Extra Credits: No Redeeming Value

[Cptn_Squishy]

I criticized the characterization of Kratos in GoW3 in this forum before Yahtzee and Extra Credits did and I got CRUSHED for it. The thread I created regarding the fact that Kratos is nothing more than a jerk and a bully ended up getting removed by the site.

Course, as soon as Yahtzee said pretty much the same thing, everybody seemed to be in complete agreement. I'm just glad I borrowed GoW2 and watched GoW3 on YouTube rather than actually buying them. GoW1 is still great though.

 

[Ixal]

And now Kratos appears on Mortal Kombat.
What a sellout.

In GoW 1 the violence was part of Kratos characterization. In GoW 2 and 3 it was the only selling point and completely mindless.
But as long as the market is dominated by twitch kiddies who care only for violence, graphics and gore this will happen again and again.

I love Extra Credit, but I just think that the greatest roadblock for games becoming art are not the games itself but the consumers who mostly demand cheap and mindless slaughter with spectacular graphics and no form of thinking required.

 

[Sindre1]

Finally I get to watch this video.
When it came out I had not played any of them, now I have played them all.
Fits perfectly together if you ask me.
But I agree that the first-person thing was a bit pointless.

 

[The Harkinator]

Another feature of the character of Kratos is his pride. He refuses to let any foe best him in combat. When Kratos kills his family he sets in motion events that lead to him committing suicide at the end of the game. What he would let no enemy do to him he does himself. Kratos may have always planned to end his life after exacting his revenge. The pride makes Kratos a bezerker type warrior, he will not rest nor accept death and defeat until all who stand in the way of revenge and redemption that he seeks have died. Kratos will not allow himself to be killed by others until he has settled his issues.

A greek tragedy is a brilliant thing in no small part to the complexity of the character. His rise and fall personify him and give him goals and motivations. In GOW1 this is Kratos. In GOW2 Kratos is overconfident and immature now he has ascended to godhood. He is punished and yet again swears revenge, only this time the warnings were clear that if he didn't stop he would be punished. Kratos must have known that his punishment would be exile from Olympus or otherwise death as a rogue god would cause too much trouble.

In GOW3 Kratos seems so consumed by revenge on Zeus that he kills everything he can reach. Kratos tears anything (or anyone) in his way into pieces and is not seeking redemption, rather he seems to have no care for the consequences of his actions (the consequences of pledging his life or killing his family define him in the GOW series) and goes far past 'the point of no return' into the realm of 'you don't actually care what you do anymore do you?'.

So all in all Kratos is a character who degenerates into a speaking blender for gods to die in

 

[spoospoo]

I love the images at 3:58-4:02

 

[spoospoo]

I love the images at 3:58-4:02

 

[mikespoff]

Great episode, and you're right - we must never stop challenging the medium to be all that it can be, never stop nettling the developers and publishers who are satisfied with mediocrity.

Also, I like this perspective, although I'm positive it wasn't the intention:

It could be that the trilogy itself is a kind of meta-greek tragedy. We have a great first game, it goes on to become something that loses it's original flare in the second game because it was overdoing the stuff that made it good in the first place, and in the third game the series is reduced to blind pointless self destruction.

Or something like that.

 

[DarkKnightBob]

Lol you guys don't think you might be over-anlysing a bit?

Do you want a game or a bloody novel?

This whole "everyone trying to debate and nitpic a plotline" is bloody crazy you'll never figure it all out to everyone's standard.

 

[Aphantas]

This summed up my view of at least the 3rd god of war game entirely. GoW 3 is one of the few game i stopped playing halfway through because the main character, the avatar of the player had no qualities to redeem himself and forced the player to commit actions which where completely immoral for no reason. The story implied that Kratos the cause of all of the conflicts, but then tried to pin all responsibility for his actions on Zeus and make Zeus the Evil figure. For a game where you are meant to play as the hero, you seemed awfully like the main villain.
It's good to hear that the story just got muddled after the first game which i will definitely now play

 

[Byzantinium]

See, the problem with this video is it assumes that 2 and 3 are also Greek tragedies. They aren't. They're what happens when the poor bastard who's been kicked around by fate and the gods stands up and bellows his defiance, his intent to bring down the whole rotten order of things.

I think the lack of covering the PSP game(s, since a new one came out), also hurts, as they go further in-depth for why Kratos breaks down so thoroughly between 1 and 2 (shorthand, when he tried to kill himself, he would've been reunited with his family in Elysium; while as the God of War he was forced to kill the monster his mother was transformed into and watched his brother die as the gods continued to meddle in his life).

And then, at the end. Zeus could not be left alive, because that would solve nothing. With the death of Zeus, Kratos is free. He no longer faces torment in the afterlife for the paranoia of his father, and he has no more reason for walking the Earth. He does what he tries to do so many years ago and takes his own life, even as Athena begs him not to (because she needs him for her own ends).

Kratos dies a free man, the whole world freed from the tyranny of the gods and granted Hope by his sacrifice. At the same time, the mighty warrior, the man who killed Fate itself, dies alone; unmourned, unloved, choking on his own blood.

 

[TheDarkestDerp]

I agreed to a fault with your take on the series... UP until the end.

I was elated with the way in which the ending was handled, and offer a differing view.

I walked away feeling we finally saw Kratos' growth reach it's pinacle in GOW 3. He wasn't so much being pointlessly brutal, as his point wasn't realized yet, not really, not by him and possibly not by the player.

Like most people, Kratos was acting out through the majority of his time with godhood, lashing out more pointedly, through the entire series. In GOW1 he killed his family by accident in the original story and he had never been able to forgive himself for this. So he focused his rage on Ares, 'blame-casting' or 'projecting' his self-loathing. Killing Ares in the end did nothing but move him to a different place, different faces. He was made a god, but still all of GOW2 was just his inner demons, his self-hate continuing to eat him alive as he lashed out, finding new places to set blame for his pain and hate. And again, as in 1, he was not seeing where his blame was truly set. GOW3 finally brings this to fruition as he is forced to feel as a father again and lose a child again. His bloodlust brings the destruction of the entire planet and his rage still fuels him, leaving him no place to look, but where he should have looked all along, but as with most people, even the mighty Kratos refused to set the blame for his hate where it belonged and learn to let it go. His anger, his blood spattered rage at the entire world had to be thrown everywhere, he had to destroy and demolish until there was nothing left to destroy to see that the thing he'd really hated all along was himself. He'd allowed himself to become a monster, and it cost him the lives and the love of his wife and child.

The final act, his enraged pummeling of Zeus was the deed most necessary for his character as it was brutality called for specifically by the player (The need for the FPS shift) to let it go, to beat and beat and beat on Zeus until it was simply the tiring act it had always been. It WAS player control at it's finest, an act of letting go because we realized we were doing something pointless, acting on a rage against no target, just a red blur, hate for it's own sake.

And then, in the darkness he'd created, he finally learned to let it go. A fitting final narrative.

This is a behaviour we all see in a friend or perform ourselves. Be it the unresolved issue with the parent-figure resulting in directionless aggression all of someone's adult life ruining every romance and friendship, or the guilt over relationship trauma in one's youth resulting in an unending string of bad relationships and 'clingy' emotional uncertainty.

Personally, the worst part of the entire series to me? Seeing the blood trail in the end, implying Kratos was somehow not dead, and possibly leaving the franchise open for another sequel... dear gods I hope not.

 

[OceanRunner]

I don't think Kratos cared about what became of him. He wanted to be free of the nightmares of killing his family and the gods waited for him to kill Ares to tell him that they couldn't do it, so he attempted suicide as alast resort.

 

[duchaked]

rage...rage...rage

well I can't say for God of War 2-3, but I personally loved Wolverine's story (comics to movies) because of all that animal rage in him, struggling to find his own humanity

 

[Darthbawls77]

The first GoW will always be loved for the fresh new story and awesome gameplay. If only the following twos stories was as solid. Thank you guys for this look into a legendary game icon that lost his way a bit.

 

[Aprilgold]

I understand the whole point of "Who plays god of war for its story." BUT IT HAD HUGE POTENTIAL TOO! And after the 40TH FUCKING time you see the SAME FUCKING KILLING animations, it gets a bit old, so having a story under it all, even a small, detailed one would be perfect.

 

[OrpheumZero]

I think it was a bit rushed on how Kratos was judged. Yes, he did become an ass in GOW2, but he was doing it because he was fed up with the Gods saying "We'll totally help you with your inner demons if you do this." Only to be told "Welp, you are forgiven, but you're not allowed to forget." Does that mean acting like an ass was completely justified, no, but it doesn't mean he was being so just because.

Same goes with GOW3, he didn't intend to destroy the world, just the Gods that he felt had become nothing but bloated, corrupted entities that were being selfish. And in some way he did the world a favor, as anyone who played 3 knows, Zeus and the other gods had been corrupted (even though it was kind of Kratos' fault). Would they have completely gone bad if left alone? Who knows. But I felt that Kratos came full circle in the end. He had finally realized that it was his own dependence on revenge that was holding him back.

Was his "suicide" a defeat of character? Or possibly the only act of noble sacrifice to give the world he had ravaged a fighting chance? Maybe Kratos could have been more "human" but at the same time it might have demoted his awesomeness if brought down too much to our level. He is, after all, not quite an ordinary man.