God of War (series)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Zeus. In the third game, it's revealed that he wasn't actually evil, he was just consumed by the evils of Pandora's box, which came out when Kratos opened it.
    • Zeus still did things like chaining Prometheus and having a bird eat his intestines every day for helping humanity. The box may have enhanced his paranoia but he was an evil jackass long before that. The main difference is that he at least had redeeming qualities before the box's evil stomped them all out.
    • After all that's said and done, it's not hard to feel at least a little bad for Kratos when the weight of his monstrous actions finally sets in at the end of III. Realizing that he's become a bigger monster than the gods ever were and that slaughtering most of the Greek pantheon didn't make him feel any better, he takes his own life, both in penance and in order to release hope into the broken world he left behind. It didn't take, of course, but the weight of his guilt would go on to haunt him during the entirety of the Norse duology, and would shape him into a better man.
    • Thor and Baldur in the Norse games. While a murderous, genocidal brute, Thor is also a depressed alcoholic trainwreck of a man shaped into a self-loathing Living Weapon by Odin, who cuts him down the second he stands up for himself. Baldur, on the other hand, is ultimately a victim of his mother's selfishness and has been subjected to A Fate Worse Than Death that twisted him into a total maniac. Seeing him break down crying when he watches visions his past unfold in Helheim drives home just how heartbreaking his plight is.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Kratos is not a nice person, that's undeniable. But people seem to be split as to whether he's a tragic Sociopathic Hero or an outright Complete Monster. There's a good amount of support for each (with another argument to be made that he drifts between the two from game to game). Even when he properly redeems himself in the games depicting the Norse pantheon, there's still plenty of arguing about whether he's now a truly good person or still a monster who learned to reign in his worst impulses.
    • The developers have implied that in the Greek saga, Kratos' position between sociopathy and monsterism depends on just how blinded by rage he is.
    • Zeus' vindictiveness toward Kratos is because Kratos released fear from Pandora's Box, which infected Zeus. From a certain point of view, Zeus' actions are not his own and can't be blamed for wanting to kill Kratos.
      • By this interpretation, Kratos' death at the beginning of God of War II is a form of Hoist by His Own Petard in hindsight since he caused the fear which made Zeus stab him. It also creates an infinite regress of circular motivations because Zeus wants to kill Kratos because of the fear he unleashed and Kratos wants to kill Zeus because he killed him once.
      • Zeus might have been trying to connect with his estranged son Kratos through the Grave Digger disguise
  • Anticlimax Boss: Hermes. After bragging about his super speed and leading you on a chase through collapsing architecture to his fight, he's.. not very fast, and his attacks are girlish slaps that do almost no damage. This fits his spoiled brat/schoolyard bully character, though.
    • It's implied he's facing a few shattered bones from Kratos' improvised catapult by the time you actually fight. It's still a letdown (especially after the Hades fight), but it's understandable.
    • The final bosses of the second game are also a bit of a disappointment, not because they themselves are particularly easy (they aren't), but because they're preceeded by a gauntlet of Demonic Spiders with no sense of Mook Chivalry. If you can survive that, 1-on-1 duels with polite bosses are nothing to sweat over.
    • Kronos in III. The "fight" against him can basically be described as a series of mook fights with environmental hazards and where floors sometimes happen to turn into walls, peppered with a couple of quick time events. The visuals and the battle theme are nice though.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: The Centaurs. They almost never flinch, love interrupting your combos while you fight smaller mooks (because they always come with smaller mooks), have a crapton of health, and the QTE when they grab you requires super-human reflexes to win. The finishing move on them is one of the squickiest of the game, but you won't mind. Chimeras are a similar case, although they are arguable easier to deal with.
    • The Satyrs, too. Monsters that actually pay attention to your attacks and punish you for poor timing. Why else do they appear so late in the game?
  • Complete Monster: Ares qualifies big time in the original. Less so in the sequels, where Kratos arguably becomes far more heinous.
  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Kratos' villainous behavior can sometimes really make it hard to care if he wins or loses. Ares is shown be worse than him the first game, but in the second, Kratos goes on to do all of the same things that Ares had been, so even though Zeus is being paranoid and simply trying to get rid of a threat to his power, him wanting to kill Kratos hardly seems like a bad thing. It gets worse in God of War III with Kratos going even further off the deep end. To recap, while Zeus is stated to have tortured Hephaestus and imprisoned Pandora while generally acting like a tyrannical dickhead, Kratos keeps pursuing his revenge even though killing the gods releases disasters across the world. By the end of the game, he's nearly destroyed all of Greece and has killed almost every likable character in the game.
  • Demonic Spiders: The puppy Cerberoi in the second game. Very maneuverable and hard to hit. Take too long to kill them, and they evolve into full-grown Cerberus mini-bosses. (The Fuck-You Button is the most effective way to deal with them - not to mention the only way, at higher difficulties.)
    • Likewise the Satyrs, who don't evolve but are practically impossible to stagger, meaning you spend more time dodging their attacks than countering. If you grab them, it initiates a button-mashing grapple for the satyr's staff, which would be well and good except there's usually two of them per fight, and they show blatant disregard for the rules of Mook Chivalry.
    • There are several of these in the PSP version - or perhaps they just get introduced into gameplay more quickly. The worst ones are guys who are Dual-Wielding: you can't block their attacks, they have five-second-long combos, and they always come in packs. So: Dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, land one hit, Lather Rinse Repeat. (Actually, if you're quick, you can stagger them out of their attack patterns, but if you miss that first dodge, it's them juggling you.)
    • The Goddamn Satyrs and Wraiths in III.
      • Not so much the Wraiths once you know how to rip them out of the ground like Saddam out of a spider hole.
    • Sirens in Chains of Olympus, who have picked up the mannerisms of aformentioned wraiths, sink into the ground when they land after a knockback, and leap out of the ground to put you into an action sequence, this wouldn't be too annoying on its own, except the lunge is ridiculously fast, tracks you, and is one of two attacks in the game (the other belonging to armored cyclops) that can knock you out of your block + attack invincibility frames, did I mention there's a part where you have to fight three of them and an armored cyclops at once? Good luck getting an attack in before you have to mash L and R.
  • Designated Hero: Kratos is, by any rational standard, a monster. It's his plight that makes you feel sympathy for him - in any other situation he'd be the villain. Though of course, this isn't surprising since this is a retelling of Greek mythology, which was full of protagonists that count as Designated Heroes by modern standards.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Kratos gets this a lot for his badassery.
    • It's a strange case, since it's the male fans that do this.
    • And again, this is probably how Greek mythologies want us to react to the story. They have an entirely different concept for heroism from ours in modern days.
  • Ear Worm: God of War 2's theme. "Hold Devil's Pot of Tea, Hold Devil's Pot of Tea, Hold Devil's Pot of Tea Mulan!"
  • Enemy Mine: Theseus fighting along side with Minotaurs in his boss battle could be this.
  • Epileptic Trees: As pointed out on the WMG page, there are 3 murals showing different parts of history in the Halls of Time. The first one is the events of God of War I & II. The second is Kratos and the titans triumphing over the gods. The third one? Three kings men following a star in the desert...
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Yes, Kratos kills the evil gods and releases hope into the world, but look at the state the world's in.
  • Fandom Berserk Button: Saying that Kratos is only a good character in the Norse games, and that it's those games where the franchise "grew up". It's a sentiment that started making the rounds when game journalists hyped up the 2018 game, and it rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way. Youtuber Tactical Bacon Productions challenged that statement in this video, pointing out that while definitely a monster by the end, Kratos was still a multifaceted tragic character whose story portrays a compelling fall from grace showing how badly revenge can blind someone starting with good intentions.
  • Fandom Rivalry: There's a noticeable inter-fandom rivalry between fans of the Greek saga and fans of the Norse duology. Diehard fans of the Greek saga prefer the more action-packed combat, insane setpieces, and brutality Kratos displays while feeling that the Norse games made him into a wimp and a softy. Meanwhile, diehard fans of the Norse saga like the bigger emphasis on narrative and find the Greek games too distasteful and immature, viewing the Kratos of Ancient Greece to be little more than a one-dimensional screaming brute.
    • Friendly Fandoms: With that being said, there are still plenty of fans who love both eras as a whole. To them, their strengths in gameplay and narrative compliment one another, and do a good job at painting Kratos as the complex character he truly is.
  • Franchise Zombie: Some people feel that the announcement of God Of War Ascension has put the series into this territory, especially since it's another prequel. Tellingly, it took a while for the series to return. And even though the Norse games have generally been well-received, some people aren't fond of the gameplay changes and wish that the series ended with III.
  • Goddamn Bats: Harpies. Fairly easy to kill on their own, but they tend to show up while you're fighting tougher enemies or bosses, and often disrupt your combos or distract you enough to get clobbered. They also like to knock you off narrow beams.
    • The Feral Hounds in III may just have the harpies one-upped in terms of sheer goddamn-ness in that they render you a total sitting duck for other stronger enemies if even just one latches onto you.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Due to the way the game is designed, some Game Breaker bugs exist that allow you to have - among other things - infinitely regenerating magic and maxed out weapons early in the game. Also, holdover features remain from when the game was in "test" phase, including invisible ledges, which can lead Sequence Breaking. There are a whole bunch of gamers dedicated to finding and refining them in order to perform better speed runs.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Tessho Genda's Japanese voice as Kratos can be considered as such if you take in account he voiced Kurama The Nine-tailed Fox, and Kratos' job is destroying creatures like him during all the games.
  • I Knew It!:
    • The Titans' betrayal.
    • How Kratos "defeats" Aphrodite. Not to mention the fact that Aphrodite would be the...ahem..."opponent" for the sex minigame.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks: The weapons in III have been criticized for falling into this trap, aside from the lion gauntlets. Having said that, with the gameplay in the entire trilogy being basically identical from start to finish, we should be probably be impressed that it only fell into this trap here.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Raging dickhead Kratos might be, it's easy to see why he turned out the way he did. He's spent most of his life as a punching bag for the gods, who are responsible for the deaths of his loved ones and the destruction of his homeland. They took advantage of his grief and manipulated him into killing Ares so they could force him to take over his old job (which he did not want), went back on their deal to erase the traumatic memories of killing his family, and had the gall to kill him when he didn't do his job exactly as they had ordered. He softens up into a genuine Woobie during the Norse games, where he's now a widower twice over and is desperately trying to keep his son from making the same mistakes he made.
  • Memetic Badass: The reason there are no more Greek gods, deities or mythological creatures anymore? Kratos killed most of them.
  • Memetic Sex God: Kratos, in universe. In God of War 3, his having sex with Aphrodite turns on her servants so much, they start making out with each other. In Ghost of Sparta he starts having a threesome, and by the end of it, at least 10 girls are in his bed.
  • Moral Event Horizon: The game makes it clear that you're put in control of a character who starts as a Sociopathic Hero only to evolve right into class-A douchebag.
    • The developers have stated that they originally wanted to give Kratos a cute little dog to follow him around, as a way to give him some humanity and remind him of better times. He would then have to kill the dog before it turned into Cerberus. They eventually decided that was too cruel even for the series.
      • The concept lives on in the Cerberus monster. Little Cerberus pups quickly grow into mature Cerberus, and the easiest way to deal with them is to grab the puppies before they mature and grind their skulls into the ground.
    • Assuming he didn't cross it with his bloodlust and warmongering, Ares crossed this by getting Kratos to kill his own family, giving him hope of saving their souls, and then ripping it away from him, all so he could turn him into a weapon he could use against Olympus. He succeeded, alright. Maybe a little too well.
    • Zeus betraying and killing Kratos, while undeniably a dick move after everything he had gone through, is at least understandable given Kratos' mercurial nature and destructive tendencies. Him demolishing Sparta purely to be a spiteful dick and punish him further? There's no justifying that. Not in the slightest.
  • Most Annoying Sound: In the first game. "What are you doing? Athens crumbles as you waste time!"
  • Nausea Fuel: The Chronos Boss fight. Tearing off his blistered fingernail, cutting open a scab, getting swallowed and then graphically cutting your way out of his stomach with the Blade of Olympus? Disgusting... but cool.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • Clotho, the giant boob monster.
    • Kratos ripping off Helios' head... *shudders*
    • The first-person beatdown of Poseidon, from HIS perspective, ends with HIS EYES GETTING GOUGED OUT.
  • Player Punch: Brutal, and possibly the most poignant and well-written part of the game it appears in. Toward the end of God of War 3, Kratos retrieves Pandora from the Labyrinth. Kratos needs Pandora because she is literally the key that will get him past the Fires of Olympus and open the box that bears her name. To serve her function as the key, though, Pandora has to die in the Fires of Olympus. She willingly goes with him, and as they journey together, for whatever reason, Pandora speaks with Kratos as though he is someone she trusts. She bares her heart (figuratively) to the guy who has been going around butchering the world by proxy. And you start to see just a hint of decent human being re-emerge in Kratos: she clearly reminds him of his own lost daughter. Enough that when they finally reach the Flame of Olympus, as Pandora is walking toward it, Kratos grabs her arm and refuses to let her continue. Pandora struggles with him, pointing out this is what he brought her there for. Which means all the soul-baring she did, all the things she said to him were words said to the man she knew was functionally her executioner. She then yells "Let go, you're hurting me!" at the guy who has spent the whole game murdering helpless opponents, slaughtering friend and foe alike, and killing the world by proxy. And his hand snaps off her like he's been burned. And then Zeus shows up, and it just gets worse...
  • Rated "M" for Money
  • So Cool Its Awesome: Let's just say that pre-ordering any given game is a sound investment and leave it at that.
  • Squick:
    • The sacrifices in the second game.
    • The fight with Kronos in the third game has Kratos slashing open blisters and ripping out fingernails. Not to mention slicing open his stomach - allowing the guts to start falling out - and driving a crystal shaft through his chin.
  • That One Boss: The Kratos Doppelgangers from the first game. Even on normal difficulty its easy to lose this fight if you're not paying attention to Kratos' family's health bar. On God mode it's nearly impossible. At any given time there are 7 Kratos-clones onscreen, and they respawn a LOT. Get hit by any one of them, and it breaks your combo. Get knocked on your ass or get grappled even once, it wastes precious seconds during which the clones will slaughter your family
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In Chains of Olympus, you have to find Helios, the sun god, and restore him to the sky to fend off the assault of Morpheus. Not only do you not fight Morpheus in the game, but it turns out the real Big Bad is Persephone, and Morpheus just took advantage of Helios' disappearance without ever knowing why the sun vanished.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Arguably, anyone who knew who Kratos was and still decided they were going to try and kill him, you can hardly feel sympathy for people who go into a fight knowing you killed a god and not just running.
    • Persues and Icarus in two come to mind, Icarus at least has the excuse he's a little unstable
    • Special mention goes to Hermes, who doesn't stop running his mouth until Kratos chops his legs off, and Helios, who could have just answered honestly and gotten away with his life. Still, considering what Zeus would have done to them if they didn't try to stop Kratos, it's a lose-lose situation.
  • Vindicated by History: Interestingly, this applies more to the "hero" than his games themselves. As time went on, Kratos would be looked down on as being a one-dimensional murder machine who's responsible for many of his own problems and a monster who's even worse than the gods who screwed him over. Gaming journalists and other like-minded individuals would consider him an embarrassing relic of gaming history who should really be forgotten... and then the 2018 game happened. Not only did it rescue him from his growing Scrappy status by giving him compelling character development, but many fans went back to the older entries and realized that even there, he was still a complex and tragic character. His many negative character traits that turn him completely unsympathetic were in turn recognized as deliberate character flaws that lead up to his big My God, What Have I Done? moment and subsequent redemption in the Norse games, and sympathetic qualities like his love for his brother Deimos and daughter Calliope had a lot more attention called to them. Since then, writing pre-PS4 Kratos off as a one-dimensional meathead has become viewed as a misunderstanding of the character at best and malicious historical revisionism at worst.
  • What an Idiot!: Helios has Kratos legitimately interested in the prospect of sparing him, only to totally blow it by saying that he cannot defeat Zeus. He then uses the LIGHT OF THE SUN to blind him. In a remarkable (and extremely funny) display of practicality, the Spartan just sticks his hand in front of his eyes, walks over and unceremoniously tears off Helios' head.
    • Hephaestus. He knows all too well of what Kratos is capable of, especially considering that Kratos had just returned from killing Cronos, with only anger towards Hephaestus ailing him. Upon making the weapon he had promised for Kratos, he tries to kill Kratos right then and there with lightning, only to be killed in possibly one of the shortest QTE's ever. He becomes The Woobie again by asking for forgiveness reaffirms his status as The Woobie by begging Kratos to spare Pandora as he draws his last breath.
    • Gaia refuses to save Kratos when they start falling down Olympus, saying that he was just a pawn in the Titans' revenge plans, and allows him to fall into the River Styx. When Kratos escapes Hades (yet again), he almost immediately runs into an injured Gaia, who begs for help. No points for guessing Kratos' response.
    • Kronos sort of counts for this too. After trying to smash Kratos and even getting to the point of eating him, after Kratos slices his way out of Kronos' gut and gets the stone he came for, Kronos replies with this little gem: "You have found what you came for, so leave me alone!" Yeah, Kronos, I'll get on that ASAP.
    • Perhaps the biggest of all is Kratos in the third game. A large chunk of the game revolves around his quest to find and open Pandora's Box, having been told that it contains the power to kill a god and would thus grant him the power to take down Zeus. For whatever reason, he doesn't stop to consider that 1) he already opened the box in the first game, 2) he had already killed numerous gods at that point, and 3) he had Zeus beaten once before, and would have killed him were it not for Athena's intervention. The game does a very good job of undermining that last one in the actual final battle, but still, Kratos has no reason to suspect what occurs there before it happens.
      • To be fair, he was doing this on the advice of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, after she had regained his trust.
      • He did consider the first of those. When Athena first tells Kratos in III that he needs to get the power inside the box, he mentions he already used it to kill Ares. She insists there's another power inside it, thinking Kratos drew on the evils of the box when he killed Ares.
      • To be fair, Athena said that he needed to destroy the Flame of Olympus around Pandora's Box to weaken Zeus, so getting the contents of the box was secondary.
    • Or the start of the second game. Athena tells Kratos that Olympus is growing angry at his slaughter. Then Zeus throws down a sword and tells him to drain his power into it. When Kratos asks why he's told that it's done "for the good of all Olympus". He then proceeds to weaken himself three timesby draining his power into the blade, rendering him mortal. Then Zeus kills him. Apparently he didn't see this coming.
    • Hermes. He knows full well how powerful Kratos is, having seen him kill multiple gods. Any rational person would expect him to put as much distance between himself and Kratos as possible, especially considering how he taunted him. Instead, he barely keeps ahead of Kratos, all the while taunting him for being slow. Three guesses as to what happens to him, and the first two don't count.
    • Everybody who betrays Kratos and most of the people who try to fight him count. He killed the God of War in a fair fight and tears out of death Like a Badass Out of Hell! He's unstoppable.
      • Especially egregious because one of the first things he did to save the gods in the game's timeline was to escape from Hades, as a mortal.
  • The Woobie: Hephaestus.

Assorted character YMM Vs

All the gods

  • Alas, Poor Villain: With the exception of Ares, no one of the gods were actually evil by choice or birth. Their evil came from the evils that were released from Pandora's box by Kratos. Before that, they seemed to had been hard yet benevolent rulers who tried to bring order in Greece from all the monsters and Greece's mortal enemies that attacked Greece and her people. Poseidon seemed to had been the only god who remained uncorrupted, Hephaestus just wanted to protect Pandora and Hera is just loyal to her husband.
    • "Still wanting to kill my husband, I suppose? Can't say I blame you." If this line is any indication, Hera had about as much love for Zeus in this game series as she did for him in actual mythology.

Zeus

  • Alas, Poor Villain
  • Jerkass: Such a douchebag to everyone and everything, from Kratos, to Hephaestus, to Pandora, to mankind, to the Titans and he didn't even gave a shit when Athena was stabbed by Kratos.

Ares

  • Complete Monster: He is the reason why Kratos had become what he is now, and so is indirectly responsible for everything that happened, including the murder of Kratos' family. Plus, he doesn't have the excuse of being turned by the evils of Pandora's Box.

Danaus

Hades

Hephaestus

Prometheus

Hermes

Hera

Clotho

Perses

Perseus

  • What an Idiot!: Stepping into shin-deep water before turning invisible, and talking.

Clotho

Lakhesis

  • What an Idiot!: Helping Kratos into her place when she should know that bad things are gonna happen once he has come.

Atropos

  • What an Idiot!: Bringing Kratos with her when she attempted to change the past.

Helios

  • What an Idiot!: He could have survived if he hadn't enraged Kratos by taunting him, then trying to blind him with his light.

Charon

  • Nightmare Fuel: His face is like a skull, and he has severed heads on his belt.

Pandora

Boat Captain

The Last Spartan

Calliope

Daedalus

King Midas

Poseidon's Princess

Callisto

Gyges

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