What do you think of the new game/reveal?
In terms of story?
Well, first off, you should know that I have loathed the idiot shitstain protagonisting this series since I played the first game a few days after release, and my hate boner for his dipshit ass has only grown over the years. However, my problem with Kratos is not what people typically point out. "He's such an terrible person!" So what? I love plenty of fictional characters that I would consider terrible people, including within this very medium. After a lot of reflection, it's that ever since the first game, the writers of the series have a biased narrative playing out in Kratos' head, and then a very different one in the actual game, but more often than not, the narrative seems to go with what Kratos believes happened vs what actually happened, and often the fanbase goes with that. That is the short version, and I have a lot of example and arguments for this, and a lot more problems with the writing than this besides, but I don't want to make this an overly long post, so lets say my problems with Kratos' story boil down to that core issue. That Kratos makes up this persecution complex and the story seems to go with it despite things obviously happening otherwise.
In light of the reveal, the persecution complex things haven't happened yet, but I already see the seeds of it there. However, the narrative contrivances that are made to provoke his anger are already there. When you break down the hunt of the deer, it makes very little sense, but the part of note is that it when the boy looses an arrow and misses, Kratos yells angrily that now it will be on it's guard. But he's wrong. Literally three minutes later, the Deer is calmly chewing on some grass not 50 feet away from the giant and remarkably loud troll battle that happened.
Now, lets back up and admit that this is one really dumb ass fucking deer. The boy's yelling when he found the tracks didn't scare it off, it wasn't scared off when it literally ran into the boy except to run away a few feet, and then somehow didn't run away from the booming sounds of giant troll battle literally shattering the ice river, thinking it was safe it because it lightly jogged a couple feet. Maybe this deer was the equivelent of Alan Wake and can't run for more than 5 seconds without having to catch his breathe. Regardless, it's a miracle this fucking thing didn't die from walking itself into a cave and putting its neck inside some bears jaws before Kratos ever got hungry. Natural selection got lazy I guess
But of all the comments I read on the game and with how the narrative is depicting him as the learned hunter who is passing on his wisdom onto his child, no one seems to have pointed out that, by the evidence of the game's events themselves, Kratos is an ignorant shit whose one of the two pieces of advice to his kid was dead fucking wrong. The other piece was "think of the deer as a target". Yeah, thanks Kratos, where would your kid be without having to have it pointed out to him that a deer is a target. But that would mean we have to acknowledge Kratos as incompetent, and if there's one thing we can't have, it's that.
Part of this is just bad writing, where characters say one thing, but another is depicted. I point to the aforementioned deer as an example but also, the boy says that he's been 'taught' to hunt, but not only has he not killed anything yet (how does that work, exactly? I'm not hunter myself, but I would imagine that the importance of desensitizing their understudy from making the actual kill is tantamount. How do you have any hope of them actually doing it themselves otherwise?) even though he only sees track marks that are dead fucking obvious and then yells them out loudly, which should have alerted any normal deer to him and sent them running. The narrative wants me to believe the boy is skilled, but tender to the harsh ways of life, but he's depicted as just stupid hunting an event stupider deer.
But bad writing or not, if we're already getting issues where the telling isn't congruent with the showing, then I imagine the persecution complex Kratos is known for is not that far behind. And I can't wait to see people buying into Kratos' false narrative again when he willingly makes some kind of deal with whatever asshole god, and then oversteps his bounds in some way, and then gets mad when the god decides to slap his shit down over it.
But in terms of gameplay?
The story beats were part for course for a GoW game, even if the content was not. This, however? Huge change, and not for the better. People have been worried about the epic moments and there was even a thread made to alleviation people's fears that theyll be there. Personally, I never doubted it. If anything, the third person camera will make it easier for those moments to happen. My problem is what this will do to the normal gameplay.
While I never thought much of the gameplay of 1 or 2, I was actually somewhat impressed with it in 3. You have 4 universally viable weapons with unique movesets and items you could use at any time. While not NG/DMC/Bayo tier, they were much better suited for a combat system than the previous two games, and I was looking forward to seeing how they built on it. Maybe the weapons would be even more distinct from one another!
Nope, over the shoulder third person camera, slowed down movements, and frankly strange adjustments to the combat system to include things like manually aimed projectiles. Again, there wasn't enough shown to make any certain sweeping generalizations about it, but it figures that once they finally stepped into the right direction with the combat system, they'd say 'fuck it' and go do something else.
Graphics? Music? Presentation?
All obviously fantastic. Production values is one thing I always happily give God of War props for. All the games are beauiful, mostly well paced, environmentally intriguing, with a killer soundtrack. I really enjoy the norse rendition of the theme.
Anything else?
Who in the hell named this "God of War" and nothing else?! Not even a subtitle?! Guys, it's not a reboot, they've been crystal clear about that, so it should not have the same name as the first game! There are very, very few cases where this naming convention is actually justified, but here? No...NO! Not at all! This isn't some ancient relic franchise being resurrected from the dead like Doom! God, fuck it, cancel it, burn it, burn it all to the ground!
