So I haven’t yet completed God of War 2 (nor has Chuf), but I do have the excuse of finals and papers until last Thursday morning. I also have the excuse of not being as impressed with the game as the general editorial community seems to be, and while Chuf has said this is because I’m a Ninja Gaiden fanboy (which I suppose is not so far from the truth), I think there’s more to it. Kotaku has posted a link to a sort of ongoing discussion between Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal and MTV’s resident “interactive media columnist” Steven Totillo discussing the merits of the game and their differences of opinion.

Their arguments are hard to really boil down, because they’re pretty nuanced and multifaceted pieces of critique, so I suggest that you read it and come back. However, for the lazy among you, both writers are nice enough to follow a more or less essay based format for their positions, which means well drawn conclusion paragraphs. Totillo’s main point can be gleaned from this selection:

‘The game is a virtuoso piece of design. It’s beautiful. And if I didn’t know any better I’d say it’s among the best games made in years. But it’s also re-treading A LOT of material and A LOT of tone. Twilight Princess did too, mostly ripping off material and feeling from Ocarina of Time. I was torn with that case, because, from a technology standpoint I would have to recommend Twilight Princess over Ocarina to a Zelda neophyte. But, really so much of the ground it covered has already been traveled.’

Croal’s is a little more spread out, but here are some snippets:

‘You stated that you’d like to see more intertextuality in games, so why do you have beef with intratextuality in games?’

‘…if Jaffe freely borrowed from other games to create God of War, why wouldn’t his successor Cory Barlog freely borrow from the first game?’

‘…since Jaffe has become a fan of musical analogies, I’ll happily apply one here: God of War II may not be perfect–and I’ll get into that in a subsequent email–but it is unquestionably a game that will make you shake your ass. And that’s my point of departure when assessing the quality of my gameplay experiences. Not originality.’

My interpretation after the link…

Now, it’s easy to take either side here (especially if you’re a fanboy of Zelda, GoW, Sony, either of the writers, etc), because God of War 2 is an easy game to defend; it is, as Totillo puts it, a “virtuoso piece of design” in a lot of ways, especially visually (and games are, despite what Nintendo would like you to believe, a very visual medium), and both writers are quite convincing. However, I’m going to have to side with Totillo on this one and take his argument one step further, and not just because I was also disappointed by Twilight Princess. I think the reason that the moments Totillo discussed (that feel like rehashes in GoW 2) cheapen it is because of how much the original relied upon spectacle and novelty to define itself as a game, and as an experience. It was novel in the first game to sacrifice that soldier to continue; it was novel to victimize anyone in the immediate vicinity as a savage, angry, guilt ridden character who wanted to die, and even though Kratos was a horrible individual, he was still a sympathetic character. He knew he was a piece of shit, and his motivation in the original was to finally be allowed to not exist any longer. I’m not going to discuss the merits of the ending of the first and what the repercussions are to a player’s investment in a story to take their actions and turn them around on them by making Kratos a new god instead of non-existent, but it hurts his motivation and the association with him in the second game. And those moments in the first that were novel and character defining before now feel weary, forced, and arbitrary, as well as more gratuitous given the absence of the kind of narrative investment they had in the first game. Because of this, the game feels more hollow. I will be honest and say that my experience with the original God of War is limited, but it was a big enough event in gaming that it became a part of our cultural awareness as gamers, and being aware of it to the degree that I was, I still feel somewhat disappointed.

I think God of War 2 is a textbook example of the risks developers take in placing an emphasis on a forceful, directed narrative over user control and accomplishment; when I’m playing the game, I don’t feel like I have the agency to move the story forward. The story moves forward pulling me along, while I grind through enemies and bosses on hard. There’s a lot of deus ex machina going on in the game (and I don’t mean that in a punny way), so much so that it doesn’t feel like I’m discovering anything. If I need something, I know that eventually it’ll sort of fall on my head while I hope that it’s useful in more than one situation. It’s a spectacle to be sure, and I think that while Croal is right that self referentialism is acceptable to a degree (and I don’t find the references to the previous game in gameplay or story a problem), he’s also ignoring that God of War 1 and 2 rely heavily on the crutch of our western awareness of Greek mythology. In this way, the backstory we are offered (or need, really), is limited, and instead the designers focus on playing with those expectations, visually and characterization wise. Either way, it feels like because they have that crutch from our familiarity with both mythology and the previous game, the narrative in this game is sort of lazy, and feels forced. It is a technical achievement, and the presentation is amazing, but in the realm of gameplay and control (both in a literal and figurative sense), I feel dissatisfied.

I suppose that this could be considered a preview of my review, but I do have more to say for that venue. In the meantime, I will continue to smash my head against the proverbial rocks to get the game finished. Anyone have any thoughts?

-Aegies