[After another bit of a gap from guest posts, I’m very happy to introduce one again! I’m once more welcoming David C James, whose previous posts here include State of Emergency and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted.]
Movie sequels tend to disappoint. All the writers’ best ideas were used up into the first movie, there’s a struggle to top the last film’s conflict, and the novelty has evaporated. Games don’t seem to suffer that problem, with sequels allowing developers to refine gameplay systems, squeeze more performance out of hardware, and zero in on what players enjoy the most.
Think Assassin’s Creed 2, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Silent Hill 2 and, yup, God of War II.
2005’s God of War was no slouch when it came to violent thrills, but it was with this sequel that the franchise hit the bullseye. The scale is bigger, the bosses are nastier, the locations are prettier and the exploration/combat/puzzle rhythm is so polished you could eat your (bloody, screaming) dinner off it.
Kratos’ second adventure is also something of a victory lap for the PlayStation 2. The game was released in April 2007, seven long years into the console’s life (and six months after the PlayStation 3’s US release). By this time first party developers like Santa Monica Studio knew the hardware inside and out wew able to push it to its absolute limits.
It’s notable that director Cory Barlog considered making this an early PlayStation 3 exclusive, though decided against it on the basis that a 100 million strong player base is nothing to sniff at and familiarity with the hardware would free them up to focus on gameplay. This proved a smart move, though the doddering PlayStation 2 works up a sweat as it renders the scenery-smashing action at a reasonable frame-rate.
These ambitious demands clearly caused consternation during development. Barlog was asked just prior to the game’s release about why they’d stuck with PlayStation 2 and how it impacted development:
“Foolishness was most of it. Occasionally, the art director would come to me and say, ‘Dude. We can’t do this. This is way too big.’ Somehow I would convince him – drug him, give him a beer – that this would be possible. He’d walk away saying, ‘Did I just agree to do that again? I told him I wasn’t going to do it.’ But to his credit, he found solutions to problems we thought were unsolvable, where on God of War I we thought, ‘This is it. This is the best it gets.’”
The fruits of their labour can be seen in the still-impressive opening battle against the Colossus of Rhodes, with the gigantic statue smashing apart a city as you battle through the ruins, shatter its metal plating, and eventually clamber up inside its guts and bash apart its magical brain. I mean, what more do you really want from a boss?
From a modern perspective, and with 2018’s God of War having given this franchise a heaping dollop of emotional maturity, looking back at the original Kratos kinda feels like finding an old Polaroid of yourself as a teenage goth in a Marilyn Manson hoodie. But the God of War II Kratos finely threads the needle between the thinly sketched angry bald dude of the original game and the genuine monster we see in God of War III (using a woman as a doorstop is not cool).
There’s even some fun subtlety in the way Kratos is presented here. For example, in the Colossus of Rhodes boss fight it’s natural to assume you’re the hero taking out the big bad guy. But, if you happen to know Greek, the soundtrack lyrics tell a very different tale: “Colossus / Save Us / Rescue Rhodes / Kill Kratos”.
But this is a game of broad strokes and while Kratos’ single-minded one-man-army of violence is extremely unfashionable in 2022 (even the Doom Slayer now has a guitar-building hobby), it fits this linear adventure to a tee. Kratos rockets through Greek mythology like a bullet from a gun, with the game never losing that sense of forward momentum as you dismember ever larger enemies, manipulate colossal building-size machinery, and wreak your terrible revenge on the gods who’ve wronged you.
The only real stumble are the excruciatingly lame sex scenes, which were embarrassing at launch and Duke Nukem levels of prehistoric now. There’s a certain sick elegance to God of War II’s violence, though hit one of the ‘erotic’ moments and most modern player will shiver as they sense the stagnant, hot breath of a mid-2000s gamer on the back of their neck.
But, when all’s said and done, God of War II is about as fine a farewell to the PlayStation 2 as you can imagine, utilizing together every optimisation, hack, and design sleight-of-hand trick Sony’s best minds could cook up. The console would sputter on for years on a thin diet of annual football updates from FIFA and Pro Evolution, but this was its last hurrah.
The PlayStation 2 has arguably the greatest library of any gaming console to date, so it’s fitting that the final big entry is the incredible bombastic God of War II. Talk about going out on a high…
Top of the charts for week ending 28 April 2007:
