God of War (2005): A Titanic Action Classic

 

Perhaps appropriately for a game that’s all about massive scale, this post is quite large, even by my standards. To help break it up a bit, I have included headings throughout. The post can be roughly divided up by topic, though it is also designed to be read from beginning to end without the breaks. I don’t like the idea of writing “listicles” as blog posts since they give too easy of an out with regard to planning and organization, and I was originally resistant to including the headings since they might give off the wrong impression. In the end, though, I recognize that this is a lot of words. If you need breaks, consider using the headings as a guide. This post contains spoilers for the original God of War, though the discussion here isn’t really focused on the story. Note that there is a bit of somewhat NSFW imagery and discussion in this piece, particularly in the last section.

Sections:

*If you want to CTRL + F to pick up somewhere or (I guess) find a topic that is of interest…

Intro (My Early Impressions and God of War’s Place in Gaming History)

God of War’s Connections to Onimusha (Including Difficulty)

God of War’s Focus on Spectacle (Including How The Visuals Have Aged)

God of War’s Combat (General Discussion)

God of War’s Combat (The Blade of Artemis)

Grab-Bag and Conclusions (The Sex Minigame, Game Length, and Final Thoughts)

 

Looking at the original box art for the first God of War, maybe you can guess at how something like this might have stuck in the mind’s eye of a kid with a relatively sheltered, conservative upbringing (see in particular the prominent blood). This cover image comes from the God of War Wiki: https://godofwar.fandom.com/wiki/God_of_War

Credits:

With the exception of the cover image above, all screenshots of the first God of War in this post are taken from essayist and game critic Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ retrospective on the whole God of War series. I highly recommend watching it if you don’t mind the spoilers and if you’re looking for something a bit more interpretive and that fills in some gaps in my critique. Gervais touches on the series’ depiction of women and sexuality, for example, which I only gesture at here. Gervais is also one of my favorite writers in any medium, and all of his videos come highly recommended. 

The single image from Onimusha: Warlords is taken from a retro review of the game by YouTuber TheGamingBrit, whose work also comes up later in this post. I will link to his review of Onimusha here, but his entire channel is also recommended viewing. 

 

Intro (My Early Impressions and God of War’s Place in Gaming History)        

            The original box art for the first God of War game, which released in early 2005 for the PlayStation 2, is a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of that game. Seen above, it features the protagonist, Kratos, looming in the foreground, jagged twin swords streaked with blood gripped in both hands, his attention fixed on the background where a mammoth structure that towers over even this grim figure extends up beyond the top of the frame. God of War—the series, not just the first game—is about violence and about titanic vistas, beasts, and odds. At this point in time, there are a lot of elements of the series that could be said to be representative of it: the iconic twin blades Kratos whips around on chains bound to his forearms; the oddly dainty way that he “hops” by thrusting his legs downward in midair to double-jump; the games’ reliance on QTEs (Quick-Time Events) where the player must follow controller inputs displayed onscreen in relatively quick succession to perform special actions like executions on stronger enemies; the so-called sex minigame (a staple of the early titles, since excised as the series has aged and courted a more “serious” audience); the scale of its environments and encounters, which consistently pushed whatever hardware the games appeared on to its limit.

            God of War was a hugely influential series in the 2000s. Much like the horror-shooter Resident Evil 4 did for third-person shooters, God of War did for action games during the PS2 and PS3 generations with its flashy but still accessible combat. It’s possible to compile a pretty decent list of the more direct imitators—Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, Dante’s Inferno, Conan, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Heavenly Sword, and so on—but the list of influenced titles grows exponentially if we also include games that followed the trend of punctuating action sequences with QTEs like God of War (and, admittedly, like Resident Evil 4 as well). It didn’t invent them, but it helped popularize them for at least a console generation. Its particular blend of combat and presentation informed trends in action games looking to court similar mainstream commercial success.

            As influential as God of War has been, though—and as fun of an action/beat ’em up/hack and slash/character action game as it is, a genre(?) that I have come to love ever since I first played Devil May Cry 3 in high school—I went a long time before actually playing any of the games. Since my family followed the ESRB age rating guidelines to the letter, I was aware of the series for a while before I could (even theoretically) play it. I saw the box for the first game all the time in electronics stores, and there was just something… raw about it. The texture of Kratos’ skin, which seemed so fleshy and real, the prominently-featured blood on the cover, and the realistic art style and lighting stuck in my mind. I had a friend at the time who had played the game(s), but I don’t remember what he told me about them. It was a game and a series that just sort of lingered somewhere in my brain as a set of impressions gained primarily second-hand. I saw and read the reviews of the games in Game Informer magazine, for example. But I wouldn’t play any of the games myself until around 2013 when my original release PlayStation 3 overheated and, when the time came to get a new one, I settled on the tie-in model that had been released alongside the latest title in the God of War series (Ascension) as a replacement. The system and controller were red to reflect that prominent color in Kratos’ design, and, critically, the package came with the complete collection of God of War games, including the newest one at the time.

            Over the years, I have dabbled with each of the God of War titles, except the mobile phone game, and have completed God of War III (multiple times), Ascension (multiple times), Chains of Olympus (once), and the most recent God of War from 2018 (once). I played a good chunk of the first and second games and a little bit of Ghost of Sparta but never finished those three. Recently, I got the urge to revisit the series, especially the early ones that I had not actually completed. In part, this was motivated by replaying the first Devil May Cry, which was released around four years prior to the first God of War, and was a game that played a key role in defining the genre or sub-genre to which God of War belongs. I also finally played Ninja Gaiden Sigma, another early entry in the genre/sub-genre that was originally released back in 2004, and then, perhaps most importantly, Onimusha: Warlords, the earliest of the bunch released back in 2001 and before even Devil May Cry—a game that, supposedly thanks to a glitch in its combat system during development, inspired the enemy launching and juggling mechanics so central to games like Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and, yes, God of War.

            What I hope to ultimately communicate through this bramble of names, details, and dates is that I was getting interested in the origins of this particular type of game that I love so much. The best of the best in action gaming, including heretofore unmentioned names like Bayonetta and Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro, arguably all trace back to Onimusha and then even further back to the earliest fighting games and side-scrolling beat ’em ups. However, it was Onimusha that arguably took those ideas and systems and began the process of combining them into their own sort of genre. I use the term “genre” and “sub-genre” in reference to these games interchangeably and loosely since there is some argument over whether “character action” is really a distinct type of game. “Action” is probably the appropriate more widely used designation (or “Action-Adventure” or even “Action-RPG” for some titles). Personally, I do like the idea of there being some kind of special designation, even if only casually, to describe the unique focus of these sorts of games on hardcore combat challenges, with flashy moves to master and an emphasis on beating enemies while looking as cool as possible. However, I’ll also link here to a good video by YouTuber TheGamingBrit that argues against this distinction in a way that I think is compelling. He argues, in essence, that these types of games are ultimately just particularly good action games and that we don’t do them or the rest of the genre any favors by trying to sequester them away in their own little corner.

 

The first Onimusha helped establish the conventions that action games like God of War would follow and refine over time. If you compare this screenshot to one further down from God of War, especially those with the HUD (heads-up display) visible over the action, there’s a striking similarity.

            To make a long story only slightly shorter, however: I’ve recently been interested in older action titles, in particular those from the early 2000s that helped shape the expectations that would carry forward to the modern day and games like 2019’s Devil May Cry 5—a game that, for all its modern visual polish, plays by more or less the same rules as its predecessors.

God of War’s Connections to Onimusha (Including Difficulty)

            Having recently played those other early action titles, the original God of War has been so much more interesting to revisit. The Onimusha connections are particularly prominent and fun to notice. It’s been often debated over the years how well God of War stacks up against its, I guess you could say, “cousin” Devil May Cry and other titles in the genre/sub-genre in terms of mechanical complexity and difficulty. I’ll address some of those issues below, but, for now, what I can definitively say is that God of War belongs in the same sentence with those other games. It shares the same DNA in a way that I didn’t really appreciate even back when I could still see certain similarities like launching and juggling enemies.

            For one thing, the game’s currency of red orbs is the same as Onimusha’s, and it displays that currency in the exact same way on the HUD—as a bar that fills and then increments a number (from one bar filled to twelve filled and so on). God of War’s boss fights can feel like slogs that drag on, but so can Onimusha’s. What both games offer the player, though, is the promise of rejuvenating pickups in the form of other colored orbs that the boss releases throughout the fight, which means that even being near death isn’t a reason to give up. If you push forward, the boss will likely drop a health or magic pickup that gives you a second wind. It’s possible to go from near death to fighting fit multiple times over the course of a single long boss fight, which adds to the thrill of these encounters. It’s too bad there aren’t more of these in the first God of War—only three, and there’s quite a stretch between the first and second in particular that really feels like it could have used a major fight or two with a singular opponent to help break it up. 

            In Onimusha, when the player would acquire a new weapon, the game would show a cutscene where the protagonist, Samanosuke, would appear in a sort of featureless void and pose with the sword. Similarly, in God of War, Kratos appears in a featureless void and poses with the new weapon or magic spell. Both games start you off with a blue lightning-based power (something the first Devil May Cry does as well). These were the most striking similarities, though there are others—like how the player will occasionally receive a prompt asking them if they want to pick up or use certain key items in a manner reminiscent of Onimusha and its own predecessors like Resident Evil. It’s ultimately a purposeless inclusion in games like Devil May Cry and God of War since there are no inventory limits and since the path forward requires the player to pick up and use those items in what are largely linear adventures without the sort of exploratory backtracking Resident Evil and even Onimusha featured, but it’s a vestigial bit of game design that clearly connects the games to their roots.

            There is a less obvious similarity to Onimusha in the original God of War as well, and it’s one that is a little hard to describe, so bear with me… Put (maybe) simply, both games have questionable ways in which they create difficulty. Put another way, both are games that are uncertain, in a sense, about what the primary source of their difficulty should be. Put still another: God of War is primarily a game about combat, so how much difficulty should be presented by, say, its traversal elements? Players of the game may already have an idea what I’m driving at here. To backtrack slightly, though, I got well and truly stuck in Onimusha only several times, and very few of those instances involved combat. Instead, they involved puzzles that I simply couldn’t solve with skill or luck. The first was perhaps the most infuriating—a sliding tile puzzle on a timer, where the penalty is a game over that sends the player all the way back to the title screen and forces a reload that then requires the player to watch multiple cutscenes and solve other puzzles in a sequence before they can finally even attempt the sliding tile puzzle again. I had to look up a guide for that puzzle in the end and, in the end, still only just solved it within the time limit.

            The puzzle was, I felt, too complex and the punishment for failure too harsh. I hated cheating it, but, at the same time, it raised questions for me as someone interested in game design about whether it was appropriate to have the difficulty in a game about exploration and combat spike so noticeably with something unrelated to those things. It seems to have become more an accepted norm of game design over time that the focus and especially challenge of a game should come from its primary, back-of-the-box modes of interaction rather than surprise deviations from the formula.

            God of War’s offending sections are less obviously out of synch with the rest of its design since traversal is an element of action games, but the difficulty of some of these segments still raises questions about their inclusion (or at least their execution). The game’s balance beam sections were so notoriously infuriating, in fact, that a future entry in the series would have a trophy earned for traversing a single short balance beam featuring a joking nod to the frustration. The first God of War seems to do a lot more of this sort of thing than the later games, which apparently “learned” from its design mistakes. An early and egregious-seeming offender was a section where the player must move a box from one end of a ship to another to access a ledge, but they are constantly under attack by archers whose arrows can break the box and force the player to start over again. My hard mode play through of the game almost ended in frustration right then and there in what was essentially the tutorial for the rest of the adventure. However, similar frustrating situations involving traversal would crop up throughout. 

 

Pictured here: One of the late-game balance beam segments that killed me a few times before I got it right. While it feels more trivial in hindsight, at the time, this traversal challenge killed me more times than many fights in the game.

            There are certain sections, for example, where the player has to cross a rope hand-over-hand and where, as they move across the screen, enemies start climbing along in pursuit from behind and to intercept the player from the front. With no 3D movement or jumping available and only limited melee options, the player must make continuous forward progress to avoid being sandwiched between the two groups of enemies and likely stun-locked to death by their attacks. On a previous attempt at hard mode, I got to the first of these rope traversal sections with too little health to take even several hits from the enemies and found myself stuck, dying over and over again. Luckily, the game’s designers seemed to have anticipated the potential for something like this to happen, so my health slowly refilled a bit at a time with each death until I finally had enough where I could, using the game’s super “Rage of the Gods” mode that I had thankfully built up and not expended in an earlier encounter, actually make it across the rope. I’ve seen videos of other players finessing these segments, but I ended up using the “Rage of the Gods” on each one to give my basic quick kicks enough oomph that I could speed from one end of the rope to the other. These segments were challenging, but were they the right sort of challenge for the game given how they deviate from its basic combat rhythms, the systems on which the player reasonably expects to be tested?

            Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya actually has a reputation at this point for including similar difficult deviations from standard combat in his own games. Kamiya is a fan of the classic Space Harrier rail shooter games, for example, so many of his otherwise melee- and combo-focused action games like The Wonderful 101 also feature segments where the player has to engage with alternative methods of play focused on dodging enemy projectiles and shooting that are quite different from the usual. That performance in these segments also impacts the player’s score/rank in the games is probably what pushes them most into the area of controversy. God of War features no scoring system apart from a basic hit counter that provides some bonus currency in exchange for long combos or kills using specific magic spells or finishers, but some of its challenges fall into a similarly questionable category regardless of a lack of score penalties for failure to manage the new mechanics or gameplay expectations. The parts that made me rage the hardest in the game were overwhelmingly not those tied to its normal combat encounters or even most puzzles, but those focused on traversal and/or combat with additional gimmicks thrown in.

            As I already mentioned, the God of War series went on to reduce the use or at least difficulty of these gimmick challenges—perhaps, ultimately, to a level that feels too extreme with the 2018 God of War’s climbing and limited jumping feeling particularly on-rails. I don’t think that the more intensely complicated application of these elements disappearing from the games is either a good or bad thing outright since the combat, the principle method of interacting with the series anyway, has been refined and the same types of puzzles designed without quite the same lethal or obnoxious gimmicks, but the way that the first game differs from the others illustrates the process of the designers figuring out what the series should be and where the focus of the difficulty should lie. Even the combat difficulty would be fine-tuned over time. While my personal feeling is that the most balanced difficulty level in the God of War series  in general is “hard,” a level at which you take high enough damage that you must actually pay attention and deal with enemy attacks appropriately but at which you can also still take a few hits without dying, the first game’s version of hard mode just seems like a bit more of a slog—like the enemies are just a little bit too tanky, causing fights to drag on ever so slightly longer than they should.

            What’s really remarkable about the first God of War is how, like Devil May Cry, it gets so much right on the first try within its series. While the original Devil May Cry is significantly simpler than its later entries, the ones that would prompt some players to dismiss God of War as too simple by comparison to warrant mentioning in the same breath, it absolutely nails so much of what the series would go on to refine. The first God of War was similarly successful at creating systems and mechanics that just worked for the series in a way that, maybe (just maybe), the team took too far without meaningful iteration. The iconic Blades of Chaos weapon, for example, feels so satisfying to control that the designers clearly struggled for years to give the player equivalent alternatives or to think of new moves for that primary weapon.

 

God of War’s Focus on Spectacle (Including How The Visuals Have Aged)

            Additionally, the first God of War still holds up as a game with an emphasis on spectacle. More so than Devil May Cry, the first God of War is really about massive-scale environments and encounters. These macro details of the game still hold up to this day. If you look closely at the character models in the first God of War, however, they can be laughably janky. Kratos fairs the best, but secondary characters like the Oracle of Athens have in-game models featuring glove-like hands and obvious joints where their body parts fit together in a way that recalls the PS1. The Oracle gets a special mention here since her transformation from in-game mannequin-esque blockiness to CG movie sex appeal (with her diaphanous outer garments revealing bare breasts and scanty lingerie) stuck out the most for the whiplash it created transitioning from one form of presentation to another.  And yet, the limitations in some areas reveal the game’s quite lofty aspirations in others. God of War’s environments are huge 3D spaces that manage to maintain a level of detail at an impressive scale. It doesn’t all hold up to close scrutiny, particularly on an HD screen, but a majority does.

            The game’s first boss fight, for example, features a ship in a storm, with wooden debris surrounded by moving water in the background and rain pounding a massive deck area—sickly clouds rolling across the heavens—where the encounter begins. Here, Kratos fights two lively-animated Hydra heads while a third, much, much larger head, looms in the background. The smaller Hydra heads aren’t killed and then removed from the game world—They’re impaled using the environment and continue to writhe and twitch on the deck as Kratos ascends smoothly to the upper reaches of the ship to battle the biggest head. That all of these impressive sights appear without loading screens at all is incredible. The whole game is like this: a seamless adventure from the rainy decks of the fleet of ships in its opening to the top of the mountainous temple on the enslaved Titan Cronos’ back. Of course, the graphics have aged—especially the pre-rendered cutscenes which could not receive the HD polish of the rest of the game with the PS3 re-release—but so much about the style and obvious preoccupations of the game have not. If anything, it looks more impressive than ever when kept in its original context. The trade-offs with things like the quality of the smaller character models clearly reveal the priorities of the designers in a way that the more consistent visual fidelity across the board in modern games can’t in the same way. Like I said at the beginning when talking about God of War’s box art, the titanic spectacle is a defining element of the series, and it is on full display in even the first title.

 

While the game’s few fully CG cutscenes like the one pictured here still hold up pretty well, the same cannot be said for those that were pre-rendered (recorded in advance and stored as video files on the disk). While it was possible to apply a coat of HD visual polish to the game itself with the re-release on PS3, it wasn’t possible with the cutscenes, short of re-recording them with higher-quality assets. The aforementioned Oracle of Athens actually seems to have three different models—the lowest-quality one that appears during regular gameplay, a higher-quality one for pre-rendered cutscenes using more of the regular in-game assets, and the highest-quality model used for the rare CG cutscenes. It simply wasn’t possible at the time to always use high-quality models, especially not for every character or object. Kratos is an exception as the main character the player will spend the whole game seeing onscreen, but most secondary characters and background objects viewed up close in the first God of War don’t hold up as well as the large-scale elements like giant statues. The trade-offs, however, reveal the game’s primary goal of showcasing massive spectacle over fine details at every level of magnification.

            While there are other elements that could be considered iconic or essential to God of War, the spectacle is noteworthy because it’s where the series chose to invest long-term as well. In terms of mechanics (or at least available moves to use in combat), the first God of War and Devil May Cry are about even, with God of War having more options total but with each move being a bit less distinct, with some serving more or less identical functions where each of Devil May Cry’s fewer moves has a distinct role in the combat system. There are other specific details that differentiate the two, like the greater mechanical depth of Devil May Cry’s boss fights, but, broadly, they are pretty similar. Where they ultimately chose to focus their attention as each series went on, though, is where they clearly diverge.

            Devil May Cry has become more and more mechanically complex, while God of War has focused more on the aforementioned spectacle. Comparing and contrasting them like people do—like I’m doing right now—is both appropriate and inappropriate. It’s appropriate because they are similar games with the same lineage and inappropriate because they also care most deeply about very different things. Kratos hasn’t necessarily gotten significantly more mechanically complex as a character—unlike Devil May Cry’s Dante—but the games have continued to push instead toward more technically impressive visuals and large-scale set pieces in the spirit of the first game’s Hydra, with each entry more or less attempting to outdo the previous one (especially in the opening encounters/boss fights).

 

What’s hard to communicate with either text or screenshots is the sum total impression of the varied 3D objects and visual effects onscreen. Pictured here, you have the pouring rain and moving clouds on top of everything else going on—like the gigantic boss monster moving around and the explosive fire effects that appear when Kratos attacks. It adds up to an impressive spectacle even now but especially when placed in its original context on the PS2.

 

God of War’s Combat (General Discussion)

              My experience with the combat in the first God of War this time around went like this—At first, I was having a lot of fun with it. Like I said before, it and Devil May Cry have their similarities, and the strategy of launching and juggling enemies (either from the ground or in the air yourself) is a satisfying one. I found myself experimenting, I think, a lot more than I had in the past, pushing myself to try things I hadn’t really considered viable options before, like launching the heavier minotaur and Gorgon enemies that I had previously assumed probably couldn’t be knocked into the air consistently. Trying to launch enemies and hit them as many times as possible in the air before slamming them back to the ground in order to stay safe, look cool, and build up a large combo is extremely satisfying. Spending red orbs to upgrade the Blades of Chaos offers new moves (like a rushing shoulder charge that can stagger and interrupt enemies), and I had fun trying to find a role for each move in combat. Over time, though, frustration started to creep in. Enemies became harder to launch, for example, with some seeming inconsistency in that regard.

            At first, it seemed that the rule was that enemies that had been knocked to the ground could not also be launched, but then there were some enemies who, without blocking or evading, would also not consistently launch from a standing position, which meant that it wasn’t possible to push quite as hard in combat since it seemed that the impact of a particular attack could be inconsistent. The sirens, an enemy type introduced a bit later in the game, would dodge away from almost all combos and special attacks and also constantly pelt Kratos with projectiles that made them both hard to focus down in mixed groups but also a priority since they’d pick you apart otherwise. I ended up spamming the magic lightning projectile, light attacks, and the shoulder charge combo against them since those seemed to be some of the few attacks that would connect consistently and/or were quick enough to not be interrupted by projectiles. 

 

A representative screenshot of a standard combat encounter against multiple enemies in the first God of War, including an enemy with the iconic floating circle icon over its head that indicates it can be grabbed and executed. For larger enemies and bosses, executions often require quick inputs with additional button presses (like tapping circle repeatedly or pressing several buttons in sequence). These gory finishing moves add a bit of extra, special flair to the game beyond what can be achieved with regular combos, in addition to sometimes awarding bonus red currency orbs and rejuvenating green and/or blue orbs. Since grabbing and executing enemies usually makes Kratos invincible, these short sequences can also be used to temporarily get a breather from combat or even strategically avoid incoming attacks.

            In trying to reduce my issues with the combat down to specific examples, I feel like I’m not quite capturing the fullness of the feeling of awkwardness that started to creep into the experience over time, but it’s just not possible to meaningfully express that feeling otherwise. It was, if I tried to explain it more appropriately but also more abstractly, a sense that some things in the game are somewhat mistimed or just don’t catch and interact with one another properly—like the gears inside of a machine don’t quite turn smoothly against one another or only just barely touch enough to turn. The early hours are fun because the enemies and fights are simple enough that it doesn’t generate a lot of friction, but the harder the game pushes you and the harder you try to push back, in particular if you try to play more experimentally and don’t rely on basic combos, the more the moments of annoyance with how the enemies and Kratos’ move set interact start to appear. Staying on the ground and just tapping out basic combos with the Blades of Chaos is satisfying in its own right, but it’s when you try to push things a bit further that you seem to run into issues.

            The sort of meme take on God of War’s combat is that it’s all about mashing square, square, triangle (the shortest combo you can perform by default that is both quick and ends with a decisive heavy area of effect—AOE—slam that stuns, knocks back, or sometimes launches enemies). This is patently untrue. You can play God of War with style to an extent, but the issue is that there’s nothing ultimately stopping you from spamming square, square, triangle (except maybe those speedy, projectile-tossing sirens) for an easy win just outside the enemies’ reach. As the game progressed and the combat encounters got more grueling—the fights larger and longer, the enemy types more annoying and harder to actually play around with—I did find myself resorting at points to square, square, triangle. True to the meme, it was devastatingly effective at killing enemies, keeping me safe, and racking up a much larger combo than trying to chain together other moves had been. According to the game’s only systems for evaluating performance—the hit counter and, I guess, the amount of health left in your gauge—this was skilled play.

            In fairness to God of War, however, it’s definitely not alone in the genre/sub-genre in having this problem. Ninja Gaiden has a powerful aerial combo called the Izuna Drop that does high damage to a single target, AOE damage to targets on the ground, and is pretty easy to spam. Bayonetta has punch, kick, punch, a short, fast combo ending in one of the game’s high-damage, combo-building “Wicked Weaves.” Devil May Cry has had for three entries “Real Impact,” a gauntlet weapon move that does high damage in exchange for somewhat tighter timing thanks to the long windup animation and short reach. Once you master the timing, though, it can be spammed to kill enemies and build style points in a way that seems somewhat unbalanced, especially in the fourth game where a glitch involving activating and deactivating the game’s super mode (“Devil Trigger”) with the right timing caused the move to deal even greater damage. Enemies in these other games are somewhat better at getting around these exploits due to their own available moves and level of aggression, I feel, but God of War is not alone in having cheap solutions to its combat challenges that are also rewarded in-game.

 

God of War’s Combat (The Blade of Artemis)

            If I wanted to, I could go on and on about the various nuances of combat—about how, for example, annoying it is that Kratos doesn’t get a powerful descending attack for the Blades of Chaos until the very last upgrade level or how the dodge, while a genuinely ingenious use of the right analog stick which otherwise goes unused thanks to the static camera carried forward from Onimusha, doesn’t feel as precise as it could and seemed to fling me into hazards and off ledges a good bit—but I want to try to be at least somewhat selective about what I cover, so I want to talk about the game’s single alternative to the primary Blades of Chaos melee option: the Blade of Artemis, a relatively late-game acquisition. Where the gods you encounter on your journey generally give you magic spells with more specific utility or limited move sets, Artemis gives the player a secondary melee weapon in the form of a single enormous sword with its own complete set of combos and special moves, but it’s a divisive tool. Even before I played God of War myself, I saw people talking about what a disappointment the sword is and how it’s not nearly as good as the Blades of Chaos. Since I’m a bit of a contrarian who likes to pick the weapons with the most awkward move sets in Dark Souls for the added challenge, I decided to use the Blade of Artemis as much as I could to see if it was really as bad as people said or if there wasn’t some sort of under-realized depth to it.

            The truth of the matter is that the Blade of Artemis is and isn’t as bad as people say. In terms of its move set in isolation, it’s actually quite interesting. It’s at least as complicated as the Blades of Chaos in terms of normal combos and special moves. Kratos’ default weapon has three inputs that lead to combos (square, triangle, and the right shoulder button), with the circle button reserved for grabbing enemies, which does open up additional options in combat that the Blade of Artemis doesn’t have. The Blade of Artemis also has three inputs that can be tapped to perform combos (square, triangle, and circle), with the right shoulder button reserved for a lunging stab with the sword. You can still grab enemies with the Blade of Artemis equipped, though only when they have an icon hovering over them, whereas the Blades of Chaos have the ability to perform grab attacks even without the icon against some enemies and/or under certain conditions. At a glance, the two look somewhat equal, though the varied actions that can be performed by grabbing an enemy more freely may make the Blades of Chaos more versatile in that way. What the Blade of Artemis can do that sets it apart is perform more complex crossover combos between its various inputs. Its different basic combos cross over with one another in ways that the Blades of Chaos’ do not, so you can potentially mix and match attacks with the Blade of Artemis in a way that feels very fluid.

            You can, for example, press the right shoulder button to zip toward an opponent, then press square/light attack to immediately perform the final, multi-hit spin from the end of the standard light combo. You can perform two quick, horizontal attacks with square and then press circle to perform the final, slower vertical hit, which gives the resulting combo more crowd control potential than the regular circle combo with its focus on vertical rather than horizontal swings. The weapon’s special moves, performed by holding block and then pressing an attack button, are mostly variations on the final hits of each of its normal combos that provide immediate access to those moves without the additional earlier hits you’d normally get by tapping the button repeatedly: Square performs an even longer multi-hit horizontal spin; triangle immediately performs a launcher which can be tapped to launch just the enemy or held to move Kratos into the air as well; circle performs the heavy vertical slam; and the cross button performs an extended version of the square, square, triangle combo that features even more vertically-oriented swings.

            There’s quite a bit to come to grips with, and the game’s issues with the Blade of Artemis ultimately begin with the way that it’s given to you. As opposed to every other weapon and spell, the Blade of Artemis can only be levelled up to increase its damage. All of its combos and moves are otherwise immediately accessible, which is, quite frankly, overwhelming. Unless you’re willing to sit down and just practice for a bit to see what each input does, you’re not necessarily going to have a grasp of what the weapon is capable of. The move list menu isn’t technically complete either, since it doesn’t clarify the crossover combos possible by alternating inputs like I previously described. The weapon should have levelled up like the others, with each level unlocking more of its moves while also increasing the damage. It’s strange that it’s like this since there is still actually a lot of game left between the point where you get it and the end, so you could definitely have earned the red orbs necessary to unlock and use its full move set if it had been split up across the different weapon levels.

            YouTube game critic and essayist Matthewmatosis has a great commentary video on the original Devil May Cry where, among other things, he talks about the importance of the shop in that game where you purchase items and new moves. Of particular interest to this discussion is how he notes that the existence of the shop and the necessity of purchasing moves acts as a “soft tutorial” since it gives the player more of a chance to appreciate the role of each move or attack since they are not just given to them in bulk. God of War doesn’t allow the player to pick and choose moves like Devil May Cry, but the linear upgrade paths and the necessity of collecting enough orbs to upgrade each weapon or spell means that this system serves the same function as the shop. You have time to experiment and figure out where each new batch of upgrades fits into your strategy before you can afford to upgrade the same weapon or spell again. The Blade of Artemis is just handed to you with everything already unlocked, and it makes upgrading it less satisfying and fun, in addition to making it an overwhelming weapon to even begin to use.

            Using the sword in combat has its own problems, though, and after some time spent thinking about it, the Blade of Artemis could arguably have been improved significantly through a relatively minor tweak. Unlike the Blades of Chaos, the Blade of Artemis is not a mid- to long-range melee weapon, which means you have to close with enemies more. It prevents square, square, triangle spam (or at least makes it harder to justify since the sword’s version of square, square, triangle doesn’t produce the same explosive results). The reduction in effective range isn’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, it intensifies combat greatly because you’re more often within range of enemy attacks. To someone like me who has spent a lot of time playing Devil May Cry, the Blade of Artemis also actually feels pretty natural to use since it has moves that more closely resemble those of the basic swords in that other series. It has a powerful aerial descending attack from the get-go, for instance. The range makes some enemy types awkward to fight, though. The club-wielding cyclops enemies in particular have unblockable attacks with considerable reach, which means the player has to rely on the somewhat awkward dodge against them where with the Blades of Chaos you can maintain a certain amount of space between Kratos and the enemy and keep up a withering string of attacks without worrying (so much) about reprisal.

 

Here you can see the Blade of Artemis in action. As a single sword without the reach of the Blades of Chaos, using it in battle against lots of enemies or those with even somewhat long reach of their own, like these minotaurs, can feel awkward or even unbalanced (like most of the game wasn’t really designed with this weapon in mind).

            In general, you have to spend a lot more time on the defensive with the Blade of Artemis, as, if enemies gain momentum against you, you have no choice but to evade or block repeatedly. Even if the sword might deal more or equal damage to the Blades of Chaos in theory, in practice it can be harder to keep up a sustained assault against enemies in groups using it since it lacks the reach and AOE damage of the Blades of Chaos. The fact that it can be hard to fight aggressively with the sword means that your combos break constantly, so you’re not fighting skillfully according to the game either. The change that I mentioned above which would probably have saved the Blade of Artemis is the addition of a parry. Early in the upgrade path for the Blades of Chaos, you get the ability to follow up a perfect block with one of three attacks. The square riposte, in particular, is great for dealing with groups of enemies since it strikes all around Kratos and is a heavy enough of a hit to knock most opponents away if not also to the ground. This allows you to continue to build a combo when under fire and helps keep Kratos safe while maintaining momentum. The Blade of Artemis has no equivalent ability. You can’t even parry normally without a proper riposte when it’s equipped, and you should be parrying a lot more if you’re fighting within easy reach of enemies and are more likely to be struck by their attacks.

            This is without even getting into the fact that the sword interacts extremely poorly with the game’s built-in grapple mechanics to the point that pressing circle, the designated grab button, near an enemy with the Blade of Artemis equipped will sometimes cause the damage for the weapon’s unique circle attack to register as a sword strike while Kratos also performs the animation for his grab, resulting in very awkward moments where the enemy seems to be sliced in two by Kratos’ attempted bear hug and the grab action you might have been trying to perform is missed. This is only an annoyance some of the time, but it can also be a major source of irritation if you were trying to grab the enemy to, say, escape damage from an incoming attack or to get back a specific resource like the magic-refueling orbs you get for executing Gorgons.

            However, the lack of a parry in particular results in stopping and starting constantly with the Blade of Artemis in a way that makes fights drag on and stops you from performing long combos. It’s also more dangerous since longer fights mean more opportunities to get hit and potentially lose precious health or die. Playing the game with heavy use of the Blade of Artemis ultimately feels harder than using the Blades of Chaos, which I would reluctantly fall back on at points after I was appropriately frustrated. This might be a legitimate mechanical challenge for players who want it or inconsequential when playing casually or on the lower difficulty levels where getting hit isn’t quite as devastating, but it is also very much at odds with the way that the weapon is presented by Artemis: The sword that she used to kill a Titan ultimately felt like a downgrade in many combat situations.

 

Grab-Bag and Conclusions (The Sex Minigame, Game Length, and Final Thoughts)

            After all that, this piece still hasn’t touched on many elements of the original God of War, both good and bad. The way that this first game drip-feeds Kratos’ origins to the player as the story progresses? Good—suspenseful, gory, and interesting enough as a narrative for this type of game. The speed with which Kratos moves objects like that box I mentioned a few paragraphs back? Not so good—annoying in a lot of puzzle situations where the solution is obvious but executing the solution takes an agonizing amount of time. The sex minigame? Goofy fun—It’s a great little Easter egg in this first game.

            After you finish the opening segment with the Hydra, a cutscene plays that sets up more of the game’s actual main plot that revolves around Athena calling on Kratos to kill the god Ares, who is currently attempting to destroy Athens, in exchange for peace from Kratos’ mental torment. You’re shown two women in Kratos’ bed during the cutscene, and Kratos tells them to get out now that they’ve reached Athens after the cutscene ends. To initiate the sex minigame, you have to jump up onto the bed (essentially a small platform in the game world) and then press circle to “grab” the women when the giant rotating circle button prompt appears that you usually see hovering over severely weakened enemies and bosses to indicate that they can be executed. In practice, the sex minigame consists of some lewd audio playing while you finish a QTE and watch a jar on a bed stand get jostled off onto the floor. Your reward for completing this short sequence is a stream of large red orbs very useful in the early game for upgrading the Blades of Chaos or your first magic ability.

            The minigame is not necessarily a well-hidden secret, but it is a little secret nonetheless, and playing the game, I thought about how there were almost certainly people who just watched the cutscene and left the bedroom or maybe interacted with the women from beside the bed but then left because they assumed the dialogue was all there was. It would take a somewhat experimental, maybe horny, gamer trying to actually jump back in bed with the digital women to uncover the minigame, and I imagined that it was the sort of thing a friend might tell you about at lunch in high school. (“Man, did you know you can have sex with the women at the beginning of God of War?” “What? No way.” “Seriously! You can!”) There’s stuff to be written and argued about God of War’s depictions of sex and women—nonconsensually(?) grabbing and kissing the Nyads in Poseidon’s portion of Pandora’s Temple later in the game gets you an upgrade feather toward increasing your magic meter, for example—but there’s not room in this particular post for it. The sex minigame specifically is just, in its presentation in this first game at least, a silly little secret in a game about pushing extremes (see the prominent, realistic blood on the cover). Ultimately, though, the sex minigame and bare breasts aren’t really the focus of God of War. They’re too small-scale. The real focus is there in what you see on the cover, larger than life. It’s a book—er, game—you can judge pretty safely by that cover. It’s fleshy, bloody, and gigantic.

 

Seen here: the obnoxious siren enemies and their massive… mouths. Breasts clearly gender certain monsters, and there’s absolutely something to be said about the series’ depiction of sexuality, women, violence, nudity, and monstrousness—just not in this post. Also, in fairness to the sirens specifically and their big… fangs, they are sirens and are supposed to lure men to their deaths presumably.

 

            Completing the game feels like a real Herculean effort, because of the annoying bits like the ropes but also because of the pacing. It took me just over 13 hours according to the official in-game clock, though that doesn’t appear to include failed attempts/deaths, to finish God of War on hard mode, but it felt longer. This may actually be a flaw with the pacing to a degree. It felt like the game was reaching a narrative climax around the point I was summoning Cronos with the temple on his back out in the desert and then continued to draw out that feeling over hours and hours more of combat and puzzle-solving. By the time I reached the peak of the temple to retrieve Pandora’s Box, I felt like I had been playing for much longer than I had. From the desert onward, I was frequently struck by the feeling that there couldn’t possibly be more, but there always was, including a pretty difficult three-phase final boss encounter with some annoying gimmicks in the second and third phases. Maybe this pacing is good (because you feel like you’ve accomplished a trial like Kratos has) or bad (because the game seems oddly-paced) or even neutral (because maybe I only felt the way that I did since I fully upgraded my health and magic earlier than I could have by scouring for secrets early in the game, which potentially contributed to me feeling like the game was nearly complete prematurely).

            In any case, though, it’s a journey worth taking. While the experience was an uneven one—I spent something like two hours getting angrier and angrier at the final boss fight to the point that winning it no longer had quite the emotional resonance it should have had—I found God of War really interesting to think about from a design perspective. Placing it mechanically with other games of its type in the early 2000s was very enlightening, and, perhaps most importantly of all, it’s just a great game in a way that a lot of games today aren’t, up to and including the 2018 God of War. Despite how I felt about this game’s pacing, its length is extremely accessible by today’s standards. It has no padding in the form of middling side quests or item collection checklists and no unnecessary RPG mechanics. Instead, God of War was, from its auspicious and influential origins in the early 2000s to the point where the industry started to find the series less satisfying and out of step with the times in the early 2010s, a consummate example of a Video Game. It tells an inoffensive story in the medium, but the real prize is the gameplay—though sometimes goofy and sometimes exploitative in ways that even God of War itself now seems to frown upon, it’s a pure, focused mechanical gaming experience of the sort that just doesn’t get made anymore in the so-called Triple-A industry. It has a meaningful place in gaming history as a classic for its influence, and it deserves that spot and is worth playing… just maybe not on hard and very hard unless you want to really feel the rage like Kratos.