LogFAQs > #947205342

Final Analysis: God of War (2005)
What I thought of GoW: Fun at points, annoying at others
Would I play it again? Probably not
Did it deserve to make Round 3 (In GotD 1?) Still salty it took down ToS tbh

One of the purposes of games is that they can simulate experiences that you wouldn't want to go through for real. You can lie and backstab your friends in a strategy game without the betrayal tearing your social groups apart. Video games almost always do that with violence. Real world combat would be traumatic, but you can extract some of the thrill of battle without having to go through anything like that. Maybe that's part of the reason why almost all video games have combat. All my favorite games have combat, but I notice that I'm not a big fan of games that are almost exclusively about violence.

God of War, of course, is one such game. It's not really about anything except watching a big buff angry dude kill things in flashy ways. That will never be my biggest interest in life, so I could only ever have been so fond of God of War - about as fond as I was of Bayonetta, maybe. I can put aside quibbles like how the story's really bad and how not much care went into building a compelling or cohesive setting around Greek mythology, but I think the game has flaws that prevent it from really achieving its goals as a fun, flashy hack and slash game. It can be rough how you respawn from checkpoints with some of your health missing, because it can mean going through a tough fight with a minimum of resources. A lot of the encounters feel long and overly enemy dense. There are times when you're just fighting endless respawning clones of a single enemy type, which feels pretty repetitive. The climbing and platforming sections tend to be a pain. I don't like rolling with the analog stick and the circle button has more tasks than it can handle. Even the game's character progression system has the flaw that it discourages trying different options.

It still has solid core mechanics underneath all that, and there are definitely some highlights that I'll look back upon fondly, but I have trouble understanding why God of War was such a big name franchise. It was a common Game of the Year choice back in 2005, which I don't really think it deserved. Maybe it had to do with the technology involved, because one of its other major strengths is the impressive sense of scope it's capable of portraying.

For me, God of War needs a few things before it can be a part of that kind of conversation:

1. More enemy variety. I think the biggest thing that lets the moment to moment gameplay down is that there aren't quite enough enemy types. It can be a while between the introductions of new baddies and the ones that are around often have to pull double or triple duty to make up for that. It's common to see palette swaps of older enemies as powered up versions and there are a lot of battles against single enemy types. For such a combat-oriented game, I think having a few more types and mixing them up more would help keep the gameplay fresh.
2. More boss fights. The two boss fights against giant monsters are definitely the highlights of this game for me. They're challenging in a fun way and make good use of the game's theatrical violence. I get how much work they must have been to create, but I did think it was a little disappointing that there were only two in the whole game.
3. A better main character. I didn't find much to like about Kratos. He's one-note, uncharismatic, and pointlessly cruel. He doesn't think much of killing people who have done nothing particularly wrong and whom he doesn't need to kill to achieve his goals. I think this series is going for a sort of dark storytelling where the protagonist is deliberately a bad person, but I don't think he has the kind of depth that makes such a thing interesting. Even for a gameplay-focused game like this one, having a compelling main character can make things a lot more enjoyable and a lot more memorable.
4. Penises. Ancient Greece was famously one of the most homo-erotic cultures in human history. Men competed naked at the original Olympics and women weren't allowed to watch. That was reflected in a lot of their art, which was a huge influence on the rest of European culture. God of War isn't a Greek game though, it's an American game with some Greek influences, and America has an exceptionally puritan culture. Its devs had to limit their mature content to more socially acceptable things like watching people get disemboweled. It's not completely taboo to video games though. There are nude statues in Symphony of the Night, God of War's "rip-off" Dante's Inferno had a boss with a giant swinging dong, and even Animal Crossing includes David's best feature in its digital reproduction of Michelangelo's statue. I find it kind of funny that the M-Rated ultra-dark God of War is the game to chicken out and cover the walls of its temples with awkward neuter figures that the Greeks would be disgusted with. Of all the changes the game makes to Greek mythology, this is clearly the most egregious.

God of War wasn't everything I hoped for, but it didn't discourage me from trying out the second game. Of my four main criticisms, I dare to believe it can assuage 1 and 2.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V