This one goes up to 11, or Kratos gives up the ghost.
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Victor Davis Hanson, a Stanford military historian, once described human nature as "primordial and reptilian." Writing about conflict will never go out of fashion because we are "governed by pride and fear and envy." It's hard not feel like the embodiment of those sentiments as I guide Kratos through a disemboweled centaur in God of War 3. The conclusion of the trilogy continues the bestial traditions of the first two games. It's like a pacifier for the teething lion inside us all, the darkling that likes to see the tendons in your neck protrude in speech and makes a point of asking for the steak prepared bleu on special occasions.
What's supposed to be new for God of War 3 is really more of an amplification of scale that's been a part of the series since Kratos first found a towering dungeon strapped to Kronos's back in 2005. There are two carefully planned setpieces in God of War 3 that center around Titans, Kratos leaping from the palm of the giant's hand to its esophagus with a series of cutscenes with button prompts. In the opening sequence you ride on the back of Gaia as she climbs Mount Olympus and help defend her from Poseidon, a gushing cross between a horse and a spider. Then midway through the game you play a murderous flea on Kronos's hide, finally fishing out from his intestines a key to turn a crank and extend a bridge a few rooms over. The camera will periodically zoom back so far that Kratos appears as tiny orange strokes in an enormous Romantic painting.
There's also more detail to the gore, which means you get to see skin and muscle tearing when you literally pull Helios's head off (and proceed to use it as a flashlight). You'll see red and brown intestinal tubing spatter out of centaur bellies, put minotaurs' eyes out with their own horns, and pull out Kronos's fingernail in an especially unpleasant moment. The microscopic level of evisceration set against the gigantic tableau recreates a fantasy world where our most primordial and reptilian selves get to toss around giant metal blades.
What's unexpected in all of this isn't the sharper textures, more detailed characters, nor the introduction of bowel physics, but instead the shifts in point of view to a more disturbing first person view. It's a rare occurrence but, more than any other game in the series, God of War 3 has a sense of suffering in its toysome violence. The aforementioned scene with Poseidon is the first of these nasty transitions. For the final kill, players are put into Poseidon's place seeing the hulking Kratos smother them with blows. In a nod to the inherent masochism of all games built around failure ("Your Are Dead"), you'll see button prompts to control Kratos's attacks. They come directly at the camera in a terrible barrage that makes it possible to see Kratos not as a hero, but as a violent idiot with whom there can be no reasoning.
My heart sank in the second I saw him coming towards me, no longer a moody and cool hero, but now a homicidal beast. It was like being in the ocean and seeing a dorsal fin suddenly appear nearby. I realized escape was impossible and instead started wondering about just how badly things were going to hurt. It's easy to gloss over that scene because it's short and there aren't many like it in the rest of the game, but I can't think of any other game that's so forcefully shown the cruelty of the violence it demands for progress. We use the term "badass" in games as if it's supposed to be a compliment, combining all-encompassing negativity with an instrument of defecation. This scene offers a glimpse of the tragic resignation that must accompany the sight of a real badass arriving on the scene. It's time for a ****show.
Switching back to the action-figure presentation feels almost sterile in comparison to the immediacy of that moment. The more I played, the more I wondered about what I wasn't being shown. The gameplay is rooted in the same simple combo strings and steady rhythm of attack and evasion from the first game. Every action has a hyperbolic payoff in the form of a glowing weapon trail and chunky explosion of blood. The increasing challenge comes from learning to vary the rhythm and frequency of your combos to survive the shuffling array of enemies thrown in the way. I feel almost like a dog gnawing on a bone as I grind away in room after room, taking the nobby end between my molars during one scene and going down to the narrow shaft with my incisors for the next. Every scene is different, but has the same essential marrow.
Where's the nail fungus removal minigame?
In many ways, the expanded scale of the action makes it more difficult to keep track of the minute-to-minute action. With more enemies and larger arenas Kratos can become obscured amid all the lavish environmental detail. In many of the busier fights, it becomes especially challenging to know when an attack is doing damage to you. The fight with the fire Cerberus during the endgame is especially unclear, with explosions everywhere, a zoomed back camera angle, enemies attacking from off-screen, and a big three-headed dog that periodically blocks Kratos from view.
It's not unplayable, but it's an example of the friction between using older models of gameplay with the more powerful machinery of this generation. The first game's smaller rooms and more grueling difficulty level were well matched to the mechanics because each input could be related to an animation and timed against a corresponding enemy animation. With characters appearing smaller onscreen and so many more enemies to reckon with in any given moment, the system can feel more arbitrary and faith-based.
