First Impressions With God of War Ragnarok

(Editor's note: We're gonna be discussing some spoilers from the previous game and the first hour or two of Ragnarok, so if you don't want to get spoiled, peace out now.  Now back to the regularly scheduled chicanery.)

I have something of a weird relationship with the God of War games. They came out when I was in high school aka “the proper age you are supposed to be into a lot of really violent action games”, but they also had a decent story for the time. And by that I mean the first game was a pretty decent Greek Tragedy and the second game for the first two-thirds was a decent revenge narrative that ultimately couldn't keep justifying your revenge considering how terrible Kratos ended up being. The less said about 3’s full-on descent into nihilism-fueled deicide turned “never give up hope” narrative in the last 10 minutes, the better. This is funny to me considering how many JRPGs I like where the final boss objective is literally “Kill God/Kill a godlike being”.

This brings me to the 2018 game, God of War (I know, this is confusing me as well). For all intents and purposes, I should not have liked this. As someone who was so thoroughly sick of Kratos as a character before God of War 2 ended, I initially read them ageing him up, moving him the Midgard of Norse Mythology, and giving him another dead wife and a still living son, as possibly the most cynical way imaginable to elicit sympathy for a character that doesn’t deserve it, and it should have made me bounce off of it…but it didn’t. God of War 2018 had the self-awareness to not only detail how what Kratos went through shaped him post-Deicide spree but also shows how he tries his best to ensure that his son Atreus doesn’t end up turning out as he did, and as the main emotional story of the game, as well as honouring the final wishes of Atreus’s mother, it worked out fantastically. This is best exemplified at the mid-point of the story where Atreus falls ill and Kratos has no choice but to figuratively and literally dig up his past and use the Blades of Chaos to get through Helheim and get the item Freya needs to cure Atreus. While the story and writing up until that point were beginning to win me over, this was the one-two punch that sold me on Kratos really was doing his best to be a better person. Could he still have some work to do? Yup, but it was a good start.

And now, after giving some surprisingly in-depth context by my standards, we reach God of War Ragnarok, which if the first few hours are anything to go by, is set to take the foundation that the first game built and run with it. Taking place three years after the events at the end of the previous game, God of War Ragnarok finds Kratos, the still-just-a-head Mimir and a now-adolescent Atreus doing their best to both survive Fimbulwinter and maintain a low profile. This immediately goes off the rails following a group of raiders breaking through their protection stave, a bear attacking Kratos Revenant style, the group is then met by Thor and Odin, and Kratos ends up getting into a fight with the former, followed by beginning a search for the Norse God of War Tyr.

Have I mentioned that all of this takes place in the first hour of the story? Because it does. Since the pieces and players are already in place, for the most part, Ragnarok wastes no time introducing new characters and building in current ones. Atreus being aged up adds a new dynamic to the father-son relationship by both Kratos doing his best to guide his son but also allowing him to become more independent and Atreus readily being more outspoken, opinionated, and direct in his interactions with his father. And while I can tell that even in the opening hours I’ve played that this new dynamic is going to be strong enough to help carry the narrative. But there’s also the Aesir you run into. As mentioned earlier, you encounter Thor and Odin almost immediately and they are pretty interesting in terms of interpreting these characters. Thor’s boisterousness and bloodlust are perfectly understated by an air of dour calm when out of combat, and Odin provides a perfect foil to Zeus in the previous trilogy, replacing grandiose scenery chewing with gaslighting and manipulation that’s as insidious as it is subtle. A different kind of holier-than-thou douche canoe, but a holier-than-thou douche canoe all the same. Freya also returns, having spent the last three years hunting Kratos in revenge for killing her son Baldur. And while I haven’t seen much of her in the intervening hours since, I hope she shows up again, the game seems to want to do something interesting with that.

Now that I’ve talked at length about how the previous game and Ragnarok’s current narrative ambitions are some herculean heavy lifting (pun not intended) that I respect the hell out of; let’s talk about the mechanics for a bit and how some of that’s changed. The game is still over the shoulder (most likely to maintain that “single unbroken shot” motif that Metal Gear Solid 5 and God of War 2018 also did) and you still fight using a combination of the Leviathan Axe (which is ironically the perfect foundation for a Thor game), the Aegis Shield, and the Blades of Chaos. The Axe still covers the most ranges and is great at single-target damage, the shield is still great for defence and racking up stun damage, and the Blades are still great at dealing with mobs of enemies and lighting them on fire. But there are some structural changes to combat this time around that make it feel far more fleshed out.

The main difference is the Shield and how it’s changed on top of still being a defensive powerhouse. Due to outside circumstances (and by that I mean it gets severely damaged in the fight with Thor and a later boss outright destroying it), Kratos needs to get a new Shield. You have the option between either a Tower Shield that can block practically anything not designated as unblockable or a smaller buckler-style shield that allows for a greater parry timing window, meaning more parries more often. And the combat is full of these small little changes that make it more fleshed out. Enemies are more reactive and use swarming tactics to catch you off guard while the heavies try to twat you over the head with clubs, you can charge the Leviathan Axe and Blades of Chaos to empower them and inflict status effects on enemies, the skill trees are more finely tuned for Kratos an Atreus to allow for more customization. Small stuff that I assume will get bigger as time goes on.

The first few hours of God of War Ragnarok feel like a taste of what the full game has to offer, but it was a hell of a good sample. It both fleshes out the 2018 entry in some meaningful ways and also expands into some exciting new directions narratively. I’m gonna stick with this one.