So I played four God of War games in the last two months.

Where I Left Off

If you’re ancient like me and cling to old memories like a comforting blanket before death, you may recall my enthusiasm for the first two God of War games back in 2015 and 2021, which are two very real years that certainly happened recently and not nine and three years ago respectively. In addition to being technical showpieces for the Playstation 2, they’re both fun video game-ass video games whereupon an angry man murders all of Greek Mythology and sometimes pushes blocks. Not the deepest experiences in any sense of the word, but as far as deeply stupid PS2 action games with just a sprinkling of puzzle solving are concerned there are only a handful of things I’d put above God of War 2.

Unfortunately, they kept making them. Four more God of Wars, in fact, before rebooting the series into the critically acclaimed prestige sad dad games we’ve all come to know and love(?) Thanks to my current stream fixation of “questionable character action” I’ve finally gotten around to finishing the blank spots in the series and can finally play Ragnarok or something, like two years too late.

God of War 3 is cinematic excess writ large

In a lot of ways I think God of War’s focus on spectacle and cinematic set pieces set the general tenor of AAA video games during the following console generation. That’s nowhere more obvious than in God of War III, a game that consists almost entirely of set pieces for its surprisingly brief runtime. As a recap, by the end of God of War II, Kratos is sufficiently pissed to storm Olympus with the help of the Titans and murder every single god who crosses his path. That doesn’t stop III from doing the requisite abilitease murdering Poseidon before throwing you into the River Styx and ensuring you’ve still gotta get them red orbs.

In terms of pacing, it’s quite breezy, as there’s rarely *that much* block pushing or combat room stuff before you’re inevitably thrown against the next Olympian to gruesomely eviscerate. Rip Torn is there Hephestus, whom you cuckold before murdering, and I was surprised to see Bridget Bardot in a fairly brief bit role as Hera, who is suitably portrayed as a shitty wine mom (whose corpse you then use to solve puzzles, because even for 2010 this series was Bad to Women.) There’s also Kevin Sorbo doing a cameo as Hercules (you murder him too) and a brief voice snippet from Elijah Wood based around a sequence that was cut in the final game. Point is, they went all out for this, and by the gods you do some really, really fucked up things to all of them.

There’s probably some sort of commentary I could make about how cynical and calculated this series feels at pretty much all times, or how there were multiple moments where I found this game’s ultra-violence to be genuinely disturbing and lurid even for my relatively bloodthirsty tastes. But in terms of escalation, I get it. You’re on new hardware and need to conclude a trilogy of games by making everything Bigger. That Kratos’ tale ends with even more banal violence isn’t really a condemnation of these games, because that’s what they’ve been the entire time. No hilariously last-minute swerve towards redemption or making the Gods of Olympus “Just as Bad” really changes the core power fantasy of being the angriest man doing the worst things possible for all involved. Sometimes that’s fun! In some ways, it’s definitely more honest about its vapidity than most of the other big tentpole releases from the “Pre-Ludonarrative Dissonance*” era of game design.

All of this comes at the cost of the actual video game, which feels like an afterthought most of the time. I played the PS4 remaster, which looks nice and runs at a locked 60, but even at this point with just the third game, it feels like Sony Santa Monica didn’t know what to do with the basic Square Square Triangle beyond some basic polish to the way things move and play out. Even the new weapons you get are almost all just different variations of wide-swinging chain blades, as if they were afraid to do something outside the comfortable Blades of Chaos zone. Don’t worry, I’m sure this topic won’t come up again. But yeah, God of War III is fine. It’s running almost entirely on spectacle, but it’s absolutely the most spectacle you could get on one of these things. Also there’s that bit where you can keep mashing the attack button to keep punching and that’s just good video game.

*note: this is probably a topic beyond the scope of what I want to talk about here today but do you ever think about how like three games journalists talking about Nathan Drake’s body count in the 2010 fried Neil Druckmann’s brain and led him to make no less than three video games in a row about how fucked up it is to do a bunch of murder in a video game? Discourse is hell. Avoid when possible.

The PSP Games Are PSP Games

For those of you too young to remember what handheld video game platforms were like in the 2000s, the DS was where Nintendo put most of its good or interesting first party games for like 8 years and the PSP was where Sony put compromised, scaled-down versions of its console games that people ignored in favor of the weird quirky Japan studio stuff, vaguely horny JRPGs, Monster Hunter, and casual piracy. That’s a gross oversimplification, but my point is that the PSP was always the B-studio console for them and the games people remember probably didn’t come from Sony proper.

This is no more readily apparent than God of War: Chains of Olympus, which is massively impressive in the sense that they crammed that thing onto a Playstation Portable and forgettable in the sense that it took me like three years to pick up my save file to finish the game 90 minutes away from the ending. I started this game in 2021 after finishing GoW 2, but my enthusiasm didn’t manage to get through the decidedly brief 7ish hour runtime until bad streaming times happened. I wanna be clear here, this game is a well-made, competently constructed portable approximation of God of War which ironically has far more video game parts to it than the big boy PS3 title it was holding the line for. Ready at Dawn deserves commendation for that. In my hubris I apparently started playing the game on Hard difficulty, which I don’t recommend. Don’t play any of these games on hard, actually. This is not the kind of series that benefits from you having to make fewer mistakes. The final boss kinda sucks when you lose a third of your health from one hit.

Ghosts of Sparta is the actual surprise here. It probably won’t shock you to know by this point I was starting to reach a level of exhaustion with the basic flow of the combat, whose irritations and imprecisions only really come into focus after getting to the third One of These in approximately a month. But still, Ghost of Sparta makes the micro-adjustment of actually making Kratos’ pathos be about something other than his dead wife and daughter for once, instead being about his relationship with his brother and the rejection of his role as the new God of War after killing Ares (this is also an interquel between 1 and 2 btw.) It’s fucking peanuts at this point but when I’m at the video game circus I’ll take some peanuts. It’s also just generally a well-paced, tight little experience, even if the spartan spear you get as the obligatory second weapon might be the single worst weapon for any game in the series. It’s worth some consideration and might not be a terrible thing to look at if you’re like me and just have those PSP games on the PS3 for whatever reason.

Sensing burnout, I put a brief pause on my God of War hijinks and went on to play other, different, questionable character action games. I’d just like to reiterate that even mid God of War is still probably better than most of the games trying to imitate it from that era. If you’d like to get a full update on that stuff, I highly recommend you keep up with my twitch or its youtube archives. There you’ll see exciting escapades such as me finding out exactly how bad X-Blades is (it’s really bad!) or my general sentiments about Onimusha 3 (yo that game fuckin rules.) I know I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to, but I still appreciate those of you who take the time to read and even comment.

God of War: Obligation

The last two or three years of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation mostly exist in a haze of lost memories and underwhelming sequels. Microsoft just made a bunch of kinect bullshit, I think? Remember when everyone was convinced that no one wanted new consoles and just wanted to play games on phones? Yeah, me too. Boy, they sure were dumb. Definitely no bad decisions made that would come to haunt corporations for more than a decade afterward made during this time. Don’t get me wrong, there were good games between the years 2012 and 2014, but you’d be excused for forgetting that the big marquee stuff coming from big publishers had an overwhelmingly stagnant quality. God, remind me to bring this up whenever someone on a discord tries to make the argument that the 360/PS3 generation was nothing but winners the entire way through.

Of the underwhelming late-era sequels, I straight up think God of War Ascension is the worst. Halo 4 feels like a portent of disaster to come in retrospect, but I’d still play it over 5. Gears Judgement is loose and experimental in a way that’s a lot easier to recommend as a Game Pass addition than it was for $60 in 2013. I’ve long since said my piece about the Mass Effect 3s and Assassin’s Creed IIIs for the world, so I won’t repeat them here. God of War Ascension though? It just feels tired. This one is even more of a prequel than the last prequel, detailing the time Kratos murdered the Furies, the last three figures in Greek Mythology who weren’t already killed in the last couple games. Its narrative stakes could not be less important or interesting, with Kratos’ final revelation being his discovery that he killed his wife and daughter. You know, the thing that you learn like two hours into God of War 1? The thing these games literally hammer over and over again because they’re incapable of giving that character any other motivation or depth? Not gonna lie, for all my problems with modern 2018 God of War, it’s a fucking miracle they made that swerve work.

I’m not going to go too hard on Sony Santa Monica for this, because this project has the overwhelming energy of something no one wanted to actually do. When your big selling point is a superfluous multiplayer mode (alas dear reader, I was unable to find a match) it’s apparent to all involved that this game exists to fill a spot on a calendar and keep people employed. For the first time in literally six entries, Kratos’ basic control scheme has been subtly altered, with the circle button now being the domain of punching, kicking, and sub weapon-ing. The grab has been moved to R1, and parries now require an active input instead of just generously timed blocks. Your rage bar now requires you to not get hit, and your magic attacks are tied to the elemental imbuement on the blades of chaos. No secondary weapons for you this time, just four different flavors of chain blade with slightly different outcomes for Square Square Triangle. While appreciable in a vacuum, these all feel too little, too late and mostly just meant I had to break an enemy’s block with a sparta kick.

What actually rocketed this game to the bottom of my rankings (2 - 1 - Ghost - 3 - Chains - Ascension) is the pacing. There’s some Prince of Persia-esque time manipulation and shadow clone stuff for the bulk of the puzzles, some of which feel moderately clever (well, as clever as a puzzle in a game like this can be) and a few of which feel unnecessarily bad at flagging important information. But there aren’t many set pieces in this one, and outside of the “this was clearly at an E3 presentation” sequence during the first hour of the game, a lot of it feels like padding. There are about as many stand-out moments in this game as there were on the PSP ones, but this game is roughly four hours longer than either of those and a lot of the back third feels like an endless string of combat rooms against spongey enemies. At least the execution animations are gruesome in a way that (once again) made me go “Jesus christ that’s too much” because I got to see them over and over and over again.

I do think it’s funny that my feelings on this game mirror how sentiment was starting to turn against the things God of War popularized. We can probably thank Resident Evil 6 for killing QTEs and Dark Souls for being the new generic template modern action games borrow from (well, at least after everyone stopped trying to do Batman combat) but my biggest take away is that I’m shocked this didn’t kill the franchise. In a delightful bit of dramatic irony, the main menu of this game offers an opportunity to play The Last of Us early. Thus goeth one style of Sony First Party into another. Sony might’ve traded one style of rut for another, but at least the sad dad prestige games that take five years to make aren’t going to be accused of a lack of effort.

What have I learned?

I don’t think there are any broad conclusions I could make about God of War that aren’t already foundationally obvious to anyone checked in enough to read this stupid blog. Video games are hard to make, the AAA side of things is a precarious minefield, and maybe making the same thing over and over again for eight years is a bad call. Sure, modern big video games are bad and hateful and exploitative in different ways, not to mention they all take 5 years to make, but perhaps this is a better state for the industry than the most stagnant decline imaginable. Or maybe it's worse because three of these games come out each year and then half the teams who work on them get fired.

Anyway that’s it for me. Maybe I’ll get back into writing things on a regular basis. Maybe I won't.