In this article I’m going to talk about God of War – All parts before 2018 (which gets it’s own article). At this point, a spoiler warning: I won’t tell you the whole story, but might get into detail here and there

First of all, I love the series. I actually only wanted to play the new part, but just for fun I started with the original game for the PS2. I was immediately excited. From my point of view, apart from the obvious technical advances, the game has aged very well.

When I thought of the “Hack & Slash” genre, I thought of dull games all about hacking up as many monsters as possible in the shortest amount of time. That’s also true if you just look at the gameplay. However, the game wouldn’t have picked me up just like that. The controls are incredibly well made (with limitations in the PSP parts), the graphic elements and the scenes, some of which are shown in huge sections, really impressed me despite the low resolution. But what surprised me the most was the story.

In the first part we get to know Kratos as a kind of mercenary, as a servant of the gods. He did unspeakable things as a former warrior of Sparta, and one he will never forget and will never forgive himself: he brutally murdered his wife and daughter in the destruction of a village.

Little by little we learn how this came about, and with each piece of information our view of him changes more and more. I don’t want to summarize the whole story here, that would be a whole book. But I found it incredible how with every betrayal you could better understand why he is the way he is. Kratos is not a hero in the true sense, he is probably even the opposite. But you could understand him and in some places I had some sympathy for him.

I found the two parts for the PSP – “Chains of Olympus” and “Ghost of Sparta” – good and strange at the same time. The former was the better of the two for me, both didn’t blow my mind story-wise, but what they did do was reveal more about Kratos: more betrayal, more hope that was shattered within him – his anger at the gods within Part two was even easier to understand. It’s a shame you had to have multiple consoles to see these elements.

An absolute slip for me was “Ascension”. This part came out last but was meant to be a prequel to everything. I’ll make it short: the game was meh, the fights were terrible and the story – I have no idea, I still don’t know exactly what the goal was. But the mediocre storytelling did it’s best so I didn’t even care.

While all parts on their respective consoles (or the latter via PSNow) ran very well technically and delivered good results in terms of graphics, controls and the like, one thing struck me: every. single. part. had exactly one fight, at where the balancing got completely out of hand. I don’t know why, but I always had to switch to “easy” for a fight in order to even make it – everything after that was easily doable again on the first try, even on “medium”. I have no idea why that was, but I didn’t want to leave it unmentioned.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with the entire series so far. The character development of Kratos is incredibly well done, he is a much deeper character than it first seemed and the games themselves were a lot of fun – both the dull slaughtering of opponents and the interspersed puzzle elements. Looking at the end of part 3, maybe it should have been left at that – the Kratos development arc was pretty much complete at that point.

The series definitely gets a clear recommendation from me. You can find out what the next part, God of War (2018), is like next time!