Santa Monica Studios

Jainism is presented in the God Of War series as a concept. The chains of religion and the very politics of the greco-roman Gods pursue the doctrine of war, no matter their true nature. The embodiment of this nature is Kratos. Now even though he has very flawed character writing, I have to commend the dynamics between passive and active inclusivity which he shows throughout the story. This series is flawed, from its repetitive and janky gameplay to its visuals and art style that lean on blandness to very stylistically adequate. So to get all negative predilections out of the way:

• The gameplay has a lot of the PS2 jankiness, which is inherently outdated.
• The fully rendered cutscenes present a very ugly, brown color engine, which takes away from Kratos’ character design.
• Lastly, Kratos is written to be a flawed character on purpose, however there is no development nor multi-dimensionality.

Now that we have all of the negativity out of the way, I want to highlight the well-formed parts of the gameplay, and combat. The combos that are presented in the game show simplicity and a more RPG approach to damage variation. However, this leads to the player base spamming a singular input or combo. However the stunning blades of chaos allow more than just combat usage, but of puzzle solving and also movement sections as well. However, you receive many different abilities that show more variation. Discord user HutchArmy, believes the combat is very flawed.

 “I like the combat enough, but the puzzles that involve moving a box with enemies fighting you and the sheer amount of times you fight spongy enemies that can stun-lock you and never stop spawning are breaking me. I’m stunned that people like this so much, but it seems like it was better in 2005. But after getting to the Challenge of Poseidon and seeing the dog fight followed by the pushing a soldier uphill sequence I’m so sick of this game.” They go on to postulate, “ I’m normal and this feels like a crushing level of difficulty.”

The visuals, even though they have this very odd brown filter, give a very ugly color scheme to everything, I think they wanted to go with a golden look since it is ancient Greece and it was also made with the running power of the PS2. Especially since I played the HD release on the PS3, I thought there would have been some more fixes to those colors. However, it made the seemingly unharming polygons smooth out, which made everything flat, and even more stylistically bland. I did like the character design, the two highlights being Kratos and Ares. I loved the whole idea of his family’s ashes being grafted onto his skin as a punishment by the oracle. Even Hades’s final boss design, with a more arachnid form, takes on a fresh realization of the character, even though it isn’t accurate to the original mythology. GameFaqs user, Shinobier gives credence to the idea that the visuals are underdeveloped.

“It almost looks like PS1 graphics. I can’t believe I thought this game looked good when I was playing it years ago. it looks so cheesy.. at least they revamped the resolution but the cutscenes were still in low resolution. gah.. it hurts my eyes.. what else.. no airdash? no fast ladder jump? It’s too slow.” They pressed on by stating, “ I can’t bring myself to play this game again.. this used to be one of my favorite games and I thought it was an absolute masterpiece.”

Overall, the game for sure has its flaws, but I think it is very important to see that this game spawned a whole new branch of the hack-and-slash subgenre, even though my own biases within that branch may overlook the simplicity of those games. I think the conceptualization of this game was groundbreaking and very cool at that time. While yes, the narrative is flawed by design, via cross-examination by the original writer. It for sure deserves to receive some trial for some philosophical and narrative fallacies.