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Also a new Indie Royale bundle, ten games apparently hand-picked by a commentator named the Gamer Chick. Current price is about $5; $8 min to get an album too (not clear which one by Gavin Harrison but probably this one). Some of them look pretty neat.
Also, grab Super Ninja Warrior Extreme from the bundle page, until this bundle ends!
Only if you're taking the plot seriously, though. I'm pretty sure that God of War about as serious as MGS is.
And did you expect a God of War to be a merciful pacifist?
I'm pretty sure that raping and killing people indiscriminately makes you a dick.
I do take it seriously becuase the game gives me no indication that Kratos is played for parody at all. Nor the music, nor the script, nor the gameplay. If you don't take it seriously, it's your call, but I am kinda sure it was not intended as a self-parody, at least not when the saga began, unlike MGS, which is a pastiche from the very start.
Killing gods for petty revenge, leaving their posts unattended, with great consequences for the mortal world is far more dickish in my eyes. And Kratos also kills people indiscriminately.
Which makes him a dick. Not seeing how the gods aren't assholes, they're just assholes with important jobs to do.
Gabriel also follows similar patterns. He destroys an entire civilian population to get back at a few people (sound familiar?) and menaces other, smaller villages for seemingly no reason. In my eyes, he's no better than Kratos: he just has less power (relatively speaking) to act out his murderous and destructive desires.
In God of War, I can kill entire legions of soldiers in increasingly bloody ways. Immediately afterwards, I can have a threesome with nine women and fight a giant freaking demigod-monster. I don't see how anyone can take a god-killing Mary Sue like that at face value.
OK, I was going to back out of this God of War discussion, but this is getting silly. Do I need to identify with Kratos to enjoy God of War? No. Do I have to take God of War's world seriously in order to enjoy it? No. I enjoy God of War for its elegant combat and incredible set pieces. It has influences both in action-adventure games (i.e. Castlevania, Zelda) and beat-em-ups (i.e. Final Fight) that I admire. It's fun to play, even though Kratos is a horrible myth-person with only three emotions. I am okay with this. Others are not okay with this, and It Just Bugs these people that God of War is so popular.
Whatever. I'm done. Now back to Donkey Kong Country Returns. It has bananas.
Obviously you've never read fanfiction. :P
I approve of this and I need to play this soon myself.
That's not really what we're arguing about, though. No-one is contesting that Kratos is a mass-murdering asshole, and no-one is contesting that the games themselves are fun.
What is being contested here is whether or not Gabriel is better than Kratos. And coming from someone who's played all the LoS games? In the end, the only difference is that Gabriel is Scottish.
There's more than one LoS game right now? I must have missed it. In the first LoS, in any case, Gabriel doesn't kill or abuse (or have much opportunity to do either) civilians or other random inhabitants he stumbles across. In fact, the first thing you do is saving a fortified village from a werewolf.
And just to be a bit anal, Gabriel's accent is more Irish than Scottish.
That depends on how one views revenge. If revenge is a form of justice, then so is retribution, under the idea that even-handed misfortune is fair -- even if it has to be enforced in some way. But I don't believe in revenge or retribution as a form of just punishment, because I feel those forms of punishment get in the way of the progression of both individuals and the communities they belong to.
But that's not the most particular part of my criticism of Kratos. He wants revenge -- fine, that's a decent basis for a video game about slaughtering things. He goes further, though, making whole populations submit to his personal need for revenge. The Gods he fights against are far from just rulers, and Greek mythology is certainly full of them using humans disposably towards their own ends, but even that is several degrees better than Kratos' wanton slaughter of people who have nothing to do with any of this.
What makes it worse is that Kratos seems to think that the solution to his problem is the behaviour that got him into his predicament in the first place -- mindless, hot-blooded violence. I don't particularly care that I don't identify with Kratos and don't particularly like him, but on top of being alien to human behaviour and a complete dick, he's a cardboard cutout of a character who is never at all interesting. He's a complete caricature of a kind of hypermasculine social id, like a collection of all these horrible things men are taught to be in their infancy and childhood.
As a character, he's a complete waste of time and energy. And the God of War games, given their lack of gameplay depth and lack of storytelling proficiency, have been wastes of the efforts of many programmers, artists, animators, sound technicians, writers, game designers and writers who may have been doing much better work under much better leadership. Remember that AAA video games are multi-million dollar endeavours; I'm not particularly pleased that the video game industry continues to spend that amount of money on such shallow material while other entertainment and artistic mediums continue to evolve in technical proficiency, social awareness and storytelling skill.
With all that said, I think it's fine if anyone likes the God of War games, because appreciation is subjective and I'm in no place to determine what the personal experiences of others are. But it's perfectly possible to enjoy something personally while stepping outside of the experience and seeing something for what it is, flaws inclusive. I love the Witcher games, for instance, but the first one in particular has an incredibly masculine mindset from a gender relations point of view. So while I'll defend The Witcher until my last breath, on the basis of its importance in terms of how choice and consequences are dealt with within it and its success as an adaptation of a literary setting, none of that will prevent me from recognising its flaws as well.
So when I criticise God of War here, I'm not saying "your experiences were wrong". If you enjoyed it, that's fine, and I don't think anyone is a horrible or stupid person for enjoying anything. What I am saying, however, is that God of War is disappointing and shallow given the praised heaped on it and the money that has gone into making the series a reality. It's not my intention to insult anyone personally for what they enjoy, but that doesn't mean I have to be so kind towards a product on store shelves.
So basically what I'm reading is that God of War has an uninteresting, shallow narrative, but may nevertheless be quite fun to play.
I have yet to find anyone who plays it for the story.
I've seen some internet reviewers actually do that.
I played FFV for the story. The job system added some variety to the gameplay, though.
I play a lot of games for the story. I played God of War in spite of the story.
Talkin' 'bout the Witcher, I've finally found time to play the game. Found it as good as told. It was also fun to see all the in-jokes in there.
So... much.... DOTA....
Final Recettear loop begin. Incoming Griff.
...I may have made a million pix on day three. I probably could have paid off the entire debt on day one by vendoring the checkered floors I stockpiled before starting the loop.
Thanks to boredom seeping in, I kinda want to do a Let's Play for Medieval II: Total War (Vanilla) or Crusader Kings II (With all DLC)... Can someone please help me decide which game I should do?
Tales of Xillia comes out Tuesday. I've already preordered it, but I... probably won't play it until next year. Basically every time I visit GameStop they take me downstairs and introduce me to The Gimp.
How does God of War's gameplay suck, exactly? Like Monsoon said, it combines aspects from various other games to create a fluid experience.
^^^ I'd say Total War, for the reason that CKII has a whole thread on the Hangout.
I've rented Tatsunoko vs. Capcom from the library.
I like how the Wii remote plus Nunchuk controls change the game from arcane fightstick nonsense to simple, babby controls for fighting game idiots like me.
I don't like how that forces Tekkaman's Tek Win and lvl 3 H.C. to always attack diagonally, though.
So I'm farming stuff with Griff to get the final True Card.
He's...pretty mediocre. I mean, his regular attack is amazing -- it's basically Nagi's range with Louie's swing arc, and it can even hit rabbits as they jump away.
But he's a total one-trick pony, even more than Louie. His specials are all terrible and prohibitively expensive. The lightning dash from the boss fights has a decent wallop, but it's twice as expensive to use, and doesn't have the escape uses of Charme/Nagi/Elan's fire attacks. He has this ridiculous black hole that costs 30 MP (!) but takes so long to go off that you'll probably get hit out of the animation (losing the MP of course), doesn't do enough damage to be worth it on a boss, and you'll tear up normal monsters faster with the really good regular attack anyway. And then he has a Berserk that's pretty much the same as Elan's but more expensive and reduces combat to running up and spam attacking.
He also has a weird dash that shadows through stuff, but it takes a few steps to kick in, and doesn't go far enough to be all that useful. More often than not, you'll either accidentally ram whatever you were trying to phase through, or pop out of it too early and clip their backside.
The story is really slow paced and silly, isn't it? I played it for the job system.
Also:
It's debatable whether or not it's justified, but I think that it's understandable in this case. I mean, if I got killed I'd want revenge too, know what I'm saying?
Honestly if I got murdered for some reason I'd probably think I deserved it.
Well Kratos certainly deserves it, but he definitely doesn't think that way.
I don't remember it being slow. The Advance version has a humorous translation with various references, though the RPGe translation takes it more seriously.
It's definitely got far fewer unexpected plot twists than FFIV, but FFIV had too many of them. FFV's story is usually regarded as very cliche. However, I thought that, despite the cliches, it handled dramatic sense very well and it felt really well done and emotionally satisfying.
I think 6 was the first one that didn't have an utterly cliche and predictable plot (bad guys want to get/destroy elemental crystals and inevitably succeed until you kill them). And even then it was pretty cliche. Evil empire fucking shit up, stage a rebellion using a demigoddess -- the only real twist was when Kefka took it off the rails and caused an apocalypse halfway through.
FFV's advantage was not drowning itself in melodrama unless someone died. Even so, it fell victim to a lot of the same devices all the previous ones did. Most irritatingly, killing off pretty much every secondary character you met in moments that fell flat because almost none of them were around for more than a few minutes of cutscene in the first place. The only one you really knew long enough to start feeling bad for was Gilgamesh, and given the sum total of your exposure to him was a few lines of casual in-combat blather, that's really saying something about how flat everyone else was.
Evil empire fucking shit up is II's plot. But, wasn't I about a timelooped prophecy?