God of War 3

In 2022 I decided to only play hack and slash games, in whatever order i saw fit to connect any threads I wanted to explore. This is one of the games I played during The Year of the Hack and Slash! I’m porting over this post which originally appeared as a thread on twitter in 2022.

The Man Before The Dad

With the arrival of Thanksgiving, fall is officially coming to a close which means its time to wrap up The Autumn of 3s! The next hack & slash that bookends a trilogy played was God of War 3 & boy do I have opinions! This is going to be my first God of War game so I really didn’t know what to expect. After watching a story recap of 1 & 2, I STILL was unprepared for the tone of this game.

GoW 3 is a brutal, unrelenting violent romp that takes that makes viciousness a central character. Kratos’ brutality is his defining feature, be it ruthlessly cutting down helpless humans caught in the wake of a war they have no say in, or killing Hera with a twist of his hand in her garden because she was mean to him. I understand he opened Pandora’s box, but to play as the personification of the terrors that plague man is just not what I was prepared for. Basically, Kratos is a huge dick. This game had a much more cinematic story than most of the other games I’ve played on this list, I imagine Santa Monica Studios has plenty of talented hollywood storytelling folk at their disposal, and they crafted a well written narrative, its just that I didn’t care for it. There were also some tremendously gross story moments, like being forced to perform QTE actions to have sex with aphrodite and killing the helpless, topless ‘poseidon princess.’ Those moments are weird and left a bad taste in my mouth. Catrena described them as “superficial gamer-boy fantasies” and I couldn’t agree more. They were unnecessary and felt out of place.

Another moment of note, and I haven’t fully decided if i liked it, after fighting poseidon it switched into a first person view from Poseidon’s perspective, but you still control Kratos and have to continue beating him. Then, a QTE pops up and its L3+R3 and you gouge out his fricking eyes! THE EYES YOU AS THE PLAYER ARE CURRENTLY PLAYING FROM. Just brutal. (Killer is Dead would do something similar to this for an entire boss fight 3 years later.)

The combat is great, its way deeper than I had imagined it was going to be. You get 4 weapons, each with a magic ability, specials and combos. I like the enemy grab mechanic, it offer some variety to combat. The series obviously had some influence on other games in the genre. GoW was able to take the fighting giant monsters at scale thing and make a defining feature. Bayonetta certainly took some ideas from GoW after GoW took ideas from DMC.

Lets get this out of the way right now, God of War 3 has the best goddamned flashlight in any game. After fighting Helios, you reach down and tear his fucking head off with your bare hands, and then clip it to your belt. When you need to see in the dark you pull out the screaming head of a god that blasts light out of its sad eyes and mouth.

Lastly, I just cannot understand how we go from Kratos brutally killing the entire Parthenon to Dad of the Decade. I’m going to play GoW 2018 to find out, but until then I need to take some time off from this scumbag. Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, if you celebrate!

Thoughts from the Future

As I reflect on this game through screenshots, most of what I wrote holds true. I think I’ve turned the corner on gouging out Poseidon’s eyes, I think that was actually incredibly fucking cool. Look, Kratos can be brutal and unwavering in his sympathies, he’s a man hell bent on revenge. But there has to be a limit to that revenge otherwise you are clearly just a monster. It’s the Scarface paradox. Most of what happened to him was his own fault because he’s such a GD asshole! The same can be said for Kratos, too. But It’s understandable why this is the way he is, just look at the source! Combat was great, visuals were great, the flashlight fucking rules, but Kratos is too much of a dick for his own good.