VideoGame A cardboard sandwich advertised as an Apple of Idunn
I wanted to like this game. I really did.
But even now that I'm caught up with everything that happened after I gave up on the series the last time, it's still not working for me. Now that we've gotten rid of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy of the original trilogy, the problem we have now is that the game has edited the entertaining elements out of Norse Mythology and replaced them with "and then Odin ruined everything in a disappointingly mundane way."
You wanted magic, awe, and cosmic power alongside your ultraviolence? Well, we've got industrial mining ventures, pollution, and sneaky deals out of Game Of Thrones. Season 8 Game of Thrones. Oh, and padding. Lots and lots of padding.
Kratos, once so much of a Designated Hero I put down my controller so I could watch Zeus fry him like a Cajun Catfish, is now carrying the story: voiced beautifully by Teal'c himself, he does a pretty damn good job trying to keep this mess afloat ... but he's outmatched by the weapons-grade boredom that is Atreus.
Atreus is no longer the Class A Character-Redeeming Device, but a Class Z Mumbling Teenage Assache Nuisance, wandering off, blundering after his own agenda, and playing into Odin's hands. Now, I can forgive horribly flawed characters; what I can't forgive are boringly flawed characters, and the fact that Atreus is meant to be Loki only makes this worse.
Every time the game tries to hype up Atreus as a big thing, all I can think of is the crazy things myth!Loki got up to. Oh, you accidentally turned into a bear? Cute. Loki became a mare, seduced a stallion, and gave birth to an eight-legged horse. Call me when you're interesting, kid.
Plus, in the original myths, Loki provided most of the fun through his schemes and cons. In this game, the schemes go to Odin, who makes them boring; even the theft of Mjolnir is mentioned - but made as blandly Game of Thronesian as possible. For comic relief, we have Mimir, who couldn't fill the shoes of myth!Loki with a gun to his head.
Oh, and the hyped-up Ragnarok isn't an apocalypse after all, but just the end of Odin's reign. Was this a sign that the studio couldn't live up to the apocalypse that Kratos caused three games ago, or did David Benioff co-write this shit?
The gameplay isn't much of an improvement; we have long, dreary slogs through beautiful landscapes interspersed with tiresome banter between Atreus and Mimir, polluted with boring puzzles that Mimir and Atreus will not shut the fuck up about , followed by long, dreary combat segments with generic barbarians and monsters - during which Atreus fails to be helpful and Mimir drives me to hit the goddamn mute button.
But when you get right down to it, the most damning thing about this game is...
...well, it's been done.
Really.
When it comes to deconstructions and reinterpretations of Norse mythology, it's been done before and done better in countless novels, films, and TV shows before this. The Gospel of Loki and American Gods both did a much better job of portraying Odin as a darker, more villainous figure. Even Thor: Ragnarok gave Odin a more ambiguous portrayal! And you know what these three works had that GOWR didn't have? A fun, interesting depiction of Loki.
Supposedly, the Norse mythology that everyone's familiar with is just propaganda created by Odin. If the reality was this boring, I'd happily take the propaganda.
VideoGame Incredibly Disappointing
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this game was an unworthy successor to the phenomenal 2018 soft reboot of the franchise. While the gameplay was servicable, and the graphics and the music were great, the real problem with this game comes down to the story. Which makes sense considering Ragnarok is more movie than game.
In general, God of War Ragnarok is an objective step down from 2018. Which in hindsight was a step down from the original games. I kinda knew this was coming because 2018 wasn't about the Norse gods, not really. It was about Kratos and Atreus bonding with Baldur and all that drama being a roadblock to Jotunheim. Ragnarok was already in a bad spot because it removed the personal aspects of the story and went for this crappy Endgame style war and team up thing. One of the first red flags I identified was that Marvel-tier writing is all over the game and not in a good way and I can't emphasize enough how much I think the MCU's use of Bathos has fucked up modern entertainment. Constant one liners and jokes are undercutting moments that are supposed to be serious. The Flanderization of Mimir is downright unforgivable, he goes from a witty and helpful companion to a mobile stand up routine with his almost constant quips during gameplay and cutscenes.
I have a lot of gripes with the characters, particuarly the treatment of our big old Spartan beefcake. I think what I consider the biggest red flag is how much contempt the writers seem to have for Kratos as a character. It's ironic they made him a grumpy, boring sad dad when the writing in Rag was clearly more suited to the high energy warrior he used to be. It was almost like they were planning on having him relapse into his old ways but they aborted that storyline before it went anywhere. In the time after finishing my run through, I've found myself reguarly going back to GOW 1, 2, and 3 because, shockingly, Kratos was a much funner character when he was a man on a mission. All this bullshit about him being deep now is pure history revision because Kratos was always a fucking deep character. The plot of 1 and 3 is literally him hiding his extreme pain behind his god killing vengeance.
Atreus is the real main character of the game and it shows, with his sections being almost comically long despite being pretty railroaded. Unfortunately, he's very annoying and causes needless conflict with Kratos and the other characters. Most of the dialogue with him and Kratos is the exact same conversation over and over. "We should start Ragnarok" "No we shouldn't" again and again. The lack of faithful adaptation to the Nordic myths legitimately started to hurt the game I feel. Did you know that Freya in mythology is a goddess of war, death, sex, love and fertility? Yeah where is any of that in this version? I get that she was mourning for Baldur still, but it's like they kept the Valkyrie aspect and nothing else. Another controversial god is Odin, whose depiction I actually did like. But he was underwhelming just like the rest of Asgard, which is literally a bunch of shacks for some reason. He didn't strike me as the king of the gods, he struck me as some dude's shady uncle. Also, did anyone else feel like the design for Asgard doesn't fit the established aesthetic of giant golden temples and shit? Like why is Tyr's temple's this magnificent golden bridge but the actual bifrost is a tiny little horn in Asgard? I get the feeling this was a retcon because what we're seeing is not what was being described in the last game.
Another big issue was...everything to do with the Giants. For one thing they're too perfect, I was hoping that Kratos and Atreus were being fed a bunch of propaganda in the first game to force them into conflict with Odin, but no. They really were just oh so amazing. Secondly, we keep being told they're all dead but then the game continues to introduce more and more, ultimately telling the player that a nonspecifc number of Jotunns are still alive as little baubles with souls in them. So which is it? Are they extinct or in hiding? Finally, what the hell was up with Faye? The set up seems to indicate that she is clearly communicating with Kratos from beyond the grave, but it doesn't go anywhere. It's like they introduced the concept in the first dream but then forgot to build on it.
Finally, the actual climax of the game, which is Ragnarok is...underwhelming. The devs seemed to deliberately not use a ton of stuff in the game that would actually match the mythological version of the event, such as Fenrir killing Odin or Thor and the Serpent killing each other. The enemy layout doesn't feel like a grand, epic final battle, just a generic level. The fights with Thor and Odin are depressingly bad, especially when we had a much much more glorious battle with Thor back in the tutorial. I don't know if they really did run out of money but this did not feel as amazing it was being built up. Speaking of build up, the mask and the rift storyline was just ugh. It should be illegal to dedicate hours of set up to a plot thread that never goes anywhere.
I'm already seeing this cope that if the game was broken into 2 it would've been better. But here's the thing: Ragnarok is like 36 hours and only 6-10 of those are good or at least not padding. If they couldn't fill out half the game's runtime with good content then makes you think a third game would've magically fixed everything? It's like Game of Thrones, sure we can insist that more time, and longer seasons would've made it a better ending but the exact same events would've still come to pass and people would still be pissed.
So in conclusion, I didn't like it but it's still a game you can play for a while. 6/10.
VideoGame The New Definition of a Perfect Sequel
When I reviewed the previous game around its launch period, I firmly declared that it was the new standard for AAA games: polished on all fronts with an engrossing story, wonderful characters, fun gameplay and an engaging world to explore. Ragnarök isn't just the new definition of that, but also of perfect sequels, and that's a mighty feat to accomplish.
Let's start with the storyline. Rather than bringing ashes to the mountain, we instead focus on the looming, dreaded event of Ragnarök and various characters trying to either prevent it or enact it on their own terms, with their motivations changing as the story progresses. It may not be as straightforward a narrative as the last game's, but in exchange we get to follow a much larger cast of characters spread across all nine realms that set up a truly epic tale. Speaking of which, every single character in the damn game is wonderfully and intriguingly realized; the Aesir, the Vanir, the new Jotnar, the Norns, even the returning cast of Kratos and his allies, every single one of them are so much fun to watch interact, grow, and play their parts throughout the game, popping up and changing the course of events in oft-unexpected ways that truly make this a character-first narrative. I love the entire cast, even Heimdall (for being such a tool).
Then there's the gameplay. When it comes to video games, what I ask of sequels is not to reinvent the wheel every time, but to keep what works, fix what didn't, and add what was missing - this is exactly what Ragnarök does. For a first in the God of War series, you keep most of what you collected over the course of the previous game (particularly the Blades) and so have much more variety and options for combat and traversal at the outset, which is then expanded upon with highly useful and fun equipment like the Draupnir Spear. The combat is so much more hard-hitting and fluid, and the traversal is fast now; I can't think of a single department in which the gameplay experience is inferior to the predecessor's. They even give you multiple companions and the ability to play as ATREUS multiple times! Oh, and there are just SO MANY different bosses (and even normal enemies!); as soon as I saw Kratos murk a troll in a cutscene without actually having to fight it, I knew the devs had heard that recurring complaint about the last game, haha.
Most of all, the conclusion of the Norse saga was well worth the wait. I know Santa Monica opted to make this a dilogy so people wouldn't have to wait 8 more years to see the journey's end, so parts of the story are indeed compressed, but it doesn't feel like anything was rushed through, not even the final battle (which I thought fit the overarching theme of "chaos" pretty well) - everything gets the space to breathe that it needs in order to truly resonate with the player, and I was in tears at the ending while glad that the franchise gets to keep going. Truly a perfect game.