I started playing God of War as soon as I could hold a controller. I had Deus Ex to play at about 5 or 6 but that got boring fast when all I could do is run around New York spawning random aliens. Still God of War was the first game I ever actually played to completion and still sits at the number 4 spot on my top 5 games list of all time. A few good things went into God of War that tipped it slightly above the crappy movie tie in games I was playing around that time, see here Star Wars Bounty Hunter and Star Wars Episode 3 The Game, which were a great main character with actual human struggles, albeit ones pertaining to a psychopath, a script and score that were both entertaining and well done, and gameplay that was varied enough to be interesting from a combat standpoint and a puzzle standpoint which when smoothly transitioning from combat to puzzle to even some combat puzzles is entertaining and very well made, and it’s interesting to note that I remember the game for being fun and then going back to play it I found it narratively enjoyable as well, which I can’t say for many games I played around that time.
So what did God of War 3 do wrong?
Well, it’s thematically confused, it has an attempted emotional subplot that doesn't really go anywhere, and it doesn't really give us anyone to root for anymore. The theme seems to be revenge but it forgot the problem with revenge stories in that the main character has to drop to the level of the guy he’s getting revenge on, and it made Kratos just unlikable to have him killing the gods and titans, who are essentially his family, and all of them are just protecting Zeus and although they are protecting a really bad guy they are still pretty much innocent and protecting Zeus with their lives gives them enough to get the Kratos death sentence.
The attempted emotional subplot involving the fear of losing power and Kratos’s relationship with Pandora once he saves her comes to it’s conclusion with a speech by Pandora that reads as follows,(insert Pandora’s speech). It makes sense in the context of the myth of Pandora’s box, in which when she released all the evils on mankind the the only one that wasn't an evil was hope, which now populated the world to a much smaller degree than envy, hate, fear, all the evils of man. The point for this is that Ares’s death at the hands of Kratos caused Zeus to seal Pandora’s Box in the Flame of Olympus so that no one could challenge his rule, and when Zeus saw Kratos getting too powerful in God of War 2 he had to silence him before he could come back and kill Zeus. This brings in an interesting parallel to the Pandora’s Box myth in that everything in the box wasn't freed when Kratos opened it to kill Ares, and there was something left. Pandora talked all the time about Hope and when Kratos finally opens the box in a cutscene at the end of the game he finds it’s empty and there’s that moment of “All you need is to believe in yourself default cop out ending blah blah blah.” that is so typical of these stories I caught my eyes rolling at the cliche crime against humanity that was just created.
Oh, I almost forgot, the ending…
Kratos’s death at the end really didn’t accomplish anything for me aside from the fact that this arc needed an end fast. I would like to see more of Kratos’s rule as the God of War, or rather just jump to a whole new main character with a whole new story. This is a series that could continue sequeling itself forever like Assassin’s Creed but unlike Assassin’s Creed they would stick to gameplay innovation rather than making the game FarmVille. I wouldn’t mind a new God of War every year but only as long as they stick to what the series is good at but go back to the original days when it was about character and the character could be sympathised with.
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