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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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I don't want to add (much) negativity here, but I'm someone who was around when the original God of War games came out and thought they were 7/10 at best, and mostly due to the good graphics, animation, and (though I hate to admit it) story. I was around 20-24 around that time and a massive gamer, so I was right around the target demographic, and I found the combat to be really dull even compared to the much older game Devil May Cry, and especially compared to its contemporaries Devil May Cry 3 and Ninja Gaiden. And God of War was one of the major popularizers of Quick Time Events in games, and I remember finding them tiresome already by that time, in how they essentially inserted short cutscenes with win buttons into combat sequences instead of actually making a combat system that's fun and flexible enough to cause these spectacular moments to come about in the course of natural combat. On top of that, the 1st game had a grand total of 3 bosses (Hydra (and don't get me started on how the Hydra popularized the awful "huge boss standing in front of a platform you're standing on" genre of bosses), Minotaur, and Ares IIRC), with 2 out of those 3 being primarily gimmick bosses that relied very little on combat for victory, when its contemporaries made it basically a standard that there'd be at least a dozen bosses with most of them being actual ways of testing the player's understanding of the combat system.
I haven't played the latest God of Wars, but I have watched a playthrough of the 2018 one, and I was surprised by how much better it looked. Moving away from the crazy action genre of the originals to a slower, more Souls-style combat genre really seemed to help; the series never did the former style well, and these recent iterations seem to be doing the latter style much better. The combat looks less visceral and more slow-paced, but it also looks like there's actually a fun sort of flow to it, with bosses that actually engage the player with it.
94/100 Universal Acclaim
Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly. And I'm not entirely sure it belongs in the same category as Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. But, what struck me most about God of War was how playable it was. Especially coming from PC games, where being able to save whenever you want is the expectation, I found a lot of acclaimed action games on console borderline unplayable. You'd regularly lose 10-30 minutes of gameplay at a chunk if you died in a difficult section. In rare cases as much as an hour, with some unskippable cutscenes thrown in to add insult to injury. God of War started you either at the entrance to the room, or a room before, tops. And there were often save points in all the places you'd really want one. There was just so much focus and polish on it being fun, with very few exceptions. The rough edges that were infrequent exceptions were standard in other games.
I never said that God of War didn't receive near universal acclaim. I said I judged it as 7/10 at the time. I recall being absolutely befuddled at the good reviews it got and finding that the actual reviewers just didn't seem to care about the fun of an interesting combat system that its contemporary competitors had, but rather about the presentation and the visceral feeling of controlling Kratos as he rampaged over Greek mythological creatures. Which sorta makes sense, because game reviewers often play lots of different types of games but don't delve into any single one all that deeply and so tend to make mostly surface-level judgments.
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