God Of War

Man, I really want to get into this game, but the fanbase as kind of turned me off from it, what with them saying things like this:

""This game is essentially the sequel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no clue how Japan will ever recover. Give me God of War, as it s***s on every Japanese action game ever made — and I'd be lying if I said it was even remotely close. Bayonetta. Ninja Gaiden. Bloodborne. Devil May Cry. None of it holds a candle to the sheer excellence of God of War.As someone that loves difficult stuff I can't help but think about it as I play. Never seen a Western game BTFO Japan so hard.We're talking sodomy and murder here. Internal bleeding. Colon ripped wide open. Dead on the side of the road. Nobody at the funeral 'cause it's just too embarrassing.""

Apparently, this game has made Japan's gaming industry completely irrelevant, as it makes every single one of Japan's action games look like kids stuff compared to this masterpiece. Which I find rather insulting.

edited 2nd Jun '18 10:16:16 PM by LDragon2

Who the fuck is saying that?

Seriously don't listen to this assholes.

It's just a good game about family & Norse Mythology that's worth being played at least once, nothing more than that.

Dude, no one is saying that.

Actually play the game and judge it on your own merits before reading reviews.

I'm sure you can find trolls saying offensive stuff about every reasonably popular game in existence. It's no fault of the game itself.

Problem, L Dragon, you're taking the words of Trolls and saying as if they were a universally held position. But it isn't.

If anything, this makes Sony, both American and International, seem even better off now as a whole.

This is partially why I try not to rely on reviews as much. Granted, I like to listen to fans over critics and this is from a fan so this kind of damages my preference a little buuuut anyway the moral here is unless you're on a tight budget give the game a shot, regardless of what people say or how obnoxious they choose to be about it.

Really, don't let a fanbase dissuade from playing something. If I did that, I'd have missed out on a lot of great games over the years.

I don't know where you found that "review" but that person hardly speaks for the majority of fans. They're probably just hyped up, just came off of playing it and being as hyperbolic as possible.

That.

edited 3rd Jun '18 6:24:04 AM by Soble

In all honesty, I had never heard people using this game to attack Japanese media before you posted those quotes. If anything, God of War 4 owes quite a bit to certain Japanese franchises.

If you base your opinion of a piece of media on Youtube or Twitter comments, you'll hate every IP in existence.

edited 3rd Jun '18 2:16:55 PM by Rationalinsanity

Like I said sometime ago, any acclaimed piece of media is bound to get "over-praised" in certain places, so to speak. If you fret too much about it you might as well go live in the forest.

You know, I've seen a lot of people praise this game as being a savior because it is single-player focused, lacks microtransactions, and is well-polished, apparently being one of the few games released these days that does it, hence why so many people are singing its praises. This is ignoring that the previous year also had so many spectacular micro-transaction free single player experiences too that were also successful with gamers. (Zelda BOTW, Nier Automata, Yakuza 0, Persona 5, Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein TNC, Divinity OS 2, RE 7, Gravity Rush 2, Nioh, and Horizon Zero Dawn, just to name a few). Not trying to demean this game, just that I feel that it is getting much more credit than it deserves for creating such an experience.

Did Star Wars Battlefront II and its loot box controversy along with EA's statements about the decline of single-player just completely overshadow everything that 2017 had?

Thing is, While those were all popular The New God Of War is just a culmination of what we saw in 2017 taken to a new, more mainstream level.

And yes, sadly, Star War Battlefront II (And Shadow of Mordor, to a lesser extent) did overshadow a lot of those games because Star Wars and Lord of the rings are still more mainstream.

So. A thought occurs to me. Kratos can kill gods.

I know, I know, it's not exactly the most earth-shattering observation, but listen. The original GOW trilogy makes a big fuss about how he needs the light of Hope from Pandora's Box to kill gods. Even though he's a god himself, it's only with Hope's Light that other gods can actually be slain.

With the big twist being that he's had the light of Hope since he opened Pandora's Box in the first game, which is why he's able to kill gods throughout GOW 3. The game is very specific about the fact that merely being a god is insufficient for god-slaying.

Cut to the new God of War. Baldur and his men know damn well that Kratos is a god. There's zero confusion about this. And yet, when Kratos buries his axe in Magni's skull, Modi is shocked and horrified that it's even possible. The pair worked for Baldur; they knew Kratos was a god, but were firmly convinced that he couldn't kill them until he proved them wrong, and then everything changed.

And it makes sense that Modi would be so shocked, given that according to the traditional myth, Magni and Modi are meant to survive Ragnarok. Now Magni's dead before the event even begins. As is brought up several times throughout the game, something has changed. Kratos should not have been able to kill Magni. This is consistent with the previous trilogy's assertion that merely being a god is insufficient to kill a god.

So, one wonders: does Kratos still bear some of Hope's light within him? Is that what changed, that Kratos brought the god-killing Hope with him when he journeyed to the Norse lands?

I suppose that's possible. Though I doubt the writers were thinking that deeply about it and just decided to have Kratos kill gods like he's known for.

So, finally beat this last night after playing through a God of War retrospective via Playstation Now. I think this is probably my favorite God of War game. While it doesn't have the same sort of epic scale as some of the originals, it's still a really great look not only into Norse mythology but a great new setting that I thought was going to be ruined by Kratos's shitty attitude. But, not only did they change up the combat and make it really fun and a lot less frustrating, they also made Kratos an actual sympathetic character who knows just how badly he fucked up and is trying to make things right.

Atreus was also a great character, and I found myself getting concerned along with Mimir and Kratos when he started to follow in Kratos's footsteps after he found out he was a god.

An amusing running gag though that I enjoyed was the fact that every single time someone called Kratos out for keeping secrets from Atreus, he proceeds to immediately prove them wrong by telling Atreus how badly he fucked up in the past, like just after the final boss.

There was also a lot of sidequests that managed to not make it seem like they were inflating the game artificially at all, like the Valkyrie sidequest and the challenge areas.

So personally I can't wait to see where the new games go from here; this has actually made me a God of War fan rather than someone who thought "These look interesting, let's take a looksie".

Between his outsider status (are Greece and Midgard even in the same dimension?) and all the crap he has been exposed to, I assumed that Kratos' very presence throws destiny off.

I'd say they're the same. Kratos was able to travel from one to the other out of a localized apocalypse. Maybe Ragnarok will be the same way for "Midgard."

Aren't they actually unaware of what Kratos is? They thought he was a Giant.

At the same time, they've at least heard of the Ghost of Sparta, as Mimir can attest.

I really loved the revelations during the ending. Alternative Character Interpretation obviously, but personally I see Kratos' dead wife as a reflection of himself: someone who was hurt by the Gods and became obsessed with revenge to the point of cold-hearted selfishness. To me the ending implies (personally I think it outright says it, but others have interpreted it differently) Faye set Kratos up to die to get Atreus on the revenge path too, to make him slaughter the Gods like they slaughtered their race. History Repeats, and she knew about it the entire time they were all a happy family. Wouldn't it be tragically fitting that despite his attempt at redemption, Kratos just turned out to be a more or less disposable tool to someone out for revenge against the Gods? While the game made me want to see him survive the events that are supposed to kill him, I can't think of a better way to die for him.

I suspect Kratos isn't wholly bound by fate and destiny ever since he killed the Sisters of Fate. That and coming back from the dead repeatedly, being infused for years with the Light of Hope, wielding all manner of divine weapons and magic, being born a demigod and ascending to full godhood...and let's not forget that the one prophecy he does fulfill — the destruction of Olympus — came to pass because he actively pursued it. In stark contrast to Classical Myths where people try to avert prophecies and fail.

Lol at the idea of GOW blowing away Japan. I'm playing GOW 3 remaster for the first time(it's free for PS plus members) and this series doesn't hold a candle to say Ninja Gaiden Black or the best DM Cs in combat(not to mention the awkward dodging attached to right analog thing). Also the QTE fests are really obtrusive. Maybe the new GOW is different in this regard(I don't know much about it but it seems really different from the previous games) but my impression is that this series falls into the same traps a lot of western games fall into in regards to the genre.

Is Berserk Button used wrong in Kratos's character page?

Yeah, people are specifically talking about the new God of War. It's crazy that a game that won Game of the Year and deserved it is still being overhyped, but there you go.

Don't have a system for it (or money), so I haven't played God of War myself, but I'm a huge fan and I've seen some playthroughs. One thing I noticed when watching the start of a new playthrough is that Fay is larger than Kratos. It's kind of hard to tell, exactly, because she's a dead body wrapped in a blanket lying horizontally, but measuring out her proportions to Kratos seems to show that she's a good six inches to a whole foot taller than him. The door frame also goes over a foot above Kratos' head.

Makes sense, with the later reveal that Baldur was there looking for her and he expected the giant living in that house to be taller that Kratos. I'm assuming that the reason she's not the size of a mountain like the other giant corpses is because of shrinking magic?

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Jan 12th 2019 at 9:14:02 AM

God of War - Raising Kratos

A documentary on the 5 years Santa Monica took to make God Of War (PS 4)

Jesus christ I've rewatched the first Baldur fight again and again. This game knows how to do DBZ-esque fight scenes better than most Dragonball games do.

Kind of a shame there aren't a lot of bosses like that.