Let’s see, I was at…post-Hel, post-Atreus’ godhood reveal, and I had felt the relationship softening in a way that felt unearned to me, and I started to get upset at the story because I felt like I’d gone past the low point in the relationship already and I really didn’t think it was earned out.
Maybe I’m overly colored by personal experience, but so many lines read as intentionally deeply hurtful that I couldn’t believe they felt they’d earned the opportunity to paper over those.
Maybe. Which parts did you feel like they were papering over?
I read the story as a sort of coming-of-age thing for both father and son. Now that mom’s gone they have to really learn to live with each other and by going on their little journey they have the opportunity to actually learn enough about each other as people that their impressions of each other change. Kratos learns his son is more capable than he gives him credit for and Atreus learns his dad is more than just a grumpy old hard ass. And on another level Atreus learns how to be more than human with the discovery and subsequent handling of his true nature of godhood while Kratos relearns how to be more human again after spending so much time as a god apart from humans.
To be fair though it’s been long enough since playing it that I’m only remembering the game’s story in broad strokes and maybe you’re referring to something more specific. But I didn’t leave the game with the impression that their relationship had been completely healed or anything and didn’t really find it super jarring as it developed. This wasn’t like the first time they’d met each other. They’d been living together as a family up to this point, just now through their experience they finally had a chance to cross the gap between them and really meet each other for the first time.
No, I think you’re reading the story they tell correctly. I was interpreting the way they dug the knife in with Kratos as specifically damaging in a manner meant to create a meaningful break in their relationship. Several scenes were brutal to an extent that really damaged Kratos’ stature as a father. I assumed there would be a further cost and that the game would likely end with Kratos estranged from his son; it felt like they were specifically crossing more lines than they would be able to fix.
So I read the tenor of the relationship wrong, or, I have different standards than they do on acceptable fatherly behavior.
Nah I think it’s fair to say Kratos is a pretty terrible father.
I too felt most of the conflict resolutions were unearned, coming in too quick, too easy, and too quiet. It was like the gameplay pacing trumped the narrative during an editing process and none of the plot beats are developed enough to do the concept justice. I think I brought this up in the thread before but after a rather major escalation in Kratos’ and Atreus’ relationship in the last third of Alheim, where Kratos literally abandons his son, that plot beat is resolved within 10 minutes with a simple two sentence back of forth that touched on only one of many glaring problems with the way Kratos acted in that situation. Atreus gets mad at his father for never being sad about his mother’s death and Kratos replies that he mourns in his own way. Then suddenly everything is back to normal.
I remember feeling a similar way after Hel, even though I can’t exactly remember how that ended, and I’m sure I felt the same way for a lot of the other micro-conflicts. And I felt Atreus’ arrogance after his newfound godhood came out of nowhere, as he didn’t exhibit any sort of character traits that I felt it could have grown out of. Instead it felt like a switch flipped just so they could do a particular story beat. (Final boss spoiler) Freya’s turn (end final boss spoiler) too. The plot elements are well worn in other media so you need what the story wanted to do, but I never felt it communicated any kind of plot or character development as well as it wanted to.
The characters really needed to communicate better. Maybe that’s why the boat stories ended up being the best storytelling in the game, because it’s a protracted gameplay and plot device that believably provides a softening of their relationship. It’s a natural situation, being stuck in the car with your dad having to ride the boat with your dad, but you can hear a gradual humanization of Kratos in Atreus’ voice after all the hours of his dad so completely bumbling his parables.
And all other game dialogue is so forced into functional roles, it’s hard to find space for pure character-building like the boat. Naughty Dog does this but it’s still so nakedly functional in its character arc goals that I reject it as artificial.
I am 100% with you on everything except re:Atreus’ arrogance.
He’s a 10 year old kid who finds out he’s literally a God and his only living parent is a ragemonster that tears his foes apart with his bare hands; his attitude felt perfectly natural to me. He acted like my nephew would under the circumstances! Even good kids are fucking jerks! They don’t know any better, even when they do.
I played the Monopoly card game with the nephews on Thanksgiving and the eight year old had trouble keeping up with the rules and the whole thing was me trying to keep the eleven year old from not being a prick about it. Give a little boy some rope and he’ll probably hang you with it before he has time to realize he doesn’t actually want to.
Yeah, I saw Atreus’ “turn” largely as a reflection of his father and how he treated him. They establish Atreus was sick in the past, and his father constantly makes him feel inferior. Knowing he’s a god finally gets him out from under his father’s thumb. Atreus finally has some freedom and making mistakes won’t be fatal as his father led him to believe.
He’s not weak and broken; he’s strong now.
Think it’s also telling that Kratos doesn’t immediately try to correct him, like he’s so quick to do in every other scene before that. It escalates for quite a while before Kratos tells his son he’s in the wrong.
I think the part of it that felt off to me was that I didn’t think Atreus had a much of a concept of what gods were in the first place. The game does not portray any kind of civilization in their vicinity and as far as I could tell Atreus’ entire life had been growing up with his mother in the woods and fleeting moments with his father. The only sentient beings I can tell he’s interacted with can be counted on two hands and the only thing I knew about Atreus’ attitudes towards other people was his persistence on doing the side-quests. Kratos thinks they’re a bother but Atreus insists helping people is the right thing to do. Not for reward or a display of superiority, but because he just wants to be a nice person (probably something he learned from his mom).
So when he vents his anger towards the two dwarves it felt out of character to me. Atreus does comment a couple of times that he feels the two should make an effort themselves to work things out but he once again seemed to genuinely want to go out of his way to help them. But after the god turn, suddenly Atreus wants nothing to do with the dwarves because they’re just regular people. It never felt to me like he had a strong concept of a hierarchy between gods and everyone else in the first place.
A consistent refrain from Kratos throughout the game is that there are no good gods and I could buy that as part of feeding into Atreus’ behavior once he finds out about his nature, especially with feeling an ability to fight back against his father. But what did Atreus think of gods in the first place? What does it mean to have “godly” power? I could just easily see him being terrified of himself or just being really confused as to what’s actually different about him.
After 30 hours of “hey, we should do such-and-such side quest to help so-and-so”, it felt weird for him to suddenly take off a mask and switch to “nah, I don’t care about anyone anymore, they are all peons.” This was another plot point that I had felt had come in too quick and too easy. I know what the game wanted to do but I didn’t think it had enough of a build up.
To Gate88’s point, I did like how Kratos does not immediately react to it outside of some grunts to himself. His kid is going through changes and Kratos has no idea what to do. It’s another part of being a father that he never learned because he left it all to his wife Faye.
We know he’s heard stories of the Gods from his mother, though not precisely how they were inflected (because the game kills its most interesting character before it even starts for Man Motivation 8) ). I can’t remember the specifics, just that he brings them up and dear old dad goes HURR BOO GODS BAD FFFFFFFF
I’m afraid we’ll just never agree on a lot of this because I go “wow what excellent characterization of a stupid, emotionally immature kid whose model for masculinity is brutal violence + grunting being told he’s powerful, etc. for the first time” at every turn.
I mean, every turn of him becoming a jerk.
The whiplash relationship improvement is a whole other thing.
The most fantastical thing in the show!
A friend just texted me ‘I’m making a depth map of the lake is by seeing how long it takes the axe to return after it’s thrown’
ok it’s $20 should I bite
It’s God of War reborn as the thing it always was, an accessible Western interpretation of popular Japanese action games. And this time, with Sony’s current house style, Last of Us drizzle
Man I always wondered why this seemed so incredibly unappealing to me and you’ve summarized it all right there
it’s really good though, easily worth $20
