The first Valkyrie fight I did was easily my favourite and the hardest because I was low leveled. I did the one that focuses on projectile attacks first, I think it was Geirdriful, and that was great. Just constantly having to dodge and parry and close the distance. She took me about 10 tries and none of the others except the Queen took more than 3.
The hardest Valkyrie fight I had was against the one with the mace and shield, and only because of her dash explosion move. I had to stay in the center at all times so I'd have enough room to roll backwards away from the explosion then roll again to dodge the followup swing. Also the game had some issues with the correct distance for shield bash so I got slapped by her wings more than a few times.
Got real good at axe-throwing her out of the sky though.
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Andy JoeWe claim the land for the highlord!The AdirondacksRegistered Userregular
Guys, it's really fun playing through a game like this with someone pretty versed in Norse mythology, as Wyborn is. I'm... semi-versed? But Wyborn can spout off stories about Skaði or Mimir or Jörmungandr on a dime, and he really filled in a lot of things along the way and added a lot of fun context.
Full game spoilers
Of course, this did mean we spotted most plot twists very early-- ID'd Baldur in the first fight, and figured out the Witch's true nature by her magic. Our initial theory was that Faye was Vanir and this was a story about the Aesir destroying the Vanir, but less than a third of the way through the game we were completely sure about who Loki and Laufey were. Probably before the mistletoe arrows, even, given that there was no mention of any Loki in any boat story, plus Kratos' comment that Faye was the last of her people.
Overall, though.... I have a few pretty hefty issues with the story and characters in this. I'll lay them out from minor to major below.
1. THEY CHANGED THE STORY ABOUT ÞRYMR. Because... because they couldn't handle Thor in a dress? Come on, even if he's supposed to be scary and evil, it's just two lines from Mimir, you can keep the story as is.
2. After all the frigging things you did in the previous God of War games, Kratos, your main hangup is that you murdered your dad?! How about the murder of your previous wife and kid? Or the murder of those random civilians in those cities you passed through? Zeus really, really, really had it coming! This being the dramatic beat of the confession, in addition to being all the drama in Helheim made me laugh at the absurdity.
3. Atreus' characterization whiplash.
Woof. Past the middle of the game, Atreus goes from really good obedient child who doesn't act out whatsoever to completely disobedient child who is a hundred percent reckless, shoots his father in the chest, and murders a guy. This happens in what feels like just a couple of hours of their time. And then just as rapidly, with no positive action by Kratos (I don't count yelling "this is your fault" a positive action), Atreus shoots back into being a Good Boy. Which...... ugh, OK I understand having to abridge this arc for the sake of a 50 hour game, but was way too rapid and the latter change didn't feel earned, nor does him returning to his default state seem to indicate any positive growth, which is pretty crucial to have in a child character; not to let him do this basically keeps him in an infantilized state. Which... well, really works against the game's main themes.
And, uh, the scene immediately thereafter where Atreus claims he didn't deliberately murder Modi, and Kratos just... agrees? What? I don't buy the "he was in a rage fugue state" excuse; or at least, I can't without further lines to discuss it. Which leads me to...
4. God Kratos just TALK TO YOUR KID. This game's main theme is definitely on how the instinct to (over)protect one's child is toxic and comes from a place of selfishness and fear. OK, that's a neat theme. But they have Kratos telling one lie right after the other to Atreus way too many times as Wyborn and I basically screamed into pillows and at the TV. They really, really should have pushed the ending confession way earlier, and allowed more lines between father and son about this. And maybe made divulging the truth Kratos' choice instead of having it being coerced by Freya? The latter isn't character growth, that's being forced into a corner. It's a perfectly fine writing choice, I suppose, but it keeps your character static and doesn't make me respect him very much.
5. Speaking about the theme of overprotective parents.... Freya. Hooboy, Freya. I mean, it'd (mostly) be fine to have her embody the theme of Overprotetive Parenting Is Bad if she wasn't the only living woman in this game? And if she had any characterization outside of being Overprotective Mom, or any agency at all instead of having her "fighting spirit" entirely removed by Odin? Her repeatedly ignored pleas in the final battle were... pornographically excessive.
I was relieved we didn't walk in on her corpse or see her beaten to death by Baldur. But personally I also take issue with Kratos ignoring her decision to die in an effort to restore sanity to her son. She's thousands of years old, she can make her own choices about that. ...I mean, Kratos would probably would have to kill him after it didn't work, but eh. You would have given a fraction of agency to a character that otherwise had none? [eta: There's no perfect fix for this scenario that they wrote themselves into, other than a drastic increase in female characters. I'm just saying leaving her alive instead of another female corpse has all sorts of issues as well.]
Oh and I'm sorry, her swearing eternal revenge for Kratos killing her clearly sociopathic son because Parents Love Their Kids No Matter What was... eyerollingly absurd.
6. I have a bunch of other issues with the treatment of women in this game, or rather the absence of them. Good women are confined to being dead corpses spoken fondly about from time to time. We get some mention of Laufey's heroic past, slightly, but everything else about her and Freya perpetually revolve around the male figures in their lives, and being mothers and wives. Baldur is "the greatest gift Odin ever gave Freya." Puuuuuuulease, game, what. You are ultimately left with the angel/demonness mother split; moms aren't allowed to be flawed unless they're totally abusive and broken. They don't get a chance to have depth, make mistakes, but improve on themselves as Kratos does. Which isn't doing right by them.
I guess the key thing is that I've pretty much had enough of sad dads. Guys, I know you're reaching an emotional point of your lives; I am very grateful you are connecting with your children and feel empowered to express your feelings of fatherhood these days. But you know, women are also people, and you could apply these feelings to your female characters; moms can be these complicated, imperfect, but trying to be good characters that you have all collectively instilled in your dads.
OK... I've probably vented enough. This game was fun, and beautiful, and worth playing through, but I really felt the flaws.
Only the first God of War chiefly had to do specifically with his wife and family, the entire trilogy is about how the cycle of revenge is never-ending. Ares caused Kratos to kill his family, so Kratos killed Ares, which led to Zeus killing Kratos, which led to Kratos coming back to kill EVERYONE on his way to killing Zeus, for killing him, which caused more vengeance etc.
And I actually think Baldur got the worst of it, in terms of re-writing mythology, because by all accounts, he was a really good guy, and they wrote him into a dysfunctional mess because of the spell. It sucks that they really wanted to make him the villain, because if they had played it straight, Baldur would not have acted at all the way he did, considering how he is traditio.nally portrayed in Norse mythology.
If they wanted to highlight that Kratos was worried about Atreus falling into the cycle of vengeance, more should have been done to highlight Kratos' past participation in the cycle instead of circling around his patricide. As it is, we have a scene with Zeus' mist head showing up, followed by echoes of Kratos yelling about Zeus, followed by a mist of Kratos killing Zeus, concluded with an admission that Kratos killed deserving and undeserving people and significantly, also his father.
It's absurd to have him to have hangups on that point when there are much better candidates for him to focus on--or even just have the victims be nameless civilians, if not his past family. This Zeus focus turns the story into a weird thing about the sanctity of fathers, even monstrous god-tyrants.
Kratos's quest to kill Zeus, along with the attendant god-murder necessary to accomplish it, resulted in the destruction of Greece. Taken holistically, it was much, much worse than anything else he had ever done.
Guys, it's really fun playing through a game like this with someone pretty versed in Norse mythology, as Wyborn is. I'm... semi-versed? But Wyborn can spout off stories about Skaði or Mimir or Jörmungandr on a dime, and he really filled in a lot of things along the way and added a lot of fun context.
Full game spoilers
Of course, this did mean we spotted most plot twists very early-- ID'd Baldur in the first fight, and figured out the Witch's true nature by her magic. Our initial theory was that Faye was Vanir and this was a story about the Aesir destroying the Vanir, but less than a third of the way through the game we were completely sure about who Loki and Laufey were. Probably before the mistletoe arrows, even, given that there was no mention of any Loki in any boat story, plus Kratos' comment that Faye was the last of her people.
Overall, though.... I have a few pretty hefty issues with the story and characters in this. I'll lay them out from minor to major below.
1. THEY CHANGED THE STORY ABOUT ÞRYMR. Because... because they couldn't handle Thor in a dress? Come on, even if he's supposed to be scary and evil, it's just two lines from Mimir, you can keep the story as is.
2. After all the frigging things you did in the previous God of War games, Kratos, your main hangup is that you murdered your dad?! How about the murder of your previous wife and kid? Or the murder of those random civilians in those cities you passed through? Zeus really, really, really had it coming! This being the dramatic beat of the confession, in addition to being all the drama in Helheim made me laugh at the absurdity.
3. Atreus' characterization whiplash.
Woof. Past the middle of the game, Atreus goes from really good obedient child who doesn't act out whatsoever to completely disobedient child who is a hundred percent reckless, shoots his father in the chest, and murders a guy. This happens in what feels like just a couple of hours of their time. And then just as rapidly, with no positive action by Kratos (I don't count yelling "this is your fault" a positive action), Atreus shoots back into being a Good Boy. Which...... ugh, OK I understand having to abridge this arc for the sake of a 50 hour game, but was way too rapid and the latter change didn't feel earned, nor does him returning to his default state seem to indicate any positive growth, which is pretty crucial to have in a child character; not to let him do this basically keeps him in an infantilized state. Which... well, really works against the game's main themes.
And, uh, the scene immediately thereafter where Atreus claims he didn't deliberately murder Modi, and Kratos just... agrees? What? I don't buy the "he was in a rage fugue state" excuse; or at least, I can't without further lines to discuss it. Which leads me to...
4. God Kratos just TALK TO YOUR KID. This game's main theme is definitely on how the instinct to (over)protect one's child is toxic and comes from a place of selfishness and fear. OK, that's a neat theme. But they have Kratos telling one lie right after the other to Atreus way too many times as Wyborn and I basically screamed into pillows and at the TV. They really, really should have pushed the ending confession way earlier, and allowed more lines between father and son about this. And maybe made divulging the truth Kratos' choice instead of having it being coerced by Freya? The latter isn't character growth, that's being forced into a corner. It's a perfectly fine writing choice, I suppose, but it keeps your character static and doesn't make me respect him very much.
5. Speaking about the theme of overprotective parents.... Freya. Hooboy, Freya. I mean, it'd (mostly) be fine to have her embody the theme of Overprotetive Parenting Is Bad if she wasn't the only living woman in this game? And if she had any characterization outside of being Overprotective Mom, or any agency at all instead of having her "fighting spirit" entirely removed by Odin? Her repeatedly ignored pleas in the final battle were... pornographically excessive.
I was relieved we didn't walk in on her corpse or see her beaten to death by Baldur. But personally I also take issue with Kratos ignoring her decision to die in an effort to restore sanity to her son. She's thousands of years old, she can make her own choices about that. ...I mean, Kratos would probably would have to kill him after it didn't work, but eh. You would have given a fraction of agency to a character that otherwise had none? [eta: There's no perfect fix for this scenario that they wrote themselves into, other than a drastic increase in female characters. I'm just saying leaving her alive instead of another female corpse has all sorts of issues as well.]
Oh and I'm sorry, her swearing eternal revenge for Kratos killing her clearly sociopathic son because Parents Love Their Kids No Matter What was... eyerollingly absurd.
6. I have a bunch of other issues with the treatment of women in this game, or rather the absence of them. Good women are confined to being dead corpses spoken fondly about from time to time. We get some mention of Laufey's heroic past, slightly, but everything else about her and Freya perpetually revolve around the male figures in their lives, and being mothers and wives. Baldur is "the greatest gift Odin ever gave Freya." Puuuuuuulease, game, what. You are ultimately left with the angel/demonness mother split; moms aren't allowed to be flawed unless they're totally abusive and broken. They don't get a chance to have depth, make mistakes, but improve on themselves as Kratos does. Which isn't doing right by them.
I guess the key thing is that I've pretty much had enough of sad dads. Guys, I know you're reaching an emotional point of your lives; I am very grateful you are connecting with your children and feel empowered to express your feelings of fatherhood these days. But you know, women are also people, and you could apply these feelings to your female characters; moms can be these complicated, imperfect, but trying to be good characters that you have all collectively instilled in your dads.
OK... I've probably vented enough. This game was fun, and beautiful, and worth playing through, but I really felt the flaws.
Only the first God of War chiefly had to do specifically with his wife and family, the entire trilogy is about how the cycle of revenge is never-ending. Ares caused Kratos to kill his family, so Kratos killed Ares, which led to Zeus killing Kratos, which led to Kratos coming back to kill EVERYONE on his way to killing Zeus, for killing him, which caused more vengeance etc.
And I actually think Baldur got the worst of it, in terms of re-writing mythology, because by all accounts, he was a really good guy, and they wrote him into a dysfunctional mess because of the spell. It sucks that they really wanted to make him the villain, because if they had played it straight, Baldur would not have acted at all the way he did, considering how he is traditio.nally portrayed in Norse mythology.
If they wanted to highlight that Kratos was worried about Atreus falling into the cycle of vengeance, more should have been done to highlight Kratos' past participation in the cycle instead of circling around his patricide. As it is, we have a scene with Zeus' mist head showing up, followed by echoes of Kratos yelling about Zeus, followed by a mist of Kratos killing Zeus, concluded with an admission that Kratos killed deserving and undeserving people and significantly, also his father.
It's absurd to have him to have hangups on that point when there are much better candidates for him to focus on--or even just have the victims be nameless civilians, if not his past family. This Zeus focus turns the story into a weird thing about the sanctity of fathers, even monstrous god-tyrants.
Kratos's quest to kill Zeus, along with the attendant god-murder necessary to accomplish it, resulted in the destruction of Greece. Taken holistically, it was much, much worse than anything else he had ever done.
"I wiped out the entirety of my people" would be a much better line then. Centering his speech specifically on "kill[ing] my father" tells you what he / the writers thought was most significant about his actions
Also regarding the mist vision in Helheim, how was the follow up speech NOT "Atreus, you saw me with that old man? Yeah he's not a feeble old man, he was the king of the gods. And he got totally paranoid I was going to usurp him so he totally killed all the Spartans and came out of nowhere and backstabbed me and I had to pull mega time travel shenanigans AND ANYWAY he totally was part of the "deserved killing" column"
I mean, at this remove, i dont think those justifications matter to Kratos one bit. That's why he doesn't mention them.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I mean, at this remove, i dont think those justifications matter to Kratos one bit. That's why he doesn't mention them.
From his speech, he's clearly focused on the cycle of children killing their parents. He's trying to break it, but he's not that good at breaking things that aren't necks.
Written his concerns / fears to be anything they wanted. He's done a lot of not so good things in his time! This particular one, prioritized over everything else, doesn't make much sense given what else he's done in the past few games
It also doesn't make much sense in terms of this game. Why is this his particular worry when it comes to raising Atreus? We don't see any indication that it's out of fear for being the next victim of such a cycle. Nor does Atreus seem particularly prone to committing this particular act. Why write a person like Kratos so hung up on specifically having killed his father, rather than any of the dozen or so atrocities he's committed, including murdering his previous child/family and ending the Greek world?
Written his concerns / fears to be anything they wanted. He's done a lot of not so good things in his time! This particular one, prioritized over everything else, doesn't make much sense given what else he's done in the past few games
It also doesn't make much sense in terms of this game. Why is this his particular worry when it comes to raising Atreus? We don't see any indication that it's out of fear for being the next victim of such a cycle. Nor does Atreus seem particularly prone to committing this particular act. Why write a person like Kratos so hung up on specifically having killed his father, rather than any of the dozen or so atrocities he's committed, including murdering his previous child/family and ending the Greek world?
The reason why Kratos admits to Atreus about killing Zeus at the end of the game is because we just witnessed attempted matricide. It was meant to convey ‘I’m broken, they’re broken, but together, you and I can be better. He could’ve tried to debate with Freya, a grieving mother, explaining that Baldur was unhinged and her death would have been meaningless, but he’s a hypocrite in this regard, so the words would have bounced off. Instead, he was honest with Atreus, something he’d had real trouble with up to this point, because Atreus is innocent, and instilling those values could potentially lead to Atreus not repeating their mistakes..
Kratos sewing Zeus in Hel as opposed to...anyone else, is a bit more up in the air. We also see him with Athena, meaning he also regrets her own death, but playing through GoW2 and 3 very recently, Kratos is completely obsessed with killing Zeus, but over the course of the games, the narrative totally loses the plot as to why. By the end of 3, I actually had to go back and think about why Kratos was so driven, and what Zeus has actually done to justify killing everyone else along the way, and brush it off as collateral damage.
It’d actually be a really interesting story technique if it were intentional, which it probably isn’t, and more simply it’s because the story is so shallow in those games they just never bothered. But him killing Zeus is the act most emblematic of where you end up after following a path of blind vengeance. It’s what he’d be killing for up to that point, and then he did, and... nothing happened. No resolution, no closure, just another dead body, and Kratos, who now had no choice to stand there and realize what he’s done.
It’s not necessarily the moment he regrets the most, it’s that, from a storytelling perspective, it’s the moment that most succinctly encapsulates what he regrets about his previous life. If they’d shown just him killing his family, that would have diminished everything he did after that.
But you see, this emblamatic moment of killing Zeus isn't remotely described in the way you make it out to be. Again, the line is "I killed my father" instead of literally anything else, including "I blindly chased after vengance / ignored that the collateral damage was going to be my entire people"
We disagree of the efficacy of the storytelling though, and that's always going to be at least in part due to personal tastes
But you see, this emblamatic moment of killing Zeus isn't remotely described in the way you make it out to be. Again, the line is "I killed my father" instead of literally anything else, including "I blindly chased after vengance / ignored that the collateral damage was going to be my entire people"
We disagree of the efficacy of the storytelling though, and that's always going to be at least in part due to personal tastes
This kind of the perennial problem with long-running series
how do you try to write a serious, more meaningful game and reconcile it with the dumb, blunt storylines earlier in the franchise without a major retcon?
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Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
But you see, this emblamatic moment of killing Zeus isn't remotely described in the way you make it out to be. Again, the line is "I killed my father" instead of literally anything else, including "I blindly chased after vengance / ignored that the collateral damage was going to be my entire people"
We disagree of the efficacy of the storytelling though, and that's always going to be at least in part due to personal tastes
The vision of Zeus' death at Kratos' hands is emblematic in my mind, but for something very personal to Kratos.
Kratos came from a family that existed in an endless cycle of murder and betrayal. He knew the weight of his and his family's past and legacy and decided that Atreus should never be forced to carry it. Kratos wasn't worried that he might do to Atreus what he did to his wife and daughter so long ago, as he'd tempered that blinding rage since those times. And he wasn't worried about slaughtering the humans of Midgard in another blind quest for vengeance, because a) he has better control of his faculties now and b) Midgard was pretty much a post-apocalypse for humans already when he left the woods.
Instead, the thought that weighed on him was that he would be just another in his family's line of terrible fathers and fail Atreus like Zeus failed him and Cronos failed Zeus and Uranus failed Cronos. And if he failed Atreus and kept the cycle going, then Atreus would come for him like Baldur came for Freya and every son in his family's history came for their father. He wanted his family's cycle to be broken.
So it's part self-preservation, part desire for his son's future to be brighter than Kratos' past.
The big takeaway here, with regards to how we received the game
Is that Kratos still has hang-ups about his past life and his murders but they have nothing to do with Lysandra and Calliope, and are instead part and parcel with the game's weird enshrining of fatherhood to the exclusion of the importance of femininity in a game where living femininity is exclusively a destructive force, and that's pppbbbbttt
This conversation has further convinced me that not knowing the specifics of the first set of games makes this one significantly better because it seems like they completely failed to address massive parts of his past
The big takeaway here, with regards to how we received the game
Is that Kratos still has hang-ups about his past life and his murders but they have nothing to do with Lysandra and Calliope, and are instead part and parcel with the game's weird enshrining of fatherhood to the exclusion of the importance of femininity in a game where living femininity is exclusively a destructive force, and that's pppbbbbttt
The degree to which the Greece-set sequels shifted the blame from Kratos to the gods is admittedly absurd, but I think you have to take their contention that Kratos had essentially no culpability for the death of his original family at face value if you want the story here to make any sense.
This conversation has further convinced me that not knowing the specifics of the first set of games makes this one significantly better because it seems like they completely failed to address massive parts of his past
It's an interesting set of circumstances, for sure
The big takeaway here, with regards to how we received the game
Is that Kratos still has hang-ups about his past life and his murders but they have nothing to do with Lysandra and Calliope, and are instead part and parcel with the game's weird enshrining of fatherhood to the exclusion of the importance of femininity in a game where living femininity is exclusively a destructive force, and that's pppbbbbttt
The degree to which the Greece-set sequels shifted the blame from Kratos to the gods is admittedly absurd, but I think you have to take their contention that Kratos had essentially no culpability for the death of his original family at face value if you want the story here to make any sense.
Yeah, even in the first game they're very specific about it being Ares that was actively brainwashing Kratos, and using him to destroy temples of the other Gods.
Which is fine if you considering this a cop-out, but is very consistent with the narrative. Kratos killing his family was a horrible tragedy that happened because of Ares, but Kratos killing Icarus, Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Athena, Poseidon, Hades, Helios, Cronos, Atlas, Hephestus, Hera, Pandora, and Zeus, was cold-blooded, first degree murder.
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
This conversation has further convinced me that not knowing the specifics of the first set of games makes this one significantly better because it seems like they completely failed to address massive parts of his past
At the same time, as someone who doesn't know the specifics of the first set of games, I think that was a smart move
Making vague references to his past and essentially using the cliff notes make the original games seem better/more thematically interesting than they were
This conversation has further convinced me that not knowing the specifics of the first set of games makes this one significantly better because it seems like they completely failed to address massive parts of his past
At the same time, as someone who doesn't know the specifics of the first set of games, I think that was a smart move
Making vague references to his past and essentially using the cliff notes make the original games seem better/more thematically interesting than they were
Right except it means they don't address extremely sexist parts of those games
This conversation has further convinced me that not knowing the specifics of the first set of games makes this one significantly better because it seems like they completely failed to address massive parts of his past
At the same time, as someone who doesn't know the specifics of the first set of games, I think that was a smart move
Making vague references to his past and essentially using the cliff notes make the original games seem better/more thematically interesting than they were
Right except it means they don't address extremely sexist parts of those games
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Nifleheim is going to take a very long time.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Once I got a set of gear that let me stay in for a full run, I’d usually get out with about 3000 mist echoes. There was one run where I got an insane amount of chests though, and ended up escaping with over 9000.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Holy shit fuck this Muspelheim trial where you can't get hit ever.
Guess I'm not getting all the
Valkyries
Use the Traveler's chest piece. It allows you to take 1 hit without taking damage, and it recharges about once a minute or so. It will make the challenge a million times easier.
That being said, I just wish I had more to play. Scrolled through my ps4 library and there really isn't anything that comes close. The combat in this felt so good.
I just beat this. The final fight didn't feel like it should have been the final fight.
That’s why I liked it
Having a final fight be the end cap of the experience would have felt weird, since you weren’t traveling around to fight. Making the fights unimportant to the resolution of your journey was the best way they could have distanced themselves from the attitudes at work in the original games.
Post Sickness and Round 2 - that sure is a direction they decided to take Boy in! What an odd choice of story to tell, given the age of that character and the certificate 18 rating for this game.
3DS: 2234-8122-8398 | Battle.net (EU): Ladi#2485
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I beat the don't get hit challenge on the first try because I follow one tenet... NSR... Never Stop Rolling.
The big takeaway here, with regards to how we received the game
Is that Kratos still has hang-ups about his past life and his murders but they have nothing to do with Lysandra and Calliope, and are instead part and parcel with the game's weird enshrining of fatherhood to the exclusion of the importance of femininity in a game where living femininity is exclusively a destructive force, and that's pppbbbbttt
The degree to which the Greece-set sequels shifted the blame from Kratos to the gods is admittedly absurd, but I think you have to take their contention that Kratos had essentially no culpability for the death of his original family at face value if you want the story here to make any sense.
Yeah, even in the first game they're very specific about it being Ares that was actively brainwashing Kratos, and using him to destroy temples of the other Gods.
Which is fine if you considering this a cop-out, but is very consistent with the narrative. Kratos killing his family was a horrible tragedy that happened because of Ares, but Kratos killing Icarus, Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Athena, Poseidon, Hades, Helios, Cronos, Atlas, Hephestus, Hera, Pandora, and Zeus, was cold-blooded, first degree murder.
I mean, I don't think this is quite fair.
Zeus killed Kratos in Gow2, so it's like... post hoc self defense. Zeus also leveled Sparta, so he committed genocide against Kratos' people. In general they tried to switch from pure personal revenge to dethroning a tyrannous, monstrous god-king. I don't think they stuck the landing on that one, though.
I'm more concerned about the fact that destroying the gods essentially destroyed the whole world in 3, something they seem to have quietly retconned or abstracted. And in that game they tried to play it up as freeing humanity and giving them hope or something like that. It was weak.
I beat the don't get hit challenge on the first try because I follow one tenet... NSR... Never Stop Rolling.
Shield goes up and never comes down as I spam BOY arrows.
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Yup, Shields, Rolling, and BOY
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
I finally finished this
I understand the complaints that people have regarding issues of pacing and characterization, but I didn't feel them as strongly
There was only one final complication that felt like padding to me, and it didn't last that long, and while I don't particularly care for where they took one character, their motivations at least made sense and felt consistent in the moment
And then, as someone with only a passing familiarity with Norse myth, the ending really made me excited for the sequel
This was a hell of a game. It pushed a lot of my personal buttons, and I really hope they can make the inevitable sequels as strong and surprisingly human as this
So if the World Serpent isn’t Nidhogg, then what’s Nidhogg
It's not as concrete as some other myths but it's generally understood to be a serpent (either a snake or a dragon or a big-ass worm or something) that gnaws on the roots of the world tree. It's also understood that people who committed the worst crimes would be thrown to Nidhogg after death and it would basically chew on them for all time.
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I'm replaying the game on easy mode just so i can beat that frigging Valk.
I would have said that when I first started because I was expecting a God of War game and I got something entirely different.
After a bit though, the combat starts to click and you start forgetting about the previous bias and you realize the combat in this game is amazing.
Got real good at axe-throwing her out of the sky though.
Also regarding the mist vision in Helheim, how was the follow up speech NOT "Atreus, you saw me with that old man? Yeah he's not a feeble old man, he was the king of the gods. And he got totally paranoid I was going to usurp him so he totally killed all the Spartans and came out of nowhere and backstabbed me and I had to pull mega time travel shenanigans AND ANYWAY he totally was part of the "deserved killing" column"
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That was a hell of a fight
It also doesn't make much sense in terms of this game. Why is this his particular worry when it comes to raising Atreus? We don't see any indication that it's out of fear for being the next victim of such a cycle. Nor does Atreus seem particularly prone to committing this particular act. Why write a person like Kratos so hung up on specifically having killed his father, rather than any of the dozen or so atrocities he's committed, including murdering his previous child/family and ending the Greek world?
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Kratos sewing Zeus in Hel as opposed to...anyone else, is a bit more up in the air. We also see him with Athena, meaning he also regrets her own death, but playing through GoW2 and 3 very recently, Kratos is completely obsessed with killing Zeus, but over the course of the games, the narrative totally loses the plot as to why. By the end of 3, I actually had to go back and think about why Kratos was so driven, and what Zeus has actually done to justify killing everyone else along the way, and brush it off as collateral damage.
It’d actually be a really interesting story technique if it were intentional, which it probably isn’t, and more simply it’s because the story is so shallow in those games they just never bothered. But him killing Zeus is the act most emblematic of where you end up after following a path of blind vengeance. It’s what he’d be killing for up to that point, and then he did, and... nothing happened. No resolution, no closure, just another dead body, and Kratos, who now had no choice to stand there and realize what he’s done.
It’s not necessarily the moment he regrets the most, it’s that, from a storytelling perspective, it’s the moment that most succinctly encapsulates what he regrets about his previous life. If they’d shown just him killing his family, that would have diminished everything he did after that.
We disagree of the efficacy of the storytelling though, and that's always going to be at least in part due to personal tastes
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This kind of the perennial problem with long-running series
Kratos came from a family that existed in an endless cycle of murder and betrayal. He knew the weight of his and his family's past and legacy and decided that Atreus should never be forced to carry it. Kratos wasn't worried that he might do to Atreus what he did to his wife and daughter so long ago, as he'd tempered that blinding rage since those times. And he wasn't worried about slaughtering the humans of Midgard in another blind quest for vengeance, because a) he has better control of his faculties now and b) Midgard was pretty much a post-apocalypse for humans already when he left the woods.
Instead, the thought that weighed on him was that he would be just another in his family's line of terrible fathers and fail Atreus like Zeus failed him and Cronos failed Zeus and Uranus failed Cronos. And if he failed Atreus and kept the cycle going, then Atreus would come for him like Baldur came for Freya and every son in his family's history came for their father. He wanted his family's cycle to be broken.
So it's part self-preservation, part desire for his son's future to be brighter than Kratos' past.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
It's an interesting set of circumstances, for sure
Which is fine if you considering this a cop-out, but is very consistent with the narrative. Kratos killing his family was a horrible tragedy that happened because of Ares, but Kratos killing Icarus, Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Athena, Poseidon, Hades, Helios, Cronos, Atlas, Hephestus, Hera, Pandora, and Zeus, was cold-blooded, first degree murder.
At the same time, as someone who doesn't know the specifics of the first set of games, I think that was a smart move
Making vague references to his past and essentially using the cliff notes make the original games seem better/more thematically interesting than they were
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Right except it means they don't address extremely sexist parts of those games
Oh hell no, why would they ever
That'd mean owning up to some shit
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Not going to take nearly as long as I thought.
Guess I'm not getting all the
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Use the Traveler's chest piece. It allows you to take 1 hit without taking damage, and it recharges about once a minute or so. It will make the challenge a million times easier.
That’s why I liked it
I mean, I don't think this is quite fair.
I'm more concerned about the fact that destroying the gods essentially destroyed the whole world in 3, something they seem to have quietly retconned or abstracted. And in that game they tried to play it up as freeing humanity and giving them hope or something like that. It was weak.
Shield goes up and never comes down as I spam BOY arrows.
I understand the complaints that people have regarding issues of pacing and characterization, but I didn't feel them as strongly
There was only one final complication that felt like padding to me, and it didn't last that long, and while I don't particularly care for where they took one character, their motivations at least made sense and felt consistent in the moment
And then, as someone with only a passing familiarity with Norse myth, the ending really made me excited for the sequel
This was a hell of a game. It pushed a lot of my personal buttons, and I really hope they can make the inevitable sequels as strong and surprisingly human as this
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Also I absolutely love how utterly sick of Thor's shit Jörmungandr is.
Steam ID - VeldrinD | SS Post | Wishlist
It's not as concrete as some other myths but it's generally understood to be a serpent (either a snake or a dragon or a big-ass worm or something) that gnaws on the roots of the world tree. It's also understood that people who committed the worst crimes would be thrown to Nidhogg after death and it would basically chew on them for all time.