(Series
Spoilers for the God of War franchise. You have been warned.)
The
concept of sequels and franchises is a very core part of our
industry. Since the development and release of video games is
primarily a business, it only makes sense that the head honchos of
the field would look for concepts and ideas that could easily spawn
sequels, continuations, spin-offs, and the like. Sometimes this leads
to great
games
that the audience grow to love for many reasons. Other times it leads
to games that are obvious
attempts to grab money
without any real concern for quality. Most often, the games released
are somewhere in the middle. I say this because this weeks topic is
largely about a game that, in my opinion (which I confess is not
popular), suffered from continued sequels: God of War.
Before
I go into detail as to why I think this, I want to make one thing
perfectly clear: I
do not consider God of War, or its sequels, to be bad games.
This franchise demonstrates very solid game design principles. The
combat is solid, fast-paced, visceral, and very fun to play. A smart
decision was made to break up combat sections with platforming and
puzzles (of debatable quality, but most people agree that most
puzzles were not bad). They also did, in later installments, a very
good job of increasing the sheer scale of each game in terms or both
the enemies/bosses fought and what Kratos was doing in the story.
From the perspective of a gamer looking for a good time, the God of
War games are easily some of the best, but that is not the lens I
look at games with. While I always want my games to be fun, I expect
much more from them. Games need to have a high-quality plot and story
to go along with stellar and interesting gameplay. The original God
of War did this very well, the later installments falter on this
front in a pretty interesting way. (I am only including the main
series games in this article as I have not and probably will not play
the side stories for the PSP and the new PS3 game, Ascension, slated
for release.)
The
first God
of War
game was an example of superb storytelling in video games. The story
of Kratos was a very tragic, relateable, and believable one despite
the fact that the player was killing thousands of creatures at a
time. It begins with the protagonist throwing himself off a cliff,
and we as the players must go through his life to learn why he did
this. The story of one man who needed power in a desperate bid to
stay alive is an interesting one that most people can understand,
even if it is not one that can necessarily be empathized with.
Players can comprehend the emotions Kratos feels when he is tricked
into slaughtering his family by the very god he serves. We follow him
as he abandons Ares and fights for revenge, but it is more about
revenge. This is also a story about one man dealing with his personal
demons through war. When the time comes to confront Ares, the
audience is just as eager to best him as Kratos is because they have
followed him and went through his story. And it is a tale of
futility. Though Kratos fought and did his best to avenge his family
and repent for his sins and his family's death, ultimately he is
still left a broken man and commits suicide as he is overcome with
grief. When Athena saves him from this fate, we can empathize with
the anger and despair he feels as he realizes that he can not find
peace even in death because of the need for a replacement God of War.
The violence and war that he has grown to love in life are what
inevitably cause his suffering and destroy his family, some of the
few people that he ever held dear to him. This is an example of a
great story being strengthened and told through the interactivity of
video games.
The
sequel
lacked the same strength of storytelling. God of War 2 begins with
Kratos learning nothing from his experience in the original games and
losing all pretense of grief. He is rampaging across Greece, aiding
Sparta (his home country from before his ascension) in its conquest
of the other city-states. Athena, desperate to keep him from
suffering retribution, warns him that any further transgressions in
the mortal world would force Zeus to take action and deliver divine
retribution. When Kratos disregards Athena and tells her to go screw
herself, the god-king fulfills his promise. Kratos is stripped of his
powers and cast into the Underworld. This is where the titan, Gaia,
gives him the strength to crawl back out. She tells Kratos to get
revenge for Zeus punishing him just like he threatened to do. In
order to do this, Kratos must find and kill the three Sisters of Fate
and take control of his own thread of fate, allowing him to go back
in time and get his powers back. After succeeding in this, Kratos
goes back, reclaims his power, and attacks Zeus like the petulant
child that he is. The final shot is him riding the Titans to the top
of Mount Olympus, preparing to assault the gods in a final showdown.
This
plot is much weaker than the original's for one huge reason: Kratos
lacks the depth of character his first incarnation had. In the
beginning, Kratos was more than just a perpetually angry war machine.
The Ghost of Sparta was overcome with grief for killing his family
and anger at the one who tricked him into doing it. His mind was
constantly occupied with reliving and re-experiencing the memory of
his greatest failure, giving him constant nightmares. Even the sex
mini-game was appropriate as Kratos was trying to keep himself
occupied. In the second game, he became
a war machine. The newly crowned God of War spent all his time taking
his anger out on the world and taking control of nations. The
grieving warrior was completely lost, replaced by this reckless and
stupid asshole who is disregarding warnings in order to vent on poor
defenseless people. They do not even mention his family or their loss
at all in the second game, which is essential to his character and
what makes him so fascinating. The whole plot is Kratos getting
revenge on Zeus for doing what he said he would do all along. This
interesting and nuanced character became so flat and one-dimensional
that it was painful to watch, which to me is the ultimate tragedy of
the franchise.
The
third game
did its best to remedy this, which was unfortunately too little too
late. The whole plot of the third is that Kratos goes on a rampage at
Mount Olympus, killing all of gods and causing an apocalypse. Though
Kratos is well aware that his actions are damning the people at
large, he does not care in the slightest. Slaughtering Poseidon
caused the ocean to grow catastrophic with tidal waves, decimating
the people of the coastal regions. Ripping off Helios's head erased
the sun and ushered in a literal Dark Age. The evidence was there and
he saw the results, but refused to stop. Then, he learned via the
ghost of the goddess Athena exactly how he needed to defeat Zeus. He
needed to open up Pandora's Box, like he did in the first game, and
claim the weapon hidden inside. To reopen the box, he needs to find
Pandora and get her to use her power on it. Meeting Pandora reminded
him of his own daughter and the circumstances behind her death,
bringing back the one thing that makes Kratos an interesting
character. This aspect of his character humanizes him and gives him a
relateable persona. They made the right decision in this regard and
played with it very well.
The back and forth between Kratos and Pandora was interesting since
Pandora believes in hope and has an optimistic look on life while
Kratos has been beat down so much that he no longer believes in the
concept of hope. This comes to a head when Pandora reveals that she
has to sacrifice herself to open the box and help Kratos beat Zeus.
Kratos is highly resistant to this as he does not want to feel like
he lost his daughter a second time. When Zeus shows up to officially
join the fight, it was heart-wrenching as the player had to force
Kratos to let go and allow Pandora to do her thing. As the box opens
and is completely empty, the audience could feel the sheer gravity of
the situation that left Kratos and Athena dumbstruck. Athena flips
out and describes how Hope should have been in the box. She then
realizes that when Kratos opened the box the first time to gain the
power to fight Ares, he took Hope instead of the elements of discord
that were held in the box. With this knowledge in mind, Kratos goes
to fight and defeat Zeus once and for all, destroying civilization
while leaving Hope for the world, because Hope is all that matters
when disease, famine, and death take their hold on the land.
The best thing about the plot was that it returned to the best parts
of Kratos. While God of War is superficially about one man beating up
a shit load of people, there is more to it than that. They forgot
about the family aspect in the second game and the story suffered for
it. Bringing it back in the third was a very smart decision and added
to the overall narrative, adding an element of nuance to the
character once more and giving Kratos making him more believable.
Sadly, this whole theme of suffering and personal repentance is
completely undercut by the fact that Kratos is knowingly causing the
destruction of life as we know it. They were already on that course
by the time that God of War 3 began, so there was not much that they
could do to remedy the plot. The ship was already sunk before it left
the port, which is quite unfortunate because the writers, who were
not the same people who made the original (The sequels were made by
an entirely different team.), clearly began to understand the
character much more after working with it in God of War 2.
In an oddly fitting way, the development of the God of War franchise
follows the plot of a standard Greek Tragedy in which the protagonist
is undone by the qualities that make him iconic and great in the eyes
of many. People latched onto the violence and rage of Kratos when
that was far from what made him an interesting character. This
decision to focus on that aspect is what inevitably ruined the
character. The writers did not realize what they were doing until it
was far too late and the plot was not able to be fixed. It is an
important lesson in game development. If you are handed a great and
iconic game and asked to make a sequel, take the time to analyze the
game on a deeper level and figure out what makes it so great. Look
beyond the gameplay and into the plot, setting, and characters. All
of this is crucial to game design.
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