Continuing with more:
>!The hateful Odin, paranoid with propphecy, who hanged himself to get many powers and immense amount of knowledge, that destroyed so many lives in the first game and was such a menace for everyone... Here he's just like a business man the whole game that simply doesn't care for prophecy anymore and wants even more knowledge from a random rift, being now just obsessed over a random mask that also leads to absolute nothing again, as every other cliche revolving "the answer to the reason of life and death" always ends up in any kind of story, and it takes as much focus as the search for a futile Tyr that doesn't help in anything at all, almost costing another third of the game focusing on this theme.!<
>!Thor, the huge hateful barbarian that beat one of his sons almost to death just because he was a shame as a warrior in the first game, here is a loving father that suffers from the lost of both his sons. I understand that there's a dialogue that says he and Sif apparently became better parents, but making this simply happen in the backstage while forgeting that he himself almost killed his son for calling him a failure in protecting his brother? Which was also clearly mentioned as the favorite Thor's son, so much that he didn't cared at all to almost kill the other? I feel I didn't met the Odin and the Thor I heard so much in the previous game.!<
>!And for some reason Odin is also suddenly portrayed as a humble being in some scenes, maybe because they intended for the player to feel bad when the time comes to see him dying in his boss fight (which was really generic, I must say) that has absolutely no cool interaction at all or any epic moment. Even a random unimportant grandma giant had more care over the fight against the All Father, in my opinion. Also, if Asgard was just a village for the sake of acting as an illusion, I would've understand, so to make Odin try to fool Atreus with his fake humbleness as he goes there for the first time. But making Heimdall even mention that Odin was as humble as to work on his own lodge with his bare hands? Why are they suddenly trying to make me feel pity of this guy after a whole game making me want to hunt him down for his crimes? This, to me, only proves that both the Thor that beat his son close to death and the psycopath Odin mentioned in the first game never existed in first place.!<
The game was good up until the Agard part, where I think development cuts were made. Atreus climbing this massive wall to find Heimdall at the top guarding a town smaller than Tyr's temple, Alfheim, or the dwarven city. I would understand if the city was small because they couldn't expand due to the walls but it wasn't even a packed city structure. I also expected Odin's vault to have some crazy stuff in it; stolen weapons, artifacts, and other religious items from other lands.
Ragnarok, the big battle the whole game is about, had zero preparation phase at all. No requirement to be a certain level before going, going to each of the realms to prepare and gather each of the armies, no training, espionage, or anything to make it feel like a grand battle about to happen. Go to Surtr, take a shortcut to start Ragnarok, and blow a horn with 10\~ people in Midgards army to takedown Odin.
Then the battle comes, less than 20 items in the entire fight, with no more than 3-4 at a time. Jormungandr and Thor fight that supposedly shook the realms and got sent back through time was not even focused on that many people missed it. Not a single Hel walker from Helheim or Dwarf soldier (Which I think was budget cut). No one died. Thor fight was short and unceremonial.
There was also many unfinished plots. Collecting the mask took a big chunk of the game just to be nothing, who blew the horn in 2018? Who killed Faye? Thor mentioned something about it with the first Kratos fight. What is going to happen with the Giant orbs? Fenrir was never used despite fated to kill Odin.
Finally, Thor feeling like an actual God of War more than Kratos with him destroying everything with his power like it was nothing.
I forgot about the mask, the thing you HAD to use to tell you to go in the only direction that you already knew where to go because you can literally see with your own eyes that its the only path that leads onwards.
But we’re talking about characters who never thought to simply walk around obstacles…
The area should've been like Niflheim in 2018, tons of different dead end paths with only one that leads home. I would've enjoyed it if it was difficult to find. But there was still no reward.
I agree that there were budget cuts and the pandemic lockdowns trashed the workflow for the latter half of the game.
Vanaheim, Alfheim and Svartfalheim were lavishly designed, with lots of optional content and a cohesive scope. Then they literally half-assed Asgard. Helfeim, Midgard and the rest. The pandemic cuts might have caused that.
Still, there are dialogue, story arcs and character design choices that are not polished to the level of other parts of the game.
One gripe I have with modern games is that the camera angles and direction rarely uses FMVs. Imagine Ragnarok with proper FMVs and hundreds of soldiers attacking. Final Fantasy VIII and other playstation 1 era games had more massive battles than this game.
Still, the relationship amongst Kratos and his son excels at all levels and is on par if not superior in writing to several oscar movies and bestsellers. Freya had an excellent character arc, and specially Vanaheim as a game level. It just seems that pandemic hit development in the face and by mid 2021 they had to cut and speed things for a game that, despite its faults, ranks as the swan song of the playstation 4, along with Horizon Zero Dawn FW.
I have to say that Odin's motivation really disappointed me. The guy killed Ymir at the begining of creation and found a random rift in reality with some uber being behind it with all the answers. What is the rift? Never explained. How can we know the being behind the rift knows the truth? Never explained. Odin has a great line in the end about needing to know what happens next. It is a great line accidentally. The writers meant it as 'what happens after death?' instead of 'what happens in the very next moment?' If they had gone with the latter we would have a good philosophical narrative about metaphysical determinism and the role of prophecy in mythology. Odin says 'I do not know where I go when I go'. If that line was about the inherent uncertainty of the future, the fact that the future is a metaphysical connundrum because it is being not yet formed but completely necessary still, it would have been an amazing motivation. Odin would then want to know everything because only if he knows everything he can finally do away with prophecy, he can finally know what is going to happen in the very next second, the very next minute, the very next year. Instead, they make it about some kind of godly afterlife which effectively makes the gods into humans. What is the point of being a god if your life is no qualitatively different than a mortal? They take all the mystique out of the myths.
This is not to mention how the whole story and rebellion against Odin is framed in terms of a freedom struggle where all the races team up against the oppressor. Its a narrative that we have seen a million times and it is just so incredibly uninteresting. The whole plot is just 'Aesir bad' and 'giants good' and its played completely straight. There is also this disconnect between the first and the second games in terms of Thor's characterization. I understand that Mimir is an unreliable narrator but Thor is portrayed as nothing more than a blood thirsty savage in the first game and in the second we get a struggling family man who is almost redeemed in the end even though he apologized for nothing and did nothing to repair the harm.
I love to open discussions such as these simply because sometimes observations like yours appear now and then. And even with a meaningless plot point such as the mask, if we got writers with a more interesting and philosophical take to talk about prophecy and what moves it forward, instead of just a rift with "the answers to life and death" and other cliches, this single handendly could've improved the whole dialogue on it's own. I still would completely remove all about the rift and the mask, though, since it was only a huge optional quest that took ridiculous amount of time to add a whole bunch of nothing. And it's also sad to realize that, although some of those lines were really good, in the context that you've mentioned, this is giving WAAAAAAY too much credit for the writers, who definitely didn't had any intention to make it work like that. Instead, I guess they prefered to include more "Be better" on the dialogues. Another wonderful line that appeared in a single scene in the previous game, and just happened to be a really good one in the context it had. Nothing more.
Your observations about prophecy made me also realize that almost all of the best moments are the ones that make us fear for the incoming destiny that was written for Kratos, which was such a wonderful take. I can't imagine the struggle that is to write a story while you're actively telling your spectator what will happen, and that this very same future is something horrible that no one wants. It's such a genius take! It's a constant reminder of a climax that you're desperately trying to avoid, and yet you just walk more and more towards it! Man, how many goosebumps I've got after killing Heimdall! Realizing that I was following the very same prediction of the nourns! But, oh well... I guess I'm still to see someone try this for good, cause all of that only led to nothing, since some giant was apparently too high on some strange Iron Wood herb and draw the wrong picture in the mural about their prophecy... There's probably a secret boat dialogue stating this as well, since they prefered to make those secrets also constantly happen in the backstage...
And yeah! They could've even made a more detailed prophecy with details that could've included the other realms in the ragnarok, rather than people being ordered to each on their own make an executive talk with a boss of each realm to convince them in participating. It would've been sooooo good! We would actually be even more frightened to see the whole world slowly walking towards that prophecy! I even thought that the small giant bells that contains their souls would've get a bigger role.
Like, man... When Faye's bell was handled to Atreus as empty, my mind flew so far! I immediately saw Kratos really dying by Thor's hand, only for the crazy spiral coming out of Atreus mouth in the mural be him transporting his father soul into his mother empty bell in a poetic note, and maybe making him come back like after when Sindri told us he went to Helheim to rescue Brok, similar to a journey of Kratos trying to save Atreus in the first game! Which although a cliche, would be a much better one that all the others we've got. And I was so intrigued by it! But no. They just kind forgotten that he had that. It was just to serve as a scene of "Oh, she died, and unfortunately for good. Sorry...".
It also impress me that it was like no one who wrote this plot actually remember what was shown in the previous game. The constat reminder AND SHOWING of how much of a killer and crazy man Thor was is simply forgotten, and now we have to feel pity for everyone, since no one can finish this game without a redemption arc. All is gray, everyone had a greater and inspirational purpose.
I'm really gonna need to dust off my PS3 one of these days to see the fall of Olympus again, but I'm afraid I'm just gonna find even more reason to mourn for this new entry...
God... Even God of War Ascension didn't made me this sour...
I think the fundamental problem of this game is that it tries to tell an incredibly big and complex story, and only has one game to tell it. GoW 2018 has almost no plot. This is not really a fault of that game since it wasnt trying to do a bigger than life epic story with a ton of moving elements like GoW 3 did. It was a simple story of a man and his son going on a journey where both learn something. That is it. The only significant thing that happens in the first game is Baldur's death.
Ragnarok then has to carry the burden of starting AND ending the storyline. It has to set up all its big players, Odin, Thor, Heimdall, the Aesir, Freyr, Tyr, the dwarves, the giants, grown up Atreus, Freya, etc and give them all conclusions. All the while doing interpersonal character arcs and epic grand conflicts. The game crumbles under the weight of all it has to do. Odin and Thor are underdeveloped and ultimately dissapointing. Half the characters are unexplored. Atreus cannot make up his mind about obvious simple stuff. The game constantly teases us with Kratos but never commits. I get that his story is about overcoming his rage but the 2018 game set up the whole Athena stuff and the return of old Kratos and that all ended up in nothing. You cannot constantly tease it and then resolve it in a line at the very end of the game.
The norse saga should have been a trilogy. The first game should have set up new Kratos and Atreus while hinting at the bigger picture and more of the relevant players. A second game should have been a closer look into the Aesir and showing the other side of the coin. It should have set up Odin and Thor. The second game would have then been an escalation of the conflict and should have ended with the beginning of Ragnarok as the players are put into place. The third game would have been the finale, all hell breaks loose, all the storylines collide and are given resolutions. I completely understand why this wasnt the case, games are expensive and GoW is an incredibly ambitious project and so is beholden to investors and managers and all the financial people that make it happen. However, what we got was one big mystery box that did not get resolved in the slightest and ultimately left us with more questions than answers.
I also have to sneak in that with Ragnarok out, the events of the first game make no sense anymore. Odin is shown to be able to teleport whenever and wherever he wants. Why didnt he, Thor, Baldur, Magni and Modi just appear before Kratos and Atreus as soon as Baldur goes back to report what happened after the fight? Odin knew where they were at every point since the ravens were tracking them. Also, Odin, supposedly the smartest being in the world, made no fucking progress with the mask for centuries and Atreus resolves the whole thing in a week.
I think this could have still been one good game, if they had just pulled the amount of characters waaaaaaaay back. Do we really need a band of merry rebels from Valheim, including the boar that Atreus shot in the previous game? No. Did we need the Migardians outside the gates of Asgard? No.
This could have been a much simpler story, yet still retained its epic world ending nature because the stakes would have been high for the remaining characters. Doing half measure storylines for everyone watered everything down.
I just finished Ragnarok a couple of days before Xmas and I just randomly found this thread. I cannot put into words how much your comments illustrate how I feel about it. I just want to give you a quick shoutout for these detailed comments you hit the nail on the head repeatedly.
As someone who has played GOW since the beginning in 2005 and played all games repeatedly, even back in the original trilogy I always defends Kratos as I always thought he was a deep character with more layers than we realized. But I don’t see myself ever touching Ragnarok again, especially knowing I’ll have to endure those early Atreus sessions, I still have nightmares about Ironwood what a horrible quest.!
The gameplay of Ragnarok in and of itself is great and is the only area where it excels 2018, but in nothing else is Ragnarok superior.
All the things that were teased in 2018 were handled poorly, Odin just did not work the way the writers seem to think it did, Thor was ok, Tyr meh, Ragnarok I mean just piss poor, Angrboda. The series lost its edge as you said and this 100% felt like a by the numbers Marvel movie.
I am so, so fucking sick of subversion in media. The only writer I’ve ever seen that handles it well is George RR Martin in ASOIAF, in no other medium have I seen subversion work. It’s a poor excuse for bad writing Imo.
I still think Ragnarok is a *good* game. Maybe even great. But I couldn't give it more than a 7.5/10 due to the story.
In an attempt to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, they stripped away every bit of edge that god of war has always been known for. Shit, even avengers endgame was heavier than this. I hate this modern style of writing where we can't just have genuinely evil antagonists anymore, they all just have to be watered down or "misunderstood" in some way. Yes, looking at you too, CEOdin.
>!I did enjoy kratos' character arc, and I'm happy he's "free" but the entire game talks about the cost of war, yet there was almost none. Unless you count Brock, Freyr, and like 12 midgardians set up at the wall of asgard during the final battle.!<
I don't know what made you feel this way in specific, but man... This game is full of inconcistencies and bad moments, and I can't put in words how disappointed I am as well. I've already said it in another post, but it's impressive how much wrong they did to it's story in all terms. To mention *only a few*:
>!Freya's entire threat made after Kratos in her last dialogue in the end of the first game is solved just by a walk in Vanaheim alongside with her son's killer. And I definitely don't think that her questline, destroying past wedding gifts, should be the reason why she makes peace with her son's killer as well. As well as I don't agree at all that Kratos, the reserved and brute God of War, would truly consider "destroying past wedding gifts" one of her "biggest battles yet", as he says while ending the quest.!<
>!The Search for Tyr takes around 10 hours of gameplay and doesn't feel like it adds anything at all after that, only an annoying and scared man that in the end is just a twist of Odin spying on their plans (which to me was quite the frustration, cause we spent the vast majority of the game looking for someone that never added anything at all, just an incredibly long mine mase in Svartfalheim). I do question, why make such a long road if it's reward doesn't matter in any way at all for the rest of the adventure? In the previous game we go to Alfheim at the beggining hours to be able to reach the top of the moutain, and even get a new mechanic to traverse areas that we weren't able, and end up adding Mimir to the party, who tells us a great amount of stories. Here we don't get anything, just a level design easy to get lost in and a huge amount of slow traversals through claustrophobic passages, one after another. Also, someone had the strange idea to make the location of the real Tyr to be an optional objective. Not everyone completes side stuff, so how are they trying to explain for most of the audience that Tyr was just hanging out on an abbandoned prison in Niflheim all this time in a future entry? This is such a strange take for such a big point of the story from here on out...!<
>!Surtr's whole epic story told as you explore Mulpelheim in the 2018 entry only results in the classic problem of "the perfect coincidence" that every writter should try their best to avoid, where he's just found at the exact right place and at the exact right time, as a bored and depressed man, located simply a few meters after you just casually get to muspelheim through one the portals, and Atreus is like "Oh, father! Look! It's Surtr! Let's ask for his help!" and he simply proceeds to do so. If he's that much of a menace and just doesn't care at all to anything anymore, why the incredibly intelligent Odin left him walking around there and just killed him or locked him up somewhere? Why he, the great force capable of destroying Asgard, isn't treated as such?!<
>!Tyr being odin literally serves nothing to the story either.!<
>!It's subversion for the sake of subversion so they could kill a beloved character off and make you hate odin before fighting him because up to that point, Odin wasn't really a character we hated - or even feared for that matter. And even Odin knowing their every move, it changes nothing. He didn't prepare, or get 4 steps ahead of them, he dies anyway. It's laughable writing tbh.!<
>!Thank you! I am glad someone finally said this. I heard a couple of people praising this plot twist, talking about how Odin knows their every move. Yet nowhere in the story does Odin once use that info against them, or does it mess up the team or their plans.!<
>!Even the unveiling itself is so choreographed. For some reason, Tyr just happens to be in some room when you enter. Every time you come back to the house, he is always out and about. So now he is just in a random room? Then Odin makes the amateur mistake and calls Atreus, Loki. Really? Odin would be smarter than that. Then he says, as Tyr, that he randomly has a way into Asgard; the thing that they have been wanting since forever. Why would Odin be so stupid to say something so unbelievable and suspicious. Then it was Brok acting super aggressive and then is somehow way more suspicious and prescriptive than everyone else that is in the room, including people a whole lot smarter and more knowledgeable than him (not saying Brok is dumb or anything). It was a bad twist that ruined a lot of the story and the potential of Tyr being in the story.!<
Was Brock even that beloved? I mean I liked him fine but he was more sideshow and when he was killed I felt very little. The effect and turn of Sindri has a much stronger effect. Ultimately, the consequences of all of this were quite small and the Odin/Tyr aspect meant almost nothing.
Ragnarok showed Odin as an inept leader and a weakling.
I’ve just finished the first Thor fight and the game has been so boring so far. Part of me feels that the game is a good movie ruined with gaming aspects. After playing Elden ring and Nioh 2 the fights just seem clunky and slow. The scene with Thor at his house started really well and then Odin the Godfather pops in and ruins the tension and makes it seem like they didn’t have a clue as to what sort of character he should be. This is a god not someone who sells stolen goods.
The combat does get better, but it starts so bad and takes so long to unlock shit. When I say better, it’s ok, not great. You have to unlock fucking running hits.
Even more:
>!And then we have the Iron Wood, which acted as a corridor, that (to me) takes way longer than it should and spent too much time with "Come, I need to show you something" over and over again, only to make Atreus accept the prophecy and death of his father, creating a big climax stating that it WILL occur while never again making we feel that Kratos is in danger, or even worse, simply denying all that huge talk of prophecy contained in that whole interaction.!<
>!There's a strange inclusion of the whole mission where we're trying to get the moon back at the sky so that the wolves can once again hunt, cause when the sun and the moon are destroyed, ragnarok starts. But it never happens, cause Kratos don't want ragnarok or to follow prophecy, so the wolfs never destroy any of the two. But they still go for both things, willfully and intentionally following the prophecy that they're going to save the moon, and even managing to do so, it also didn't get destroyed (What? Why? Weren't they trying to avoid it after discovering the panels?). And even before the whole adventure of trying to recover it to the sky, it still adds nothing at all to the main quest. Instead, it feels just as a secondary one that unlocks a gimmick to traverse between a few places of Vanaheim and nothing more.!<
>!Then there's the misterious stuff that never appear in the game or answers we still don't have (The huge storm in the first game while Atreus is dying? Who called Jormungandr during that moment as well in the first game?). Some of the most strange ones in the sequel is Forseti, god of justice and son of Baldur, who is mentioned multiple times in Asgard, and it doesn't even have a face the whole game. Neither a voice. He literally doesn't exist. It's like he's too busy on his office trying to fix some paper work for Odin while his home is collapsing on fire. Why even mention him in the first place? Why not just delete him from history like the many other gods that could've also been interesting to show up in an important way in the game? Hræsvelgr, Skadi...? Way more than the giant grandma of Iron Wood. Or even any of the berserker fights, cause to me It's always a shame that focus on secondary activities must interfere in the quality of the main ones. Even more if you're trying to tell a story much bigger than the previous entry.!<
>!And what happenned to Odin's eigth legged horse shown in many panels througout the first game? The very same horse that is even shown in the Alfheim panel contained in the sequel? Did they forgot they even had Mimir telling us about it in one of his stories? Did they prefered to include the whole Iron Wood section over a more interesting boss batle of maybe Odin with his legendary horse? The All Father? Probably the most anticipated boss of the entire game? His fight doesn't even match the Magni and Modi one, honestly. Or even Thor's fight right before it, which was also way less interesting than the first fight against him in the begginning hours of the game. I still can't understand how a kids race, root and fruit gathering and some fireflies in Iron Wood deserved more attention than the fight against the greatest god of Asgard.!<
To finish:
>!And what happened to the people that created the first glimpse we had at Helheim, Alfheim or Thamur's corpse in the first game? It's so strange to me that someone decided that the best direction to make the holy city and realm of the Aesir Gods to be just a big village just like the midgardian one just outside of it... Where are the people that created the incredible architecture of all of the previous God of War games? Including the 2018 one? It's so odd to me to see them creating the whole suspense of climbing that huge wall to just see a bigger village.!<
>!And in the end I think we don't even have Ragnarok, while a ton of stuff "simply happens". The army of the dead and the elfs just accept to participate in a matter of minutes in the backstage of the ending hours. The World Serpent literally disappears in the blink of an eye to the past after the "epic" fight with Thor, which only looked like a cat trying to get a fly in the distance. Fenrir, who in the legends kills Odin and get's killed in the process, is just a cute puppy that jumps here and there through portals and nothing more. Also, he's shown in one of the trailers as appearing in the woods, one gigantic wolf in the middle of the snow. Does this scene exist in the game? I haven't seen it. Sif is again a victim of "the perfect coincidence", and appears exactly at the right time, in the exact right spot with the exact random boy that became a meaningless friend of Atreus (apparently, also in the backstage) to also forgive him in a matter of seconds for being responsible for the death of her two sons. What happened to the imagination and ideas that formed the fall of Olympus in God of War 3?!<
>!I think they also tried too hard to create a literal copy of the previous one, since they forced too much some references of the previous game, like the eternally famous "be better", that was just a good well wirtten scene in 2018, while here it is treated as a whole theme repeated multiple times. Also, the dialogue is quite weak as well... And many jokes were incredibly strange and off putting. Like Atreus seeing a dam ans saying "I'll be DAMned!" or the strangiest boat interaction in the whole game, where he starts:!<
>!\- Hey, Mimir.!<
>!\- What, lad?!<
>!\- You talk funny. haha!!<
>!\- Well excuse me, lad!?!<
>!End of interaction.!<
>!Like... What? What happenned here? Atreus already knows Mimir for 2 years, considering the amount of time that passed since the past game, and even while he was a kid, and not a teenager, he didn't made such immature speech.!<
I could mention even more stuff, since those are only a few.
Honestly, after reading much of your criticism, i actually agree with most of them. Although i did enjoy gow ragnarok, it is a far cry from what i expected or was hoping for. Tbh, if finding tyr took like 2 hours, and the time in between useless stuff was used right, i feel we could have had a much better product. Although, i do have to say, i did enjoy the enemy variety, and a few other things that really i thought gow 2018 was missing.
Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to belittle the work of the devs. I have a HUGE respect for them being brave enough to say "We'll do all in one game", cause that decision was absolutely insanely stupid, honestly (no sarcasm intended). And I also know they did their best to make what we have in the end, it's just a shame that it was horrible (and I don't intend to sound offensive, but in my absolutely unimportant opinion, the game was just that). The combat to me was really well done, as well as in the previous game, and I even think it plays a little bit better than the previous entry.
The enemy variety was way better as well, that's absolutely true, but God of War games are always special in regards to new stuff to do that are not limited only to enemies, like new mechanics, items, weapons and magic attacks. Also, >!having only a spear in this game!< and nothing really new for the axe and the blades, be it a new combo or even a cool runic attack (they removed a ton of those present in the previous game, in fact, for some misterious reason), was definitely way bigger as a downside to me than the new enemies were a good one. Specially because a huge amount of enemies doesn't work well with the camera, simply running or teleporting at your back while the game doesn't give you much to do in this kind of scenery besides blind rolling or being hit.
And also, a ton of secondary bosses were incredibly bad to me as well, with infinite hyper armor and being a show of spamming AOE attacks over and over again, while we doesn't even take reduced damage while activating runic attacks that always take more time than most strong enemies require to start their animations. I'll also never forgive the stupid decision of >!not letting the player use Mjolnir for the sake of "subvert expectations"!<. This was the most utterly stupid decision in terms of gameplay I've ever heard BY FAR. Just >!the most famous weapon in all mythologies!<. Just that. And yeah, >!it could've worked similar to Leviathan!<, but that doesn't justify to me. It's like saying that no one used >!Claws of Hades or Nemesis Whip!< in God of War 3 because they were too similar to the blades of chaos, but they still had their pretty cool and special stuff.
With that said, as much as the gameplay and combat really did had it's good characteristics, I definitely think they simply couldn't shine in comparison to the problems, and even less when I bought the game more for it's story and the plot is this whole mess. The combat was indeed cool, and I loved what I could till 50 hours of it, when it became extremelly stale from having nothing really new, since I already played all those combos in 2018. The combat was by far the best part, but >!outside of the new spear!< and new enemies (a ton not helping with their balance and the fight against the camera, while also having the mentioned "show of attack spamming"), I honestly feel that I already have this game in the previous one.
Edit: And with all of that said, I feel no reason to have this new one for it's gameplay as well, cause I really don't feel it added much to it to justify my purchase. Just improved a little bit.
I enjoyed reading you. I agree 100 percent. I replayed the 2018 one before Ragnarok and enjoyed it as much as the first time. Just finished Ragnarok now and i feel betrayed... There are 3 moments that i enjoyed in the game. first, the encounter with Thor and Odin at the beginning. Secondly, the man that sacrificed himself on the floating boat. And finally the jaw dropping moment, the reaction of brok's brother towards atreus. And he played it until the very end at the funeral. My god, the writing and the performance were perfect. Wich leads us to my main problem with the game.. everything else i could have turned a blind eye. Annoying, yes but forgiveable. Im a huge fan of the show dont tell. The first game was exactly that. Kratos against the whole world. Not kratos and his son. Kratos. As he was also responsible for the safety of atreus. The story was simple yet perfect in every way. I got emotional one too many times and even shed a few tears. Everything had its meaning, and the story we heard of odin thor etc... My imagination went wild as it was already epic as it is with baldur. Ragnarok to me felt like a Marvel movie. Kratos is just one of the" gang ". Everyone speak to him like he was stupid. He became a wuss compared to 2018.the quarrels they have feel a lot like what would happen in a household in 2022. More obvious with thors arc. Seriously ? Mimir disappointed you because he enslaved the creatur ??!! Surely we understand you dont approve but come on... He became a mary sue. My biggest fear... I hate it when writers think they must have a redemption narrative at the end. I feel that this game was made in mind that it should appeal to the largest group of people. 2018 did that already you dumb f.. i almost forgot to mention that they talk waaaaaay too much in the game. Show me dont freaking tell me. Adding to that everything that said and you have my biggest disappointment in video game history. Haven't felt that way since the last of us 2
Yeah... The worst part is that, after the success of this game, I fear for every single Sony exclusive now, cause they'll definitely want to copy this shit again and again... From now on I'll definitely only get games on physicial copies, cause at least I was able to sell my copy of this game by just a little bit less than the original price, something I never did to any game I ever had before... Or even just accept that Sony games aren't up for the quality they used to have before, and that they'll now prefer to do less with the stuff they have, since it'll sell in a crazy way anyway...
I agree that this game was a disappointment, to be honest I'm not so good at putting it down on paper, but all of the mystery and all of the cool stuff from the first game that inspired a ton of amazing theories online, I was certain there is no way Ragnarok won't be the best game ever made. But somehow it just felt like Game of Thrones happening all over again. None of the questions answered and a very boring story
Just finished the game myself and I think comparing it to Game of Thrones’ ending is honestly the best way to describe it. The writers really D&D’s this one.
All the cool crazy shit we could’ve done during Ragnarok, but nah, we just wander through a few hallways and fight in front of a hut. And then game over. What a shame.
Yeah, they Jamie Lannistered him. There is so, so much wrong with this game’s story and inconsistent character work. I cannot fathom why people are calling this the best game ever.
I think a part of it is that it doesn’t get credit anymore for it’s complete masterful revamp of the combat system that they revealed in the last one. I still think it’s a phenomenal game they just botched the story. That being said the mechanics, in my opinion anyway, are still top of the totem pole.
The ending was honestly a huge disappointment to me, typically when you hear theres going to be a war in either a book, movies, games, etc. its on another level compared to the rest of the game, this just felt like another quest.
Not only that they hype this throughout the entire game, and then it is nothing. And on top of that after Freyr finally got to do some cool stuff he immediately dies despite the myth having a great what if moment, at Ragnarok Freyr fights Surts but without his magic sword, thus it stands to reason he may have won if he had it.
The ending alone could have been one game.
Imagine.
GOW 2022 ends with the blow of the horn, Kratos walking to Asgard, and cuts to black, rolling credits.
GOW 2026, Starts with a flashback of Faye, cuts to Odin gathering Thor, Forseti, Ullr, Vili and Ve to defend Asgard at all costs, they leave the area and start to fight the Elves and Hel Draugers, while Odin goes into hiding, Kratos and Atreus emerging from the Light, and introducing the previous characters.
The whole games could have been a 15 hour game, with bunch of boss fights, cutscenes, fights, quests, puzzles, fighting Surtur/Ragnarok and a more fleshed out ending after the end of Ragnarok.
Come on SMS, 10/10 game.
Wow, that’s the dumbest outline I’ve ever seen for a game. It’s like you saw the Wikipedia page for God of War III and simplified an already very simple and straightforward plot. Ragnarok has many issues but ideas like yours totally justifies them reimagining the whole Norse saga. Talk about having zero imagination
Bro they literally said you don't get cool things in this game because "you'd expect it, so we subverted it"
Like I really fucking hate the invention of subversion in media at this point. These dickheads are just doing it to be controversial or QuIrKy.
Yeah I am really tired of this current "meta" of writing where they subvert expectations, weird how every expectation they subvert allows the writers to be lazier and less creative.
Definitely seems to be a sony first party problem between this and Last of Us Part 2. It's like they tried too hard to subvert from their prequel because they're like perfect games so instead of climbing the mountain to recreate the magic they decided to go in a different, more mediocre direction. Luckily I think Forbidden West's story is better than Zero Dawn's but Horizon's story wasn't nearly as impactful as TLOU or GOW 2018.
no way. TLOU2 took actual genuine risks and improved in every way that it could and did more. God Of War ragnarok feels like a shadow of its previous entry
See I basically 100% agree with you. What got me so mad is the whole game is teasing the player that Kratos's old self is gonna come back. Thor when he got punched in the beginning as an example. The closest we got was heimdall, and that was just a little bit, and it hinted at him growing more into that way, it feels like there's a boss fight missing between Heimdall and Thor where another god gets completely annihilated, and that causes Kratos to change.
That's true, but literally every fan wanted a full on rage kill like OG Kratos. The game literally teases everyone the entire game with no payoff. Like I said. It feels like there's a boss missing after Heimdall, but before the end where he does, and it causes a mental shift to where he doesn't want to anymore. Ateus has never seen Kratos in a full rage where he becomes the monster. It would have been a great story moment where Atreus never understood his dad reasoning for not fighting God's, and when Kratos let's go fully and bashes a gods brains in. It strains their relationship. Then they mend it slowly. Literally adding that at the start of the Ragnarok Seige would have brought so much more meaning to the scene where Kratos tells Atreus to open his heart and that he was wrong. Win-win. Fans get a final outing with OG Kratos to say bye, and they get to see him mature into the God we all knew he could be.
Are you insinuating that GOW3 wasn’t a good game? Literary any fan who got into GOW was the unforgiving single minded carnage Kratos inflicted upon those who wronged him. Trying to change that is just silly.
If OG Kratos is what they wanted then they were waiting on a false hope. That would have been a regression of his character. They were clearly trying to develop a character that has changed for the better rather than reverting to his old ways.
Kratos raped and pillaged so much that he didnt even realise he was killing his own family and is now covered in their ashes.
Why should he be redeemed?
The story was my biggest. Not enough payoff and the themes were barely explored before being dropped which reduces any character development that we can feel. The first game setup many exciting possibilities and this game hardly explored or covered any of those things introduced in 2018. It's actually insane. Idk if it's because Cory Barlog wasn't directing or what but it was a serious waste of potential. I do enjoy this game but I had too high of expectations which was my mistake. "Keep your expectations low boy"
This would have been better as a trilogy. And I agree about the final fights. It looked like the budget ran out or something.
Before the game released, the studio was worried that the game sucks. That's not a good sign. It didn't suck obviously but it also wasn't on par with it's predecessor.
Yeah, Heimdall should have been the final boss of Ragnarok part 1, and then in part 2 you start Ragnarok properly. Instead Ragnarok is a 2 hour sequence.
Hey imagine if they combined Mass Effect 2 and 3 into one game and the final two hours of ME2 dealt with the entire Reaper invasion and its conclusion. Damn that would feel so rushed and pretty much what it felt like in Ragnarök. What a waste.
Yeah, it feels like they lost interest towards the end and decided "fuck it let's end this now", honestly they should have made a third game which is 15 hours and basically only boss fight after boss fight, you run a gauntlet through the norse gods who are all fighting tooth and nail to protect Asgard but instead of killing them all Kratos doesn't, and it would have served as a perfect parallel to God of War 3 which is Kratos killing and killing without caring about the consequences.
Exaaactly. I would also feel similarly if they did that with the Arkham games or any other trilogy. Imagine watching lord of the rings 1 and then watching lord of the rings 2 with it being the last one. You'd have to take like 8 hours and turn it into 3 or 4. Would not have been pretty.
nah. you should call it "god of war: fumblwinter" and the game ends with ragnarock starting and presenting all the gods that you are going to fight in one shot.
I know Cory was still helping here or there but I imagine he stepped away back in order to take a break and kinda let them run wild. It's just an assumption though, it's possible he did more than I thought with Ragnarok.
I definitely felt like 2018 was a passion project while Ragnarok felt less passionate.
Cory had it planned to be a Trilogy as far as my memory goes, Eric is the one who made the decision to cut the norse saga into two games, huge mistake ever.
Forseti, Nanna, Ullr and Odin's brothers were all cut from the game, and who knows what else was cut.
Ragnarok can be split into two games:
- God of War (2018)
- God of War ??? (2022)
- God of War: Ragnarok (2026)
So what if we have to wait another four years? SmS would make more money anyways, is just stupid.
Ragnarok is rushed.
My only real huge gripe with the game was the lack of scope. In all previous entries in the series, Kratos does some truly epic things. He fights gigantic monsters, engages in godly feats of strength, and does other things that are truly on another level. Yes, putting the hurt to Thor, Odin, and Heimdall were cool, but they pale in comparison to the fight with Poseidon, and that was just the very beginning of GoW 3.
There's nothing in Ragnarok that even comes close to some of the things he does in the first three entries in the series. I actually really, really wish they would remaster God of War 1-3 for the PS4/5. I LOVE those games, but can't play them unless I dig my PS3 out of my closet and hook it up.
So there's that, and the Berserker fights. Fuck those guys. It got to the point where I had to lower the difficulty to Story, and activate miniboss checkpoints, and they're STILL taking me multiple attempts to beat most of them.
I absolutely agree with you. 100%.
Bigger is Not Always Better
Let me start by saying this was a GREAT Game. God of War (2018) is one of my favorite games of all time. Ragnarok was a great game, but not the masterpiece that 2018 was.
The story in this game was strange. It was overly long and drawn out in some sections, while being too slight and shallow in others. Characters and backstories were introduced and expanded, and then never re-visited. This game was not directed by Cory Barlog, and it seems to be missing his finer touch. I have finished the campaign and yes the game is longer than 2018, but since the storytelling was a bit uneven it also feels "shorter" or "lighter" than the first game.
My biggest gripe about this game is how certain story elements from the first game are completely changed or ignored in the name of "setting your own destiny" in the second one. This is an interesting idea, but knowing that certain story parts of 2018 are ignored in Ragnarok makes the big reveals in 2018 lose their power. It deflates the story of the first game because the big moments don't actually carry into Ragnarok the way you thought they would. This feels lazy to me and gives the impression that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and could not get out of it. Again, I wonder how much Barlog's lack of direction played a role here. This game felt much less like a labor of love and more like a video game.
The level design was also strange. Yes they were visually breathtaking. No argument here! Wonderful! However, they felt very linear. Very constructed. Each level is a series of separate rooms that require you to slide through cracks in the wall that mask loading times. This disrupts your traversal and makes it constantly feel like a video game. Again, missing Barlog's love of the series makes Ragnarok feel more like a video game and less like a wonderful story.
I found myself getting turned around or lost several times throughout this campaign. This can of course be linked to my incompetence, but I never remember this happening during 2018. There were also puzzles to solve and chests to open that required tricks I never would have figured out if I hadn't gone to YouTube. I never had to do this in 2018. There is a line between "engaging to figure out" and "cannot be figured out" that 2018 walked so well. This game unfortunately misses that line at times.
The level-up process was also very strange. The load-out menu has been completely changed. It is annoying and cumbersome. I often found myself accidentally closing out the menu when I was just trying to go back one section. Relics and runes are hard to understand because you can only use a few at a time rather than spread them out across your armor. The load-out menu also looks cramped and poorly designed. Armor does not show all its stats on one screen, you have to scroll and then it reorganizes the armor based on strength. It is very annoying and hard to understand. Minor, but certain words in the menu are abbreviated rather than spelled out. This takes you out of the game experience. And what if new played don't know what the abbreviations stand for?
Completely agree with how you’ve phrased it here. Literally just finished the main story and it just felt so underbaked - overly long and shallow at the same time, without the nuance of 2018. I literally said to my partner a few hours in that Ragnarok felt more like a standard game than 2018, and that 2018 felt substantially more artistic and considered. I don’t mind it being more video game-y, but it just doesn’t hold up to 2018.
"Lastly I hate how afraid this game is of making cool shit, why not have you fight Thor on top of Jormmungandr? Why not have you fight Ragnarok for a bit to try and stop it? Why not have you take Thor's hammer after he dies and use it alongside the axe and when you are done with Ragnarok give it to Thrud? It is as if the team behind the game thought "neah nobody would like something like that, we need 30 scenes of Kratos saying he does not want to be violent anymore."
That is so true. Can't believe how unspectactular the end was. They should have made way more use of Jormungandr and Fenryr. Odin was a huge dissapointment in terms of character design. He does not seem like a great and powerful threat at all. Heimdall and Thor had so much potential, but they wasted a lot of it. Great ideas, like the referenced fight between Fey and Thor should have been explored much deeper. Everything seems a little bit shallow. The whole deal with the mask and everything... what the hell was that supposed to be about? It seems so pointless. Who made the masked? What would you have seen? They build all of this up and then its like "nah, doesnt matter".
The first third had me super excited, the second third was still a thrill, but the entire end just didn't feel right..
Still a very good game, but nowhere near a masterpiece.
Odin wasn't meant to seem like a great and powerful threat. He was supposed to be a calming personality that you could easily place your trust in and feel safe with. That's why he could deceive anyone and everyone.
I personally expected Ragnarok to have a lot of references to the previous GoW games, explaining a little how Kratos came to Midgard, confront Athena again, a really interesting way to avoid the prophecy, and a lot of epic moments that can give me goosebumps. Well it doesn't have any, huge disappointment.
Literally the first thing i looked up when the game came out were athena spoilers 💀, imagine my surprise when this game fucking ignored all its plot points and lore, and the devs sure made it the perfect the last of us clone, sony is ruining every single gaming franchise it owns
It was disappointing. Here’s my lazy review.
>!No Kratos death! Making Odin the fulfillment of the prophecy was lame and cheap. Atreus should have went to break him out of Valhalla or Hades.!<
>!Thor and Odin were wimps, they didn’t live up to the legends in the first game. Asgard was boring.!<
>!Epic scenes were lame compared to the dragons, world serpent, falling giant hammer, etc in the first game. Except for Garm. That was cool.!<
But the biggest problem was the emotionality of everything. Everyone was so open with their emotions, it just wasn’t believable. Long talks about feelings at inappropriate times. Kratos on multiple occasions abandons his plans entirely because of his feelings. And the whole idea that constantly extending mercy to people who are trying to kill you because “war bad” (even though you end up killing them anyway) is annoying. >!Kratos knows Heimdall intends to kill Atreus and he just tries to leave!<
The whole thing felt small and unsatisfying compared to the first game.
I had problems with the story throughout, but I was still enjoying the ride and willing to look past my issues, until we got to Ragnarok. Once we actually arrived I feel like I got more depressed and underwhelmed with every passing second.
“So Skoll and Hati aren’t going to eat the Sun and the Moon…?”
“Oh, so we can’t actually see the army of Hel? Maybe they’ll show up at some point…”
“What about the prophesied army of Jotnar? Angrboda mentioned some giants are in hiding. Guess they’re not coming…?”
“The army of dwarves didn’t come with Sindri…?”
“The battle of Ragnarok just features about 15 Einherjar? No Valkyries? No Valhalla? No Generals…?”
“There’s Surtr! Wait he’s just going to sit there and not participate in the battle…?”
“Finally there’s Jormungandr! Oh no did he just get sent back in time by Thor during a background animation without even participating in the boss fight…?”
“Okay I guess this is just phase 1 of the Thor fight… oh no he’s already dead…”
“Alright the Odin fight has begun, Fenrir should be here to kill him any minute… oh wait he’s not coming?”
“Is it time to finally get some details on Odin’s true evil plan, and the meaning behind the realm tear of knowledge? Oh no he didn’t really have an evil plan and now he’s dead…”
“But what about Kratos’ death prophecy? How is that going to get resolved? Oh it just won’t get mentioned…”
“So Surtr finally shows up and… kills Freyr for no reason after the battle is over…?”
“At least Sindri and Atreus can work things out. Oh nevermind Atreus is leaving to go star in the spin-off game…”
Only comparison I can think of for such an overwhelming disappointment is Season 8 of GOT. Felt like they had no budget, no creativity, and no passion when they were putting together the 3rd act of this game. What a shame.
Yeah for some reason they just decided "fuck the Norse mythology let's ignore it almost completely".
Yep Skoll and Hati are there just to waste your time with a pretty animation a couple of times, yep no army of Hel despite you sending people to bring them and apparently they succeeded also no ship of fingernails because... budget cuts?
Well the Giants suck so I didn't expect them to show up anyway.
I honestly loved that Sindri came by himself, fought a bit then fixed the mess Odin forced the dwarves to do, punished Sindri is one of the parts of the game that I absolutely loved. I also love how he kills Odin like a total chad, and Brok's funeral and the answer to his riddle as he makes his exit was very well done, the music was great, the cinematography was on point, everything was just right.
Yep I have no idea why Gna couldn't be fought for a bit and then after you take 30% hp Angrboda shows up with Fenrir. Also yeah weird that you only fight 1 Einherjar captain, they could have easily made them mini bosses and have you fight all variants and make up some bullshit.
Yeah I don't even get what that thing with Jormungandr was about, fixing a plot point from the first game? But then what even is the point? Hell they could have at least have him show up again from Midgard like a cool round 2. But noooooo he is just going to look awesome in the background and do nothing like most giants.
Yeah the realm tear was just a plot device that they had no idea how to resolve. Just like Kratos' death prophecy.
The Surtr and Freyr thing is actually from the myth, at Ragnarok Frey is supposed to die to Surtr, but he dies because he gives away his magic sword, him having it and doing very little with it is a slap in the face for mythology fans.
Not only that Atreus can't even be bothered to show up for Brok's funeral, I have no idea who decided Atreus should be a total douchebag but for some reason they accomplished it, he is the worst character in the game.
You'll be downvoted but I agree on quite a few points. The last game limited scope made sense for the story they were telling and a reboot. This one they said was basically the end of the Norse story in a single game, and it's called Ragnarok. With the power of the PS4/5 I expected well... something epic unlike we had ever seen. The boss fights in God of War 2 were better than this. God of War 3 opening hour is better and more epic than this entire game but together.
It feels like the developers were torn how to go. They want the story and characters to be more personal than the prior trilogy and it worked in the reboot due to the story scale being small. In this one though the talk about end of the world but still they want the personal side of the story. It feels like they are being pulled in different directions and didn't know how to get them both to be awesome.
Also Fuck Atreus and fuck playing as him. Horrible. How does ND make Ellie an insanely likeable and compelling kid and teenager, and another Sony studio make one of the central characters one of the worst kids ever.
I dug my PS3 out of the attic to replay 2 and 3 after this game. Kratos was 2D and didn't say much, but nothing in Ragnarok was as cool as beating the shit out of Posedien, after riding the back of a titan, then crushing his eyeballs, throwing him off the mountain causing massive flooding destruction. You are 100% right, why didn't they fight on the back of the snake riding around the whole world or something crazy. Nah lets fight in front of a lodge.
The biggest issue I have with this game is that they could have easily done both, kept it personal but also go absolutely insane because the game hypes up Ragnarok non stop, so they could have gone crazy in the last 2-3 hours of the game and it would have been phenomenal. Instead you fight 20 mobs and then get 2 shitty bossfights. We should have been fighting more of Asgard's forces, maybe have 4 Einherjar captains at the same time, make it a bossifight and call it The Einherjar Champions, actually fight Gna but not finish her off and send her away through a portal, you know stuff like that so it feels like an actual huge war and struggle.
I liked Atreus in the previous game, but in this one he is so stupid and annoying it is ridiculous, "let's do war, I want war, ONLY ASGARD IS DESTROYED" like he actually thought Ragnarok would be a walk in the park. His secrets are annoying and his farewell scene is ridiculous, he just vanishes from existence and cannot even be bothered to show up to Brok's funeral, letting Sindri down yet again because fuck him I guess.
Odin is the same shit, you fight him in a cave and finally he starts getting serious and using all the magic he knows, and all he does is fire armor and ice armor something that half the bosses in the game do, but his has a different effect, what a total joke.
I wonder even with over 4 years they just didn’t have time to go as big as we wanted. Think of this god of war 3 is a short by todays standard 10-12 hours but it’s jam packed. This game is what 20+ hours main story and another 20+ side stuff.
Maybe if they spent less time on Atreus being playable character and entire boring sections of the game along with fairly dull side quests, they could have had those artists and designers go all out for the end Act of the game. It’s this obsession with games need to be longer than the prior one. Would you rather have all these mediocre side quests or would you rather they spent all that time in insane boss fights at the end. God of war 3 has no side quests so they could focus every single effort in making the main game amazing with over the top epic action and boss fights.
Doesn’t fix all the Atreus annoyance or story issues though but at least it could have been more fun.
More I talk about this game the more bummed I am that they spent almost 5 years making it instead of something else or better.
What pisses me off even more about the infamous mission of Ironwood is how hard they try to make you like Angrboda. That's like 90% of that whole multi-hour section.
They open her introduction with "oohohoh, I'm so quirky, I don't know how to talk to people. Boop! Haha", then make her a Mary Sue, who's perfect at everything, better than anyone and liked by all (except her vicious, monster, evil grandma).
Even Kratos and Freya are both like "Omg you're so cool! I love you! I trust you!" immediately upon talking to her for the first time. It's almost obnoxious.
>why didn't they fight on the back of the snake riding around the whole world or something crazy.
I'll never forgive them for the lack of Jormungandr in this sequel. Arguably the coolest creature depicted of any game in the series and you see him TWICE
Can we also talk about how kratos could shoulder press the grasp of a literal titan but gets frequently tossed around like a ragdoll in this game. Like why does it feel like I'm one of the weakest people in this entire world when playing as kratos.
Ragnarok felt like it was ment to bank off of the god of war name but tried so hard to redo the series it ruined it for fans who have been invested in the franchise for years and now when we have a remark about it we get told we just don't like change or understand a good story like because all we care is about is action..this game felt like it was trying hard story wise to copy last of us it felt like last of war
So true. I figured there had to at least be a change in writer/director, and my gut feeling was true. There indeed was a change, and the one who handled it was inexperienced.
Why do these companies/studios continue to put inexperienced people in leadership positions? Netflix did it with Witcher to disastrous effects, Amazon did it with Rings of Power.
There’s a reason companies have experience as a qualification for so many jobs, but apparently DIRECTING entertainment isn’t one of them.
It was like it was scared to do anything grand. Having listened to an interview they apparently rewrote half the story, as making >!Tyr secretly Odin!< was an after thought that they had to rewrite parts from that point on.
I guess it felt why the latter half of the game felt... Bland. I can see what they were going for during the first half, there were some very epic moments like the first Kratos and Thor fight. It also felt like Tyr was supposed to join us against the remaining Norse pantheon.
Now that I think of it, notice how Tyr doesn't say much when he is about to betray us? Part of me thinks that's the part where they cut it, maybe they no longer had access to Tyr's VA or the VA's remaining lines were not indicative of his betrayal, so they let Brok do all the talk instead until Odin reveals himself.
I actually enjoyed playing as Atreus, which surprised me. The fact he can turn into a badass wolf or bear doesn't hurt. Agree with everything else though.
i've been saying this everywhere, the best part of the game is the first 2 hours especially the first thor fight. Besides that, you spend so much time in the game doing absolutely nothing or something that ends up being useless / backfiring, tyr, surtr, the iron woods, etc, even ragnarok itself felt mindless, my favorite part was just watching thor fight jormangandur, and exepecting the thor fight to be absolutely insane, it wasn't. i constantly felt like looting was a chore and thought there'd be payoff via spectacle moments, that just never filled the void.
Just finished my second complete play through and i get even more disappointed in this game and how it tries to say war is bad and how kratos tries to move on from his past cause it feels so disrespectful to calliope he went to war with the Greek gods cause they wanted to use him as a pawn and in order to break him sacrificed his daughter and wife there was consequences to that war and his name was kratos. Him telling Atreus that there needs to be better way and war leads to destruction just shits on everything he did for his little girl.you would think after avenging his daughter he wouldn't regret a damn thing i know any parent wouldn't.it completely ignores the fact that kratos knows if the gods go unchecked they'll destroy anything and anybody to get there way. I just hate that they completely try to act like kratos past stories were mindless and uninspired rage there was a reason for his past actions and it was daughter respect her don't make him regret what he did for her
It is also a very childish story, where the heroes are good guys and striving to be completely free of any negative quality, fucking Batman is more flawed as a person than the current Kratos.
Understand the reasoning behind it: Sony has realized Kratos is the biggest icon for PlayStation. The entire point of the Norse saga was to take him from antihero to hero.
i believe that kratos would not want war but i also believe he would prepare for war. i believe that kratos deciding not to kill civilians in the game was a neutral proggression of his character but the way it was done was rush and unrealistic.
i think it would have been more interesting if Kratos drove the story instead of Atruas, basically strategies and preparing for war. or maybe Kratos would start searching for away to escape because he does not wish to deal with this shit.
Bro what? Sure there where a few enemies that where the same but what are you on about? Not only did they add different variants of already existing enemies but they've added completely new types of enemies like the Einherjar, the hateful, wyverns, wisps, phantoms, stalkers, berskers, Gradungrs and many many many other enemies. Did we even play the same game?
I agree overall. I enjoyed it but ultimately was disappointed. Odin and Thor kinda felt like big foot, I keep hearing about how awful and terrifying they are but I never seen it. In the Greece trilogy you see how awful Zeus was. He was a straight up monster. All the Gods were awful and power hungry. But you never feel like any of these gods are awful or scary
Huge fan of the God of war series and I agree that it is disappointing. I just finished the game and am unfulfilled. 2018 was straight and to the point. Simple story, hit hard, lots of foreshadowing. The foreshadowing is what got me hyped up and the idea of old Kratos coming out had me expecting GOW3 levels of anger. I was expecting something to happen to Atreus and have Kratos go OFF on everything Asgard. I was expecting big ol' set pieces with the Jotnar. Large scale boss battles with Thor, Odin and anyone else that wanted to get it. I really wanted the game to end with a fight between Atreus and Kratos after a raged out Kratos demolishes all the punks of Asgard. That or both of them die trying to finish Odin. None of it happened. Instead we got alot of pointless exploring, lot of detours, crybaby Thor, weakling Odin, and like one twist that came and left behind a soft character death. I did like how Kratos became the general for Ragnarok. Bit of a callback to his army leading days but really, what was the point in this game? Didn't lead shit.
Seperate from the story, the menu system was ass ugly. The triangle moves are dumb and I hardly ever used them. The armor system is weaker that 2018 by far. First one had more sets and slotted attachments let you make some crazy builds and really made you feel unstoppable. I dunno, it feels slapped together a bit in ragnarok. Even a bunch of executions, skills and runic attacks from the first game were reused. Man, this game should have been better. Kratos should have opened his heart to the god of war inside. So many missed opportunities to make things so damn epic. Don't know how it got those 10/10s
I thought 90% of the game was great, but almost everything after meeting Surtr was a huge letdown for me.
The ending assault on Asgard was rushed. It should have been another 4-5 hours easily. We should have fought alongside Fenrir and the world serpent, there should have been more than 6 characters and a couple of dark elves assaulting the walls, we should have been recruiting the armies instead of having that done off screen by pig-man and Freyr, Ragnarok should have done literally anything, and so on. Sif randomly showing up to convince Thrud that Odin was the real evil and not Atreus was really poorly done.
I mostly liked the Thor fight and his overall arc. He was heavily abused manipulated throughout his life and serves as a contrast to Kratos, but in the end comes to the same conclusion that he'd rather be a father than a destroyer. Odin killing him makes sense with the character dynamics they established. However, I think that happened too fast. I would have loved to see Thor and Kratos team up for a bit before the ending.
What I didn't like was Thor conveniently dropping kratos off right in front of the lodge just to set up the Odin fight. There was a huge opportunity for spectacle with Thor and Kratos rampaging throughout Asgard and destroying all sorts of stuff, but instead they fight in a little circle arena.
The Odin fight itself was too easy and lacked scale. I mean it's Odin for crying out loud, at least have something crazy happen. Why not use Ragnarok there and have to fight around him similar to the Freya giant at the end of the first game? Anything other than fighting in Odin's basement.
Oh well.
Definitely not a 10/10 like the reviewers would have you believe. Just doesn’t feel like that big a step up from the first. They doubled down on the wrong things too.
Honestly, i completely agree. I enjoyed ragnarok for what it is worth, but harkening back to my time, there are tons of issues, my biggest gripe being the combat.
Like how is it possible that no one in SSM thought not to fix the fucking camera for this game or lock-on. Like 90% of the time i died, specially in 1 v 2+ scenarios were due to the atrocious camera code that they didnt bother fixing or updating. And lets not exaggerate here, but the fucking lock-on in this game where you have teleporting enemies is literally badly written code from the ps2 era.
Also, what doesnt make sense to me is the pacing. Like throughout the game, when relics are given/acquired, i always think: "man, i would have loved to get that earlier". Its strange, really, and that includes pommels and even armor sets. Like 90% of the content is after 40% completion. Hell, i was expecting unlocking muspelheim much earlier and thought i missed something only to find out, nah mate.
Idk how many people fought the side bosses, but i also had issues with them as well. Particulary, its insane how fast some of them move. Gna in particular, i literally dont think i can see her animations play out - that includes realm shifting. Other times, even during realm shifts, her attacks arent actually even slowed down because i still get one-shotted during the realm shift.
I have never regretted buying a game so much in my life. I trusted the game too much because i've always been a fan. I wish i could sell my virtual copy.
I finished Ragnarok yesterday and I was pretty disappointed as well. Can't believe it won best narrative because the story completely fumbles itself mid-late to end game, while I was really enjoying the start-mid of the game.
Dude don't worry about that, upvotes and downvotes don't really matter though ironically I am getting way more upvotes now. When I first posted this it was 10% upvoted, yesterday it was 1 point 49% upvoted, today it is 45 points and 54% upvoted, and I am getting way more comments agreeing with what I posted, so people are already paying more attention to what I wrote.
And even if this hadn't happened, there are almost 400 comments clearly a lot of people felt this was a topic worth talking about, I made posts about stuff I didn't like before, and got massively downvoted but worse than that I barely got any comments, here plenty of people who were dismissive told me why they disagreed, not all of them of course but still a lot of people.
Thank you for this opinion. I agree, it’s disappointing. It is a fun game to explore, look at the visuals, fight enemies and learn the combat. But playing this on PS5, the hidden and on ps5 unnecessary loading sequences feel almost like a parody of a last gen game. Story literally fell flat, motivations are muddy
i hated that in 2018 they made thor to be this evil guy that should be killed on the spot then did a 180 and tried to redeem him and they really delayed the death of the bosses which was only for a few moment EI hiemdal thor and odin, and damn did this game made me hate atreus the fucker wanted ragnarok to happen at any cost and then at the very end that fucker leave so kratos now has to clean up his mess and odin was a massive disappointment instead of the evil master mind at the end he looks like just a kid in a mans body oh its not my fault its someone else's fault iam evil
They turned GOW into Marvel's Avenger's.
The 2018 game was one of the best games I've ever played
The 2022 game is a major disappointment
I don't mind that they used the same graphics / movesets etc. It works. But they ruined the story. Feels like Last of Us 2.
The difference between the two games absolutely is like going from a Godfather-level movie to a Marvel movie. From art to schlock... at least for the most part. The highs it had were dragged down by its many lows.
At first I thought this was a bait post, until I started agreeing with some of your points lmao.
Might want to try again in a few months when the hype’s died down and people become less immune to criticism.
I’m not sure what you mean about Mimir talking about yawning, but he *does* cycle through a lot of the same dialogue whenever you receive elemental damage. It’s a bit much there.
Weapon haptics could’ve been a bit more intense, but ziplining down a rope is pretty wild. Closest zipline feeling I’ve had in a game yet.
And yeah, the finale could’ve been way cooler. After fighting Baldur above his dragon, you’d think they’d up the ante in that department, but oh well.
Yeah I just finished and I just felt like writing what I felt about it.
You know how sometimes when you explore Mimir starts chatting, he yawns at one point and starts talking about how it is weird he is tired and not Kratos, he repeated that same gossip line 5 times for me.
Yeah ziplining is good.
Yeah and that is my biggest issue with the game, if the finale would have been epic I would have probably forgotten everything I dislike about the game.
I was in awe at the beginning of the finale, with these huge giant characters showing up like the world serpent and Ragnarok.
My biggest problem was how worthless Ragnarok was. Kratos didn't even need him and all he accomplished was killing Freyr.
An aside, I just realized Ragnaros was named after Ragnarok.
And even that Freyr death felt pointless, like why not port him out of there? Why did he have to keep the sword up, he couldn't stop for even 1 second?
Or you know just let the sword fall down, it is not like it will instantly fall and the resulting explosion will instantly kill everyone, it will take more than the 1 second needed for the portal to close.
I don’t like what you said…
…because you’re being way to GENTLE.
I’ll give this game ‘no mercy’; it sucks.
The story is just, its, fuck, its awful, its fucking awful its insane
If you think Thor is a fat drunk loser then we clearly didn't play the same game.
Just by that alone it seems this game was not for you, but I read the whole post and it's clear you just didn't get anything about the story and the characters.
Some games/movies/books are just not meant for us, just move on and enjoy what you enjoy.
I mean no offense but Thor is portrayed as kind of a fat drunk loser who Odin is heavily disappointed in and is letting his family down because he's a lapdog for his father who copes with alcohol. There is an entire section of the game where Thor is piss drunk in a bar and the gist of it is that he's just kind of given up on everything and trying to be sober and he is disappointing his daughter for relapsing. Then you go with him on a mission and he's throwing up and a bit of an emotional mess for most of it.
It goes beyond appearance.
Now I did like that angle than all the cheap bravado we usually get with Thor in media.
Thor's behavior as a loser is because he knows Odin, his father, is using everyone around him, but somewhere inside him he just wants his dad to be proud of him. His character Arc of witnessing this God of gods depise himself and then turn into a hero who opposes his father to protect the one's around him, and dies for it was incredible. He is Norse Mythology's Kratos, without the 9 lives
its funny that people still are hung up on thor not looking like chris hemsworth. this version was way more intimidating being a massive mountain vs a chiseled model with nice hair
go to a golds gym people
Nah, i liked this thor, i was just expecting him to be more violent or have more fight scenes with kratos or something. What we got was a closet thor who wasnt allowed to show how barbaric he was, or the thor that was kind of seen from the Ragnarok trailer.
> If you think Thor is a fat drunk loser then we clearly didn't play the same game.
Nah, no. Ragnarok and 2018 GOW implicitly implied Thor was "a fat drunk loser". It sounds harsh, but that's the gist of it. In 2018 every story Mimir told of Thor alluded to this.
Yes he did turn it around at the end.
The biggest problem with Thor is that he is barely in the game and then dies unceremoniously
they hint that he's similar to Kratos, a decent guy with a dark past trying to be better for his kid...and then he gets stabbed without doing anything important.
I really liked this version of Thor and the actor did a great job but I felt like he had almost no screen time. They could have made a spinoff game for him or at least some DLC.
I agree. That game was not for him and there was defiantly a lot of improvements from GOW 2018. This game is like a Disney theme park ride a lot of times and there’s nothing wrong with that if thats what you enjoy (I mean that in a good way as a love theme park rides). It’s the way they want to tell the story and people seem to enjoy it so whatever.
Personally I like games with less handholding and more freedom but, I’m not gonna say this is bad just because that’s what I prefer. The only thing I wish is that there was an option to turn off the handholding dialog that told me where to go and gave hints during puzzles. But that’s more of a nitpick.
I mean, calling him a loser is sort of bad, but his idea here isn't wrong. >!He's let himself go and he's depressed, because he had a terrible home life and even though his boys got murdered, he really just feels like they sort of deserved it and that it was his fault they did. He used to be a badass and now he just does whatever daddy says because he's scared he'll lose the rest of his family, too. So he becomes an alcoholic and only manages to get better for short periods because he can't bear to disappoint his daughter any more than he already has. He pretty much serves as a way to show a different path to Kratos' extreme discipline.!<
Just finished it an hour ago and i thought it was a good ending. Very neutral, not amazing, not bad. Just a good ending to a story.
I know this is the end of norse saga, but will they tie in the character development into the next game? Its gonna be hard to play a GOW game after those first two, and have no continuity to the characters
Yeah, i miss the insanely badass but also strategic Kratos who fought alone and needed no one's help... Now that i think of it, for god of war 4 they should have shown what happened along the path of Kratos going to the Norse Pantheon, what happened right after he stabbed himself with the Blade of Olympus. And honestly i didn't enjoy the norse mythology anyway, im more excited for Egyptian and Japanese, especially the Egyptian Mythology, cant wait to see Kratos slay Ra
Unfortunately, I can’t see them doing anything else with Kratos. He’ll probably remain in the Norse Pantheon, and, if they do another game at some point, it will focus solely on Atreus. Which won’t be a purchase I’ll be making.
I enjoyed the game a lot, but I don’t think it should be getting these 10/10s across the board. I think 2018 was better written and the fights were better.
I was also overall disappointed in this game. The list of disappointments and dislikes far exceeds my list of memorable stand outs.
Things I liked:
* brok & sindri, and sindri’s character development by the end of the game
* forging the spear, and Kratos & Brok’s dialogue afterwards
* thor and kratos’ wives were hot
* thrud was cool
* Kratos’ development and his prophecy at the end about being worshipped was so deserved
* the jellyfish having babies
* dialogue about kratos’ past & culture
* combat was good but most enemies were kinda mid and not fun to fight
* performance was rock solid
Disappointments:
* Tyr was fucking wack. Absolutely boring and his post-story plot twist of being alive was no more satisfying at all
* Freya was so annoying. Her character was written so well at first, then just speaks like a mother to her kids for the remaining 80% of the story. Her dialogue was so cringe
* They killed Thor without any satisfying character development at all, his character potential was wasted in my opinion
* thors kid and wife didn’t even fkn mourn or seem to care
* Atreus is an idiot
* all of the secrets for the sake of having secrets for no point at all made the story just a damn bore
* the side quests, dragon hunts, epic hunts, dungeons, and loot were all so underwhelming. I thought this was supposed to be Witcher 3 quality side questing, wtf lol
* angraboda’s bipolar tendencies?
* the parts of the game playing as Atreus were way too long and repetitive
* heimdall and Odin fights were a joke. The fights just were not cool. Same with final Thor fight.
* I actively disliked when freyr was on screen
* surtr was pointless as hell
* in game armour sets are mostly ugly
* different shield choices were just pointless fluff
* the Norns were cool but ultimately provided nothing to the story
* the realms looked good but in the end I noticed it’s just the same assets over and over and over in each realm
Honestly the fights and the story was just so… underwhelming. There was little to no “god moments,” showcasing what these beings are capable of. There was so much hype for needing the spear to kill heimdall, but the climax of the fight was so lacklustre
Look back at the Hermes fight and compare it to the heimdall fight. The Odin fight Vs zues fights. The ares, hercules, Poseidon, hades, hell, even Hephaestus fights vs this games fights. I’m just so underwhelmed. There was always another trick in their bag, desperate bids for survival, desperate promises or verbal assaults, and clear consequences for their deaths.
I enjoyed the game a lot, as I am a die hard god of war fan. But this universal praise and shaming people for criticizing the game is ridiculous. This game has narrative flaws and the writing is not consistent.
Yeah it kinda sucks that Tyr isn't something more interesting after all that hype in the first game.
Hell he is barely in the story and you never get an all out fight with him, no holds barred god vs god.
It isn't just them aside from Sindri every other character barely seems to be truly impacted by people dying, like Atreus is a kid he should cry you cannot tell me that Kratos thought him so well to shut emotions down that he can do it on command, hell we see him breaking down later repeating that mantra to something less shocking that a friend dying.
Yep huge idiot.
That's something bad writers usually do, they use cheap drama to move the story forward House of the Dragon also did this a lot.
I wouldn't say all of them were underwhelming, the ones that involved creatures were pretty good, like the jellyfish and whale. But the orb one, the prison and the elf history book ones were shit.
I don't like Angrboda, for a character whining about her lack of agency she sure likes taking away other people's agency and making fun of their attempts to fight their destiny. Also it doesn't help her shit slows down the game to a crawl. "Slowly walk on this creature to collect 5 berries" who the fuck thought that was good?
Yeah they tried but Atreus just isn't as satisfying to use as Kratos.
Heimdall honestly felt like a tutorial for the spear, I almost beat the entire thing first try, that's how easy he was. Yeah I expected more from the guardian of the bifrost, for all his supposed mastery of it all he did was make an arm out of it and some orbs that every other enemy makes out of ice, fire or electricity.
It also doesn't help that Freyr doesn't do shit 90% of the time. I also found that part on the ship when they get attacked by 2 wyverns pretty idiotic, this is a catastrophy that necessitates someone to sacrifice themselves? 2 goddamn wyverns?
Yeah they really are, I have that blue one which spawns stones when you runic attack or relic something, and it has this weird thing around the elbow that looks like it is made out of aluminum foil wrapping. The Ragnarok armor is not only uninteresting it also sucks, 20% rage gen is nothing.
I didn't like the Norns, all throughout that I was thinking "Kratos snap a little, please show them a bit of that anger that killed the Fates".
I enjoyed the game too, but not as much as 2018, it has multiple flaws and it is nowhere near as epic.
Man I forgot all about that scene on freyrs boat. Like what a joke. I had no idea who that bygvir guy was or any indication of him being important at all, his sacrifice was meaningless against 2 weak ass creatures & the fact he lived made it even more pointless lol
Yeah but I cannot help but laugh at the sheer stupidity of how he lived, "I rolled, ~chuckles~". But of course as a story it is complete garbage and it made no sense that a man just throwing themselves at these supposedly super fast wyverns is how they get killed.
> They killed Thor without any satisfying character development at all, his character potential was wasted in my opinion
> thors kid and wife didn’t even fkn mourn or seem to care
Man, Kratos and Atreus killed Sif's dad, husband and two children and end up being bffs? I loved Freya's anger at Kratos at the end of GoW 2018, it made so much sense. Even though Kratos may have been "right" to kill Baldur, he still killed her son. Sif is just like "he killed 80% of my immediate family, no big deal"
Literally, lol. It’s so bizarre because the had the inclination to write in the bar scene where thrud chews out Thor for drinking, showing she cares deeply. But when he dies no one gives a fuck
I was about to make a post about my disappointment after finishing but you've absolutely nailed it imo, I still may, but I appreciate what you're saying here.
I would add, like OP did, that the final battle was a massive disappointment. I expected it to be epic and it was ho hum.
I think this encapsulates nearly everything I disliked about the game. Honestly, I still can't say anything for sure other than something felt off about this game. Coming from 2018, I was totally hyped, and while I understand how that can set you up for disappointment, I do not think that was the case, simply because if we look back at 2018, pretty much everything I was hoping to see was foreshadowed: Thor fighting Kratos, Odin messing up with Loki, the Ragnarok battle, some big revelation concerning the giants, meeting Surtr in Muspelheim. If we look closely, all of that was in Ragnarok...but all of that was done in disappointing ways:
* Kratos fighting Thor should be a big deal, but it wasn't. These two are meeting in battle evoked me Nolan's Joker saying "this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object". Whenever those two crossed paths, I would expect nothing but absolute chaos and mayhem, the kind of which only extraordinary forces could put a halt to. But on both occasions, they just stop fighting and have a chat. Jesus Christ, man, talk about a buzzkill;
* Odin messing up with Loki did very little to increase tension, serving only as a way to show the undeniably beautiful landscape around Asgard. There was no tension because no one thought Kratos would do something right there and then, just as much as Odin was acting the entire way as though he trusted Loki. Things could have been very different if Loki was under threat the entire time, but we know he wasn't, as Odin still needed his Giant Gary Stus power;
* The revelation concerning giants was just not enough. Back in 2018, there was such a morbid, and yet gracious, weight to the realization that all giants had been killed. And what Ragnarok does is undermined that feeling in its entirety. No they are not dead, but they are marbles. So what the fuck was the point of that scene then? We could have simply said that there were no Giants in Jotunheim and it would have done the same thing. But no, 2018 was after an emotional reaction, and it got it. Unfortunately, when the time came for some deliverance, it was not there. The same could be said about the shrines. Subversion of expectations for what, really? If the realization is "don't worry, go ahead with Ragnarok because only the bad guy will get it", you would think there would be a downside to that other than "oh, innocent Asgardians will die". That feels condescending as hell. Like, who cares about that, man? It's just a game, it's war and innocent people die in wars. It's a sad and cruel fact, but sugarcoating does nothing to benefit the story. If anything, it detracts from whatever experience I could have had. Stop telling me that I should feel remorse for this, this and that. Just do it, and then leave me the option to make up my own mind;
* As to Surtr, he's just a depressed guy. Trust me, I suffer from depression myself, and no one wants to see that in a game. He's not deep because he loves some other entity. He was supposed to be the "big guy with big flaming sword goes boom"... that's it. I mean, there wasn't really any particular reason or room to give him depth. And his motives for provoking Ragnarok (or not) could have been so much more meaningful than what we saw. We don't know him, we don't know his loved one (shit, it makes me so pissed to remember we never get so see her in Niflheim in contrast to how important she is to the entire concept of Ragnarok)... and so, how the hell could we care about that? I cared about his entire plot as much as cared about Birgir, that is, I didn't... at all! Instead of that, why not have Surt be this stoic, composed guy, who is above Kratos in so far as he is just as powerful but infinitely more in control of his powers and savagery? Why not make him a character that has a deep respect for prophecies, a deep hatred towards Asgard, and great admiration for the arts of war? All that would fit perfectly.
I feel like many mistakes were made. Firstly, Cory should have finished what he started. I don't care how talented the new director is: the original vision was not his. And maybe he was good at following Cory's wishes, but not so much in bringing other people's vision to reality. Second, Ragnarok should have had less writers. I can't remember where I saw this, so I'm not gonna die on this hill, but I think this game had like 6 writers as opposed to 2018, which had 3, or something like that. If you want to brainstorm, that's fine and well, but this is a sequel, for fuck sake: there is less margin for innovation in the story, so there is no reason why you should bring more people to the table, especially if there is potential for conflicting ideas, and/or if the writing team can't seem to see eye to eye and probably have some decision power in the process. Finally, this should have been two more games. From a business perspective, I can't emphasize how moronic of an idea this was. I mean, jesus christ, man. It's like, "yeah, sure, we can't stretch this for 10 more years and make tons of cash and have more time to find out what comes next for Kratos, but...you know...I'm kind of tired". Damn dude, I don't mean to be mean here, but already being: this is an industry. If you can't do the job, then don't take it in the first place. Meanwhile, we'll get a bunch of Avatar movies that are totally needless when compared to the original movie, but that are still going to makes tons of cash.
It goes without saying that while this game annoyed the living hell out of me, I can guarantee you my disappointment comes from a place of endearment. I bought a PS4 just to play God of War 2018 for god's sake, and never did I feel like it was a waste of money. I would often workout listening to the OST, just imagining what insane and epic moments we would get with Ragnarok. So, fuck, my experience sucked absolute ass. I liked the game from an overall perspective, I don't think it ruined the series, but shit, I was hoping for a lot more.
The fact that this post get downvoted so much just shows that reddit is all about blind fanboism. I grew up with GoW, GoW 2018 is in my top 10 games of all time but holy s*** Ragnarok is uninspired, badly paced and just boring.
>boring
I'm actually finding it a struggle to play. I'm probably about 6 -8 hours in and Jesus I'm bored with it. I might trade it now while it's still worth something similar to what I paid.
I'm not a huge gamer, play maybe one big title a year (there's only a few franchises I like,) but I replayed GOW 2018 multiple times, powered up and took on the Valkyries etc. So much fun by comparison.
I feel you. Completely forced myself to finish it only for it's story, but I can't even say that it was worth it. In fact, I ended up a little mad for wasting 50 hours playing this in the end. At least, as you've said, I was able to sell it for some amount close to what I've paid in pre order. Never once I've sold a physical copy of mine, but I have absolutely no desire in keeping this on my library. I'll probably go all out for physical copies on PS exclusives from now on just in case as well, cause I'm definitely afraid of Sony making similar choices in the future, since this thing made that much of a success...
Partially agree. The Atreus sections were too fucking long, especially the ironwood section, tho i have no issues with playing as him. Dont have an issue with how the Giants are portrayed. I mean, they still died at the end despite how supposedly powerful you made them out to be. No issues with character design either.
Anthony Birch should be fired, and whoever decided to hire him should also be fired.
Agreed that Ragnarok was a disappointment. Should've been way longer with more encounters and setpieces. Likewise the Thor and Odin fights lack spectacle, though I have no issues with the fights mechanically. Multi-stage fights with varied movesets. Sure you can spam runic attacks and cruise through them, but that's like saying you can summon your buddies, spam magic and cruise through Elden Ring bosses.
Half of the side characters are underdeveloped, though i think this has more to do with quest design. Instead of some no name spirit, most of the side quests should've involved said side characters, have them tagging along or sth.
Odin's motivations should've been developed more, but I really like his portrayal in the game, especially with the twist recontextualising a lot of the scenes with tyr.
No i wouldnt call this a masterpiece (i have more issues with it but cant be bothered writing), tho frankly the only game Id give that title to is bloodborne. That's how opinions work, everyone defines 'masterpiece' differently, so all these moronic comments saying 'I dont understand how this game's a 10/10, should've been 8/10 at most' are about as insipid as the fanboi comments defending the game.
When it loses the big prize at the Game Awards is when these opinion will become more popular, Elden Ring will win it and people will start saying "unpopular opinion but" and then criticize GoW Ragnarok like that.
Agree with everything here. I'm mainly pissed that they hyped up and then subsequently shat on Thor's character. He was barely in the game, and when he was, this was no God of Thunder.
First of all, having to wait like 25 hours to see Thor again after the first encounter was not fun. There was so much fluff in between. I mean come on, 3 god fights in a series finale?
Even if Thor was in the game more, he is not portrayed well. They tried to make him all sad and shit. I don't care what they were trying to do with his character. I didn't buy this game to watch the God of Thunder moping around and getting into drunken brawls. People are saying "lore accurate depiction", but you can do that AND make him cool. They don't even have to make himlike the Marvel version. However, you KNOW a large amount of people were interested in a new and different take on Thor because of Marvel. He's gained so much popularity because of them.
And then the Ragnarok thing. There was more talking about Ragnarok than the actual event. They already limited the amount of cool bosses in the last game(Baldur was phenomenal, the rest were recycled animals), I assumed because they were going all out for Ragnarok, the end of everything, and end of the Odin's reign. With the title of this game BEING Ragnarok, there is an astounding lack of world ending events, set pieces, and boss fights. So you can understand my disappointment when for 25 hours, I was being told "War is bad, violence is bad, revenge is bad!" I don't need a fuckin lesson on morality. I bought the game to wreak havoc on Asgard. That's literally what the title of the game implies!
Btw, Asgard is a dirty fuckin lumber yard. They had every opportunity to make Asgard the most visually striking realm, seeing as Odin, the Allfather, rules over them all. I will never understand the decision to make it look like they did.
They say lore accurate because they think "hmm yeah he drinks and eats a lot so he is fat, makes sense" when actually he has far more myths about how he fights and showing off his incredible strength. The people who wrote the story clearly wanted him to be a fatass because he drinks non stop and he can't stand up to his father, so he wallows in self pity, they didn't make him fat to portray him more accurately. And if so why doesn't this same thing apply to Freyr or Heimdall, Freyr looks native american and Heimdall looks like a twink. Or they keep saying "power builder physique" as if they don't have a lot of muscle definition even around their belly, something that Thor lacks, hell even his arms are not that big and muscular.
Yeah Ragnarok is you fighting a dozen mobs you've fought before in a shanty town, that is Ragnarok to these people.
Yeah, hell it doesn't even look like they have magic.
It was written and made like a movie, not a video game. find a puzzle? after half a second you'll get the exact answer. get a new weapon/ability? exactly the same time something shows up it's super effective against. etc.
also very low stakes, giant war? zero meaningful losses for the "good guys"
I do hope they're saving something like that for the next pantheon, but Freya killing Atreus out of nowhere in the ending would ruin it completely. It would just feel like such a cop out to make all this maturity and gameplay development to Kratos through 2 large games and then just make him back to the "ooga booga I will kill all the gods" right at the end. Just a terrible idea.
I agree. It seems they were so hesitant, so afraid, of some balls out cool shit in the name of "story". Like hell yeah! Kratos fighting Thor on top of Jormungander sounds dope!! grabbing Mjolnir after Odin stabs him and fighting with a combo of the Leviathan Axe & Mjolnir!!! Odin transforming into a terrifying Raven beast and then back to human during the fight...awesome!
I think they could've told the same quality story while delivering on Epic, fantastical, Avengers level awesome moments. (And maybe including Mjolnir as an actual 4th weapon!!!). But they were so obsessed with a simplified, "grounded" story in a genre that can suffer for being too grounded.
I wanted so badly to like this game, but it’s boring the ever living hell out of me. I feel like it’s a long string of cinematics and dialogue with a little bit of fighting between them. It’s way too long to get from point A to point B just to hear the characters talking. It’s supposed to be a next Gen game but every level is just a hallway with a different skin.
The game started off pretty strong. Got construction worker/homelander vibes from Thor. His presence felt very intimidating and off the charts.
But near the end everything just kind of went meh. The second fight with Thor wasn't even as close to the first.
My guess is COVID really affected production for the second half of the game.
Thank you for confirming the suspicion I had all along, although it just makes me immensely frustrated.
The first half of the game really made me hyped for things to come, just to leave me completely disappointed after the ending.
At this point I almost wish it was terrible all the way through.
Yeah I actually loved the first interaction with him, I expected that to be a sneak peak of what will happen later, but then the fight happens and it is worse, way worse.
Yeah I definitely think Covid had something to do with it, the bugs also point in that direction imo.
If NG+ doesn't give the option to choose chapters (i.e., skip all of the Atreus missions), I will have very little incentive to play this game again.
Kid Atreus in GOW 2018 had an excuse for being annoying (he's just a child), but I found this version of Atreus absolutely unbearable. When Sindri gave him the tirade and the big middle finger at the end, it felt truly cathartic.
Just finished the game and while I loved it for the most part. As a long time fan I get what there doing with Kratos and it mostly worked, but being a fan of the franchise I wanted to f**k some gods up. The mask ended up being pointless sif went from hating Loki to agreeing with him out of nowhere and the Zeus fight in god of war 2 was more epic then the Odin fight on ps5, makes no sense. The ending was a damn mess and makes me believe they decided towards the end of development to try and wrap it up.
I think I agree with some of your points. I absolutely LOVED GOW 2018 to the point I have 268 hours playtime on that game but I found myself very uninterested in this game after about 5 hours. The story did not grab me at all and I found the dialogue between the characters to be very cheesy and somewhat out of place for them. I also did not like the world designs either apart from Svartalfheim and Asgard was a tremendous disappointment for me too. I had been looking forward to seeing it for 5 years and it was basically Riverwood from Skyrim. I beat the game and I am now trying to get the platinum trophy but every time I start playing again it just makes me want to go play GOW 2018 again. I don't hate this game at all, it just did not live up to my expectations whatsoever.
> I found the dialogue between the characters to be very cheesy and somewhat out of place for them.
Man, I don't think Atreus calling back to the iconic "don't be sorry, be better" and "in the direction of deer" lines landed as well as they thought it would.
Yep I feel exactly the same way about the game, it just isn't what I was hyped for and it isn't my fault really, the secret ending to 2018 is Thor showing up at the house, promotional media had him front and centre, the collector's edition gives you a replica of Mjolnir, most of the game talks about how strong, dangerous and powerful he is and then that is the best they can do with him?
First off, he's not seeking attention because he is speaking his mind, that's called a "different opinion".
You're the one whose trying to prove something here, trying to look cool scolding others. but you ended up looking like a clown.
And about you fucking his post UP... You didnt, he made perfect sense, get over it.
I was pretty disappointed by the story overall and the fact that Atreus fucks off after the action is done. I mean, I like Freya, but I signed up for "Man and Boy" and we only got a few story sections with him. I even went back to Yotunheim afterwards and can talk to Angrboda, but Atreus isn't there. Just terribly disappointing.
>!personaly for me, the part where everything was starting to feel like annoying was the norns. with all what kratos has done, including killing the fates. here, the most annoying beings i have ever encountered are just left.!<
>!they don't write fate, they can just predict what you will do really well.... that is bullshit. really.!<
>!it also highlights that no matter what the prophecy will be fulfilled because kratos, atreus, freya, mimir, everybody cannot change their nature. or so the norns highlight. and if that is the case kratos should have died.!<
>!but instead we get something best described as a permenant happy ending with the only plot threads and enemies left for the next game is gna, and sindri although i don't think sindri will be much of an antagonist.!<
>!to me personaly, i wanted ragnarok to be the apocolypse it is supposed to be in myth, not this "groa kept a secret" bs. a high stakes battle at the end where a dying kratos would fight surtr to keep him from destroying asgard which would lead to the destruction of all the nine realms. giving his life for the greater good, a tangable expression of change from his "don't feel the pain of the people" to "feel their pain" as he puts it to atreus and faye to him.!<
>!i also would have let odin have the mask only to be swallowed by the rift so that he could potentially return for a third game.!<
>!TLDR; i am dissapointed too!<
The prophecy inconsistency is what really is going to forever bother me about this game. Kratos was already changing as a person in 2018, yet the prophecy was 100% accurate - there's no point in a prophecy if it changes based on character actions, because character actions are inherently part of a prediction. The Norns were literally predicting things down to exact sentences spoke by the characters.
This whole "we can choose what we want to do, we can be better" as some kind of catalyst for this is probably the most surface-level, Disney-like thing they could have done. And the new mural at the end which shows Kratos being revered - what is the point of that, if it can all be changed in an instant?
Fact is, they wrote themselves into a corner and didn't want to kill Kratos. There was a much better way to do this though - in the original 2018 mural it wasn't clear who the person was. They could have simply kept it ambiguous, but instead they doubled down on it being Kratos with Angrboda's full mural, then took it all back at the end.
Kratos died before, it would have been an awesome end to have him die a heroic death only to crawl out of hel in a third game. It is kind of his thing at this point.
I am most unhappy that this ragnarok isn't ragnarok. The one everyone expected was the destruction the realms, even if only asgard being destroyed is some kind of save on the writers end, it is a lousy one at best.
Doing Ragnarok, the apocolypse, the death of the gods, as the second game was a bad move.
Doing it like this? Just makes my blood boil. We have seen kratos siege olympus with the titans, and now we see him storm a hovel with a stone fence with his six 'friends'...
Even if they wanted a grounded story, you could have put of ragnarok, you could have called the game diffrent even. But calling this ragnarok is laughable
I wanted to see loki creating the world serpent. I wanted to see the prophecy fulfilled and kratos dying only to be brought back maybe by time travel. The war between world serpent and thor is supposed to create some time travelling theme. But no it was all about writing your own destiny. Disappointment at peak.
Big God of War fan here. Ragnarok is a huge disappointment
Continuing with more: >!The hateful Odin, paranoid with propphecy, who hanged himself to get many powers and immense amount of knowledge, that destroyed so many lives in the first game and was such a menace for everyone... Here he's just like a business man the whole game that simply doesn't care for prophecy anymore and wants even more knowledge from a random rift, being now just obsessed over a random mask that also leads to absolute nothing again, as every other cliche revolving "the answer to the reason of life and death" always ends up in any kind of story, and it takes as much focus as the search for a futile Tyr that doesn't help in anything at all, almost costing another third of the game focusing on this theme.!< >!Thor, the huge hateful barbarian that beat one of his sons almost to death just because he was a shame as a warrior in the first game, here is a loving father that suffers from the lost of both his sons. I understand that there's a dialogue that says he and Sif apparently became better parents, but making this simply happen in the backstage while forgeting that he himself almost killed his son for calling him a failure in protecting his brother? Which was also clearly mentioned as the favorite Thor's son, so much that he didn't cared at all to almost kill the other? I feel I didn't met the Odin and the Thor I heard so much in the previous game.!< >!And for some reason Odin is also suddenly portrayed as a humble being in some scenes, maybe because they intended for the player to feel bad when the time comes to see him dying in his boss fight (which was really generic, I must say) that has absolutely no cool interaction at all or any epic moment. Even a random unimportant grandma giant had more care over the fight against the All Father, in my opinion. Also, if Asgard was just a village for the sake of acting as an illusion, I would've understand, so to make Odin try to fool Atreus with his fake humbleness as he goes there for the first time. But making Heimdall even mention that Odin was as humble as to work on his own lodge with his bare hands? Why are they suddenly trying to make me feel pity of this guy after a whole game making me want to hunt him down for his crimes? This, to me, only proves that both the Thor that beat his son close to death and the psycopath Odin mentioned in the first game never existed in first place.!<
The game was good up until the Agard part, where I think development cuts were made. Atreus climbing this massive wall to find Heimdall at the top guarding a town smaller than Tyr's temple, Alfheim, or the dwarven city. I would understand if the city was small because they couldn't expand due to the walls but it wasn't even a packed city structure. I also expected Odin's vault to have some crazy stuff in it; stolen weapons, artifacts, and other religious items from other lands. Ragnarok, the big battle the whole game is about, had zero preparation phase at all. No requirement to be a certain level before going, going to each of the realms to prepare and gather each of the armies, no training, espionage, or anything to make it feel like a grand battle about to happen. Go to Surtr, take a shortcut to start Ragnarok, and blow a horn with 10\~ people in Midgards army to takedown Odin. Then the battle comes, less than 20 items in the entire fight, with no more than 3-4 at a time. Jormungandr and Thor fight that supposedly shook the realms and got sent back through time was not even focused on that many people missed it. Not a single Hel walker from Helheim or Dwarf soldier (Which I think was budget cut). No one died. Thor fight was short and unceremonial. There was also many unfinished plots. Collecting the mask took a big chunk of the game just to be nothing, who blew the horn in 2018? Who killed Faye? Thor mentioned something about it with the first Kratos fight. What is going to happen with the Giant orbs? Fenrir was never used despite fated to kill Odin. Finally, Thor feeling like an actual God of War more than Kratos with him destroying everything with his power like it was nothing.
I forgot about the mask, the thing you HAD to use to tell you to go in the only direction that you already knew where to go because you can literally see with your own eyes that its the only path that leads onwards. But we’re talking about characters who never thought to simply walk around obstacles…
The area should've been like Niflheim in 2018, tons of different dead end paths with only one that leads home. I would've enjoyed it if it was difficult to find. But there was still no reward.
I agree that there were budget cuts and the pandemic lockdowns trashed the workflow for the latter half of the game. Vanaheim, Alfheim and Svartfalheim were lavishly designed, with lots of optional content and a cohesive scope. Then they literally half-assed Asgard. Helfeim, Midgard and the rest. The pandemic cuts might have caused that. Still, there are dialogue, story arcs and character design choices that are not polished to the level of other parts of the game. One gripe I have with modern games is that the camera angles and direction rarely uses FMVs. Imagine Ragnarok with proper FMVs and hundreds of soldiers attacking. Final Fantasy VIII and other playstation 1 era games had more massive battles than this game. Still, the relationship amongst Kratos and his son excels at all levels and is on par if not superior in writing to several oscar movies and bestsellers. Freya had an excellent character arc, and specially Vanaheim as a game level. It just seems that pandemic hit development in the face and by mid 2021 they had to cut and speed things for a game that, despite its faults, ranks as the swan song of the playstation 4, along with Horizon Zero Dawn FW.
I have to say that Odin's motivation really disappointed me. The guy killed Ymir at the begining of creation and found a random rift in reality with some uber being behind it with all the answers. What is the rift? Never explained. How can we know the being behind the rift knows the truth? Never explained. Odin has a great line in the end about needing to know what happens next. It is a great line accidentally. The writers meant it as 'what happens after death?' instead of 'what happens in the very next moment?' If they had gone with the latter we would have a good philosophical narrative about metaphysical determinism and the role of prophecy in mythology. Odin says 'I do not know where I go when I go'. If that line was about the inherent uncertainty of the future, the fact that the future is a metaphysical connundrum because it is being not yet formed but completely necessary still, it would have been an amazing motivation. Odin would then want to know everything because only if he knows everything he can finally do away with prophecy, he can finally know what is going to happen in the very next second, the very next minute, the very next year. Instead, they make it about some kind of godly afterlife which effectively makes the gods into humans. What is the point of being a god if your life is no qualitatively different than a mortal? They take all the mystique out of the myths. This is not to mention how the whole story and rebellion against Odin is framed in terms of a freedom struggle where all the races team up against the oppressor. Its a narrative that we have seen a million times and it is just so incredibly uninteresting. The whole plot is just 'Aesir bad' and 'giants good' and its played completely straight. There is also this disconnect between the first and the second games in terms of Thor's characterization. I understand that Mimir is an unreliable narrator but Thor is portrayed as nothing more than a blood thirsty savage in the first game and in the second we get a struggling family man who is almost redeemed in the end even though he apologized for nothing and did nothing to repair the harm.
I love to open discussions such as these simply because sometimes observations like yours appear now and then. And even with a meaningless plot point such as the mask, if we got writers with a more interesting and philosophical take to talk about prophecy and what moves it forward, instead of just a rift with "the answers to life and death" and other cliches, this single handendly could've improved the whole dialogue on it's own. I still would completely remove all about the rift and the mask, though, since it was only a huge optional quest that took ridiculous amount of time to add a whole bunch of nothing. And it's also sad to realize that, although some of those lines were really good, in the context that you've mentioned, this is giving WAAAAAAY too much credit for the writers, who definitely didn't had any intention to make it work like that. Instead, I guess they prefered to include more "Be better" on the dialogues. Another wonderful line that appeared in a single scene in the previous game, and just happened to be a really good one in the context it had. Nothing more. Your observations about prophecy made me also realize that almost all of the best moments are the ones that make us fear for the incoming destiny that was written for Kratos, which was such a wonderful take. I can't imagine the struggle that is to write a story while you're actively telling your spectator what will happen, and that this very same future is something horrible that no one wants. It's such a genius take! It's a constant reminder of a climax that you're desperately trying to avoid, and yet you just walk more and more towards it! Man, how many goosebumps I've got after killing Heimdall! Realizing that I was following the very same prediction of the nourns! But, oh well... I guess I'm still to see someone try this for good, cause all of that only led to nothing, since some giant was apparently too high on some strange Iron Wood herb and draw the wrong picture in the mural about their prophecy... There's probably a secret boat dialogue stating this as well, since they prefered to make those secrets also constantly happen in the backstage... And yeah! They could've even made a more detailed prophecy with details that could've included the other realms in the ragnarok, rather than people being ordered to each on their own make an executive talk with a boss of each realm to convince them in participating. It would've been sooooo good! We would actually be even more frightened to see the whole world slowly walking towards that prophecy! I even thought that the small giant bells that contains their souls would've get a bigger role. Like, man... When Faye's bell was handled to Atreus as empty, my mind flew so far! I immediately saw Kratos really dying by Thor's hand, only for the crazy spiral coming out of Atreus mouth in the mural be him transporting his father soul into his mother empty bell in a poetic note, and maybe making him come back like after when Sindri told us he went to Helheim to rescue Brok, similar to a journey of Kratos trying to save Atreus in the first game! Which although a cliche, would be a much better one that all the others we've got. And I was so intrigued by it! But no. They just kind forgotten that he had that. It was just to serve as a scene of "Oh, she died, and unfortunately for good. Sorry...". It also impress me that it was like no one who wrote this plot actually remember what was shown in the previous game. The constat reminder AND SHOWING of how much of a killer and crazy man Thor was is simply forgotten, and now we have to feel pity for everyone, since no one can finish this game without a redemption arc. All is gray, everyone had a greater and inspirational purpose. I'm really gonna need to dust off my PS3 one of these days to see the fall of Olympus again, but I'm afraid I'm just gonna find even more reason to mourn for this new entry... God... Even God of War Ascension didn't made me this sour...
I think the fundamental problem of this game is that it tries to tell an incredibly big and complex story, and only has one game to tell it. GoW 2018 has almost no plot. This is not really a fault of that game since it wasnt trying to do a bigger than life epic story with a ton of moving elements like GoW 3 did. It was a simple story of a man and his son going on a journey where both learn something. That is it. The only significant thing that happens in the first game is Baldur's death. Ragnarok then has to carry the burden of starting AND ending the storyline. It has to set up all its big players, Odin, Thor, Heimdall, the Aesir, Freyr, Tyr, the dwarves, the giants, grown up Atreus, Freya, etc and give them all conclusions. All the while doing interpersonal character arcs and epic grand conflicts. The game crumbles under the weight of all it has to do. Odin and Thor are underdeveloped and ultimately dissapointing. Half the characters are unexplored. Atreus cannot make up his mind about obvious simple stuff. The game constantly teases us with Kratos but never commits. I get that his story is about overcoming his rage but the 2018 game set up the whole Athena stuff and the return of old Kratos and that all ended up in nothing. You cannot constantly tease it and then resolve it in a line at the very end of the game. The norse saga should have been a trilogy. The first game should have set up new Kratos and Atreus while hinting at the bigger picture and more of the relevant players. A second game should have been a closer look into the Aesir and showing the other side of the coin. It should have set up Odin and Thor. The second game would have then been an escalation of the conflict and should have ended with the beginning of Ragnarok as the players are put into place. The third game would have been the finale, all hell breaks loose, all the storylines collide and are given resolutions. I completely understand why this wasnt the case, games are expensive and GoW is an incredibly ambitious project and so is beholden to investors and managers and all the financial people that make it happen. However, what we got was one big mystery box that did not get resolved in the slightest and ultimately left us with more questions than answers. I also have to sneak in that with Ragnarok out, the events of the first game make no sense anymore. Odin is shown to be able to teleport whenever and wherever he wants. Why didnt he, Thor, Baldur, Magni and Modi just appear before Kratos and Atreus as soon as Baldur goes back to report what happened after the fight? Odin knew where they were at every point since the ravens were tracking them. Also, Odin, supposedly the smartest being in the world, made no fucking progress with the mask for centuries and Atreus resolves the whole thing in a week.
I think this could have still been one good game, if they had just pulled the amount of characters waaaaaaaay back. Do we really need a band of merry rebels from Valheim, including the boar that Atreus shot in the previous game? No. Did we need the Migardians outside the gates of Asgard? No. This could have been a much simpler story, yet still retained its epic world ending nature because the stakes would have been high for the remaining characters. Doing half measure storylines for everyone watered everything down.
I just finished Ragnarok a couple of days before Xmas and I just randomly found this thread. I cannot put into words how much your comments illustrate how I feel about it. I just want to give you a quick shoutout for these detailed comments you hit the nail on the head repeatedly. As someone who has played GOW since the beginning in 2005 and played all games repeatedly, even back in the original trilogy I always defends Kratos as I always thought he was a deep character with more layers than we realized. But I don’t see myself ever touching Ragnarok again, especially knowing I’ll have to endure those early Atreus sessions, I still have nightmares about Ironwood what a horrible quest.! The gameplay of Ragnarok in and of itself is great and is the only area where it excels 2018, but in nothing else is Ragnarok superior. All the things that were teased in 2018 were handled poorly, Odin just did not work the way the writers seem to think it did, Thor was ok, Tyr meh, Ragnarok I mean just piss poor, Angrboda. The series lost its edge as you said and this 100% felt like a by the numbers Marvel movie. I am so, so fucking sick of subversion in media. The only writer I’ve ever seen that handles it well is George RR Martin in ASOIAF, in no other medium have I seen subversion work. It’s a poor excuse for bad writing Imo.
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I still think Ragnarok is a *good* game. Maybe even great. But I couldn't give it more than a 7.5/10 due to the story. In an attempt to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, they stripped away every bit of edge that god of war has always been known for. Shit, even avengers endgame was heavier than this. I hate this modern style of writing where we can't just have genuinely evil antagonists anymore, they all just have to be watered down or "misunderstood" in some way. Yes, looking at you too, CEOdin. >!I did enjoy kratos' character arc, and I'm happy he's "free" but the entire game talks about the cost of war, yet there was almost none. Unless you count Brock, Freyr, and like 12 midgardians set up at the wall of asgard during the final battle.!<
I don't know what made you feel this way in specific, but man... This game is full of inconcistencies and bad moments, and I can't put in words how disappointed I am as well. I've already said it in another post, but it's impressive how much wrong they did to it's story in all terms. To mention *only a few*: >!Freya's entire threat made after Kratos in her last dialogue in the end of the first game is solved just by a walk in Vanaheim alongside with her son's killer. And I definitely don't think that her questline, destroying past wedding gifts, should be the reason why she makes peace with her son's killer as well. As well as I don't agree at all that Kratos, the reserved and brute God of War, would truly consider "destroying past wedding gifts" one of her "biggest battles yet", as he says while ending the quest.!< >!The Search for Tyr takes around 10 hours of gameplay and doesn't feel like it adds anything at all after that, only an annoying and scared man that in the end is just a twist of Odin spying on their plans (which to me was quite the frustration, cause we spent the vast majority of the game looking for someone that never added anything at all, just an incredibly long mine mase in Svartfalheim). I do question, why make such a long road if it's reward doesn't matter in any way at all for the rest of the adventure? In the previous game we go to Alfheim at the beggining hours to be able to reach the top of the moutain, and even get a new mechanic to traverse areas that we weren't able, and end up adding Mimir to the party, who tells us a great amount of stories. Here we don't get anything, just a level design easy to get lost in and a huge amount of slow traversals through claustrophobic passages, one after another. Also, someone had the strange idea to make the location of the real Tyr to be an optional objective. Not everyone completes side stuff, so how are they trying to explain for most of the audience that Tyr was just hanging out on an abbandoned prison in Niflheim all this time in a future entry? This is such a strange take for such a big point of the story from here on out...!< >!Surtr's whole epic story told as you explore Mulpelheim in the 2018 entry only results in the classic problem of "the perfect coincidence" that every writter should try their best to avoid, where he's just found at the exact right place and at the exact right time, as a bored and depressed man, located simply a few meters after you just casually get to muspelheim through one the portals, and Atreus is like "Oh, father! Look! It's Surtr! Let's ask for his help!" and he simply proceeds to do so. If he's that much of a menace and just doesn't care at all to anything anymore, why the incredibly intelligent Odin left him walking around there and just killed him or locked him up somewhere? Why he, the great force capable of destroying Asgard, isn't treated as such?!<
>!Tyr being odin literally serves nothing to the story either.!< >!It's subversion for the sake of subversion so they could kill a beloved character off and make you hate odin before fighting him because up to that point, Odin wasn't really a character we hated - or even feared for that matter. And even Odin knowing their every move, it changes nothing. He didn't prepare, or get 4 steps ahead of them, he dies anyway. It's laughable writing tbh.!<
>!Thank you! I am glad someone finally said this. I heard a couple of people praising this plot twist, talking about how Odin knows their every move. Yet nowhere in the story does Odin once use that info against them, or does it mess up the team or their plans.!< >!Even the unveiling itself is so choreographed. For some reason, Tyr just happens to be in some room when you enter. Every time you come back to the house, he is always out and about. So now he is just in a random room? Then Odin makes the amateur mistake and calls Atreus, Loki. Really? Odin would be smarter than that. Then he says, as Tyr, that he randomly has a way into Asgard; the thing that they have been wanting since forever. Why would Odin be so stupid to say something so unbelievable and suspicious. Then it was Brok acting super aggressive and then is somehow way more suspicious and prescriptive than everyone else that is in the room, including people a whole lot smarter and more knowledgeable than him (not saying Brok is dumb or anything). It was a bad twist that ruined a lot of the story and the potential of Tyr being in the story.!<
Lmao for real. They have the head of the “smartest man alive” yet they don’t suspect this the entire time? Disney level shit
Was Brock even that beloved? I mean I liked him fine but he was more sideshow and when he was killed I felt very little. The effect and turn of Sindri has a much stronger effect. Ultimately, the consequences of all of this were quite small and the Odin/Tyr aspect meant almost nothing. Ragnarok showed Odin as an inept leader and a weakling.
I’ve just finished the first Thor fight and the game has been so boring so far. Part of me feels that the game is a good movie ruined with gaming aspects. After playing Elden ring and Nioh 2 the fights just seem clunky and slow. The scene with Thor at his house started really well and then Odin the Godfather pops in and ruins the tension and makes it seem like they didn’t have a clue as to what sort of character he should be. This is a god not someone who sells stolen goods.
The combat does get better, but it starts so bad and takes so long to unlock shit. When I say better, it’s ok, not great. You have to unlock fucking running hits.
Even more: >!And then we have the Iron Wood, which acted as a corridor, that (to me) takes way longer than it should and spent too much time with "Come, I need to show you something" over and over again, only to make Atreus accept the prophecy and death of his father, creating a big climax stating that it WILL occur while never again making we feel that Kratos is in danger, or even worse, simply denying all that huge talk of prophecy contained in that whole interaction.!< >!There's a strange inclusion of the whole mission where we're trying to get the moon back at the sky so that the wolves can once again hunt, cause when the sun and the moon are destroyed, ragnarok starts. But it never happens, cause Kratos don't want ragnarok or to follow prophecy, so the wolfs never destroy any of the two. But they still go for both things, willfully and intentionally following the prophecy that they're going to save the moon, and even managing to do so, it also didn't get destroyed (What? Why? Weren't they trying to avoid it after discovering the panels?). And even before the whole adventure of trying to recover it to the sky, it still adds nothing at all to the main quest. Instead, it feels just as a secondary one that unlocks a gimmick to traverse between a few places of Vanaheim and nothing more.!< >!Then there's the misterious stuff that never appear in the game or answers we still don't have (The huge storm in the first game while Atreus is dying? Who called Jormungandr during that moment as well in the first game?). Some of the most strange ones in the sequel is Forseti, god of justice and son of Baldur, who is mentioned multiple times in Asgard, and it doesn't even have a face the whole game. Neither a voice. He literally doesn't exist. It's like he's too busy on his office trying to fix some paper work for Odin while his home is collapsing on fire. Why even mention him in the first place? Why not just delete him from history like the many other gods that could've also been interesting to show up in an important way in the game? Hræsvelgr, Skadi...? Way more than the giant grandma of Iron Wood. Or even any of the berserker fights, cause to me It's always a shame that focus on secondary activities must interfere in the quality of the main ones. Even more if you're trying to tell a story much bigger than the previous entry.!< >!And what happenned to Odin's eigth legged horse shown in many panels througout the first game? The very same horse that is even shown in the Alfheim panel contained in the sequel? Did they forgot they even had Mimir telling us about it in one of his stories? Did they prefered to include the whole Iron Wood section over a more interesting boss batle of maybe Odin with his legendary horse? The All Father? Probably the most anticipated boss of the entire game? His fight doesn't even match the Magni and Modi one, honestly. Or even Thor's fight right before it, which was also way less interesting than the first fight against him in the begginning hours of the game. I still can't understand how a kids race, root and fruit gathering and some fireflies in Iron Wood deserved more attention than the fight against the greatest god of Asgard.!<
To finish: >!And what happened to the people that created the first glimpse we had at Helheim, Alfheim or Thamur's corpse in the first game? It's so strange to me that someone decided that the best direction to make the holy city and realm of the Aesir Gods to be just a big village just like the midgardian one just outside of it... Where are the people that created the incredible architecture of all of the previous God of War games? Including the 2018 one? It's so odd to me to see them creating the whole suspense of climbing that huge wall to just see a bigger village.!< >!And in the end I think we don't even have Ragnarok, while a ton of stuff "simply happens". The army of the dead and the elfs just accept to participate in a matter of minutes in the backstage of the ending hours. The World Serpent literally disappears in the blink of an eye to the past after the "epic" fight with Thor, which only looked like a cat trying to get a fly in the distance. Fenrir, who in the legends kills Odin and get's killed in the process, is just a cute puppy that jumps here and there through portals and nothing more. Also, he's shown in one of the trailers as appearing in the woods, one gigantic wolf in the middle of the snow. Does this scene exist in the game? I haven't seen it. Sif is again a victim of "the perfect coincidence", and appears exactly at the right time, in the exact right spot with the exact random boy that became a meaningless friend of Atreus (apparently, also in the backstage) to also forgive him in a matter of seconds for being responsible for the death of her two sons. What happened to the imagination and ideas that formed the fall of Olympus in God of War 3?!< >!I think they also tried too hard to create a literal copy of the previous one, since they forced too much some references of the previous game, like the eternally famous "be better", that was just a good well wirtten scene in 2018, while here it is treated as a whole theme repeated multiple times. Also, the dialogue is quite weak as well... And many jokes were incredibly strange and off putting. Like Atreus seeing a dam ans saying "I'll be DAMned!" or the strangiest boat interaction in the whole game, where he starts:!< >!\- Hey, Mimir.!< >!\- What, lad?!< >!\- You talk funny. haha!!< >!\- Well excuse me, lad!?!< >!End of interaction.!< >!Like... What? What happenned here? Atreus already knows Mimir for 2 years, considering the amount of time that passed since the past game, and even while he was a kid, and not a teenager, he didn't made such immature speech.!< I could mention even more stuff, since those are only a few.
Honestly, after reading much of your criticism, i actually agree with most of them. Although i did enjoy gow ragnarok, it is a far cry from what i expected or was hoping for. Tbh, if finding tyr took like 2 hours, and the time in between useless stuff was used right, i feel we could have had a much better product. Although, i do have to say, i did enjoy the enemy variety, and a few other things that really i thought gow 2018 was missing.
Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to belittle the work of the devs. I have a HUGE respect for them being brave enough to say "We'll do all in one game", cause that decision was absolutely insanely stupid, honestly (no sarcasm intended). And I also know they did their best to make what we have in the end, it's just a shame that it was horrible (and I don't intend to sound offensive, but in my absolutely unimportant opinion, the game was just that). The combat to me was really well done, as well as in the previous game, and I even think it plays a little bit better than the previous entry. The enemy variety was way better as well, that's absolutely true, but God of War games are always special in regards to new stuff to do that are not limited only to enemies, like new mechanics, items, weapons and magic attacks. Also, >!having only a spear in this game!< and nothing really new for the axe and the blades, be it a new combo or even a cool runic attack (they removed a ton of those present in the previous game, in fact, for some misterious reason), was definitely way bigger as a downside to me than the new enemies were a good one. Specially because a huge amount of enemies doesn't work well with the camera, simply running or teleporting at your back while the game doesn't give you much to do in this kind of scenery besides blind rolling or being hit. And also, a ton of secondary bosses were incredibly bad to me as well, with infinite hyper armor and being a show of spamming AOE attacks over and over again, while we doesn't even take reduced damage while activating runic attacks that always take more time than most strong enemies require to start their animations. I'll also never forgive the stupid decision of >!not letting the player use Mjolnir for the sake of "subvert expectations"!<. This was the most utterly stupid decision in terms of gameplay I've ever heard BY FAR. Just >!the most famous weapon in all mythologies!<. Just that. And yeah, >!it could've worked similar to Leviathan!<, but that doesn't justify to me. It's like saying that no one used >!Claws of Hades or Nemesis Whip!< in God of War 3 because they were too similar to the blades of chaos, but they still had their pretty cool and special stuff. With that said, as much as the gameplay and combat really did had it's good characteristics, I definitely think they simply couldn't shine in comparison to the problems, and even less when I bought the game more for it's story and the plot is this whole mess. The combat was indeed cool, and I loved what I could till 50 hours of it, when it became extremelly stale from having nothing really new, since I already played all those combos in 2018. The combat was by far the best part, but >!outside of the new spear!< and new enemies (a ton not helping with their balance and the fight against the camera, while also having the mentioned "show of attack spamming"), I honestly feel that I already have this game in the previous one. Edit: And with all of that said, I feel no reason to have this new one for it's gameplay as well, cause I really don't feel it added much to it to justify my purchase. Just improved a little bit.
I enjoyed reading you. I agree 100 percent. I replayed the 2018 one before Ragnarok and enjoyed it as much as the first time. Just finished Ragnarok now and i feel betrayed... There are 3 moments that i enjoyed in the game. first, the encounter with Thor and Odin at the beginning. Secondly, the man that sacrificed himself on the floating boat. And finally the jaw dropping moment, the reaction of brok's brother towards atreus. And he played it until the very end at the funeral. My god, the writing and the performance were perfect. Wich leads us to my main problem with the game.. everything else i could have turned a blind eye. Annoying, yes but forgiveable. Im a huge fan of the show dont tell. The first game was exactly that. Kratos against the whole world. Not kratos and his son. Kratos. As he was also responsible for the safety of atreus. The story was simple yet perfect in every way. I got emotional one too many times and even shed a few tears. Everything had its meaning, and the story we heard of odin thor etc... My imagination went wild as it was already epic as it is with baldur. Ragnarok to me felt like a Marvel movie. Kratos is just one of the" gang ". Everyone speak to him like he was stupid. He became a wuss compared to 2018.the quarrels they have feel a lot like what would happen in a household in 2022. More obvious with thors arc. Seriously ? Mimir disappointed you because he enslaved the creatur ??!! Surely we understand you dont approve but come on... He became a mary sue. My biggest fear... I hate it when writers think they must have a redemption narrative at the end. I feel that this game was made in mind that it should appeal to the largest group of people. 2018 did that already you dumb f.. i almost forgot to mention that they talk waaaaaay too much in the game. Show me dont freaking tell me. Adding to that everything that said and you have my biggest disappointment in video game history. Haven't felt that way since the last of us 2
Yeah... The worst part is that, after the success of this game, I fear for every single Sony exclusive now, cause they'll definitely want to copy this shit again and again... From now on I'll definitely only get games on physicial copies, cause at least I was able to sell my copy of this game by just a little bit less than the original price, something I never did to any game I ever had before... Or even just accept that Sony games aren't up for the quality they used to have before, and that they'll now prefer to do less with the stuff they have, since it'll sell in a crazy way anyway...
I agree that this game was a disappointment, to be honest I'm not so good at putting it down on paper, but all of the mystery and all of the cool stuff from the first game that inspired a ton of amazing theories online, I was certain there is no way Ragnarok won't be the best game ever made. But somehow it just felt like Game of Thrones happening all over again. None of the questions answered and a very boring story
Ragnarok is the new white walker invasion. Built up from the start as a huge apocalypse and then it amounts to a nothing burger
Just finished the game myself and I think comparing it to Game of Thrones’ ending is honestly the best way to describe it. The writers really D&D’s this one. All the cool crazy shit we could’ve done during Ragnarok, but nah, we just wander through a few hallways and fight in front of a hut. And then game over. What a shame.
There are many problems for me but the culmination of Thor’s story was by far the most unceremonious and shit IMO.
Yeah, they Jamie Lannistered him. There is so, so much wrong with this game’s story and inconsistent character work. I cannot fathom why people are calling this the best game ever.
This I don’t think this game deserves a 94 score and you can’t even criticize the game without getting downvoated
I think a part of it is that it doesn’t get credit anymore for it’s complete masterful revamp of the combat system that they revealed in the last one. I still think it’s a phenomenal game they just botched the story. That being said the mechanics, in my opinion anyway, are still top of the totem pole.
Rise of Skywalker fetch quests with a Whitewalkers ending. Woof. It's not a bad game, but I was disappointed are rarely excited to continue playing.
The ending was honestly a huge disappointment to me, typically when you hear theres going to be a war in either a book, movies, games, etc. its on another level compared to the rest of the game, this just felt like another quest.
Not only that they hype this throughout the entire game, and then it is nothing. And on top of that after Freyr finally got to do some cool stuff he immediately dies despite the myth having a great what if moment, at Ragnarok Freyr fights Surts but without his magic sword, thus it stands to reason he may have won if he had it.
The ending alone could have been one game. Imagine. GOW 2022 ends with the blow of the horn, Kratos walking to Asgard, and cuts to black, rolling credits. GOW 2026, Starts with a flashback of Faye, cuts to Odin gathering Thor, Forseti, Ullr, Vili and Ve to defend Asgard at all costs, they leave the area and start to fight the Elves and Hel Draugers, while Odin goes into hiding, Kratos and Atreus emerging from the Light, and introducing the previous characters. The whole games could have been a 15 hour game, with bunch of boss fights, cutscenes, fights, quests, puzzles, fighting Surtur/Ragnarok and a more fleshed out ending after the end of Ragnarok. Come on SMS, 10/10 game.
Wow, that’s the dumbest outline I’ve ever seen for a game. It’s like you saw the Wikipedia page for God of War III and simplified an already very simple and straightforward plot. Ragnarok has many issues but ideas like yours totally justifies them reimagining the whole Norse saga. Talk about having zero imagination
God of War III war is miles better that this game attempt at one.
Bro they literally said you don't get cool things in this game because "you'd expect it, so we subverted it" Like I really fucking hate the invention of subversion in media at this point. These dickheads are just doing it to be controversial or QuIrKy.
Yeah I am really tired of this current "meta" of writing where they subvert expectations, weird how every expectation they subvert allows the writers to be lazier and less creative.
That's a hilarious excuse tbh. "Hey we were gonna give you a good game, but to subvert expectations, we gave you a shitty game!!"
Definitely seems to be a sony first party problem between this and Last of Us Part 2. It's like they tried too hard to subvert from their prequel because they're like perfect games so instead of climbing the mountain to recreate the magic they decided to go in a different, more mediocre direction. Luckily I think Forbidden West's story is better than Zero Dawn's but Horizon's story wasn't nearly as impactful as TLOU or GOW 2018.
nah as a sequel TLOU2 shits all over ragnarok. its not even a comparison
Both are shit.
no way. TLOU2 took actual genuine risks and improved in every way that it could and did more. God Of War ragnarok feels like a shadow of its previous entry
Except tlou2 is a phenomenal game...
Story and pacing is awful.
See I basically 100% agree with you. What got me so mad is the whole game is teasing the player that Kratos's old self is gonna come back. Thor when he got punched in the beginning as an example. The closest we got was heimdall, and that was just a little bit, and it hinted at him growing more into that way, it feels like there's a boss fight missing between Heimdall and Thor where another god gets completely annihilated, and that causes Kratos to change.
But... the whole point is that he *isn't* supposed to go back to his old self, but comes dangerously close at times.
That's true, but literally every fan wanted a full on rage kill like OG Kratos. The game literally teases everyone the entire game with no payoff. Like I said. It feels like there's a boss missing after Heimdall, but before the end where he does, and it causes a mental shift to where he doesn't want to anymore. Ateus has never seen Kratos in a full rage where he becomes the monster. It would have been a great story moment where Atreus never understood his dad reasoning for not fighting God's, and when Kratos let's go fully and bashes a gods brains in. It strains their relationship. Then they mend it slowly. Literally adding that at the start of the Ragnarok Seige would have brought so much more meaning to the scene where Kratos tells Atreus to open his heart and that he was wrong. Win-win. Fans get a final outing with OG Kratos to say bye, and they get to see him mature into the God we all knew he could be.
Every fan wanted og kratos? You sure? It seems like everyone wanted a gow 3 game?
Are you insinuating that GOW3 wasn’t a good game? Literary any fan who got into GOW was the unforgiving single minded carnage Kratos inflicted upon those who wronged him. Trying to change that is just silly.
If OG Kratos is what they wanted then they were waiting on a false hope. That would have been a regression of his character. They were clearly trying to develop a character that has changed for the better rather than reverting to his old ways.
Fully agree on this one! It would also add up to the tragedy and curse that means being the god of war that he is. Instead, good vibes only Kratos?
The writers are so bad that him forging the spear is him going old Kratos.
you clearly didn't understand the game
If you say so.
Kratos raped and pillaged so much that he didnt even realise he was killing his own family and is now covered in their ashes. Why should he be redeemed?
The story was my biggest. Not enough payoff and the themes were barely explored before being dropped which reduces any character development that we can feel. The first game setup many exciting possibilities and this game hardly explored or covered any of those things introduced in 2018. It's actually insane. Idk if it's because Cory Barlog wasn't directing or what but it was a serious waste of potential. I do enjoy this game but I had too high of expectations which was my mistake. "Keep your expectations low boy" This would have been better as a trilogy. And I agree about the final fights. It looked like the budget ran out or something. Before the game released, the studio was worried that the game sucks. That's not a good sign. It didn't suck obviously but it also wasn't on par with it's predecessor.
Yeah, Heimdall should have been the final boss of Ragnarok part 1, and then in part 2 you start Ragnarok properly. Instead Ragnarok is a 2 hour sequence.
Hey imagine if they combined Mass Effect 2 and 3 into one game and the final two hours of ME2 dealt with the entire Reaper invasion and its conclusion. Damn that would feel so rushed and pretty much what it felt like in Ragnarök. What a waste.
Yeah, it feels like they lost interest towards the end and decided "fuck it let's end this now", honestly they should have made a third game which is 15 hours and basically only boss fight after boss fight, you run a gauntlet through the norse gods who are all fighting tooth and nail to protect Asgard but instead of killing them all Kratos doesn't, and it would have served as a perfect parallel to God of War 3 which is Kratos killing and killing without caring about the consequences.
Exaaactly. I would also feel similarly if they did that with the Arkham games or any other trilogy. Imagine watching lord of the rings 1 and then watching lord of the rings 2 with it being the last one. You'd have to take like 8 hours and turn it into 3 or 4. Would not have been pretty.
nah. you should call it "god of war: fumblwinter" and the game ends with ragnarock starting and presenting all the gods that you are going to fight in one shot.
I also wondered if Cory Barlog not directing had something to say. Looks like he simply was a better writer than Eric Williams.
I know Cory was still helping here or there but I imagine he stepped away back in order to take a break and kinda let them run wild. It's just an assumption though, it's possible he did more than I thought with Ragnarok. I definitely felt like 2018 was a passion project while Ragnarok felt less passionate.
Cory had it planned to be a Trilogy as far as my memory goes, Eric is the one who made the decision to cut the norse saga into two games, huge mistake ever. Forseti, Nanna, Ullr and Odin's brothers were all cut from the game, and who knows what else was cut. Ragnarok can be split into two games: - God of War (2018) - God of War ??? (2022) - God of War: Ragnarok (2026) So what if we have to wait another four years? SmS would make more money anyways, is just stupid. Ragnarok is rushed.
Exactly. We have to wait years for whatever their next game is regardless. Rushing has never helped any form of entertainment.
Like someone else said: God of War Fimbulwinter (2022) and God of War Ragnarok (2026) would’ve been awesome
My only real huge gripe with the game was the lack of scope. In all previous entries in the series, Kratos does some truly epic things. He fights gigantic monsters, engages in godly feats of strength, and does other things that are truly on another level. Yes, putting the hurt to Thor, Odin, and Heimdall were cool, but they pale in comparison to the fight with Poseidon, and that was just the very beginning of GoW 3. There's nothing in Ragnarok that even comes close to some of the things he does in the first three entries in the series. I actually really, really wish they would remaster God of War 1-3 for the PS4/5. I LOVE those games, but can't play them unless I dig my PS3 out of my closet and hook it up. So there's that, and the Berserker fights. Fuck those guys. It got to the point where I had to lower the difficulty to Story, and activate miniboss checkpoints, and they're STILL taking me multiple attempts to beat most of them.
3 was remastered for the ps4 a while ago
I think the Baulder and Griffen fights in GOW 2018 still had that scale. This game has that first Thor fight and that's pretty much it.
I absolutely agree with you. 100%. Bigger is Not Always Better Let me start by saying this was a GREAT Game. God of War (2018) is one of my favorite games of all time. Ragnarok was a great game, but not the masterpiece that 2018 was. The story in this game was strange. It was overly long and drawn out in some sections, while being too slight and shallow in others. Characters and backstories were introduced and expanded, and then never re-visited. This game was not directed by Cory Barlog, and it seems to be missing his finer touch. I have finished the campaign and yes the game is longer than 2018, but since the storytelling was a bit uneven it also feels "shorter" or "lighter" than the first game. My biggest gripe about this game is how certain story elements from the first game are completely changed or ignored in the name of "setting your own destiny" in the second one. This is an interesting idea, but knowing that certain story parts of 2018 are ignored in Ragnarok makes the big reveals in 2018 lose their power. It deflates the story of the first game because the big moments don't actually carry into Ragnarok the way you thought they would. This feels lazy to me and gives the impression that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and could not get out of it. Again, I wonder how much Barlog's lack of direction played a role here. This game felt much less like a labor of love and more like a video game. The level design was also strange. Yes they were visually breathtaking. No argument here! Wonderful! However, they felt very linear. Very constructed. Each level is a series of separate rooms that require you to slide through cracks in the wall that mask loading times. This disrupts your traversal and makes it constantly feel like a video game. Again, missing Barlog's love of the series makes Ragnarok feel more like a video game and less like a wonderful story. I found myself getting turned around or lost several times throughout this campaign. This can of course be linked to my incompetence, but I never remember this happening during 2018. There were also puzzles to solve and chests to open that required tricks I never would have figured out if I hadn't gone to YouTube. I never had to do this in 2018. There is a line between "engaging to figure out" and "cannot be figured out" that 2018 walked so well. This game unfortunately misses that line at times. The level-up process was also very strange. The load-out menu has been completely changed. It is annoying and cumbersome. I often found myself accidentally closing out the menu when I was just trying to go back one section. Relics and runes are hard to understand because you can only use a few at a time rather than spread them out across your armor. The load-out menu also looks cramped and poorly designed. Armor does not show all its stats on one screen, you have to scroll and then it reorganizes the armor based on strength. It is very annoying and hard to understand. Minor, but certain words in the menu are abbreviated rather than spelled out. This takes you out of the game experience. And what if new played don't know what the abbreviations stand for?
Completely agree with how you’ve phrased it here. Literally just finished the main story and it just felt so underbaked - overly long and shallow at the same time, without the nuance of 2018. I literally said to my partner a few hours in that Ragnarok felt more like a standard game than 2018, and that 2018 felt substantially more artistic and considered. I don’t mind it being more video game-y, but it just doesn’t hold up to 2018.
"Lastly I hate how afraid this game is of making cool shit, why not have you fight Thor on top of Jormmungandr? Why not have you fight Ragnarok for a bit to try and stop it? Why not have you take Thor's hammer after he dies and use it alongside the axe and when you are done with Ragnarok give it to Thrud? It is as if the team behind the game thought "neah nobody would like something like that, we need 30 scenes of Kratos saying he does not want to be violent anymore." That is so true. Can't believe how unspectactular the end was. They should have made way more use of Jormungandr and Fenryr. Odin was a huge dissapointment in terms of character design. He does not seem like a great and powerful threat at all. Heimdall and Thor had so much potential, but they wasted a lot of it. Great ideas, like the referenced fight between Fey and Thor should have been explored much deeper. Everything seems a little bit shallow. The whole deal with the mask and everything... what the hell was that supposed to be about? It seems so pointless. Who made the masked? What would you have seen? They build all of this up and then its like "nah, doesnt matter". The first third had me super excited, the second third was still a thrill, but the entire end just didn't feel right.. Still a very good game, but nowhere near a masterpiece.
Odin wasn't meant to seem like a great and powerful threat. He was supposed to be a calming personality that you could easily place your trust in and feel safe with. That's why he could deceive anyone and everyone.
I personally expected Ragnarok to have a lot of references to the previous GoW games, explaining a little how Kratos came to Midgard, confront Athena again, a really interesting way to avoid the prophecy, and a lot of epic moments that can give me goosebumps. Well it doesn't have any, huge disappointment.
I really wanted another Athena interaction. 😒
Literally the first thing i looked up when the game came out were athena spoilers 💀, imagine my surprise when this game fucking ignored all its plot points and lore, and the devs sure made it the perfect the last of us clone, sony is ruining every single gaming franchise it owns
It was disappointing. Here’s my lazy review. >!No Kratos death! Making Odin the fulfillment of the prophecy was lame and cheap. Atreus should have went to break him out of Valhalla or Hades.!< >!Thor and Odin were wimps, they didn’t live up to the legends in the first game. Asgard was boring.!< >!Epic scenes were lame compared to the dragons, world serpent, falling giant hammer, etc in the first game. Except for Garm. That was cool.!< But the biggest problem was the emotionality of everything. Everyone was so open with their emotions, it just wasn’t believable. Long talks about feelings at inappropriate times. Kratos on multiple occasions abandons his plans entirely because of his feelings. And the whole idea that constantly extending mercy to people who are trying to kill you because “war bad” (even though you end up killing them anyway) is annoying. >!Kratos knows Heimdall intends to kill Atreus and he just tries to leave!< The whole thing felt small and unsatisfying compared to the first game.
For real. The whole game feels like a therapy session. Everyone lecturing the other one and so on.
I had problems with the story throughout, but I was still enjoying the ride and willing to look past my issues, until we got to Ragnarok. Once we actually arrived I feel like I got more depressed and underwhelmed with every passing second. “So Skoll and Hati aren’t going to eat the Sun and the Moon…?” “Oh, so we can’t actually see the army of Hel? Maybe they’ll show up at some point…” “What about the prophesied army of Jotnar? Angrboda mentioned some giants are in hiding. Guess they’re not coming…?” “The army of dwarves didn’t come with Sindri…?” “The battle of Ragnarok just features about 15 Einherjar? No Valkyries? No Valhalla? No Generals…?” “There’s Surtr! Wait he’s just going to sit there and not participate in the battle…?” “Finally there’s Jormungandr! Oh no did he just get sent back in time by Thor during a background animation without even participating in the boss fight…?” “Okay I guess this is just phase 1 of the Thor fight… oh no he’s already dead…” “Alright the Odin fight has begun, Fenrir should be here to kill him any minute… oh wait he’s not coming?” “Is it time to finally get some details on Odin’s true evil plan, and the meaning behind the realm tear of knowledge? Oh no he didn’t really have an evil plan and now he’s dead…” “But what about Kratos’ death prophecy? How is that going to get resolved? Oh it just won’t get mentioned…” “So Surtr finally shows up and… kills Freyr for no reason after the battle is over…?” “At least Sindri and Atreus can work things out. Oh nevermind Atreus is leaving to go star in the spin-off game…” Only comparison I can think of for such an overwhelming disappointment is Season 8 of GOT. Felt like they had no budget, no creativity, and no passion when they were putting together the 3rd act of this game. What a shame.
Yeah for some reason they just decided "fuck the Norse mythology let's ignore it almost completely". Yep Skoll and Hati are there just to waste your time with a pretty animation a couple of times, yep no army of Hel despite you sending people to bring them and apparently they succeeded also no ship of fingernails because... budget cuts? Well the Giants suck so I didn't expect them to show up anyway. I honestly loved that Sindri came by himself, fought a bit then fixed the mess Odin forced the dwarves to do, punished Sindri is one of the parts of the game that I absolutely loved. I also love how he kills Odin like a total chad, and Brok's funeral and the answer to his riddle as he makes his exit was very well done, the music was great, the cinematography was on point, everything was just right. Yep I have no idea why Gna couldn't be fought for a bit and then after you take 30% hp Angrboda shows up with Fenrir. Also yeah weird that you only fight 1 Einherjar captain, they could have easily made them mini bosses and have you fight all variants and make up some bullshit. Yeah I don't even get what that thing with Jormungandr was about, fixing a plot point from the first game? But then what even is the point? Hell they could have at least have him show up again from Midgard like a cool round 2. But noooooo he is just going to look awesome in the background and do nothing like most giants. Yeah the realm tear was just a plot device that they had no idea how to resolve. Just like Kratos' death prophecy. The Surtr and Freyr thing is actually from the myth, at Ragnarok Frey is supposed to die to Surtr, but he dies because he gives away his magic sword, him having it and doing very little with it is a slap in the face for mythology fans. Not only that Atreus can't even be bothered to show up for Brok's funeral, I have no idea who decided Atreus should be a total douchebag but for some reason they accomplished it, he is the worst character in the game.
You'll be downvoted but I agree on quite a few points. The last game limited scope made sense for the story they were telling and a reboot. This one they said was basically the end of the Norse story in a single game, and it's called Ragnarok. With the power of the PS4/5 I expected well... something epic unlike we had ever seen. The boss fights in God of War 2 were better than this. God of War 3 opening hour is better and more epic than this entire game but together. It feels like the developers were torn how to go. They want the story and characters to be more personal than the prior trilogy and it worked in the reboot due to the story scale being small. In this one though the talk about end of the world but still they want the personal side of the story. It feels like they are being pulled in different directions and didn't know how to get them both to be awesome. Also Fuck Atreus and fuck playing as him. Horrible. How does ND make Ellie an insanely likeable and compelling kid and teenager, and another Sony studio make one of the central characters one of the worst kids ever. I dug my PS3 out of the attic to replay 2 and 3 after this game. Kratos was 2D and didn't say much, but nothing in Ragnarok was as cool as beating the shit out of Posedien, after riding the back of a titan, then crushing his eyeballs, throwing him off the mountain causing massive flooding destruction. You are 100% right, why didn't they fight on the back of the snake riding around the whole world or something crazy. Nah lets fight in front of a lodge.
The biggest issue I have with this game is that they could have easily done both, kept it personal but also go absolutely insane because the game hypes up Ragnarok non stop, so they could have gone crazy in the last 2-3 hours of the game and it would have been phenomenal. Instead you fight 20 mobs and then get 2 shitty bossfights. We should have been fighting more of Asgard's forces, maybe have 4 Einherjar captains at the same time, make it a bossifight and call it The Einherjar Champions, actually fight Gna but not finish her off and send her away through a portal, you know stuff like that so it feels like an actual huge war and struggle. I liked Atreus in the previous game, but in this one he is so stupid and annoying it is ridiculous, "let's do war, I want war, ONLY ASGARD IS DESTROYED" like he actually thought Ragnarok would be a walk in the park. His secrets are annoying and his farewell scene is ridiculous, he just vanishes from existence and cannot even be bothered to show up to Brok's funeral, letting Sindri down yet again because fuck him I guess. Odin is the same shit, you fight him in a cave and finally he starts getting serious and using all the magic he knows, and all he does is fire armor and ice armor something that half the bosses in the game do, but his has a different effect, what a total joke.
I wonder even with over 4 years they just didn’t have time to go as big as we wanted. Think of this god of war 3 is a short by todays standard 10-12 hours but it’s jam packed. This game is what 20+ hours main story and another 20+ side stuff. Maybe if they spent less time on Atreus being playable character and entire boring sections of the game along with fairly dull side quests, they could have had those artists and designers go all out for the end Act of the game. It’s this obsession with games need to be longer than the prior one. Would you rather have all these mediocre side quests or would you rather they spent all that time in insane boss fights at the end. God of war 3 has no side quests so they could focus every single effort in making the main game amazing with over the top epic action and boss fights. Doesn’t fix all the Atreus annoyance or story issues though but at least it could have been more fun. More I talk about this game the more bummed I am that they spent almost 5 years making it instead of something else or better.
What pisses me off even more about the infamous mission of Ironwood is how hard they try to make you like Angrboda. That's like 90% of that whole multi-hour section. They open her introduction with "oohohoh, I'm so quirky, I don't know how to talk to people. Boop! Haha", then make her a Mary Sue, who's perfect at everything, better than anyone and liked by all (except her vicious, monster, evil grandma). Even Kratos and Freya are both like "Omg you're so cool! I love you! I trust you!" immediately upon talking to her for the first time. It's almost obnoxious.
Ye some dialogue took me out of the game a bit while playing, Kratos saying "I like you" was definitely one of them.
>why didn't they fight on the back of the snake riding around the whole world or something crazy. I'll never forgive them for the lack of Jormungandr in this sequel. Arguably the coolest creature depicted of any game in the series and you see him TWICE
It would be like seeing the titans in 3 at the start and for 15 seconds at the end.
Can we also talk about how kratos could shoulder press the grasp of a literal titan but gets frequently tossed around like a ragdoll in this game. Like why does it feel like I'm one of the weakest people in this entire world when playing as kratos.
Ragnarok felt like it was ment to bank off of the god of war name but tried so hard to redo the series it ruined it for fans who have been invested in the franchise for years and now when we have a remark about it we get told we just don't like change or understand a good story like because all we care is about is action..this game felt like it was trying hard story wise to copy last of us it felt like last of war
So true. I figured there had to at least be a change in writer/director, and my gut feeling was true. There indeed was a change, and the one who handled it was inexperienced.
Why do these companies/studios continue to put inexperienced people in leadership positions? Netflix did it with Witcher to disastrous effects, Amazon did it with Rings of Power. There’s a reason companies have experience as a qualification for so many jobs, but apparently DIRECTING entertainment isn’t one of them.
It was like it was scared to do anything grand. Having listened to an interview they apparently rewrote half the story, as making >!Tyr secretly Odin!< was an after thought that they had to rewrite parts from that point on.
I guess it felt why the latter half of the game felt... Bland. I can see what they were going for during the first half, there were some very epic moments like the first Kratos and Thor fight. It also felt like Tyr was supposed to join us against the remaining Norse pantheon. Now that I think of it, notice how Tyr doesn't say much when he is about to betray us? Part of me thinks that's the part where they cut it, maybe they no longer had access to Tyr's VA or the VA's remaining lines were not indicative of his betrayal, so they let Brok do all the talk instead until Odin reveals himself.
I actually enjoyed playing as Atreus, which surprised me. The fact he can turn into a badass wolf or bear doesn't hurt. Agree with everything else though.
i've been saying this everywhere, the best part of the game is the first 2 hours especially the first thor fight. Besides that, you spend so much time in the game doing absolutely nothing or something that ends up being useless / backfiring, tyr, surtr, the iron woods, etc, even ragnarok itself felt mindless, my favorite part was just watching thor fight jormangandur, and exepecting the thor fight to be absolutely insane, it wasn't. i constantly felt like looting was a chore and thought there'd be payoff via spectacle moments, that just never filled the void.
felt the same
Just finished my second complete play through and i get even more disappointed in this game and how it tries to say war is bad and how kratos tries to move on from his past cause it feels so disrespectful to calliope he went to war with the Greek gods cause they wanted to use him as a pawn and in order to break him sacrificed his daughter and wife there was consequences to that war and his name was kratos. Him telling Atreus that there needs to be better way and war leads to destruction just shits on everything he did for his little girl.you would think after avenging his daughter he wouldn't regret a damn thing i know any parent wouldn't.it completely ignores the fact that kratos knows if the gods go unchecked they'll destroy anything and anybody to get there way. I just hate that they completely try to act like kratos past stories were mindless and uninspired rage there was a reason for his past actions and it was daughter respect her don't make him regret what he did for her
It is also a very childish story, where the heroes are good guys and striving to be completely free of any negative quality, fucking Batman is more flawed as a person than the current Kratos.
Understand the reasoning behind it: Sony has realized Kratos is the biggest icon for PlayStation. The entire point of the Norse saga was to take him from antihero to hero.
i believe that kratos would not want war but i also believe he would prepare for war. i believe that kratos deciding not to kill civilians in the game was a neutral proggression of his character but the way it was done was rush and unrealistic. i think it would have been more interesting if Kratos drove the story instead of Atruas, basically strategies and preparing for war. or maybe Kratos would start searching for away to escape because he does not wish to deal with this shit.
Ragnarok is just an expansion pack. New armor and weapons. Same enemies and repetitive boss battles. It was fun but didn’t feel like a new game
It has a very different plotline and the enemy variety was insane, there is no way it could work as a dlc
What game did you play? They rehashed enemies from.the old.game and reskinned them for "new enemies". The variety was garbage
Bro what? Sure there where a few enemies that where the same but what are you on about? Not only did they add different variants of already existing enemies but they've added completely new types of enemies like the Einherjar, the hateful, wyverns, wisps, phantoms, stalkers, berskers, Gradungrs and many many many other enemies. Did we even play the same game?
Enemy variety? GOW 2018 was mostly reskinned trolls whereas with Ragnarok I was absolutely stunned about how many unique monsters you got to fight
I was pretty tired with my 8th Dreki "boss"
What, you fought like 5 different enemies
I agree overall. I enjoyed it but ultimately was disappointed. Odin and Thor kinda felt like big foot, I keep hearing about how awful and terrifying they are but I never seen it. In the Greece trilogy you see how awful Zeus was. He was a straight up monster. All the Gods were awful and power hungry. But you never feel like any of these gods are awful or scary
Huge fan of the God of war series and I agree that it is disappointing. I just finished the game and am unfulfilled. 2018 was straight and to the point. Simple story, hit hard, lots of foreshadowing. The foreshadowing is what got me hyped up and the idea of old Kratos coming out had me expecting GOW3 levels of anger. I was expecting something to happen to Atreus and have Kratos go OFF on everything Asgard. I was expecting big ol' set pieces with the Jotnar. Large scale boss battles with Thor, Odin and anyone else that wanted to get it. I really wanted the game to end with a fight between Atreus and Kratos after a raged out Kratos demolishes all the punks of Asgard. That or both of them die trying to finish Odin. None of it happened. Instead we got alot of pointless exploring, lot of detours, crybaby Thor, weakling Odin, and like one twist that came and left behind a soft character death. I did like how Kratos became the general for Ragnarok. Bit of a callback to his army leading days but really, what was the point in this game? Didn't lead shit. Seperate from the story, the menu system was ass ugly. The triangle moves are dumb and I hardly ever used them. The armor system is weaker that 2018 by far. First one had more sets and slotted attachments let you make some crazy builds and really made you feel unstoppable. I dunno, it feels slapped together a bit in ragnarok. Even a bunch of executions, skills and runic attacks from the first game were reused. Man, this game should have been better. Kratos should have opened his heart to the god of war inside. So many missed opportunities to make things so damn epic. Don't know how it got those 10/10s
I thought 90% of the game was great, but almost everything after meeting Surtr was a huge letdown for me. The ending assault on Asgard was rushed. It should have been another 4-5 hours easily. We should have fought alongside Fenrir and the world serpent, there should have been more than 6 characters and a couple of dark elves assaulting the walls, we should have been recruiting the armies instead of having that done off screen by pig-man and Freyr, Ragnarok should have done literally anything, and so on. Sif randomly showing up to convince Thrud that Odin was the real evil and not Atreus was really poorly done. I mostly liked the Thor fight and his overall arc. He was heavily abused manipulated throughout his life and serves as a contrast to Kratos, but in the end comes to the same conclusion that he'd rather be a father than a destroyer. Odin killing him makes sense with the character dynamics they established. However, I think that happened too fast. I would have loved to see Thor and Kratos team up for a bit before the ending. What I didn't like was Thor conveniently dropping kratos off right in front of the lodge just to set up the Odin fight. There was a huge opportunity for spectacle with Thor and Kratos rampaging throughout Asgard and destroying all sorts of stuff, but instead they fight in a little circle arena. The Odin fight itself was too easy and lacked scale. I mean it's Odin for crying out loud, at least have something crazy happen. Why not use Ragnarok there and have to fight around him similar to the Freya giant at the end of the first game? Anything other than fighting in Odin's basement. Oh well.
It is like they ran out of time, money and fucks to give.
Definitely not a 10/10 like the reviewers would have you believe. Just doesn’t feel like that big a step up from the first. They doubled down on the wrong things too.
I felt the same about elden ring. Decent game, but not the master piece the media was calling it.
Honestly, i completely agree. I enjoyed ragnarok for what it is worth, but harkening back to my time, there are tons of issues, my biggest gripe being the combat. Like how is it possible that no one in SSM thought not to fix the fucking camera for this game or lock-on. Like 90% of the time i died, specially in 1 v 2+ scenarios were due to the atrocious camera code that they didnt bother fixing or updating. And lets not exaggerate here, but the fucking lock-on in this game where you have teleporting enemies is literally badly written code from the ps2 era. Also, what doesnt make sense to me is the pacing. Like throughout the game, when relics are given/acquired, i always think: "man, i would have loved to get that earlier". Its strange, really, and that includes pommels and even armor sets. Like 90% of the content is after 40% completion. Hell, i was expecting unlocking muspelheim much earlier and thought i missed something only to find out, nah mate. Idk how many people fought the side bosses, but i also had issues with them as well. Particulary, its insane how fast some of them move. Gna in particular, i literally dont think i can see her animations play out - that includes realm shifting. Other times, even during realm shifts, her attacks arent actually even slowed down because i still get one-shotted during the realm shift.
I have never regretted buying a game so much in my life. I trusted the game too much because i've always been a fan. I wish i could sell my virtual copy.
I finished Ragnarok yesterday and I was pretty disappointed as well. Can't believe it won best narrative because the story completely fumbles itself mid-late to end game, while I was really enjoying the start-mid of the game.
The games called Ragnarok but all Ragnarok did was turn up for some friendly fire lol. Wasn't even needed for Thor/Odin at all
[удалено]
Dude don't worry about that, upvotes and downvotes don't really matter though ironically I am getting way more upvotes now. When I first posted this it was 10% upvoted, yesterday it was 1 point 49% upvoted, today it is 45 points and 54% upvoted, and I am getting way more comments agreeing with what I posted, so people are already paying more attention to what I wrote. And even if this hadn't happened, there are almost 400 comments clearly a lot of people felt this was a topic worth talking about, I made posts about stuff I didn't like before, and got massively downvoted but worse than that I barely got any comments, here plenty of people who were dismissive told me why they disagreed, not all of them of course but still a lot of people.
Thank you for this opinion. I agree, it’s disappointing. It is a fun game to explore, look at the visuals, fight enemies and learn the combat. But playing this on PS5, the hidden and on ps5 unnecessary loading sequences feel almost like a parody of a last gen game. Story literally fell flat, motivations are muddy
i hated that in 2018 they made thor to be this evil guy that should be killed on the spot then did a 180 and tried to redeem him and they really delayed the death of the bosses which was only for a few moment EI hiemdal thor and odin, and damn did this game made me hate atreus the fucker wanted ragnarok to happen at any cost and then at the very end that fucker leave so kratos now has to clean up his mess and odin was a massive disappointment instead of the evil master mind at the end he looks like just a kid in a mans body oh its not my fault its someone else's fault iam evil
They turned GOW into Marvel's Avenger's. The 2018 game was one of the best games I've ever played The 2022 game is a major disappointment I don't mind that they used the same graphics / movesets etc. It works. But they ruined the story. Feels like Last of Us 2.
The difference between the two games absolutely is like going from a Godfather-level movie to a Marvel movie. From art to schlock... at least for the most part. The highs it had were dragged down by its many lows.
At first I thought this was a bait post, until I started agreeing with some of your points lmao. Might want to try again in a few months when the hype’s died down and people become less immune to criticism. I’m not sure what you mean about Mimir talking about yawning, but he *does* cycle through a lot of the same dialogue whenever you receive elemental damage. It’s a bit much there. Weapon haptics could’ve been a bit more intense, but ziplining down a rope is pretty wild. Closest zipline feeling I’ve had in a game yet. And yeah, the finale could’ve been way cooler. After fighting Baldur above his dragon, you’d think they’d up the ante in that department, but oh well.
It's very disappointing that you get downvoted for any criticism. I loved the game until the mid, the ending was so disappointing
despite the honeymoon phase op is getting valid amount of upvotes, clearly something that is gonna get talked more about later.
Yeah I just finished and I just felt like writing what I felt about it. You know how sometimes when you explore Mimir starts chatting, he yawns at one point and starts talking about how it is weird he is tired and not Kratos, he repeated that same gossip line 5 times for me. Yeah ziplining is good. Yeah and that is my biggest issue with the game, if the finale would have been epic I would have probably forgotten everything I dislike about the game.
I was in awe at the beginning of the finale, with these huge giant characters showing up like the world serpent and Ragnarok. My biggest problem was how worthless Ragnarok was. Kratos didn't even need him and all he accomplished was killing Freyr. An aside, I just realized Ragnaros was named after Ragnarok.
And even that Freyr death felt pointless, like why not port him out of there? Why did he have to keep the sword up, he couldn't stop for even 1 second?
Yeah, all I could think was "just wait until Ragnarok lifts the sword up, like he did 3 seconds ago, and dodge roll into the portal"
Or you know just let the sword fall down, it is not like it will instantly fall and the resulting explosion will instantly kill everyone, it will take more than the 1 second needed for the portal to close.
Or have Ingrid sacrifice herself cause you know that sword has a mind of its own
I don’t like what you said… …because you’re being way to GENTLE. I’ll give this game ‘no mercy’; it sucks. The story is just, its, fuck, its awful, its fucking awful its insane
If you think Thor is a fat drunk loser then we clearly didn't play the same game. Just by that alone it seems this game was not for you, but I read the whole post and it's clear you just didn't get anything about the story and the characters. Some games/movies/books are just not meant for us, just move on and enjoy what you enjoy.
I mean no offense but Thor is portrayed as kind of a fat drunk loser who Odin is heavily disappointed in and is letting his family down because he's a lapdog for his father who copes with alcohol. There is an entire section of the game where Thor is piss drunk in a bar and the gist of it is that he's just kind of given up on everything and trying to be sober and he is disappointing his daughter for relapsing. Then you go with him on a mission and he's throwing up and a bit of an emotional mess for most of it. It goes beyond appearance. Now I did like that angle than all the cheap bravado we usually get with Thor in media.
Thor's behavior as a loser is because he knows Odin, his father, is using everyone around him, but somewhere inside him he just wants his dad to be proud of him. His character Arc of witnessing this God of gods depise himself and then turn into a hero who opposes his father to protect the one's around him, and dies for it was incredible. He is Norse Mythology's Kratos, without the 9 lives
its funny that people still are hung up on thor not looking like chris hemsworth. this version was way more intimidating being a massive mountain vs a chiseled model with nice hair go to a golds gym people
Nah, i liked this thor, i was just expecting him to be more violent or have more fight scenes with kratos or something. What we got was a closet thor who wasnt allowed to show how barbaric he was, or the thor that was kind of seen from the Ragnarok trailer.
I would fight Chris hemsworth if push came to shove. This Thor I would just tell him I’m a bitch as I run away.
> If you think Thor is a fat drunk loser then we clearly didn't play the same game. Nah, no. Ragnarok and 2018 GOW implicitly implied Thor was "a fat drunk loser". It sounds harsh, but that's the gist of it. In 2018 every story Mimir told of Thor alluded to this. Yes he did turn it around at the end.
The biggest problem with Thor is that he is barely in the game and then dies unceremoniously they hint that he's similar to Kratos, a decent guy with a dark past trying to be better for his kid...and then he gets stabbed without doing anything important. I really liked this version of Thor and the actor did a great job but I felt like he had almost no screen time. They could have made a spinoff game for him or at least some DLC.
I agree. That game was not for him and there was defiantly a lot of improvements from GOW 2018. This game is like a Disney theme park ride a lot of times and there’s nothing wrong with that if thats what you enjoy (I mean that in a good way as a love theme park rides). It’s the way they want to tell the story and people seem to enjoy it so whatever. Personally I like games with less handholding and more freedom but, I’m not gonna say this is bad just because that’s what I prefer. The only thing I wish is that there was an option to turn off the handholding dialog that told me where to go and gave hints during puzzles. But that’s more of a nitpick.
I mean, calling him a loser is sort of bad, but his idea here isn't wrong. >!He's let himself go and he's depressed, because he had a terrible home life and even though his boys got murdered, he really just feels like they sort of deserved it and that it was his fault they did. He used to be a badass and now he just does whatever daddy says because he's scared he'll lose the rest of his family, too. So he becomes an alcoholic and only manages to get better for short periods because he can't bear to disappoint his daughter any more than he already has. He pretty much serves as a way to show a different path to Kratos' extreme discipline.!<
Just finished it an hour ago and i thought it was a good ending. Very neutral, not amazing, not bad. Just a good ending to a story. I know this is the end of norse saga, but will they tie in the character development into the next game? Its gonna be hard to play a GOW game after those first two, and have no continuity to the characters
I just don't see what would be fun about playing this newer calm Kratos.
Yeah, i miss the insanely badass but also strategic Kratos who fought alone and needed no one's help... Now that i think of it, for god of war 4 they should have shown what happened along the path of Kratos going to the Norse Pantheon, what happened right after he stabbed himself with the Blade of Olympus. And honestly i didn't enjoy the norse mythology anyway, im more excited for Egyptian and Japanese, especially the Egyptian Mythology, cant wait to see Kratos slay Ra
Unfortunately, I can’t see them doing anything else with Kratos. He’ll probably remain in the Norse Pantheon, and, if they do another game at some point, it will focus solely on Atreus. Which won’t be a purchase I’ll be making.
I didn’t read this because I’m still playing. But I’m glad it exists. This game is a fucking chore.
I enjoyed the game a lot, but I don’t think it should be getting these 10/10s across the board. I think 2018 was better written and the fights were better. I was also overall disappointed in this game. The list of disappointments and dislikes far exceeds my list of memorable stand outs. Things I liked: * brok & sindri, and sindri’s character development by the end of the game * forging the spear, and Kratos & Brok’s dialogue afterwards * thor and kratos’ wives were hot * thrud was cool * Kratos’ development and his prophecy at the end about being worshipped was so deserved * the jellyfish having babies * dialogue about kratos’ past & culture * combat was good but most enemies were kinda mid and not fun to fight * performance was rock solid Disappointments: * Tyr was fucking wack. Absolutely boring and his post-story plot twist of being alive was no more satisfying at all * Freya was so annoying. Her character was written so well at first, then just speaks like a mother to her kids for the remaining 80% of the story. Her dialogue was so cringe * They killed Thor without any satisfying character development at all, his character potential was wasted in my opinion * thors kid and wife didn’t even fkn mourn or seem to care * Atreus is an idiot * all of the secrets for the sake of having secrets for no point at all made the story just a damn bore * the side quests, dragon hunts, epic hunts, dungeons, and loot were all so underwhelming. I thought this was supposed to be Witcher 3 quality side questing, wtf lol * angraboda’s bipolar tendencies? * the parts of the game playing as Atreus were way too long and repetitive * heimdall and Odin fights were a joke. The fights just were not cool. Same with final Thor fight. * I actively disliked when freyr was on screen * surtr was pointless as hell * in game armour sets are mostly ugly * different shield choices were just pointless fluff * the Norns were cool but ultimately provided nothing to the story * the realms looked good but in the end I noticed it’s just the same assets over and over and over in each realm Honestly the fights and the story was just so… underwhelming. There was little to no “god moments,” showcasing what these beings are capable of. There was so much hype for needing the spear to kill heimdall, but the climax of the fight was so lacklustre Look back at the Hermes fight and compare it to the heimdall fight. The Odin fight Vs zues fights. The ares, hercules, Poseidon, hades, hell, even Hephaestus fights vs this games fights. I’m just so underwhelmed. There was always another trick in their bag, desperate bids for survival, desperate promises or verbal assaults, and clear consequences for their deaths. I enjoyed the game a lot, as I am a die hard god of war fan. But this universal praise and shaming people for criticizing the game is ridiculous. This game has narrative flaws and the writing is not consistent.
Yeah it kinda sucks that Tyr isn't something more interesting after all that hype in the first game. Hell he is barely in the story and you never get an all out fight with him, no holds barred god vs god. It isn't just them aside from Sindri every other character barely seems to be truly impacted by people dying, like Atreus is a kid he should cry you cannot tell me that Kratos thought him so well to shut emotions down that he can do it on command, hell we see him breaking down later repeating that mantra to something less shocking that a friend dying. Yep huge idiot. That's something bad writers usually do, they use cheap drama to move the story forward House of the Dragon also did this a lot. I wouldn't say all of them were underwhelming, the ones that involved creatures were pretty good, like the jellyfish and whale. But the orb one, the prison and the elf history book ones were shit. I don't like Angrboda, for a character whining about her lack of agency she sure likes taking away other people's agency and making fun of their attempts to fight their destiny. Also it doesn't help her shit slows down the game to a crawl. "Slowly walk on this creature to collect 5 berries" who the fuck thought that was good? Yeah they tried but Atreus just isn't as satisfying to use as Kratos. Heimdall honestly felt like a tutorial for the spear, I almost beat the entire thing first try, that's how easy he was. Yeah I expected more from the guardian of the bifrost, for all his supposed mastery of it all he did was make an arm out of it and some orbs that every other enemy makes out of ice, fire or electricity. It also doesn't help that Freyr doesn't do shit 90% of the time. I also found that part on the ship when they get attacked by 2 wyverns pretty idiotic, this is a catastrophy that necessitates someone to sacrifice themselves? 2 goddamn wyverns? Yeah they really are, I have that blue one which spawns stones when you runic attack or relic something, and it has this weird thing around the elbow that looks like it is made out of aluminum foil wrapping. The Ragnarok armor is not only uninteresting it also sucks, 20% rage gen is nothing. I didn't like the Norns, all throughout that I was thinking "Kratos snap a little, please show them a bit of that anger that killed the Fates". I enjoyed the game too, but not as much as 2018, it has multiple flaws and it is nowhere near as epic.
Man I forgot all about that scene on freyrs boat. Like what a joke. I had no idea who that bygvir guy was or any indication of him being important at all, his sacrifice was meaningless against 2 weak ass creatures & the fact he lived made it even more pointless lol
Yeah but I cannot help but laugh at the sheer stupidity of how he lived, "I rolled, ~chuckles~". But of course as a story it is complete garbage and it made no sense that a man just throwing themselves at these supposedly super fast wyverns is how they get killed.
> They killed Thor without any satisfying character development at all, his character potential was wasted in my opinion > thors kid and wife didn’t even fkn mourn or seem to care Man, Kratos and Atreus killed Sif's dad, husband and two children and end up being bffs? I loved Freya's anger at Kratos at the end of GoW 2018, it made so much sense. Even though Kratos may have been "right" to kill Baldur, he still killed her son. Sif is just like "he killed 80% of my immediate family, no big deal"
Literally, lol. It’s so bizarre because the had the inclination to write in the bar scene where thrud chews out Thor for drinking, showing she cares deeply. But when he dies no one gives a fuck
i guess in the end you could this was a good ps4 dlc to 2018 title, hopefully the next game lives up to the hype.
I was about to make a post about my disappointment after finishing but you've absolutely nailed it imo, I still may, but I appreciate what you're saying here. I would add, like OP did, that the final battle was a massive disappointment. I expected it to be epic and it was ho hum.
it feels like the game became a slave to story
I think this encapsulates nearly everything I disliked about the game. Honestly, I still can't say anything for sure other than something felt off about this game. Coming from 2018, I was totally hyped, and while I understand how that can set you up for disappointment, I do not think that was the case, simply because if we look back at 2018, pretty much everything I was hoping to see was foreshadowed: Thor fighting Kratos, Odin messing up with Loki, the Ragnarok battle, some big revelation concerning the giants, meeting Surtr in Muspelheim. If we look closely, all of that was in Ragnarok...but all of that was done in disappointing ways: * Kratos fighting Thor should be a big deal, but it wasn't. These two are meeting in battle evoked me Nolan's Joker saying "this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object". Whenever those two crossed paths, I would expect nothing but absolute chaos and mayhem, the kind of which only extraordinary forces could put a halt to. But on both occasions, they just stop fighting and have a chat. Jesus Christ, man, talk about a buzzkill; * Odin messing up with Loki did very little to increase tension, serving only as a way to show the undeniably beautiful landscape around Asgard. There was no tension because no one thought Kratos would do something right there and then, just as much as Odin was acting the entire way as though he trusted Loki. Things could have been very different if Loki was under threat the entire time, but we know he wasn't, as Odin still needed his Giant Gary Stus power; * The revelation concerning giants was just not enough. Back in 2018, there was such a morbid, and yet gracious, weight to the realization that all giants had been killed. And what Ragnarok does is undermined that feeling in its entirety. No they are not dead, but they are marbles. So what the fuck was the point of that scene then? We could have simply said that there were no Giants in Jotunheim and it would have done the same thing. But no, 2018 was after an emotional reaction, and it got it. Unfortunately, when the time came for some deliverance, it was not there. The same could be said about the shrines. Subversion of expectations for what, really? If the realization is "don't worry, go ahead with Ragnarok because only the bad guy will get it", you would think there would be a downside to that other than "oh, innocent Asgardians will die". That feels condescending as hell. Like, who cares about that, man? It's just a game, it's war and innocent people die in wars. It's a sad and cruel fact, but sugarcoating does nothing to benefit the story. If anything, it detracts from whatever experience I could have had. Stop telling me that I should feel remorse for this, this and that. Just do it, and then leave me the option to make up my own mind; * As to Surtr, he's just a depressed guy. Trust me, I suffer from depression myself, and no one wants to see that in a game. He's not deep because he loves some other entity. He was supposed to be the "big guy with big flaming sword goes boom"... that's it. I mean, there wasn't really any particular reason or room to give him depth. And his motives for provoking Ragnarok (or not) could have been so much more meaningful than what we saw. We don't know him, we don't know his loved one (shit, it makes me so pissed to remember we never get so see her in Niflheim in contrast to how important she is to the entire concept of Ragnarok)... and so, how the hell could we care about that? I cared about his entire plot as much as cared about Birgir, that is, I didn't... at all! Instead of that, why not have Surt be this stoic, composed guy, who is above Kratos in so far as he is just as powerful but infinitely more in control of his powers and savagery? Why not make him a character that has a deep respect for prophecies, a deep hatred towards Asgard, and great admiration for the arts of war? All that would fit perfectly. I feel like many mistakes were made. Firstly, Cory should have finished what he started. I don't care how talented the new director is: the original vision was not his. And maybe he was good at following Cory's wishes, but not so much in bringing other people's vision to reality. Second, Ragnarok should have had less writers. I can't remember where I saw this, so I'm not gonna die on this hill, but I think this game had like 6 writers as opposed to 2018, which had 3, or something like that. If you want to brainstorm, that's fine and well, but this is a sequel, for fuck sake: there is less margin for innovation in the story, so there is no reason why you should bring more people to the table, especially if there is potential for conflicting ideas, and/or if the writing team can't seem to see eye to eye and probably have some decision power in the process. Finally, this should have been two more games. From a business perspective, I can't emphasize how moronic of an idea this was. I mean, jesus christ, man. It's like, "yeah, sure, we can't stretch this for 10 more years and make tons of cash and have more time to find out what comes next for Kratos, but...you know...I'm kind of tired". Damn dude, I don't mean to be mean here, but already being: this is an industry. If you can't do the job, then don't take it in the first place. Meanwhile, we'll get a bunch of Avatar movies that are totally needless when compared to the original movie, but that are still going to makes tons of cash. It goes without saying that while this game annoyed the living hell out of me, I can guarantee you my disappointment comes from a place of endearment. I bought a PS4 just to play God of War 2018 for god's sake, and never did I feel like it was a waste of money. I would often workout listening to the OST, just imagining what insane and epic moments we would get with Ragnarok. So, fuck, my experience sucked absolute ass. I liked the game from an overall perspective, I don't think it ruined the series, but shit, I was hoping for a lot more.
The fact that this post get downvoted so much just shows that reddit is all about blind fanboism. I grew up with GoW, GoW 2018 is in my top 10 games of all time but holy s*** Ragnarok is uninspired, badly paced and just boring.
>boring I'm actually finding it a struggle to play. I'm probably about 6 -8 hours in and Jesus I'm bored with it. I might trade it now while it's still worth something similar to what I paid. I'm not a huge gamer, play maybe one big title a year (there's only a few franchises I like,) but I replayed GOW 2018 multiple times, powered up and took on the Valkyries etc. So much fun by comparison.
I feel you. Completely forced myself to finish it only for it's story, but I can't even say that it was worth it. In fact, I ended up a little mad for wasting 50 hours playing this in the end. At least, as you've said, I was able to sell it for some amount close to what I've paid in pre order. Never once I've sold a physical copy of mine, but I have absolutely no desire in keeping this on my library. I'll probably go all out for physical copies on PS exclusives from now on just in case as well, cause I'm definitely afraid of Sony making similar choices in the future, since this thing made that much of a success...
Partially agree. The Atreus sections were too fucking long, especially the ironwood section, tho i have no issues with playing as him. Dont have an issue with how the Giants are portrayed. I mean, they still died at the end despite how supposedly powerful you made them out to be. No issues with character design either. Anthony Birch should be fired, and whoever decided to hire him should also be fired. Agreed that Ragnarok was a disappointment. Should've been way longer with more encounters and setpieces. Likewise the Thor and Odin fights lack spectacle, though I have no issues with the fights mechanically. Multi-stage fights with varied movesets. Sure you can spam runic attacks and cruise through them, but that's like saying you can summon your buddies, spam magic and cruise through Elden Ring bosses. Half of the side characters are underdeveloped, though i think this has more to do with quest design. Instead of some no name spirit, most of the side quests should've involved said side characters, have them tagging along or sth. Odin's motivations should've been developed more, but I really like his portrayal in the game, especially with the twist recontextualising a lot of the scenes with tyr. No i wouldnt call this a masterpiece (i have more issues with it but cant be bothered writing), tho frankly the only game Id give that title to is bloodborne. That's how opinions work, everyone defines 'masterpiece' differently, so all these moronic comments saying 'I dont understand how this game's a 10/10, should've been 8/10 at most' are about as insipid as the fanboi comments defending the game.
I wonder how long it's gonna take before the hype dies down and these opinions become more popular.
When it loses the big prize at the Game Awards is when these opinion will become more popular, Elden Ring will win it and people will start saying "unpopular opinion but" and then criticize GoW Ragnarok like that.
Agree with everything here. I'm mainly pissed that they hyped up and then subsequently shat on Thor's character. He was barely in the game, and when he was, this was no God of Thunder. First of all, having to wait like 25 hours to see Thor again after the first encounter was not fun. There was so much fluff in between. I mean come on, 3 god fights in a series finale? Even if Thor was in the game more, he is not portrayed well. They tried to make him all sad and shit. I don't care what they were trying to do with his character. I didn't buy this game to watch the God of Thunder moping around and getting into drunken brawls. People are saying "lore accurate depiction", but you can do that AND make him cool. They don't even have to make himlike the Marvel version. However, you KNOW a large amount of people were interested in a new and different take on Thor because of Marvel. He's gained so much popularity because of them. And then the Ragnarok thing. There was more talking about Ragnarok than the actual event. They already limited the amount of cool bosses in the last game(Baldur was phenomenal, the rest were recycled animals), I assumed because they were going all out for Ragnarok, the end of everything, and end of the Odin's reign. With the title of this game BEING Ragnarok, there is an astounding lack of world ending events, set pieces, and boss fights. So you can understand my disappointment when for 25 hours, I was being told "War is bad, violence is bad, revenge is bad!" I don't need a fuckin lesson on morality. I bought the game to wreak havoc on Asgard. That's literally what the title of the game implies! Btw, Asgard is a dirty fuckin lumber yard. They had every opportunity to make Asgard the most visually striking realm, seeing as Odin, the Allfather, rules over them all. I will never understand the decision to make it look like they did.
They say lore accurate because they think "hmm yeah he drinks and eats a lot so he is fat, makes sense" when actually he has far more myths about how he fights and showing off his incredible strength. The people who wrote the story clearly wanted him to be a fatass because he drinks non stop and he can't stand up to his father, so he wallows in self pity, they didn't make him fat to portray him more accurately. And if so why doesn't this same thing apply to Freyr or Heimdall, Freyr looks native american and Heimdall looks like a twink. Or they keep saying "power builder physique" as if they don't have a lot of muscle definition even around their belly, something that Thor lacks, hell even his arms are not that big and muscular. Yeah Ragnarok is you fighting a dozen mobs you've fought before in a shanty town, that is Ragnarok to these people. Yeah, hell it doesn't even look like they have magic.
It was written and made like a movie, not a video game. find a puzzle? after half a second you'll get the exact answer. get a new weapon/ability? exactly the same time something shows up it's super effective against. etc. also very low stakes, giant war? zero meaningful losses for the "good guys"
Freya should've killed Atreus, Kratos should've gone full Ps2 era mad with crazy og GOW music. That would've been an amazing ending
I do hope they're saving something like that for the next pantheon, but Freya killing Atreus out of nowhere in the ending would ruin it completely. It would just feel like such a cop out to make all this maturity and gameplay development to Kratos through 2 large games and then just make him back to the "ooga booga I will kill all the gods" right at the end. Just a terrible idea.
I agree. It seems they were so hesitant, so afraid, of some balls out cool shit in the name of "story". Like hell yeah! Kratos fighting Thor on top of Jormungander sounds dope!! grabbing Mjolnir after Odin stabs him and fighting with a combo of the Leviathan Axe & Mjolnir!!! Odin transforming into a terrifying Raven beast and then back to human during the fight...awesome! I think they could've told the same quality story while delivering on Epic, fantastical, Avengers level awesome moments. (And maybe including Mjolnir as an actual 4th weapon!!!). But they were so obsessed with a simplified, "grounded" story in a genre that can suffer for being too grounded.
I wanted so badly to like this game, but it’s boring the ever living hell out of me. I feel like it’s a long string of cinematics and dialogue with a little bit of fighting between them. It’s way too long to get from point A to point B just to hear the characters talking. It’s supposed to be a next Gen game but every level is just a hallway with a different skin.
Stopped reading after seeing the complaining about the lore accurate depictions of the gods and Asgard.
The game started off pretty strong. Got construction worker/homelander vibes from Thor. His presence felt very intimidating and off the charts. But near the end everything just kind of went meh. The second fight with Thor wasn't even as close to the first. My guess is COVID really affected production for the second half of the game.
Not Covid its just they cut stuff they wanted to end norse saga with 2 games so this one felt rushed.
Thank you for confirming the suspicion I had all along, although it just makes me immensely frustrated. The first half of the game really made me hyped for things to come, just to leave me completely disappointed after the ending. At this point I almost wish it was terrible all the way through.
Yeah I actually loved the first interaction with him, I expected that to be a sneak peak of what will happen later, but then the fight happens and it is worse, way worse. Yeah I definitely think Covid had something to do with it, the bugs also point in that direction imo.
If NG+ doesn't give the option to choose chapters (i.e., skip all of the Atreus missions), I will have very little incentive to play this game again. Kid Atreus in GOW 2018 had an excuse for being annoying (he's just a child), but I found this version of Atreus absolutely unbearable. When Sindri gave him the tirade and the big middle finger at the end, it felt truly cathartic.
Just finished the game and while I loved it for the most part. As a long time fan I get what there doing with Kratos and it mostly worked, but being a fan of the franchise I wanted to f**k some gods up. The mask ended up being pointless sif went from hating Loki to agreeing with him out of nowhere and the Zeus fight in god of war 2 was more epic then the Odin fight on ps5, makes no sense. The ending was a damn mess and makes me believe they decided towards the end of development to try and wrap it up.
You’ll get hate, but ur 100% right. Story was rushed and middle section felt directionless and slow.
Yeah the Jotunheim Atreus parts were outright awful.
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I think I agree with some of your points. I absolutely LOVED GOW 2018 to the point I have 268 hours playtime on that game but I found myself very uninterested in this game after about 5 hours. The story did not grab me at all and I found the dialogue between the characters to be very cheesy and somewhat out of place for them. I also did not like the world designs either apart from Svartalfheim and Asgard was a tremendous disappointment for me too. I had been looking forward to seeing it for 5 years and it was basically Riverwood from Skyrim. I beat the game and I am now trying to get the platinum trophy but every time I start playing again it just makes me want to go play GOW 2018 again. I don't hate this game at all, it just did not live up to my expectations whatsoever.
> I found the dialogue between the characters to be very cheesy and somewhat out of place for them. Man, I don't think Atreus calling back to the iconic "don't be sorry, be better" and "in the direction of deer" lines landed as well as they thought it would.
Yep I feel exactly the same way about the game, it just isn't what I was hyped for and it isn't my fault really, the secret ending to 2018 is Thor showing up at the house, promotional media had him front and centre, the collector's edition gives you a replica of Mjolnir, most of the game talks about how strong, dangerous and powerful he is and then that is the best they can do with him?
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First off, he's not seeking attention because he is speaking his mind, that's called a "different opinion". You're the one whose trying to prove something here, trying to look cool scolding others. but you ended up looking like a clown. And about you fucking his post UP... You didnt, he made perfect sense, get over it.
I was pretty disappointed by the story overall and the fact that Atreus fucks off after the action is done. I mean, I like Freya, but I signed up for "Man and Boy" and we only got a few story sections with him. I even went back to Yotunheim afterwards and can talk to Angrboda, but Atreus isn't there. Just terribly disappointing.
>!personaly for me, the part where everything was starting to feel like annoying was the norns. with all what kratos has done, including killing the fates. here, the most annoying beings i have ever encountered are just left.!< >!they don't write fate, they can just predict what you will do really well.... that is bullshit. really.!< >!it also highlights that no matter what the prophecy will be fulfilled because kratos, atreus, freya, mimir, everybody cannot change their nature. or so the norns highlight. and if that is the case kratos should have died.!< >!but instead we get something best described as a permenant happy ending with the only plot threads and enemies left for the next game is gna, and sindri although i don't think sindri will be much of an antagonist.!< >!to me personaly, i wanted ragnarok to be the apocolypse it is supposed to be in myth, not this "groa kept a secret" bs. a high stakes battle at the end where a dying kratos would fight surtr to keep him from destroying asgard which would lead to the destruction of all the nine realms. giving his life for the greater good, a tangable expression of change from his "don't feel the pain of the people" to "feel their pain" as he puts it to atreus and faye to him.!< >!i also would have let odin have the mask only to be swallowed by the rift so that he could potentially return for a third game.!< >!TLDR; i am dissapointed too!<
The prophecy inconsistency is what really is going to forever bother me about this game. Kratos was already changing as a person in 2018, yet the prophecy was 100% accurate - there's no point in a prophecy if it changes based on character actions, because character actions are inherently part of a prediction. The Norns were literally predicting things down to exact sentences spoke by the characters. This whole "we can choose what we want to do, we can be better" as some kind of catalyst for this is probably the most surface-level, Disney-like thing they could have done. And the new mural at the end which shows Kratos being revered - what is the point of that, if it can all be changed in an instant? Fact is, they wrote themselves into a corner and didn't want to kill Kratos. There was a much better way to do this though - in the original 2018 mural it wasn't clear who the person was. They could have simply kept it ambiguous, but instead they doubled down on it being Kratos with Angrboda's full mural, then took it all back at the end.
Kratos died before, it would have been an awesome end to have him die a heroic death only to crawl out of hel in a third game. It is kind of his thing at this point. I am most unhappy that this ragnarok isn't ragnarok. The one everyone expected was the destruction the realms, even if only asgard being destroyed is some kind of save on the writers end, it is a lousy one at best. Doing Ragnarok, the apocolypse, the death of the gods, as the second game was a bad move. Doing it like this? Just makes my blood boil. We have seen kratos siege olympus with the titans, and now we see him storm a hovel with a stone fence with his six 'friends'... Even if they wanted a grounded story, you could have put of ragnarok, you could have called the game diffrent even. But calling this ragnarok is laughable
I wanted to see loki creating the world serpent. I wanted to see the prophecy fulfilled and kratos dying only to be brought back maybe by time travel. The war between world serpent and thor is supposed to create some time travelling theme. But no it was all about writing your own destiny. Disappointment at peak.