God of War 2 - Final Play - Finished Campaign

The final two or three hours are a masterpiece of huge bosses and video game melodrama. It feels overdone and unfinished. It’s filled with cliches and has more than a few unfair moments. But here’s why it works.

God of War 2 is a hard game, and its difficulty plays enchantingly well into the determinism motif I outlined before. A lot of the game’s bosses chide Kratos with thoughtless one-liners like, “You can’t change fate!” In other games, that’s usually a cliche. Here it not only weaves well into the game’s mythology themes, it is a solid reminder that advancing to the next level in God of War 2 is not a foregone conclusion.

And just when I thought I had caught the rhythm, the game would ramp up what I needed to be doing in battle, looking for in puzzles and thinking about in narrative terms. Should I be ashamed to say that I started God of War 2 on medium and I finished it on easy? I’m not, if you’re wondering.

What’s great is when these turns in the game’s severity coincide with a particuarly affecting narrative passage for Kratos. I call these his moments of clarity: when his sneer would break into something resembling regret or at least understanding. In a lot of ways, to become a god, Kratos had to strip away his own humanity. This was horrifying to Kratos, but only in quick bursts. After that, the only signs that things had changed were that the enemies were stronger and there were more of them. He may have internalized his rage to meet the exigencies of his struggle, but that’s left up to player to decide.

When you come to the end, you’re expecting to finally see some sort of destiny. But a struggle this massive is predicated around living the end one moment at a time. The game’s characters like to talk about fate. The game itself talks about the chain of moments and memories that not only lead up to that destiny, but also wholly compose it.

At the top of Olympus, bashing out combos, I sort of got what Kratos was going through. After turning off the game, I’m still positive that he had it all wrong. But I enjoyed finding that out for myself and the battle it took to get there.