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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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I wrapped up God of War (2018), which I hadn't played before. But it was on sale over at the EGS, so I figured why not?
At first, according to my nature, I kept thinking the originals were better. Especially during the hour long introductory sequence. OG God of War had you fighting with your complete control set like 60 seconds into it. I further rolled my eyes at how truly tedious travel was, and how stingy they were with fast travel. I'm assuming it's the old "elevator trick" of hidden loading screens, but all the segments where you are slowly crouching through a cave, or scrambling along a ledge, or sailing across the same lake drove me nuts. They tried to spice it up by filling it with banter between Kratos, his son, and later a 3rd character. But I found it rather hit or miss.
That being said, by the time I unlocked a second weapon, and full fast travel, I was all in. So like... 2/3rds through the game?
Of course, in my need for more God of War, and not owning a PS5, I went back to the original. I...may have had rose colored glasses. Yes, it throws you right into the action. Yes, IMHO the Blades of Chaos are a way more fun weapon than the axe in GoW 2018. Yes, the game has a much brisker flow to it without the excessive hidden loading areas. But man, that first level throws a really obnoxious "escort a fragile crate" activity at you which I forgot was a thing. And the narrow ledges you need to slowly traverse and keep your balance on while the camera uncontrollably pans causing you to now be holding the wrong direction adds nothing to my enjoyment.
It's funny how the original GoW was an immediate, almost unquestionable 10/10. The only criticism I even remember was some grumbling over the segment in Hades where there were tons of spinning blade obstacles. But I guess it was more of an action platformer, where as the new one is more of an action open world game. So marginally tedious "puzzles" and obstacles are part and parcel of the slightly different genre the original GoW was in.
I don't want to add (much) negativity here, but I'm someone who was around when the original God of War games came out and thought they were 7/10 at best, and mostly due to the good graphics, animation, and (though I hate to admit it) story. I was around 20-24 around that time and a massive gamer, so I was right around the target demographic, and I found the combat to be really dull even compared to the much older game Devil May Cry, and especially compared to its contemporaries Devil May Cry 3 and Ninja Gaiden. And God of War was one of the major popularizers of Quick Time Events in games, and I remember finding them tiresome already by that time, in how they essentially inserted short cutscenes with win buttons into combat sequences instead of actually making a combat system that's fun and flexible enough to cause these spectacular moments to come about in the course of natural combat. On top of that, the 1st game had a grand total of 3 bosses (Hydra (and don't get me started on how the Hydra popularized the awful "huge boss standing in front of a platform you're standing on" genre of bosses), Minotaur, and Ares IIRC), with 2 out of those 3 being primarily gimmick bosses that relied very little on combat for victory, when its contemporaries made it basically a standard that there'd be at least a dozen bosses with most of them being actual ways of testing the player's understanding of the combat system.
I haven't played the latest God of Wars, but I have watched a playthrough of the 2018 one, and I was surprised by how much better it looked. Moving away from the crazy action genre of the originals to a slower, more Souls-style combat genre really seemed to help; the series never did the former style well, and these recent iterations seem to be doing the latter style much better. The combat looks less visceral and more slow-paced, but it also looks like there's actually a fun sort of flow to it, with bosses that actually engage the player with it.
94/100 Universal Acclaim
Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly. And I'm not entirely sure it belongs in the same category as Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. But, what struck me most about God of War was how playable it was. Especially coming from PC games, where being able to save whenever you want is the expectation, I found a lot of acclaimed action games on console borderline unplayable. You'd regularly lose 10-30 minutes of gameplay at a chunk if you died in a difficult section. In rare cases as much as an hour, with some unskippable cutscenes thrown in to add insult to injury. God of War started you either at the entrance to the room, or a room before, tops. And there were often save points in all the places you'd really want one. There was just so much focus and polish on it being fun, with very few exceptions. The rough edges that were infrequent exceptions were standard in other games.
I never said that God of War didn't receive near universal acclaim. I said I judged it as 7/10 at the time. I recall being absolutely befuddled at the good reviews it got and finding that the actual reviewers just didn't seem to care about the fun of an interesting combat system that its contemporary competitors had, but rather about the presentation and the visceral feeling of controlling Kratos as he rampaged over Greek mythological creatures. Which sorta makes sense, because game reviewers often play lots of different types of games but don't delve into any single one all that deeply and so tend to make mostly surface-level judgments.
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