Finally! I’ve been itching to do a Backlog Barbecue for a while, but I’ve been playing The Witcher 3, and I just have a sinking feeling that we won’t be seeing that write-up any time soon. So I took a break from Geralt of Rivia and his shitty, rigged card game for something a bit more digestible. Therefore, the most recent game to get plucked from the pile and tossed into the fire is God of War 3 Remastered.

It’s been a good long while since I’ve played a God of War game. I played through the first one on PS2, and then slept on the sequel until I purchased the HD Collection on PS3. Then, after beating God of War 2, I held off on the third one until recently, when I picked up God of War III Remastered for the PS4.

Apparently, waiting until the next generation upgrade has become a tradition for me when it comes to the God of War series. Ironically though, it wasn’t the hope of an HD version that kept me from getting the games sooner. It was Kratos.

I can’t say anything here that hasn’t been said everywhere else for the past 13 years, so I’ll keep the reasoning simple. Kratos is a huge dickhead. The theme of the trilogy has always been that of revenge, but also that of uncontrollable rage. While I’m sure there’s a psychological angle that the developer and writers were going for, the affect that it has on me is exhausting.

I loathe Kratos. The unending anger, destruction, and over-the-top violence just gets really old, really quick. The reason it took me several years between playing the games was that it took me several years to just get up the urge to put up with Kratos’s incessant belly-aching. It’s always someone else’s fault. Kratos will complain about being forced to kill someone as he continues to bash their head in long after they’re dead, and by extension I am forced to bash someone’s head in long after they’re dead. The player is constantly tasked with pressing various combinations and mashing the Circle button while Kratos gouges eyes, crushes skulls, pulls off arms, and rips people’s heads off.

I’m not a prude by any means. I’m okay with sex, nudity (obviously), and violence. But I have a saturation point. Gore doesn’t bother me, but it’s the manner in which the gore is presented. I can laugh when Bruce Campbell is sawing a dead-ite in half and ridiculous amounts of blood spews like a geyser, and I can cheer at exploding zombie heads. But torture porn, that slow agonizing violence for the sake of slow agonizing violence, just doesn’t appeal to me. I would say that it’s because I’m older and my sensibilities have changed, but to be honest I’ve never been much into it. The Saw movies never appealed to me, and watching a film like The Last House on the Left (1972) was, for lack of a better term, stressful.

Playing as Kratos is stressful as well. There’s practically no respite from him. There’s no break in the action.

You get a small breather in the form of a box or lever puzzle, and it’s a nice pause from the constant mashing. But even then, it’s a tiny fraction of time before you’re back at it again, dismembering, disemboweling, shouting, yelling. It just never ends.

I originally came into this Backlog Barbecue to talk about the gameplay and mention how well the game has held up on current generation hardware, but the truth is, it’s a great game that’s still held back by its awful main character. He just makes it so hard to root for him. They even make a last ditch effort at the end of the game to explain that all the gods were infected with the darkness from Pandora’s Box back at the end of the first God of War, and it was this darkness that corrupted Zeus into doing all of the questionable shit that he had been doing. As if that makes Kratos any less of a shitbag. The gods may have been corrupted, but it was still Kratos that slashed his way through crowds of civilians and used a frightened, topless chick as a doorstop.

With the new God of War sequel on the horizon, it will be interesting to see if Sony Santa Monica can succeed in leaving the guilt-ridden, angry Kratos behind and give us a Kratos that we actually want to see succeed. My personal belief is that the new GoW will focus on the possibility of that rage living on in his young son, and that Kratos will spend the game trying to keep the kid from taking the same road that he once did. Sounds okay on paper, but we’ll see how it plays out.

If he turns into a Kratos Jr., I may just wait and pick it up on PS5.