eat. sleep. game.

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… (more…)