Retroversy

I love seeing Sony continually struggle with their obsession to make a game about how the cycle of revenge will destroy you and the people you love and then also absolutely failing to not also say that killing a gazillion dudes is cool and also inevitable, resulting in games where “character development” amounts to “hey, at least when Kratos punches a dude to death now, at least he’ll begrudgingly shake his head and mutter that they left him with no choice! That’s good writing, right?”

Seriously, I saw a clip from a boss fight in God of War: Ragnarok in which — and I’ll keep this as vague as possible — Kratos is fighting some real smarmy dude. It’s clear Kratos is trying to properly escape his violent past now. He keeps yelling things like “surrender now and I’ll let you live”. Unfortunately, the dude keeps fighting back, so Kratos incapacitates him and walks away, but of course the guy just keeps taunting him and fighting back and this goes on for like three more minutes until Kratos eventually just snaps his neck.

And then the game has the gall to be all like “Owwwww, don’t you feel bad for ol’ Kratos? He swore he’d never kill again but now he was left with no choice“. Are you kidding me? You made it so he had no other choice! What is this supposed to teach us? That violence is bad, but also that you’re a fool if you try to abstain from violence? Wasn’t this whole reboot series supposed to be about Kratos’ fears that his son will carry on his legacy of bloodshed and that carnage is just an integral part of him? Is the message you want to send then really “yeah, actually, carnage is an integral part of you and there is nothing you can do about it“. In what world does that make any sense?

A world in which games are written not to make sense, but to win awards, of course. Games like the 2018 God of War reboot — or its closest thematic analogue, The Last of Us — are not meant to be honest reflections on the nature of violence, there are entertainment media in which violence is the entertainment. There is, mind you, nothing wrong with that, but I dislike how mainstream video games — and Sony’s platform exclusives especially — demand to be taken seriously in spite of that. Games have to be cool and awesome and violent, but at the same time, they also need to have morals and themes. God forbid anyone thinks a story that revolves around a big muscly dude tearing undead monstrosities apart with his magical flying axe is for kids!

So-called “triple-A” video games love to have their cake and eat it, and their audience lets them. The world of gaming is a world in which people can say things like “The Last of Us is the best story ever told because it has an ambiguous ending” and not even realize how utterly embarrassing they’re sounding. Kratos’ journey in the God of War reboot is lauded as “humanizing a character who was little more than a toxic power fantasy” when most of what it consists of is him coming across increasingly comical reasons as to why he definitely does totally have to kill this guy and really has no choice even though he doesn’t want to. It’s manipulative. It’s hypocritical. It’s ridiculous. Yet to people who don’t know any better, it’s a whole new world.

Now don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the efforts the reboot’s developers and writers made to go against the original games’ nihilistic macho bloodshed, especially since they didn’t have to. There is a lot of honesty in the game. Yet, in the end, it’s still a video game. Kratos can’t actually give up on violence, because that would mean there won’t be any more God of War games. And why would he, when people mistake his being sad about chopping off heads for character development? The Ghost of Sparta can never escape the cycle of violence, because the cycle of violence makes his creators cold, hard cash. The only thing that has changed is that they’ve realized that making Kratos sad about this, makes them even more cold, hard cash.

I broadly enjoyed the 2018 game, but its ending — a prime example of Sony’s insistence on bending over the universe backwards just to have violence really be the only solution, followed by an unfortunate “ah, those women are so unreasonable” moment, to boot — did leave me somewhat bitter as to the series’ future. What I’ve seen from Ragnarok seems to confirm that they’re indeed going to push through this whole angle that “the cycle is inescapable” until the bitter end. I just think that’s a bummer.