes tainted or destroyed and the temple of the fates there are two scholars who must translate tomes that allow Kratos access to the fates themselves part of that ritual is that the translators must be sacrificed their blood is part of the key Kratos is more than happy to indulge them in that you the player must beat these scholars half to death and then fully to death to force them to read the full passage and fulfill their part in Kratos is personal destiny it's sad it's mean and since the scholar is know full well what Kratos is doing this the end of all things including their lives all these traps all this combat it was try to stop you individually from doing specifically what you're doing now like the temple that held Pandora's box but with even larger supernatural stakes the fates themselves make up a pretty spectacular series of boss fights the first two fates being mostly a combat puzzle and the third fate being an environmental one due to the fates grotesque size these boss fights also figure somewhat into the feeling that the early god of the wars are a bit on the sexist side sends all the feminine Andy there is in the game is either in those traditional standards of beauty attracted the main character by default that you saw earlier or else some kind of big titty monster lady one of the fates even hits on in the bed its prominent enough to draw some side eye but I feel like the primary motivation with the fates was grotesque monster design and general kind of way and not really a deliberately gendered one the fates of the muses are women in the myth so they're women here it is a monster designers job after all to make their audience feel a little uncomfortable which the game happily does in a myriad of ways for God of War two the intention seems to land on straightforward grotesquerie it's something the game is awfully good at it is good at being gross God of War one didn't leave very much slack for further sequels to escalate from but the second game has a much clearer understanding of how much farther it wants to go and spends much of its climactic energy setting up plot threads instead of resolving them after taking the windows have paid into your own hands and finding the passage the moments who struck you down and roads Grado strides right on through to pick up the conversation where was last left off with a sort of Olympus lodge and Kratos his chest I expected a big deal boss fight and it kind of get one but that was mostly the fates job to defeat Zeus you mostly have to do a quick time event it just happens to be the worst QuickTime event I've ever played in anything this stems from a determination to make it a climactic QuickTime event harsher and more finicky than any other implementation of the mechanic in the game Zeus is supposed to be stronger smarter and faster than Kratos so how do you convey that with choreographed button mashes well first God of War 2 has generally up until now been excellent had suggesting when a prompt would flash at the player was watching the animation during the QTE with Zeus he's tricky the button prompts occur the split-second before Zeus does something so that Kratos can counter second the time allowances to meet the problems have been trimmed to their barest minimums even on the lowest difficulty setting it has to be an immediate twitch reaction if you've taken the time to think about which symbol is where on the gamepad you've already lost third it's an endurance run even once Kratos has turned the tide on Zeus and begins to kick his beauty old ass any hesitation to button mash will mean that Zeus gets to counter himself and instantly kill Kratos what's more each time you die the same 30 seconds of banter between the two of them plays again before you get a chance to try again with the button mashing it took me nearly three dozen attempts which means I listen to the same 30 seconds of dialogue for 15 full minutes when Kratos goat Zeus with free may from there's dom ant boy howdy did I agree a QuickTime event used right allows for moments of action way beyond the verbs of regular play but the intention is always to make the scene feel interactive even when it is all scripted to craft a QuickTime event so twitchy as this runs the risk of trapping a player in a scene to the point where the scene loses all dramatic weight and its interactivity barely registers I had to set the game down for a night and come back to it again in the morning because I got so damn mad at being stuck in this loop I saw every death animation at every stage of each button prompt in the sequence of course there's the counter-argument that I should just get good but this is the narrative climax and it can't function correctly as the end of the game when it's experientially closer to a record skipping at the crescendo of a song once past it though Kratos continues down his path to vengeance at all costs it costs him this game Athena the only one of the gods who actually cared for him she throws herself on his sword rather than let him kill Zeus to kill Zeus is to destroy Greece surely Kratos knows this and he does he simply doesn't care in one reading this is meant to motivate him further for Abed that this is Zeus's fault somehow that Athena died but it's more plain to see that Kratos has become more or less completely unhinged his violence and rage can only get worse until it reaches a terminal point for either Greece or him or both the game ends on a true cliffhanger and a fantastic image Kratos clinging to the back of tree-covered Gaia as the Titans de 5 and now broken bonds of fate an attack Olympus to seek revenge on the children who imprisoned them for so long God of War 3 will pick up directly from that image in that moment but before that there was another major god of war release a prequel for the PlayStation Portable called Chains of Olympus today the switch is so omnipresent that it's hard to imagine a world without High Definition handhelds 2005 though was a brief transition era where mobile technology was suddenly everywhere but the coolest phone you could probably have was a razor flip phone unless you were some mr. moneybags with a blackberry when the PSP released packing the graphical fidelity of a whole ps2 when the space of a movie theater sized mr. Goodbar it was a major visible step forward and consumer technology in highschool I remember that having a PSP was definitely one of those things that drew attention anytime anyone happened to break the one out Chains of Olympus was designed for the PSP with the express purpose of bringing the sense of scale and spectacle that the ps2 games were known for to the tiny screen of a handheld chains of Olympus is shorter easier and simpler than its ps2 predecessors but the thing that's enduringly impressive about it is how its environments and boss battles feel no smaller for the change of systems later on the PSP titles were re-released for PlayStation 3 which were then much later put on the game streaming service PS now which is how I encountered them now a PSP game ported the ps3 played remotely on ps4 via emulation my point being it's kind of neat that I could play them at all considering how completely history has passed the PSP by there were people who bought whole movie libraries on its proprietary UMD mini disk system and those people are now essentially a new generation of folks who have a cardboard box full of Betamax tapes so all the footage you see here of Chains of Olympus and then later Ghost of Sparta unless you're watching this on a phone or a tablet or a switch or what-have-you is gonna look a little and a little stretched when considering the art and visuals I did try to take into account how it would be shrunken onto a tinier display natively what's noteworthy is that even stretched the way it is onto a big living room TV the fidelity is not hugely different from the ps2 titles God of War two is grander than either this or the other PSP spin-off but there are moments that certainly challenge the first god of war in terms of spectacle and grandeur a separate studio ready at non did the vast majority of work on the PSP titles yet they completely nailed the texture and feel of the franchise as a whole these games don't feel like spin-offs they feel like little lost chapters of the primary games plus these games are quite playful with the familiarity they expect series fans to come in with very early on in the first level you balanced across a short straight beam and the game gives you an achievement for completing all the beam puzzles in the game it's an achievement being used as an explicit tongue-in-cheek apology for some of the first game is more frustrating moments the only letdown is that the puzzles in the game are often too simple and too forgiving more so than the combat this time the difference seems to be and how the ps2 titles have a lot more vacuum space in their levels you can jump off nearly anything and fault here death and dozens and dozens of ways here in the PSP games invisible walls are everywhere except in situations where falling as designed as a specific hazard the game has shaved out all of these non spaces if there is a long long drop or a gap or hole in the level then it's cheaper with the system resources to simply show it and not use ibly map it inadvertently this leads to the game having a much more casual feel to it like using the things that prevent you from getting gutter balls at the bowling alley it's not nearly as mean or nasty of a game world either which gives us surprisingly way in painting Kratos is a little less of a mean and nasty guy himself there's not a lot of redeeming kratos in the present ends of the story but if we go back before the events of the first game he's at least more of a warrior and less of a supernatural harbinger of death the game takes an awfully long time to ramp up beginning with a kind of straightforward and really unimaginative defense of a city against a Persian army a giant basilisk with them it is a good way to warm up to the control scheme though but it's nothing so striking as the opening levels of the ps2 titles then the game shifts dramatically to the temple of Helios crashed out of the sky and surrounded by the toxic black dream clouds of Morpheus you've got to rally the steams and put it back in the sky the temple of Morpheus is high on puzzles but lean on plot and frankly that's fine I imagine that imitating mechanical texture of the original games on handheld was a more immediately impressive achievement than any court a sort of digression of plot the PSP did not have the twin joysticks like the TV console systems did so the control scheme here is pulled in a little tighter getting the player used to the difference would necessarily have to be a design goal the temple of Helios is a really gorgeous dreamlike environment of gold and white marble it's got plenty of chests hidden just out of frame but the smaller general size of the maps both internally is a labyrinth and extremely as a connected environment mean that those chests aren't hidden as deeply or complexly as they used to be in the previous games a lot of their solutions seem kinda obvious since every effort was made to replicate the feel of the game's predecessors I'm pretty sure that this is more of a hardware concession and not a failure of the mappers imagination the game even replicates the spiral staircase camera shot that comes to be kind of a franchise signature present in every game when the temple flies again Kratos doesn't take it to the sky like he's supposed to but down into Hades now unravel a plot between the goddess Persephone in the Titan Atlas the level design just keeps getting more and more interesting the more supernatural and surreal it gets one of my favorite side characters in the franchise is down here car on the ferryman he's presently creepy in the best of ways and game does this clever build up where you test yourself against him once in a circumstance where he cannot lose and then again with a new power that absolutely mops the floor with the snide old bastard small self-contained arcs of achievement and advancement even here and it's been off that's like a maximum of five hours long for the most part the boss fights are really excellent a little bare-bones in terms of environmental detail but rich and indicate in the animations where the strategy and attack patterns and all the hallmarks of a high budget boss monster the QuickTime events are fluid they're vicious and they're just as engaging as they've ever been they're just not quite as epic at least there is nothing quite as dumb as the extra hot hot tub minigame now the novelty QuickTime event of Chains of Olympus is way weirder and way more memorable across the whole franchise Kratos his perception of himself as a father is what comes to kind of define the human parts of his character it's pretty straightforward in the first two games he's real angry about having been tricked into killing them but beyond that there's really not much of a sense that he would have actually preferred family life to one of warfare and death Chains of Olympus is no less melodramatic than the games have been before but it is melodramatic in a broader range of ways than before which is progress the setup is that Persephone goddess of the underworld has a plot to let the world fall from Atlas's shoulders destroying the Grecian world and its gods in one fell swoop since Kratos is still serving the gods his fate bound stop it the thing is the very next game in the franchise and release order God of War three has a plot where Kratos does exactly the same thing pretty much he conspires with the Titans and God by God kills the world it's a strange kind of ironic dissonance between the active plot and the self-contained prologue plot it helps paint Kratos here as being significantly less terrible than he'll later become but it muddies the waters by having Persephone be a more sympathetic villain than even Kratos is when she details her scheme it's no more than the myth that she was forced into her marriage and is only permitted to see the surface world for a scant few months of the year in Greece Persephone was a harvest goddess waxing and waning with the crops in God of War the game looks at her story in the same modern way it has been imagining who Persephone would be not if she abided by fate but if she mocked it and took some of the Vengeance that she's well earned destroying the whole world all at once seems cruel and excessive but you end up doing it by degrees in God of War three anyway it's an interesting parallel that makes it almost disappointing that the climax of Chains of Olympus is to just beat the snot out of Persephone and Atlas the fact that Persephone's scheme disrupts and destroys the supernatural fabric of the world also takes the sting out of what would otherwise be a very strong bit of storytelling all game long Kratos is haunted by hints that the spirit of his daughter Calliope is calling to him from somewhere Persephone makes that call possible Kratos willingly strips himself of magic and health to make Elysium accessible Calliope is there they can be father and daughter again this is a conundrum from Kratos that I would be curious to see resolved without a catch or a constraint if he would actually willingly give up on power and give up on violence forever to be with the family he ruined as it is it's not really much of a choice at least not that choice for Sevigny straight-up tells him that Elysium will be destroyed unless he springs Calliope and fights if he stays they all become nothing so it's not much so much of a choice between war and family but a one where choosing family is choosing war and that's much less interesting the game has got to be consistent with its timeline sure but this was a clarifying moment downgraded to a moment of peculiar novelty killer because they made a minigame out of leaving Calliope you have to turn her away with rapid button mashes like pairing an attack in other QuickTime events three times in a row as she hugs him tighter and demands that he stayed when Kratos does pull free he starts to tear innocent souls apart to replenish the precious precious blue and green orbs that he earlier gave up by fate and necessity nothing has changed and Kratos fights against a goddess who fundamentally shares his vision Chains of Olympus is a truly fantastic small screen adaptation of all the mechanical rhythmic and stylistic elements of God of War it's only real drawback is how the storytelling is chained to the angrier crueler Kratos without that element of cruelty however God of War 3 wouldn't be the game that it is it's an action game that feels tangibly unlike any other ever played including previous gods of war and the upcoming God's warm the basics of interaction are essentially unchanged from previous titles the feel of moving Kratos and swinging the blades of chaos is as rewarding as it's ever been maybe a little better but in smaller ways instead of larger ones now what's special about God of War 3 is how it uses scale of landscape of monster and of intention to create a feeling of bleak nihilistic inevitability it flips the script on most action games by having a play the villain and destroy the world sure but it also continually reminds you that Kratos is barely a mote of dust in the eyes of the gods and the Titans in every meaningful way Kratos is the underdog literally dwarfed by his opponents and yet over the course of the game is a building sense that Kratos can't do anything but win that this small person will be the undoing of a gigantic machine no matter what God or monster stands against him God of War 3 incorporates Kratos his story his personal story more explicitly into the mythology of Olympus than ever before and the world is littered with references to past in-game events and confrontations all of these suggestions lead to the same conclusion that Kratos the Ghost of Sparta brings misery and death on unheard-of scales the hardware swap from PlayStation 2 and the PSP to the PlayStation 3 is radically more powerful capabilities allow the games to escalate immediately and creatively from even where God of War 2 left off by allowing 4 levels spatially much larger and more intricate than before in God of War 2 the titan army that scaled Mount Olympus was a pre-rendered cutscene here it's the opening level and all its seamless loading screen free fully interactive glory God of War 3 is pretty clearly designed with two audiences in mind the franchise fans who will see all the little nods and references and the newcomers who might not know anything about Kratos at all the game's story and presentation is just as strong either way who Kratos is as a character and how Kratos feels when you're mashing out combos and disemboweling minotaurs are here in this title more than any other the exact same thing a breathless manic preposterous the aggressive drive to overcome every challenge ahead of you know matter how bleak things get no matter how many indications you get that you should probably stop the animations are more beautifully fluid than before - and the new side weapons are more useful there is straightforwardly more art and more tactical variety to the combat Kratos has never presented himself better and critically there is no build up to any of this the game starts you off with most of the powers artifacts and satisfiers a player would have ended god of war - with just as that game started you off at maximum power in its opening level you've even still got the Blade of Olympus which you spend all damned game trying to get your mitts on last time around if you've played the series in order it's a seamless transition from God of War two to three and a highly rewarding start this is your first experience with Kratos and then your first hour getting to know the guy sees you putting yourself against Poseidon and prevailing not just prevailing kicking his watery ass all up and down the street with more Verve and more style than a lot of the digital action even in the 2010 Clash of the Titans remake it's difficult to start an action game off on a stronger footing in that it's an attempt to recreate the magic of the first games opening level a nostalgic intention which is often a fool's errand in this case though it's such a dramatic difference between what it's possible to portray and again between 2005 and 2010 that there's room to be drawn in the exact same way all over again it's this brilliant hook of using climaxes introduction that cinches it structurally the first level is much the same as it was in 2005 the first save point is a long way away from the beginning and the difficulty Begins had a very aggressive baseline one thing that's missing is a tricky annoying puzzle because those have been streamlined out of the game pretty much entirely the platforming is altogether more forgiving and more accessible than it's ever been part of a concession to new audiences which improves pacing noticeably but does take away some from the overall feeling of the world being arbitrarily mean and cruel the focus is much more on spectacle than on twitch reflex so that navigational novelty is the overarching battle itself kratos leaps from tighten to tighten to the halls of Mount Olympus back again the level itself the literal ground you walk on is alive in ways that are wildly creative and very novel even when he pop inside the mountain for some more traditional level design it presents you with spectacles like the corpse of areas preserved in a frozen tomb and only vaguely visible through the wavy ice in a Gamasutra retrospective senior producer steve kate ursin said quote the very first thing the tech guys did was they ported the God of War 2 engine to the PlayStation 3 very quickly we were able to play the PlayStation 2 game on the PlayStation 3 which meant that Kratos could move around he could jump he could run slices blades do all of his combos and animations and he could fly all of the things that he could do in God of War 2 he could do on the PlayStation 3 that meant that we could immediately start designing stuff and immediately get in and start working on things end quote that's the exact mechanical flavor of the introduction every single thing you remember and enjoy about controlling Kratos and the frantic ferocious gore of combat is the baseline and then in upwards moving conveyor belt of more more MORE just like how the Hydra was the real star of the show in the first level of God of War it's a constantly rotating hard-fought strung-out battle of wills against the Leviathan that steals the show here the Leviathan is like a fusion of crab horse spider gary busey it's weird it's mean and it is completely transfixing to look at God war isn't afraid to drag out the lengths of these fights longer than might initially seem fun but the thematic benefits of this far outweighed the costs these are massive impossible gods and monsters that have long been understood to be invincible so these fights typically evolved through many different stages ratcheting up the tension the danger the time investment the personal investment in a fight that's on some level as exhausting as it is exhilarating the perseverance at play that Kratos has in the face of what it what's aligned against him is a key element of his character mirroring that as the player builds a lot of resonance at the end of the introduction you have killed not only the lion but Neptune himself Neptune can barely believe it Kratos never seems to have had any doubts as Neptune dies the seas swell and rage soon the coastlines of Greece will all be drowned all of this in the first hour of the game which means according to the rhythm established by God of War - it's time for a mechanical reset zu strikes Kratos from the mountaintop so Kratos falls all the way back to Hades itself lands in the River Styx and is stripped of his powers back to the bare minimum again Kratos has now gone to Hades four times in four games having been killed by the gods and sent down there three of those times for now novelty is done you might have noticed something on the way down though this entire game world is one connected strand the top of Mount Olympus to the depths of Hades are physically connected a consistent set of levels the High Definition Hades of God of War three just isn't quite as compelling though as the apocalyptically weird bodies raining from the sky a flesh pillar puzzler of a Hades that God of War one portrayed also the combat feels weakened slow compared to what the game started you off with which is on point for how they want you to be experiencing great O's in this moment of defeat it's just a very rapid shift in mechanical rhythm it'll be a while before you're back at God killing strength which is both a narrative and mechanical necessity there has to be some kind of arc to those methods of interaction over the hours of the game and using the climax as the introduction short-circuited the most obvious escalations for both post reset you're quite literally working your way from the bottom to the top of the mountain in a bloody journey of revenge there is some bouncing back and forth later on but it just reinforces what's so clever and satisfying about this completely interconnected world Olympus Mount Olympus is a kind of gigantic mythic machine and breaking machines is something that Kratos is uniquely qualified to do God of War 3 recognized that blurring the lines between dungeon and overworld was part of what's made the franchise so unique so far the temple on Cronus is back in God of War 1 the island of creation God of War 2 single dungeons with multiple wings and interlocking parts that take hours to put into the right configuration to unveil the prize God of War 3 escalated even Matt the entire game functions in this way is wings of a singular mountain sized dungeon all the plot beats are designed to intensify that holistic feeling and allow a completionist approach to the game world the first arc is quite direct from the bottom to the top your God killing powers that might have worked on Zeus have been snatched away so you have to go back for Pandora's Box all over again like the Hades sequence it's kind of an aggravating repetition if you're doing all the games in order but it also functions as a kind of Greatest Hits type of narrative where you know a lot of your audience are coming in without having played the originals and this does intensify their connection through the recycling of motifs that are proven crowd-pleasers the Pandora's box thing is cool so we're gonna take it from the top but with even more complications this time the box is the game long goal but it's protected by a flame that kills anything it touches so kratos goes up the chain of minor gods on his way to zeus climbing the literal chain that holds olympus the mortal world and the underworld and balance first Hades then Helios Hermes Hera up and up and up and up and from each god kratos will exact a price in past games magic was granted either by the gods or the titans as a gift in God of War three Cueto steals an ability from each god he encounters by ripping it from them over the course of a given day aside it's a way for the game to distinguish itself from the previous titles in the series and from most other action games by way of the wild and excessive brutality of simply expanding your inventory god of wars violence is certainly one of the most divisive things about the franchise as a whole the way it indulges itself so much more than average and rebels in the meanness of its violence in a way that's actually kind of uncommon I've seen other game critics lament what it implies about the medium generally that the murdering feels great is such a common statement of praise about so many different games I totally agree that when you put it like that it is a strange and maybe uncomfortable statement to make but it's also one that I find myself leaning on and believing on ironically video games like any artistic medium can be put to any purpose an artist can envision there are many many nonviolent games but violence in games can have a completely different texture and weight to it then you'll see in other mediums because of its interactivity and its artificiality some games might rely on a more heavy approach to what violence means I still remember Telltale's Walking Dead Season one where you have option of amputating your own main character's arm to try to slow down a zombie infection it is super brutal very gory very violent but it's meant to inspire sympathy a human kind of feeling cray doses violence is simply the expression of power for powers sake and that's the fundamental thrill of the whole underlying game design here in real life violence means something even in a narrative if you've invested in the realness of that world it has to mean something but in a digital space there is always a constant understanding of everything you see being on some level false ephemeral it takes skill and a lot of tonal finesse to make death feel serious in a game because with save points and responds and the simple power of the new game button nothing is permanent death least of all if you're doing traditional storytelling this is a challenge to overcome but if you're leaning into the peculiarities of the medium then this is maybe more of an opportunity death and injury are a serious consequence of violence without those consequences violence is an expression of power only an assertion of will if you're a sociopath or something worse then you don't care or actively desire the consequence part the injury the death and that's what makes Kratos a villain because he is all about that [ __ ] it is his sole driving motivation at this point heartless performative cruelty the player however is probably not a sociopath so why are we taking this journey with Kratos and why is that fun well I think it's because feeling powerful is a universal human thrill in real life we must temper power with compassion and respect in play has a little different even an otherwise sickly-sweet TV sitcoms characters has become mustache twirling tyrants the moment someone breaks out the Monopoly board or for example I am pretty positive that a raccoon would kick my dog's ass if she ever took one on for real but the look that she gets in her eye when she gets her toy raccoon by the neck and shakes it until the stuffing is out and the toys covered in spit and a little brain is scrambled from the rock as well that look is goddamn infectious so mischievous so satisfied God of War three is dark nihilistic and has a fundamental outlook that would be completely indefensible if it wasn't done out of dramatic exaggeration so why is it instead an object of fun because God of War is three violence is not weighted its object is action and not consequence every time a god dies the world deteriorates and thus the narrative re introduces consequences for those deaths that the narrative is interested in giving meaning to this is a very small chunk of the violence in the game the larger chunk of violence is a 44 million dollar chew toy for humans that sounds derisive I do not mean it derisively it takes a lot to break people from their composure they're busy adults elves you're on this journey not out of real true to your character meanness and bloodlust but because you got the toy in your mouth you got the fire in your eyes and sticking with Kratos means that you are absolutely gonna get to see the stuff and come out the synthesis of everything I've been talking about so far is plain to see in the descent into Tartarus for a boss fight with Chronos on whose back you spent so much time earlier in the series even though Kratos was fundamentally on the Titans side Gaia told Kratos that this was their war not his this didn't sit well with Kratos so he decides to kill them all and let let well leave them unsorted where they lay so at the very bottom of the world is the chamber of the Festus where all game long there's a very large very ornate door that's close to you it's designed to stick in your mind and make you itch to open it it's a door to the deepest hell where Chronos waits chained the sub-basement of the whole Mountain dungeons without the holistic design that itch to see what's behind it wouldn't be there so strongly and God of War - once you left somewhere behind you really left it behind here it's less certain the door wouldn't be there if you couldn't open it so how and when this door is tied to narrative but another door the next door is an act of puzzle instead it's not that difficult of a puzzle but it sure is a good-looking one God of War has continued the traditions of taking motifs from classical art and just turning them up to 11 in deliciously impossible ways the door to Tartarus is a fine example it opens onto a wave based arena battle and then the path binds to a scenic vista of tortured souls in this massive underground space you fight all the way to Chronos you argue with them and your very first action of the boss fight is to resist being crushed between his fingers how are you possibly supposed to kill this guy there's ingenuine li no indication this early on in the fight you just have to keep pushing until an opportunity reveals itself in this instance the head of Helios which you personally tore off the Sun gods body can blind the Titan for a moment letting you leap and run along his arms and shoulders where he swats at you like a fly that is the scale of the fight man-sized Chronos vs fly sized Kratos the game has to go on so your victory is in some sense inevitable but the idea of it the look of it seems charismatic Illya bird the fight goes on and on and on alternating between QTEs where you leap from body part to body parts environmental hazards from his slapping hands wave combat from the defenders who rally along his body like ants he even swallows you whole and you have to slide down his gullet quicker than his throat can push a lump of acidic a bile toward you it is every mode of combat and obstacle that the game knows in an unpredictable sequence where the level itself is alive moving and trying to kill you swallowing you is the fatal mistake kratos uses the Blade of Olympus to herniate his way out and then climbs up to the old Titans face and drives the sword down through the Titans forehead a slow and painting needle slowly turning off the Immortals lights one by one it is uncompromisingly brutal and surprisingly sad it's also breathlessly fun and rewarding the interplay between disappointment with who Kratos is in the plot and delight in how Kratos feels as an avatar is part of what makes the game what it is it tempers the mechanics and doesn't let them get away with it without at least some element of self criticism that self criticism ends up only really extending to Kratos though your triumph in killing something a hundred times larger than you is still perfectly valid this simultaneous celebration and rebuke is a fine fine line to walk which God of War three eventually does stumble in fall off like the beam balancing puzzles of old the problems all come around to Pandora who serves as a completely counterproductive moral anchor for Kratos late in the game she's the only one who can open the box and that part's a hoot one of the most memorably devious parts of the entire game is the labyrinth where she's hidden a labyrinth of suspended boxes caught between Mount Olympus in the underworld as a plot device like any other character she could have asked a de die entirely without notice instead they humanize Pandora more than any other character in the franchise up to this point and then use her as a humanizing force on Kratos in the late game the problem with this is that it causes a domino effect of recontextualization if we're going to believe Kratos has the capacity to care about her at all the Pandora reminds Kratos of his lost daughter I believe that that's simple but if he cares about her safety and personhood more deeply than that why not others earlier there was a very weird pairing of scenes in Poseidon's old chambers still lingering in the palace Poseidon's busty and topless consort cries out for help and then recoils in fear when she sees that the help that's coming is Kratos this is warranted in the next five minutes Kratos will force her to march through the dungeon Shaner to a door mechanism and then allow her to be ripped in half by that same mechanism so they can get through the locked door this kind of thing isn't new for Kratos you roasted that soldier alive in the first game and then you threw another wounded soldier into a very similar gear mechanism in God of War two and you've always been able to kill non-combatants of either gender for health and ruthless ways sexualizing this particular scene with the nudity makes it uncomfortable for the player but you know it's not out of character for Kratos at this point however if he's able to be sympathetic to and protective of Pandora why not this woman she's hardly more than a half dozen years or so older than the kind of girl Pandora's made out to be Pandora has to choose to sacrifice herself against Kratos his wishes to open the box Kratos would have apparently chosen her over revenge but this isn't a long game so it's not more than five hours between ripping the one woman in half and having his fatherly side engaged by another once you've established that Kratos is capable of choosing differently it prompts an examination of why he did not and there aren't many good reasons why that aren't at least a little bit sexist adding to this mix scene that takes place not fifteen minutes after the gear Ground girl the infamous QuickTime event in Aphrodite is chambers Aphrodite coos and flirts and spouts dialogue that sounds like old late-night Cinemax flicks even by the standards of 2010 her super sexy seductress dialogue feels not only juvenile but also dated I went into as much detail as I did on the sex bit in God of War two because it's useful to contrast it to how they did it here there it was a prank on the player but with the peeing cherub and the outrageous circumstance of taking the time for Jacuzzi threesome mid-battle here Kratos is a murder machine who's killed every other God in his path without discrimination and yet Aphrodite spending time going around about how long it's been since a real man entered her chambers it's flattery directed towards an overwhelmingly 18 to 35 male audience at the direct expense of taking Kratos seriously or at least taking him straightforwardly during the cutscene to other toga party errs give more over-the-top compliments to the point of collapsing off-camera from being just too turned on by the guy that's equally as likely to rip them in half the joke in God of War 2 was that that particular minigame was trolla stupid you were a dumbass for playing it here there is not a joke so much as just a campy doubling down on the stereotypically masculine ways that the game tries to make the player feel powerful in the first place except it's just dumber than [ __ ] it's a sophomoric thing in a way that's extremely out of fashion and hasn't been in fashion since Freddy got fingered was lighting up the silver screen the thing is it is honestly silly enough that I'm sitting on the couch pretending to beat up monsters by overextending the compliment by having these digital reach and valley girls tell me what a fabulous lover I am because I'm mashing the buttons as they pop on screen it's hard not to feel self-conscious about how artificial the whole experience is I'm not a mighty warrior I'm a nerdy schlub in Eastern Oregon I had been happily transplanted into the world in its rhythms and now I feel kind of coerced into going outside for the rest of the day to make up for having spent such a nice afternoon on something so self-indulgent ly frivolous try to tie all these threads together kratos doesn't value a woman who doesn't directly remind him of his own family even then it's about him he kills Pandora's actual father Hephaestus and never mentions that death to Pandora once Kratos doesn't care if the matter at hand is fighting or a family or [ __ ] it's all about what he can take and how powerful he is Aphrodite's real man thing I mean when you look at all that together it's mostly old-fashioned straightforward sexism what's strange is how none of it from top to bottom none of that was necessary Kratos did not need to be humanized with a false daughter he didn't need to be complemented by a softcore porn cliche the game didn't need to blend its sex with its violence by crushing that girl in the gears all Kratos needed all he wanted was blind revenge they could left that pure and simple but by treating one woman in the supporting cast is real and human they opened up their own Pandora's box of having to ask why the rest of the scrips women are written in such contradictory fashions the climax is a little convoluted because of all these late-game shifts and character rescuing Pandora is dressed about the last major part of dungeoneering in the game all that's left to do is pop down to Hades break the chain loose from the judges who hold it as it was foreshadowed the first time we were down there and encountered all those tantalizing glowing crystals you couldn't quite smash yet using the gauntlets that you took from Hercules you break the chains using the wings you stole from Icarus you'll fly to the top of them suddenly unstable mountain when you get to the top it's time for the confrontation with the father of the gods and the father of Kratos that you've been waiting for sure you kicked his ass last game but this time it's personal and/or for keeps in keeping with the pulpy melodrama of the franchise so far God of War three further gamify as the moment by putting Zeus and Kratos in a mostly two dimensional arena with a fighting game camera angle it's like the one and only action video game trope that they hadn't bothered to explore yet and here they are last 15 minutes of the last game in the primary trilogy and they're slapping it in with a big old grin round one fight you've just got to admire the hubris of assuming that this would work and then spending so much time and effort tuning the speed and methods of attack for Zeus and for Kratos that it actually does work the pace of combat the animations the button mashing at all mimics the frantic and heavy feel of an arcade beat-em-up this is only phase one of the fight besides Phase two goes outside and then shows you your own handiwork Greece in ruins Neptune's death caused floods and rain Helio says death made it permanent Knight Hermes and Harrah's deaths Unleashed plagues on the land there is no conceivable argument that you've helped anyone or anything pure destruction every direction if you kill Zeus then what great oz couldn't care less after this arena fight you're then scooped up by Gaia and the fight continues to her heart you stab juice and Gaia's heart in one blow killing God and narrator in a wickedly efficient blow I figured this was the end it's the climax of all the arcs certainly the peak expression of mechanical power and dominance in the narrative the terminal end point of kratos is revenge that doesn't need to be more but there's more Zeus somehow pulls Kratos down into a repeating vision of his worst moment his family's death at his own hands of course Kratos has done worse since then but this is the only thing that he actually regrets as Gredos faces the memory multiple times he eventually lights a lantern with Pandora's flame and hears her voice Pandora says that what was in the box the power to kill a god is hope I mean what in the first game it was the power to grow real big and hit the bad man with a large sword you've been tearing gods to shreds and keeping the useful bits all game long it's just altogether too much to throw in this redemptive strand now at the very very end I suppose that it simply wouldn't fit anywhere else without the fight Kratos is nothing he's the [ __ ] God of War to stop doing war he'd have to stop being a god which is what ultimately allows the climax to land if awkwardly with the powers of positive thinking Kratos finishes off Zeus then what's left of Athena whose role in motivations as a green ghost I admit I'm more or less completely stumped by makers with Kratos about what to do with hope like hope is a trinket to be bartered for it's kind of baffling but Kratos has vision and choice at the end of the game our clears day he sees that this destruction was of his own making from the very beginning and that in end to this sort of war means an end to himself that in becoming the God of War he had become what he most despised so the last subject of his revenge is his own self the whole thing about releasing Hope back into the world that's all a little too much base for a game like this the thing about closing the loop of his own fatalistic extremism right on the money Kratos sees himself he sees what he's done and he lets go of his rage for the first time in the franchise this is a difficult thing to believably pull off given the truly relentless brutality of the game thus far but in making the significant pivot after the climax the player was most anticipating there is a surprising amount of tonal breathing room in which to do it Kratos is now the dog who's caught the car and he sits there dumbfounded amid the wreckage with a scrap of rubber in his mouth the game has to pivot somewhere mercifully though it opts for additional closure over cheap cliffhangers it's only concession that the further franchise is a brief post-credits moment that shows Kratos his body missing with a trail of blood going off screen would there'd be more God of War absolutely but the series would move backwards for a few years before I would leap forward again the same way God of War 3 did the next significant title was another PSP campaign released just eight months later where God of War 3 was focused on wrapping up its internal plot threads Ghost of Sparta is probably the most prolific borrower of myths motifs and images in the original series it starts you off for example on the way to Atlantis Atlantis is easily the most famous myth otherwise untouched by God of War and holy [ __ ] as the game dude upright Ghost of Sparta is widely recognized as one of the most graphics-intensive games ever laced on the PlayStation Portable coming late in the handheld's popularity Chains of Olympus had already pushed the hardware but that experience meant ready at dawn knew what margins of power and spectacle were still left to be pushed and how to push them Ghost of Sparta isn't altogether much more impressive production than Chains of Olympus closer in art and spirit to God of War to then to the other PSP game the only problem is that in spite of being just about as good-looking game as it's technically possible to make for the system that was designed for it is a de-escalation for the franchise for the first time in release order after seeing what the PlayStation 3 can do the life and movement in the level design that massive scale of its connected world dungeon going back to an optimized PSP world even if it's 25% larger than Chains of Olympus is still a much smaller less dynamic world than last time around in a certain way it was wise to move backwards in the timeline to God of War 3 was a very final finale so Ghost of Sparta slots in right between God of War 1 and God of War 2 after achieving godhood but before the spartan attack on Rhodes it concerns a plot thread that the very first game included and kind of a roundabout obscure way there's an achievement in God of War one that you get if you watch a postgame cinematic in the treasures menu that treasure talks about Kratos is long dead brother demos how there was a prophecy that the painted warrior would bring the Pantheon down and destroy Greece one day the gods thought that it was demos that killed and so they killed him they chose poorly anyway the cutscene makes it seem that the next God of War is going to be about demos God of War 2 when in completely different direction but taking that old dangling thread and building it out into this particular slot in the timeline means that in narrative order this is indeed a direct sequel to God of War 1 it even flushes out the motivations and justifications Kratos has for going rogue so soon after being introduced to the Pantheon as one of them it's a really wonderful link in the chain and the franchise's high-camp narrative but a significant portion of the enjoyment of Ghost of Sparta depends on where in the chain you place the link there are lots of different orders to play these games in and some of them I think are much better than others for example this video is arranged in release order I think it's easiest to see how one game builds off of another and how the whole picture of kratos adventure is slowly penciled in if you do look at it that way you could also do it by trilogy where you do one two three and then ascension trains of olympus and Ghost of Sparta neither of those orders are as satisfying to actually experience as going in kind of a modified narrative order I think it's important that you start with God of War one it's the most coherent introduction to the whole experience to Kratos is character to the world to the feel of it and if you can get through its puzzles and traps then everything else will be downhill next do both PSP games at once one after the other together there the length of the main game and serve as a kind of before and after story for the original god of war then play too then immediately pull a three and finally you can add an ascension if you want to is kind of a bonus experience I think this maximizes the sense of escalation that's so key to the series and lets all the different foreshadowings play out in a more or less functional order the PSP games aren't just spin-offs like so many mobile games are like how fallout shelter is to the Fallout franchise they're ambitious and full blooded titles that fit in perfectly with the rest of the primary games the thing is is that once you've played God of War 3 it feels limiting to go backwards having a choice about play order can really alleviate that still Ghost of Sparta does its best to follow up an act more technically complex then it's literally able to be Ghost of Sparta isn't just an in-between chapter it's got a very in between kind of characterization of Kratos as well it leans into the world destroying bringer of mayhem Kratos much more than Chains of Olympus ever did Atlantis is a thriving city when you arrive but by the time an hour and a half to two hours or so have passed and your fight with a boss monster in the bowels of the islands volcano reach a conclusion the city is on fire and sinking into the ocean now there's the Kratos we know and love [ __ ] it up for everybody the game even does its thing of foreshadowing with a big ol locked door knowing that you'd be wondering how you were supposed to get back to it with the whole city having tumbled to the bottom of the ocean as a prequel with a mission to humanize Kratos Chains of Olympus had all fluidity and blood of the original game but not that much of the extreme brutality of Kratos in the sequels Ghost of Sparta leans much more heavily into the later meaner Kratos creating more uniquely memorable moments and boss fights in the game then Chains of Olympus was able to manage because of it take King Midas for example there's no particular need for him to be there but like God war - Ghost of Sparta is content to just sort of pull a myth out of a hat and then set you immediately to beating the [ __ ] out of them to get across a lava stream Kratos tracks the guy down Gregson kicking and screaming to the molten river tosses him into it and turns the whole thing gold killing the old King and opening the path forward most spectacularly it's gory it's meaner than [ __ ] it's surprising it's everything that a good mythological murder was in God of War three the fall of Atlantis is also a fantastic way to carry over the apocalyptic tones and motifs of that game without being very related to it a narrative Ghost of Sparta is as masterful and execution of the style mechanical texture and ambitious level design that makes the god of war games what they are as the PSP system can manage it's just that that style and mechanical texture have started to move beyond novelty and beyond fascination - the less active engagements of familiarity and comfort Ghost of Sparta is more God of War it's good god of war and in a certain way that's good enough but it also exposes the limits of the franchise now that the whole bubble of what's possible in the setting is nearly filled in even the sex minigame is desperate to prove that it hasn't lost its shock value they seem to have figure that if they can't match the digital quality of high resolution Aphrodite they'll go for quantity and have Kratos bang out a dozen women at once I wish I was kidding but at least we've swapped from the eye rolling Lee self-congratulatory to the broadly comedic again they just keep adding two more women and then two more and then two more as if there was a short balding coach with the baseball cap and a whistle just out of frame demanding to see some hustle and good sportsmanship out on the field today the way that this scene is included is also indicative of a cry for relevancy and for attention Kratos visits his home of Sparta for the first time in the series this game that should be a really big deal for him as a character there is some flavor dialogue in a small amount of world though but probably a full quarter of the sparda experience is immediately running into this brothel we're at Kratos wordlessly picks two girls up carries them through the building and then orders up the rest in God of War one and two this side of the game was less critical to the overall franchise branding the first time they kind of hit it as by assuming that the player might not hop up on the bed to find it in the first place the second game they put a screen up there that he had to break down it was really surprising to find it there here it's a big neon sign that says hey we remember how much you like the tits have a whole egg crates worth the monster designs have begun to edge further and further into b-movie nudity - always a franchise signature but not yet quite so prolific is here having lost their ability to escalate in the story to escalate in the level design and to escalate in the game feel they're escalating the only way they can into the salacious abyss of unrepentant grand house camp the undisputed king of Grecian camp isn't Clash the Titans it's the 2006 adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 God of War one came out before that movie did and subsequent god of wars have largely avoided referencing it to directly not so with Ghost of Sparta here the entire plot is largely a riff on the opening bit about how the process of weeding out the weak and training boys to be killing machines ensures that only the strong only the HOD survive Ian's demo has helped each other navigate the brutality of those early life trials it's another sort of family that was taken from Kratos the family of brotherhood and kinship but it has been 30 years since the Wolfram the winter cold so Kratos has to go all the way to Tartarus to get him so that's you know five out of five games for going to hell and back but who's counting early on you get the Spartan spear and shield which proved to be an invaluable help of mechanically its design though is identical to the film props it's a reference more than it is mechanical choice and then when you get to Sparta the primary thing you do there is hunt down a dissenter Spartan who believes that Ares is the rightful God of War and Kratos is just a usurper Kratos calmly and rationally convinces the descender of the warrants of his claim or would if curb stomping the guy wasn't so much easier and simpler and for satisfying right killing innocence is part of what Kratos does at this stage in his arc but again juxtaposition in context matter your home coming to Sparta is one-third sexing up half the town in one go one-third remembering when you were young and also very good at fighting and the last one-third is murdering the [ __ ] out of the one guy in town who doesn't recognize your authority together it's all jests extremely tired old alpha male cliches writ large one more time Kratos is the elephant seal large enough to crush his rivals and maintain his harem big man very cool him [ __ ] him fight I still maintained that the God of War games are actually quite artistically complicated works with a lot going on but the things that give people the impression that these games are juvenile works for middle school boys aren't hard to find they're right on the surface and things like the reductively stereotypical portrayal of Spartan values and masculine strength Kratos is most interesting when the game is most skeptical of him when he's embodying the extremes of rage and obsession and being a weird scary son of a [ __ ] Kratos beats up gods this random dude with a bone to pick with him ought to be beneath his notice don't you think we don't need to further establish the Kratos is not to be trifled with we're pretty passed to that by now besides we also already know how the story will end no one's mentioned his brother damos again for a reason but the overall arc is good and there are some fun moments between Kratos and Deimos in the last 45 minutes or so that they have with each other at the very beginning damos attacks Kratos he's blamed Kratos for so much for so long and that resentment bubbles over into a boss fight yet quite uncharacteristically Kratos forgives it gives his brother the arms of Sparta and then you set off to kill Thanatos together as brothers it's fun and engaging enough but the climax is one area where Chains of Olympus actually is superior there the sympathetic villain and the whole bit with Calliope felt fresh and personal to the series this climax is grasping at whatever narratives drawers are yet unpicked that's why play order is so important for goes to for God of war if you're going through them if you play Ghost of Sparta early on it's easier to write that stuff off and bounce immediately off of it into the superior god of war too if you play it as the fifth game in a row you not only get the distinct impression that you've almost completely run out of mythic figures to kill in the Greek pantheon but also that Kratos is just stuck in a loop of himself in God of War three Hermes taunted him Kratos off on a fool's errand again never never Lyn never never change Kratos ends up ripping that guy's legs off for the insult without ever quite considering if what Hermes was saying didn't have some major validity to it after all 2013 s God of War ascension is widely regarded as the franchise's low point and in many ways that's true if God of War three portrayed the most extreme possible link that Kratos could go to as a character and his terminal endpoint of mad arena ascension was the most extreme length in terminal end point for kratos as a consumer product without completely reinventing the man and his circumstances by giving into the common wisdom that sequels must deliver more of the same ascension has very very few directions left to explore it's a wadded root system in a too small pot it has nothing to do but to run in stinky coils around the places it's already been it's a game that is trying to be something new for the franchise in small degrees fits and starts of innovation that aren't enough to change a player's perception of what God of War is fundamentally but are enough to disrupt the comfort and nostalgia the people were expecting from yet another iteration of angry Greek Gallagher and the watermelon Museum the thing is the game is kind of unfairly maligned in this way there are things about it that are awkward and weak compared to its predecessors but there are also plenty of other things that are tremendously creative and act as meaningful extensions of the kind of design work that made God of War three such a true classic the proof of concept is playing right in the opening level which is actually my second favorite opener in the franchise after God of War three ascension is technically the earliest story of Kratos in the franchise and a side plot where he has to defeat the three ancient Furies in order to be able to eventually for some reason make a move against area functionally they're just the fates all over again with new costumes and new themes God of War three intro was itself a long-awaited climax ascension doesn't have any such hook so it starts with a visually arresting schlock and keeps building out along those lines it's something like Return of the Living Dead 3 where the baseline of production is still pretty decent and the crew are obviously having a lot of fun except everyone clearly knows there's nowhere for the story to go but into a sinkhole of escalating shock value you've seen zombies yeah but what about a zombie girlfriend with glass in her breasts on one level no I haven't seen that yet on another level it's clear I had not seen that yet because the franchise hadn't yet been so desperate to be memorable in some way anyway even if that way eternally condemns it - 2 a.m. reruns on the sci-fi channel so god war ascension begins with Kratos being chained up by a weird insect lady who yells about how she'll teach him manners and respect and it couldn't have been more schlocky if they got John Waters to guest direct the scene the level that follows however is even weirder even wilder even more active in the way the architecture shifts around than the opening level of God 4 3 you're on a temple built inside the tortured half-dead body of the Hecate on kirti's Titan with according to myth many arms in many heads the fury you're fighting has these crazy powers of infection and infestation she turns the Titans flesh the ground on which the entire level is based into a seething riot of gangrenous angry living hatred all directed solely towards Kratos the Titan even rips off bits of buildings that are stuck to him while we are in them forcing you to move from floor to wall to ceiling while continuing to fight whatever monsters you've been fighting before the art is great the level design is delightful but the tone has moved beyond self-indulgence to kitchen sink sensationalism because that's the only way left that it can still try to top itself the order of levels in their construction are technically held together by an overarching plot but what the game experientially is feels more like three discrete large dungeon vignettes woven together they're all good dungeons - sometimes excellent dungeons the technical skill and polish that's always been with the franchise is here - the way extra our hidden the slow unlocking of bars and the powering up of inventory items it's all the same as it ever was for better or for worse the quality of the experience hangs more on its differences than its similarities to previous titles unfortunately for ascension once the knockout opening level is done you find yourself in a flashback within a flashback within a prologue which is about the lowest possible dramatic stakes a person can have ascension came three years after God of War three nearly two and a half after Ghost of Sparta and its relevancy in the larger gaming sphere was waning fast god of war threes climax was so climactic that it kind of scratched the whole itch for Kratos in his eternal quest of revenge here were circling back around to the very beginning of the story again and then even within that timeline we're jumping around in order that's much more complimentary to the level design that had a narrative strength strong dungeons are a major part of what's enjoyable about a God of War game but they're not alone in holding the whole production up their adjoined incompetence by the art and the puzzles still if all the puzzles the levels the art are evocative of god of wars better self for the most part why do people hate the game don't all those things provide the nostalgic reflexive satisfactions the longtime fans would turn to the game to provide I figure none of those things are quite enough if the combat doesn't feel right and the combat has been reconfigured enough to have significant textural differences compared to the previous titles the fundamental basis of combat is still swinging around within nasty old chains but the chains now operate on elemental damage principles with magic tied to the highest upgrade tier of each elemental type which is to say you use magic a whole lot less and you swap between colors on your blades a whole lot more unlike before where only brutal kills using QuickTime events gave back green and blue orbs here different elemental damages caused different pinata effects on death they also affect your speed your range of attack it's a way to more or less force a player to use secondary weapons by making the secondary weapons modes of your primary attack in previous games a lot of effort was made giving the player exotic weapons other than the blades and while some were certainly fun none of them felt or looked as amazing in sadist is the good old blades of chaos it's like the Lancer in Gears of War they made such an iconic weapon the first time that I made people skeptical and disinterested in having their attention diverted by the shinier newer weapons later on comfort loops work that way well-worn grooves of consistent expectation and consistent reward if I get a hamburger at McDonalds that tastes noticeably different from what I think it's gonna taste like my first reaction is going to be this is weird this is wrong before I even evaluate if perhaps it's actually better or worse all I know is that it's contrary and now I am suspicious the elemental variance of the blades of chaos once you get used to them except the rhythm of combat and do make things more control and controllably strategic you can choose what orbs you want back you can tailor your attack speed and your secondary effects to enemy type rather than the earlier approach of spamming magic and mashing buttons it is a refinement genuinely truly but it is a refinement that feels different from the system that players have already mastered in a way that negates that mastery it doesn't matter what the blind taste tests say people didn't and don't want a new coke not being tied to any sort of coherent storyline means that the dungeons can go absolutely nuts with their own private gimmicks though I strongly suspect that the dungeons came before the script in the development process but I couldn't find anything to corroborate that they're just so creative in ways that stand in real contrast to the exhausted tropes of the script the hecatomb cadiz is one but there's also a vast temple whose wings can only be extended made accessible by attaching three ancient mechanical snakes to a rotating Tower it's been in centuries since the mechanism was used the snakes are all deteriorating but they still coil and curve from Mountain to mountain one part of the level a whole 10 or 15-minute bit is trying to ride the snake as it goes fighting foes ducking obstacles it's just such a cool image and such a great use of the lacks laws of video game architecture the snakes defy physics but tickle the imagination just the right balance of over-the-top spectacle that's made god of warriors maximized Museum motifs so iconic weirdly ascension introduces a small game mechanic that runs counter enough to player expectations to be really genuinely novel even this late in the game in amulet that manipulates objects through time decay with age or healing them by reversing it as a puzzle mechanic this means that Kratos rebuilds more than he destroys for the first time in the franchise it may be a little more than a gimmick similar mechanic in the similarly ignored Red Faction Armageddon but here it's a mechanic more interactive with the players understanding of Kratos than the environment itself this is these very same Atlantis sinking Greece destroying Pantheon murdering man-mountain he has always been his story and his fate are fixed its the player who benefits from this sudden burst of constructiveness it completely changes the way you envision a path forward in the dungeons not necessarily looking for the walls that you can break down but the staircases you can build back up this is what makes the Temple of Apollo roughly the latter quarter of the game so uniquely enjoyable its position in the plots and the elaborate scale of the dungeon put it on par with the temple on Chronos is back in the very first game but the temple is utterly shattered when you arrive by the time you leave its gleaming and pristine marble Colossus bigger even than Chronos and his stone backpack it evokes the sense of wonder and scale that the older games did by letting you approach it in a way that's creatively contrary to your expectations of how the level design is supposed to work six games deep a player's expectations are deeply worn in plus by this point in the game you've also likely rounded out your magic list too which lets the game's combat finally reach its most stylish frenetic rhythms hiding those fellows was meant to reduce dependency on them but lack of a variety of satisfying area-of-effect attacks in the lack of a visual variety of so many spell effects is used to have dulls the pace and look of combat for hours and hours in the early dungeons again it has dulled these edges to force the player into actually being strategic but strategy takes away from the premise II of impulse and angers drivers of the combat pacing there's always been some strategy needed but here it is different I didn't even realize I was playing the most notorious part of the game until it was over and I did not capture footage of the experience because I was too busy banging my head against it over and over again thinking that I was the one who was be clumsy the trial of Archimedes is a threeway of climactic challenge wherein the first wave is cruel and difficult in a way that the games haven't really indulged since the first title it's like a puzzle and that there's really only one valid solution not a particular weapon or a particular combo but a rhythm of combat that the game seems to feel is more or less ideal the solution is deceptively simple always be carving up them snake ladies that's it in detail though the brutal kill system has been somewhat reworked to be more interactive the idea is that more regular creatures should have mini boss fight like extended QuickTime events to emphasize their danger and intensify the gore of the kill while doing these QuickTime events you're immune to other damage sources so the trial pits you against something like 30 consecutive Medusa like snake lady is 4 or 5 at a time all of them have the ability to instantly kill you by turning you to stone and also have an opportunity to try to do this during the roughly 30 second QuickTime event it takes to kill them and release their sweet sweet orbs the way through is to use magic to critically damage all the snake ladies at once then methodically refund your magic with a brutal kill system if you spend any medium or definitely large amount of time in between kills you'll certainly be overwhelmed always be Carvin if you falter in the rhythm or accidentally let yourself get turned to stone in any of the two dozen repetitions of the same QuickTime event you begin at the beginning it took me about two hours to do it probably over an hour of it was spent repeating this one particular QuickTime event over and over and over from sneak to sneak I hated it it was awful it was boring so I did not hit the record button and just sat there in numb frustration until I finally cinched it part of the problem is that they were moved a franchise stable which is where if you die over and over in the same spot the game will offer you easy mode nearly every game I began on normal and then waited until I was completely infuriated with the [ __ ] game to bump it down ascension locks you in at the difficulty you choose at the Start menu no going back the higher the difficulty the more hair-pulling the trial of Archimedes is from what I've read from other reviewers on normal it was as is anything in God of War one but not actually appreciably worse it has a clear solution it's just a get it right the first time solution like in the old days the conclusion moves backwards in time towards nostalgia for the first game in more ways than that even the whole finale is an invocation of that first level against the Hydra on the wine-dark scene you fight against the deadly illusion of some sort of Leviathan on the deck of a ship being pulled into a whirlpool why because it's really [ __ ] cool-looking that's why like most the game's best moments it stands on its own disconnected from the whole I'm fascinated though by the placement of this particular callback at this particular moment it's like a tacit climactic admission that the franchise is now chasing its own tail that Kratos will never be more than he once was when we were first introduced to him back on the deck of that ship we have gone a long long way only to rind up right here back at the beginning again Kratos had the right of it at the end of God of War three if he ever wanted to be anything other than a hateful figure trapped in a loop of his own rage he would have to let go of his anger and let go of himself the player would have to let go of the reflexively nostalgic desire for God of War to offer more of the same its well-worn rhythms of triangle triangle square and colored chests there was nothing left to learn nowhere left to go to save the franchise nothing less than complete reinvention would do 2008 teens reboot of the franchise simply titled god of war again has come to be regarded as one of the greatest game experiences you could have on the PlayStation of four I want to begin by saying that this is true I've never played anything quite like it it's a beautiful game visually structurally and most surprisingly of all emotionally with Kratos still as the protagonist the opening is unlike anything else the franchise has tried yet not because it's escalated anything because it's uncharacteristically quiet Kratos is dropping down a tree a boy is there his boy it seems Kratos is much much older they're chopping down this tree to build a funeral pyre for the boy's mother the wardens are cold and mysterious and somewhere deep within them the boy feels a change a hugely different then God who Wars ever gone on before is about to begin and you too can feel that change coming from somewhere deep in the forest long before the full shape of it becomes clear it's hard to know where even to begin but if we start with the differences first then I think the similarities become more meaningful for ball this game is a reboot in many ways perhaps even most ways it functions as a direct sequel much better and more actively than I ever imagined it would it's one of the most thoughtfully constructed action games I've ever had the joy of playing with a design that's both picky and confident about precisely what kind of an experience it wants to be and how to do it I had considered playing only the reboot when I first got a console because its reputation was sterling and the earlier games had this popular conception as being the jock jams of third-person action but I wouldn't have been nearly as invested in and moved by the game if I hadn't seen Kratos at his darkest and meanest even in the first 90 seconds of the game we're doing completely different methods of storytelling than the franchise has tried before Kratos has this moment where the bandages he's wrapped around his forearms where the trains used to be slippin dangled in a way of it's reminiscent of those old weapons he looks down at them with a weary sadness that tells the audience so so much of what he's become in the time in between games he's tried to let go but he can't he scarred permanently as indelible as the ash of his first family still clinging to his skin so much of how the new god of war is the way it is happened on account of Corey Barr logged the lead animator of the first game director of the second and third and more broadly the franchise's creative caretaker he had to fight to make it about Kratos nearly everyone else was as skeptical as I was that Kratos would function again as a protagonist in a June 2019 interview with Eurogamer he said quote early in discussion people were saying we had to get rid of Kratos it was like he's annoying he's done they really did not like the character they wanted a new character it took a lot of convincing to make them think it was a good idea end quote it took Barre log even more convincing to add the boy the moral anchor of the whole game a traces presence now seemed so critical but at the time there were many conflicting contradictory ideas about what God of War was about as a franchise who Kratos was as a character and what could be done to make him more than what he was none of these almost sand might've been czar apparent in the game the game stands as solid immovable and confident as the Ghost of Sparta himself the quietness of the intro intensifies the mystery at all so much more at the beginning to begin with the same energy as the franchise used to have and the same immediate boss fight would indicate that this is in the same old Kratos but known here he is no blades a child cutting down a tree and taking it by canoe back to his house he's still a God that much is clear from how he puts the whole trunk on a shoulder like it ain't no thing beyond that though who is this great O's what has he seen what has he learned since we last saw him what is he unlearned he is quiet stoic as always the player has nothing to do but paddled a canoe and sit with the questions in a massive interview with venture bead bar Logue talked about how important this construction of the opening moments was to him quote in the previous games we were all about that first ten minutes with a big giant creature it was great but it was also really hard by the time I got to God of War three you ended up in this arms race it's big but it's not as big as that other one you're always comparing it to the previous one and going thumbs-up or thumbs-down we couldn't do that anymore we had to throw the arms race out we had to focus in on what's interesting end quote the new god of war is easily four times as large and lengthy of a game world as the previous ones in terms of both physical space and plot yet it's these first 20 minutes that allow the game yet to come to flow as easily and wonderfully as it does the insistent minimalism of the moment lets us see firsthand in the human ways of looks and gestures that comprise the screen presence of the digital actor that Kratos is different can you imagine a narrator in a cutscene it husband 20 years since mighty Zeus has fallen all that kind of regulation issue video game exposition starting with answers before you even know what questions to ask the new god of war starts with inference instead of exposition a whole different kind of storytelling for a whole different kind of Kratos even more critically his basic physicality is changed massively the texture of how Kratos feels to control and move around the map the first biggest most immediate of those changes is the elimination of the jump forget double jumping forget single jumping here it's just mantling and planning consider for a moment how many puzzle designs from the original series that would be completely invalidated if you remove jumping 80% 90% knowing in the first five minutes that jumping bean balancing all the other your player dexterity driven content simply won't be there this time is a huge revelation the domino effect touches the puzzles the level design the pacing even the way the player looks at the world around them the puzzles necessarily then are no longer quite so tied to reflex and timing as they used to be they require a cerebral solution that you arrive at from curiosity and exploration the level design secrets have to rely much more on lock doors and intricacy of architecture than they do on fixed cameras perspective and death-defying leaps deaths from falling off the map have been almost completely eliminated from the play experience and those deaths were probably more than half of the total game over screens I've gotten in games past eliminating all those resets focuses much much more on the skill of combat and places the primary threat to immortality squarely in that arena once you've gotten used to it you see the map with these limitations in mind the logics and the patterns that you've used to sniff out traps and chests before simply don't apply anymore new game new rules new rhythms and all of this stemming from one single change to movement taking out the jump was like taking out a piece of who Kratos is the marvel is how much of an appendectomy it actually was the removal of something that was once important but no longer has very much relevance to who he is and now in six games Kratos has never been without as swinging chain blades they've got different names depending on where in the French but the blades are arguably much more critical to who Kratos is than jumping ever was they are the most iconic part of the previous games and animating those chained blades is some of the first work the bar log ever did on the franchise back when he was the lead animator for the original title he knows better than anyone how inseparable the two are and in that knowing realized that the blades had to go if we were going to accept that Kratos had changed instead Kratos carries his wife's axe instead it's magically enchanted to return like a boomerang after being thrown and can stick in wood objects and some other surfaces for use in puzzle solving the blades of chaos were a medium-range crowd-control weapon the Leviathan axe is a one-at-a-time weapon with close and long-range functions rhythmically they are worlds apart the axe is better suited to the new heaviness of how Kratos moves where the chains were more meaningful and useful when he was more dexterous as a character plus the axe is much of the very little we learn about the boy's mother she's never seen there are no flashbacks her presence here is in the quest and the axe and the boy before the opening of the game she had some last requests one was that they cut down the trees that she had marked trees that when felled would break the spell of protection from the outside world that had kept her Kratos and at Rao's hidden for so long - who was that they take her ashes to the tallest mountain in the realms the new god of war takes on an entirely new mythology Norse mythology and does a much more faithful and wide-angle telling of it than they ever did with the Grecian Pantheon in the earlier titles a lot of that has to do with framing differences Kratos was shoehorned in among them and the gods they're deformed to make room for him back when it was the Greek pantheon here he's an outsider more even than at Reyes the switch from melodrama to character driven drama shone a light on an interesting nugget of truth from the last games that despite the many many cutscenes devoted to how wrought up he was about having killed his first family Kratos wasn't much there for them when they were alive either he was always off doing war he may have wandered a world away he may have given up his blades but none of that much prepared him for what it meant to put in the everyday work of loving a family so he did what he knew he provided for them well but he was always off doing war it was the mother that raised at Reyes on the myths and legends of the world this leads to a fascinating and wonderful dynamic in the journey where Kratos is the protector but a través is really the guide Kratos doesn't care much for stories and one of the best running gags later on as his utter inability to tell a good story the player does though and so does it Reyes story sponges the two of us both besides Kratos cares quite deeply for the boy so he listens and he learns and that chance to listen and learn is extended to the audience as well at Reyes is full of stories but no practical knowledge both characters go in as blind as the audience does but from the very beginning a major part of developing the two and their relationship is through the myths and legends that they encounter the telling of them the trying to make sense of them we know that we know what Kratos knows how to kill how to loot how to progress at Reyes teaches us both so much more about the world than that when we finally meet Mamere and add his chatty decapitated head to the party Namir provides even broader context and understanding a depth of knowledge that the boy can sink his questions into that was part of why the mother's last request was what it was to force her family to grow without her there to tend to them destiny and myth play another part in that choice but her legacy in the game is present in every moment through the stories that at Reyes tells and the acts on Kratos is back she must have been quite a warrior at her and Kratos his respect and wield such a weapon she must have been quite a parent to instill such curiosity in the boy and she must have been both visionary and devious to send them on a journey that seems so simple in the beginning it snowballs into events that shake the supernatural foundations of the Norse my favorite meme about the game is the Photoshop of the cover that changes the title to dad of boy since that is so much more about what the game is about now shouldn't this necessarily contradict what the franchise is supposed to be who Kratos is and if all you're doing is asking that question it seems like you know what maybe it does playing the new god of war however shows that the game is asking the same question and then giving a very long answer the thing Kratos fears most more than any monster any God is telling at Rao's who he is and what he's done that fear is the cause of much of the distance between them at the start of the game and it's a correct fear on some level there comes a point where there is no hiding the past from the boy he just has to hope that the kids grown enough to know what to do with the knowledge this manifests very early on in a really remarkable scene the first boss fight of the game Kratos is teaching at Reyes to hunt and then they chase the stag into the clearing where a giant troll attacks it's the first time that the combat has escalated to the scale of previous games and it feels very much like coming home for the series there's even a return of the QuickTime events that make a boss's death so satisfyingly brutal and crunchy afterwards at Reyes runs to the troll and stabs it over and over again yelling in rage and triumphs completely lost in the kill it makes Kratos incredibly sad he takes the boys bow and he tells him that he is not ready that same rage did Kratos no true favors and hears that rage in the boy this is the experience that we the player want and expect from a God of War title the yelling and the stabbing and the stabbing and the yelling and here's Kratos the undisputed heavyweight champion of yelling and stabbing looking so sad and so tired and so disappointed in that behavior this tells me much more about the in-between years from God of War 3 until now then any nugget of lore or backstory could it's amazing and how genuinely faithful the game is to who we know Kratos to be as much as the whole bit about hope irritated me with the schmaltz of its presentation I'd like to Kratos was in the final cutscene of God of War 3 who he was there and who he is here are clearly two points on the same line of Kratos his story his attitude his gruffness even if the voice actor swapped from TC Carson to christopher judge he still seems like exactly the kind of utterly utilitarian brutally stubborn person he's always been where even a polite response has a low growl trailing from it putting that guy into a parental context couldn't that just come off as goofy i'll a hulk hogan starring and mr. nanny or couldn't come off as nasty a washed-up murderer yelling at his kid for hours and how do they balance it so well trial and error apparently again from that ventureBeat interview quote we were just trying to find the voice of Kratos but man people hated it hated it with a passion on the team our first seven goes at it one person wrote a really long email to us saying that this game felt like a child abuse simulator because we were trying to find Kratos we didn't want him to be too soft but it turned out he was way too mean way too mean then we over corrected and we had someone else read the temp dialogue they said he sounds like quite on gin he's so calm this is terrible the needle kept going back and forth until we honed in on it there it is it was almost the same dialogue that's the interesting part moving things around cutting things down shading a few bits and also finding the right read so that it doesn't feel angry all the time for good six to eight months people said it was depressing to play our game because Kratos is such a jerk they hated him alright that's not good we wanted it to feel true to Kratos but it can't be that hard core end quote the earlier god of War's were games of extremes and impulse how brutal can the protagonist be how large can these monsters be how far can these motifs be pushed before they [ __ ] snap this god of war is a game of moderation temperance thoughtfulness it's a kick-ass action game - don't think for a moment it's not the thoughtfulness comes in because the balance of its elements is intensely delicate much more delicate than it appears at first glance there are so many many ways that could have thrown self off-balance but didn't it was a hell of a puzzle but I guess it wouldn't really be god of war if it wasn't one they had to get right in a single go or die the absolute perfect encapsulation of what's so special about their dynamic is the scene where Kratos finally screws up the courage to tell the boy that he was a god and that the boy is God as well it has been weighing in his mind for years his voice strings to put the words together it's harder for him than killing that [ __ ] dragon was and how does a trace respond at Reyes asks if that means he can turn into an animal it flummoxes Kratos it is the perfect thing for a kid to focus on and not even in the same universe as the kind of questions that Kratos was expecting for Kratos this information is loaded with decades of memory and progressed Fort Reyes it's a matter of wide-open curiosity they don't understand each other but they have so much to teach each other Kratos knows the weight of the thing at Reyes knows the freedom of it the truth is very much in the middle as the game goes on and on and godhood sits longer on a trace his shoulders he becomes kind of a little [ __ ] about it he's got a darkness in him that reflects the darkness around them on their journey he's learning that power gets you what you want and gods are unaccountable to their power it is the exact opposite of what Kratos wants to teach but it is exactly how Kratos used to be in the old games at Reyes is learning these things because Kratos won't be honest with the boy about what damage those perspectives did to him early on at Reyes asks him but you only killed bad people right Kratos sits on that question for some heavy seconds and then says yes maybe he believes that's true and that he felt no one was without badness in them but it is a cruel deflection of the real question here had he told at Reyes no and admitted that he was wrong it would have stood as a warning by saying yes the boy becomes more convinced of his qualification to judge the worthy from the unworthy this builds and builds to the point where at Reyes who shouting at one of his only real friends that dwarf Smith Sindri that his little person problems are beneath their notice and - just shut up already his little shocking the boy is really changing and not for the better I keep going downhill until a confrontation with the Norse God modey modey insults the boy's mother and the boy kills him for it he does exactly the kind of impulsive vicious thing that Kratos has done time and time again like when Kratos strangled Hera and her gardens for the sin of calling Pandora a [ __ ] Kratos doesn't quite know what to do he's more ineffectual in this moment than I've ever seen him before in the entire frame Chai's the boy wonders why Kratos cares a pill as a kill Modi was an antagonist Kratos reply is that they kill for survival not as an indulgence I love that phrasing because it's so directly referencing all the revenge that came before none of that was survival it was all indulgence and it took from Kratos his family his country and eventually his world to make those indulgences he insists that there are consequences to killing a god he knows it the audience knows it but he's still too afraid to elaborate to at Reyes so long as all that remains big for the boy it holds no power it's only in Helheim itself the Land of the Dead where a vision of Zeus appears a ghostly replay of Kratos pounding his face in over and over and over again Kratos was like Perseus like the children of late of asjuan lady born of Zeus an immortal woman at Rao's is witnessing where this attitude leaves if you let it reach its extreme terminal fruition beating your [ __ ] dad to death two games in a row at raves begins to soften again after this but the boys darkness Fester's because Kratos is too fearful to shine a light on it he'd gone and donek cat's in the cradle the boy was just like him and that's not what either of them wanted when at Reyes is mortally injured Kratos realizes that he'll have to dip back into the person he once was to overcome the obstacles in his way the cure for the boy is in a frozen Helheim the ice tips Leviathan axe is no good for the task so more than halfway through the game long after I had made my peace with only having the axe as a weapon Kratos returns to his home to get the blades of chaos from a hiding place under the rug a storm rages as Kratos paddles a special canoe path just for the occasion the air is absolutely electric with trepidation as Kratos lets the memories the guilt and the unbridled power come flowing back into him Athena's ghost even makes an appearance as condemned natori and cryptic as she was in the third game looking identical to how she was in the old game as well I had been thoroughly lulled into thinking that Kratos had left it all behind but no his old ghosts were right under the floorboards the whole time it's such an incredible moment in postmortem interviews the developers talked about how tricky it was not to say anything about it either not in any kind of preview or in response to any kind of curious question about it tonally texturally credos needed to be divested of the blades for all the changes to movement and combat and mood to work even the control schemes had changed if you give the players the blades they're gonna want their button combos their triangle triangle square it's a whole linked chain of expectation by this point you've spent at least a dozen or more likely two dozen hours with Kratos how he feels now who he is now and then this turn of plot brings him spiraling back to this whole legacy in a storm the colors of winter and blood when Kratos felt like this when Kratos fought like this he was a villain now he's something different now he kills to survive not out of indulgences the axe and it's single enemy rhythms force a play style is much more conservative and strategic than the previous games the majority of special attacks are selected from a list two at a time heavy in a life called runic attacks they're the main sort of magic you get a hybrid of combo and spell they add options but combat is more a series of choices than the button masher it once was blades of chaos blessum have been completely unchanged and look and feel from previous titles there's still a mid-range crowd control weapon that causes Romans of indiscriminate damage all the old combo moves are then slowly added back into the roster as runic attacks now Kratos is both his past and present self and much the stronger for it his shame is chained to his wrist but it's a burden that he'll carry if it can save the boy for all the serious matter it is to Kratos getting the blades back is a huge delight as a player the expansion and the players crowd control capabilities means if the game can now throw many many more enemies at you at once they can throw elemental enemies at you two strains to suit two weapons they can build a resonance with the franchise by reintroducing animations and methods of attack that have been part of a finely honed deeply grooved trench of positive reinforcement for six games running there's a great moment when Krita Senate Reyes are adventuring in a treasure horde with a big spinning blade trap solving a small optional puzzle yields Wow how do you know that was there the boy asks experience kratos curtly replies this bust me up laughing because that was indeed exactly how i found it by this point I am reflexively conditioned to go down any and all hallways that run contrary to the direction I'm supposed to go if this was my first god of war game I might have been surprised by the chest tube I was way way past that I knew it must have be there that's how it works that's the dungeon deal kratos knows - that's the old resonance between kratos and the player the shared drive to the fight the nearly invisible line between game feel and characterization all of that is still here yet in starting with the new and slowly emulsifying the old back into it the sense of context and the sense of meaning is much more complete the feel of the new old Kratos and the old young Kratos swappable at the touch of a button just don't ask him to jump one thing bar log is very proud of about the game and others have called out as being really remarkable is the fact that it is a single camera shot from beginning to end it never fades to black or looks away it doesn't pan out and provide a cinematic Vista the way that are used to with a fixed perspective in theory this provides a more intimate feel personally I think it has less actual impact on the game experience than it might have if they hadn't also included such a complex and fiddly inventory system the straightforward upgrade trees of the old games slow at first and then increasingly rapid in contrast to other progression systems are replaced by a buying selling crafting system with dozens on dozens of crafting materials and many more sorts of objects than you'll ever actually use brocken sindri the squabbling dwarf brothers who run the shops are absolutely fantastic supporting characters so I'm hesitant to say that the game would actually be better off without these features but the amount of time you spend in menus is much larger than ever before and inventory management swapping runic attacks and enchantments and such is such a frequent occurrence that there's no conceivable way you're not interrupting the camera for it at the outside every 15 minutes or so what's more significant than if this is a perceptible choice for the games can work is how the game necessarily has to be designed to accommodate a one shot methodology no loading screens each area must be tied to the previous by a linear present-tense path no other tenses than present in fact no flashbacks no flash-forwards no elaborate cutscenes for expository dialogue if a person tells a story you watch them form the mouth words to tell it if something happens it happens right up close and personal a lot of times that something can be fatal even if deaths from falling off the map are eliminated the fact that death resets you to the last check point further degrades the single shot camera trick is experientially meaningful it's those cascade effects from the single shot trick that you really feel take the puzzle design so so much used to rely on the camera alone and how the fluid but director driven camera perspectives hid portions of the map and the older god of War's now you can turn and explore all which ways so the primary driver the puzzles has turned to looking carefully for hidden environmental detail hidden rooms or alternate lines of sight to throw your axe at a trigger item and away from just sort of mentally projecting what out of frame space a room might have there is no more out of frame it's a whole different way of looking at the map as it go along certain abilities like the fire damage of the blades of chaos or lightning damage for the boys bo allow you to solve different types of puzzles many of these puzzles are nested inside one another so if you unlock one part of the dungeon it may reveal a sort of puzzle you're unable to solve yet a sly a reminder to come back later in this way you actually pass by chests full of stuff for the blades of chaos early on it's tantalizing but not yet time the same feeling provoked by the big iron door and Hephaestus as chambers back in God of War three in fact it's the level design of the whole overworld the interconnected loading screen free map that tie is the new god of war to the old games even more than the blades of chaos earlier I had called it a world dungeon the developers now call it wide linear this is one of the few areas where the new god of war actively escalates on an element of the original run of games wide linear certainly describes the ambition behind the primary trilogy and each progressive game has widened that linearity even further the first game is traditional linear but it's interconnected and the scale of its main dungeons are meant to give you the illusion that it's not it's a straight line twisted into a dense wad of knots that you gradually on tire God of War 2 is similar but its outdoor focus and the cohesiveness of the island of creation expand the impression of how large the world is you tore everything you see even features that appear in the extreme distance of the skyboxes at first God of War 3 is connected Olympus didn't have nearly the volume of optional content as the new god of war but the scope of the game long whole Mountain dungeon is on par with the impression of scale that the new game leaves what makes a new approach to wide linear so wide is that something like half the game world of the new god of war is optional without being able to hide things with the camera the game simply hides them in the vastness of its space instead God war operates otherwise on the same world dungeon principle as the first a giant outdoor space called the lake of nine that forms a slowly unlocking hub from which all other content branches off in wings how is this different from an open world well in an open world activities are usually discrete tasks and points of interest on the map the lake of nines areas are overlapping and completely interconnected the larger side quests open up their own wings the dungeon a new and compact region the world but the side quest is hardly all you do there each region is a spiderweb of hidden chests and locked doors room by room dungeon style progression is the primary mode of engagement not the more staccato rhythm of travel activities scavenge travel that characterizes a more regular open world game you play the game in the same navigational mode that you played God of War 3 with the expectation of being able to 100% the given content no hallway exists randomly or for flavor everything is purposeful the way the game slowly unlocks the lake is unforgettable yeoman Gandhi R the world serpent lies coiled in the lake the first time you arrive you disturb him and he moves towards the hills this drops the water level and lets you access a good half-dozen optional areas a rate amount around the main temple later you summon your man gear for a brief conversation the world serpent is on a scale much larger than any other monster yet portrayed in the Chai's and making interactions with it friendly further move the new god of war away from the old god of war there's a sense of wonder here of being in the presence of something majestic and bizarre a game of all monsters can never be completely faithful to the myths behind them there has to be room for wonder there needs to be more flexibility for connecting to the story with the Greek pantheon it was easier to get away with because the franchise was exaggerating elements that were already very much in the original myths the Norse myths are stranger you hear a wide variety of them from Mamere from the story cabinet scattered across the dungeon wings from the mythic figures themselves these stories are the fabric of the world that you inhabit so when your man Gandhi recognizes you and gives you an audience the world turns the light drains out another 30 feet or so as the serpentine coils and the waters flow yet flow out now another half dozen areas open up and completely new portions of the previous half dozen areas open up as well the new and the old are interconnected by winding paths the lower paths allow newfound access to higher parts of the map that were previously closed to you in open world suggests a space that exists on some level independently of the player not so for God of War there's beauty and magic around every corner but no corner exists that isn't in some way meant to be used by the player there is no real interstitial space besides the canoe rides which provide a lull for more storytelling and character development through dialogue they're welcome for that reason and even then you're often paddling over something that later becomes relevant and useful anyway the temple of tear in the center of the lake isn't just a hub and an anchor for the world's content it's a combination lock that opens up other worlds entirely some of the world dungeons wings are set in other realms the plot-driven realms of Helheim Alfheim and Jotunheim along with the optional game mode realms of nifflheim and moose bloheim the temple will rotate its massive bridge to connect to door and Asgard the main world then the temple will displace itself into the same configuration in a different realm it's a cool effect but what's notable about it is that it's at will and not strictly plot driven you can return to any of these realms after you've been there to sniff out their undiscovered secrets each of them has rooms and segments that aren't accessible until you return with something from one of the other realms some item where ability again it's that recursive interconnectedness that makes the game wide linear and not open-world it's too dense and too deliberate to be primarily about player freedom choice is not the driver it's about depth and the content you're given on the linear path the lake of nine is a massive space but it's a singular connected space with all its optional content referring back to the main path or take the optional realms doesn't having this travel power make it an open world well the way these realms are constructive is that they're more like bonus modes of play than plot-driven world's most high in the realm of fire is a series of combat challenges that stack in difficulty they're much more artificial and presentation than anything else in the game with listed victory conditions start stop replay options and automatic chests rewards so you can come here and test your mettle and mastery of the games various weapons and abilities in a really cool environment of fire and ash for the straightforward purpose of practice and fun it's an arcade mode with a more or less completely linear progression nifflheim is even more difficult and unexpected narrative Lee it's the realm of fog and the location of a mythic workshop structurally it's a randomly generated labyrinth that you grind for special rewards the labyrinth has something like nine rooms all with a different random enemy cluster to fight the spaces connecting these rooms have a randomly chosen trap from huge spinning blades to crushing walls the chests inside are full of missed echoes instead of loot and the fog is corrosive so it acts as a timer for when you're in the maze exceed the timer or die and lose your missed echoes get back to a starting position within the limit and use them to unlock powerful items and dangerous boss fights nifflheim is another arcade mode but its purpose is much more nostalgic than mechanical this is a very difficult completely unrealistic high-risk high-reward environment like the old dungeons the traps the fights the chests are really only there for people who want a pure dungeon experience no plot no myths if you're a player who likes a context and a reason for your actions we can skip nifelheim entirely even never set foot in it if you don't want to it really doesn't matter to the game at all but if you're a player who plays god of war for how Kratos feels to control for the moment-to-moment to play this is the most traditionalist design in the entire game it's most reppin innocent of who and how Kratos used to be what would the broader design and tension of the series they've taken a whole play style and structural attitude and made an optional area of the game out of it then they're the Valkyries a whole class of optional boss fights that press the players skill is harder than anything else in the main game each optional realm incorporates a valkyrie fight in the main world they're tucked away in the hidden chambers of Odin the fights are brutal even if you adjust down the difficulty which you can do anytime now and even adjust the difficulty back up afterwards if you like the Valkyries are so much faster than Kratos keeping up with them demands the same level of total button smashing commitment is the most hectic combat of the older titles some of the fights are really intended to be epilogue content anyway tackled after the journey is complete and Kratos comes home with the boy this depth of optional content is the width and wide linear it's the impulse that separates it from an open world I don't really usually ever try it up to a hundred percent an open-world game there's too much to see there's too little reason to see all of it here the collectables and activities aren't frivolous or discrete but full-bodied features and modes of a game that has more or less perfect clarity about what makes god of war feel like god of war so then have we arrived at the long answer to the simple question of whether a dad of boy fundamentally contradicts god of War's feel and intention mechanically i think we have the game's been well and truly rebooted rebuilt from the ground up with new combat rhythms inputs and game fuel now that the rebuilding is done however the action on the scale of the game is as over-the-top and bombastic as it ever was the slow start was just a slow start by the end Kratos feels as powerful as ever while simultaneously being truly likeable in a human way for the first time in the whole franchise at the beginning this did not seem possible to me what the game accomplishes is beyond the imaginative scope of the old god of war titles but it's never too late to grow and learn new ways of being one of the most memorable moments of the game for me is when at Rao's cinema Mir tell Kratos the story of tear the Norse god of war tear is long dead in the game's timeline yet his legacy remains judicious compassion respect for knowledge and self-expression love for the world and protectiveness of Italy Kratos thought he knew what being God of War meant since he learned so well every lesson that areas had to teach tears path is completely divergent where people spoke of Kratos with terror they speak of tear with heartfelt respect where Kratos was destructive tear was constructive the Temple of the nine the clockwork structure at the intersection of realms and the center of the game world was built according to Tears vision and needs Kratos fearless as a warrior has been hiding from what his godhood means terrified of what it means for the boy because his understanding is limited by his experience there are other ways to be the God of War beyond an eternity of blood and hate of course the optimism at work here was fatal for tear neither extreme can work for ever there has to be moderation hope tempered with realism fatalism tempered with imagination even if done out of love an extreme choice can be incredibly damaging that's how we end up with Balder our villain Freya his mother has been helping kratos senate reyes all game long she is the first one to tell Kratos he needs to come clean with the boy the first one that Kratos turns to when at raius is badly hurt Freya is likely the most compassionate character in the entire franchise a person who's experienced intense hardship and cruelty but refuses to let that darkness take her with it she's as powerful of which as Kratos is a powerful warrior she took that power and she cast a spell on her son that he should never die or feel pain this was a choice informed by all the pain that she had gone through herself the gods are terrible she wanted to spare him that like Kratos wishes to spare the boy his own burden of God the spell ruined Balder utterly he ceased to feel anything at all and became a sneering snarling thing one of the main reasons that he seeks out Kratos is because Kratos at least is a fun fight all the awful things that Odin had done to Freya that was the kind of person Balder was becoming now like how a trade us was becoming when he killed out of indulgence Balder hates Freya the confrontation between the two of them of the climax is is verbally brutal as any QuickTime event was traditionally brutal Freya is the best of them and she failed her child by trying to spare him from a life that she knew would be painful Balder will not forgive Freya he won't leave well enough alone with Kratos the showdown is dozens of hours in the making but it is totally so different from any boss fight that came before this because it isn't narrative Lea what anyone except for Balder wants Balder is forcing things to violence forcing things to extremes like Kratos once did Freya's role in the fight is to animate the corpse of a dead giant and use it to try to separate the combatants the mixed feelings of inevitability and regret evoke the end of God of War three evoke the Kratos he used to be it's the Kratos he still is in times like this as far as he's run from it he breaks the spell he kills Balder he kills Freya's boy it's impossible to feel good about the outcome of the fight because from this day forward Freya is an enemy for life towards the two of them if the situation's were reversed Kratos wouldn't let it rest either he ruined all of Greece the last time someone took a child from him what extremes will Freya go to if she chooses to indulge her darkness and pain when God of War began as a franchise back in 2005 it was the fal ability of the gods as a sensationalistic hook their pettiness in their shortsightedness writ large across an operatic plot it never much went beyond caricature the new god of war treats its myths with a lot more depth they begin in the same position figuring that the fal ability of the old Pantheon czar what's most likable about them but the new game shows the gods sympathy for the first time and that makes a world of difference Freya may very well be the next game's antagonist and if that happens I will not blame her a bit it's such a funny thing that a game franchise defined by its excess and heartlessness would come to feature one of the most emotionally believable games I've ever encountered it's particularly strange when you consider that it's a franchise that's been in the same hands and guided by the same artists pretty much the whole time it is not an example of a new developer with a new approach swooping in all our machine games Wolfenstein x' it is the same developers honing their sensibilities over time it feels especially human because it's incorporated how the humans behind it have changed into the game itself David Jeff has this remarkable and depressing quote about the personal toll that making the original game took on him back in 2005 telling edge magazine quote it was a huge job I gained 40 pounds on this game I did irrevocable damage to my marriage it was a stressful experience it was a hostile environment part of that is what led to god of war being as successful as it was but it was a real challenge end quote Marv Logue was there too putting in the same hours and then again on God of War 2 and again on God of War 3 and again on the 2018 god of war bar log has a son too and he's spoken in interviews about how a large volume of the anxieties that Kratos has a big portion of the strain in the relationship between him notorious is based directly on the impact that his work life had on his own relationship with his real-life son Bart logs said to the Guardian quote so much of it reflects a relationship and my desires I would love to go on an adventure with helo I hope that he would want to that we wouldn't have this awkward relationship that unfortunately we have right now because it worked so much because Kratos wasn't around and traces early years at Reyes interprets that as you don't love me you don't want to spend time with me it's obvious that I don't live up to your expectations I'm trying to be better for my son and regretting every moment that I'm not spending with him end quote Bart log goes on to say quote years before I felt like I was creating the same game over and over again we didn't know the audience would be open to these things the audience now is more open to storytelling that tries to hit a note other than awesome end quote the distance between the first god of war and the most recent is no more than 13 years yet look at the incredible distance the franchise has covered its aesthetic and art has developed across three console generations the games began during an era where awesome was everything because the shape of what video games were even capable of saying and doing was so much more raw and undefined the relentless escalation of the franchise from game to game to game the way it pushed each system to its limits from ps2 to PSP to ps3 was a big part of the efforts to find those boundaries it kept pushing and pushing and tell enough time had passed that the medium is more basic definitions were better understood the undiscovered country wasn't and how big of a monster you could put on screen anymore the real frontier wasn't using all that technical power to make something beautiful when you think about how long movies have been around and how much has changed in a hundred years it's still a slow progression compared to the speed with which games have expanded and evolved as a medium the new god of war is less of a departure from the old ones than I had been led to believe like Kratos it's trying to be better yet some of the things that I loved most about it were the things that connected it back to its original lineage parts of the design that made it feel connected to the whole arc of past and present game design when kratos senate reyes reached Jotunheim the long-lost realm of the giants kratos unwraps his bandages for the first time the scars from his chains are sickly underneath there is none of the weary sadness with which he regarded the bandages in the first moments of the game he lets them blow away in the wind at Reyes asks him what he's doing he says now I have nothing to hide even if our past selves make our present selves uncomfortable we are not our whole selves without them we learn just as well from our mistakes as our successes and we learn best of all with honesty about witches which the new god of war is a game about radical change about wanting to be better so you can pass down something better it's also a game about fighting big monsters with chains and an axe it had to perfect the latter to arrive so well at the former if this is the extent of the change over the course of just 13 years but do you suppose the next 13 will bring no one can say just have to try your best to pass down the right lessons thanks for watching this video and all the videos I do are supported through the puffin and web site patreon I'd like to take a moment to thank by name the people who are currently donating $10 month or more to keep these projects rolling people like Alex Benson Zachary is Emma Leo you Zach don't Tyler Robinson dirt warble random vote Edward to Cleveland Andrews Josh doing David Carlson Alex Williams company hat Eddie Burton Caroline listen Nick Cole Elton big names Eli bird mess Morgan wall current vision heart's breaking Thunder oh right Jared Meyers Kevin chef Tim dogs Peter Clint German acquaint William Heather Ryan's name it real holiday Harlan Mathis aye nobody will be under Matthew Maison de la Shawn Ryan Paul Jacobson Robby ray Ethan impressive so he/she Lucas kill agofsky Corey go Dennis Clark World War two three Alexander Lester Igor abetik rival Andrea spices Anthony Burrell as Norman multi-volume that's dirty Falls even Glasscock Venus to care Lars and our Emerson medical treatment Aaron oh my total art Elijah Kane Oscar Langstrom Steven one Alexander Romanov cold beans Hercules Johnson pipe man Ciao Bella Benjamin robot ghost middle of Conor rough green water Landis Newman Jeffrey Flannery Jonathan psychics be Kim Woodsen next barns tin foil pancakes how was Houston injured McCune see need a lock to James Gray Sebastian purely well-tempered clavier been cooler ebrill Sasha Sasha of a gap and empowered Jesse look isn't Peter it is key to do Nina's side s acquaintance I'm really ready gear written Marilyn's Valera Elijah Nelson meet Cobra lady curtain Tyler ties are deteriorating Jacob Macmillan donek Carla max : Dean Oscar starboard young and rip ensign Jared 8/8 little governess Patrick McMenamin paragraph Gillison and throughout their squid war Kayla period noble gamer Maurice destro Jacob brief words Hurley mr. Flacco Lena Perillo Kyle's inner Stephen love bands Phil harder but Highland Fox conceited axis and groove boys red cobalt Jacob money trivial art history Sam bill Nair Jaime Andrews word Ram Alexa Nikifor of Nikolai Mike domes turnin nurses pescado Mireille Mathieu Richard Turner right a bad back Michael a woman Nemo amendment Rick Patrick come on Jeanette Soviet in Bambara panduru Steven Garrett day Alex a lot Callen p.m. Daniel Floyd David joins oh and material British Eagles James Henderson a bulimic a view even the gable professor Coquina : Debbie Fitzpatrick cream nice web apps I'm sorry Sheila Copps is your given name I don't mean to laugh at it it's just that's a good one that's a real that's that's a fine name I really enjoy what helps Max Pantoja Steven I'm Peter TT Marquis lupus younger boy Simon Anderson Michael Adler in the grill solid soldiers Eric Joyner Michael oh my gosh woman I'm sorry max - junior Derrick million come see really shields wall home theater at specific Adam know where he believed tongue Eloisa kisser burner over zone Simon earlobe Jordan climbing Eric come Winston mark Allah curious Sharif is any arc arc tan glow arc demon / script Brett Gelman I didn't heckuva Daniel or Christensen which story he has on our duty spooky space Cooper and gets flipped Stephen mcreddin Cisco Santana Victor Felton Mark Phillips William old woman Greeley 789 Eric Jensen Daniel our minor Alex be fightin town Michaela air scope Dicky hidden dumbest Daredevils are speak Tom swig j s SP response Colin Bassett Zach me Matthew shriyak mr. pigeon I cannot fly sounds like a letter dear friends Patterson Matthew kezzeme Simon has low written Gilbert rollin great free morpheme marcin's era load glass locales Scott Jenson heavens shipping Andrew : Zachary and woods regret under attack Daniel books Abdul Rahman Allah see Alexander soon Frank karmic logged psychedelic at Tom dougherty brilliant Jeffrey McIntyre Oscar Madison probably some Tiki Jeremy Saunders Patrick Willis Mario Mendes Jonathan Pollard Robert Mitchum constantly Kyle Zionists renovated the better stable Nicklaus John Walton Lord Warwick Ethan ace Quinn mechanic wait Peter hit Reese Gilson Janis Tim Mark James Moscow Tyrone blend modes calling routine Garrett Johnson cybot Dean Denny Kilpatrick Noah Kantrowitz Fergus Foley Newton's our last us Zachary Bernhardt Eric Jackson ball Jordan Baker David Alexander category Vanina blacks cashier I think it's been asked Colin Stoltz music oh sea otter that's a tough one yes coal with the last name of C z8j a police immunity how to pronounce that properly Quinton Maxfield Mika's Relius Howard Benson carol hellar's mr. monk John Liu Daniel Marsh Oliver Ashton scrub lower and Eric Jackson as well as everybody else who donates a lesser amount it's this service pack that pays and doubles and keeps these videos possible so really appreciate it thank you very much for watching and thank you very much for supporting my channel

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 515,193

Keywords: God of War, God of War 2, God of War 3, Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta, Kratos, Review, Critique, Analysis, Retrospective, Overview, Ascension

Id: apX3q5PCrQQ

Length: 163min 47sec (9827 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019