God of War Ragnarok – Zero Punctuation

The plot picks up where the last left off. Fimbulwinter has set in and poor old hairy daddy Kratos still can’t catch a break. Norse gods keep trying to kill him, his severed-headed common-law won’t shut up, and his son has reached the age of wanting to stick his penis in things, as well as going out rebelliously at night and to hunt the lost Jotnar Artifacts and stick his penis into them. Long, long, long story short, this eventually leads to Odin and Thor getting pissed off and another odyssey through the nine realms ensues. Remember how the last game felt like twenty hours of mostly pissing to build an epic conflict that it never really gets to? Ragnarok is what he was headed for. It’s like 2018 was a proof of concept, audiences didn’t jump on Kratos’ new cornflake strainer, so this time we’re ready to pursue the real storyline. Not that he doesn’t get his fair share of pissing on him. The first three quarters of the game are mostly Kratos and Kratos Junior doing their best not to throw Ragnarok into a frustrating and futile exercise that could have easily been avoided if someone had just shown them the fucking box art.

The lack of gameplay changes certainly supports the proof-of-concept theory. The combat camera still hovers a little too close like a pickled onion breath mid-executive. There’s still that fucking obnoxious gear crafting system that means I’m forced to play Kratos dress-up carts once in a while to keep enemies from taking too much squishy damage, and it keeps unlocking more of things to make and accessorize until Kratos should look like a shining Christmas tree. That and the upgrade system all result in a pause screen resembling a disassembled hair dryer strewn across an arts and crafts catalog. And it’s all so painfully unnecessary when I feel like I’m getting through combat just fine by smashing through a light attack and occasionally hitting block or dodge like it’s a two-button drum machine. But it’s the story and the settings that count, and I think my review is best summed up by a moment of revelation I had about twenty hours as I exited the narrow passageway in cave number 8012.” This has all the makings of a good game,” I thought, “The visuals are polished to a mirror shine. The sets are awesome. distinct personalities and intricate patterns and clean underwear and noses and all the other crap you need.

“This is exactly the kind of thing that an absolute asshole in Youtube comments would call ‘objectively good.’ fills it with abject misery?” God of Four was a big ass game and God of Five must be, no lie, at least twice as long. You’ll definitely get what you pay for. But remember how j Did you say that God of Four was like listening to a very rambling old person trying to tell a story, constantly pausing and going off on irrelevant tangents? Well, in God of Five, that old person now has Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy and her naughty grandson keep running around the room detonating firecrackers. It looks like the result of very heated negotiations between the story team and the gameplay department. “Okay for our next chapter, we want to ire advance the plot a fucking inch.” “We’re offering an eighth of an inch, and we want seven linear lanes, four cut-and-paste fights with generic dudes, two puzzles, a set piece, a gameplay mechanic that literally doesn’t appear anywhere else in the game and forty-seven squeezes into tight caves. “A quarter inch, and we’ll let you pass us in line for the taco truck.” “Do!”

There’s a bit where Kratos decides to consult the Fates. He has a relationship with the Fates dating back to God of War 2 when he made pictures of pasta with their intestines. And that kicks off a whole chapter where we drag through the map, find a cave, kill some dudes, find out it was the wrong cave, dog sled across the map again, find another bad cave, come back a third time, find the right cave, prove our worth through three set pieces and more guy kills, then finally get our reunion and fate goes “fuck you, Kratos,” and Kratos gets the fuck off. Oh, and kill Heimdall, I guess. And that literal whole chapter was just to tell him to kill Heimdall. Definitely one of those “meetings that could have been an email” situation. Meanwhile, Kratos Junior has a chapter where he falls asleep and wakes up in a Roger Dean album cover where he meets Manic Pixie Exposition Girl, the incredible human intrigue device whose whole job it is to explain the shit, and phwoar crikey the history department has to’ I sacrificed a lot of rest room privileges to get to include it. Probably why she won’t tell us until we’ve literally helped her shop for a fucking hour and then fought a boss character who’s never been before and doesn’t anymore never.

And I know you think too long a game is only a problem for whiny game reviewers who were hoping to spend some time with family and eat some food this week, but it seems so egregious. I’ve always appreciated elegance in game design, and the size of God of War Massivecock feels crude. Too much spending money. Like it’s trying to brutally force its way to Game of the Year by volume alone. Do you prefer a small, finely prepared restaurant meal or an entire room filled from floor to ceiling with Snickers bars? The second, obviously, but comparing the two hardly seems fair. And incidentally, the constant flavor dialogue with our current pet NPC doesn’t make the in-between gameplay any less artificially padded. It just means that the emotional tone keeps flailing around disastrously like an unsecured pipe. “Kratos, how do you feel about this last sixteenth of an inch of story development that happened?” “I feel stoic and grumpy, grrrr.” “Yeah, I thought you could. OH SHIT AMBUSH CUT CUT KILL END THEIR LIVES DEATH THEIR FLESH DRINK THEIR BLOOD Oh they are all dead. Anyway, what were you thinking for dinner tonight? “GRRRRrrrr tacos.”