God of War Ragnarök (Zero Punctuation) 

You're not suppose to be trying to peg Dr. Strange You are to slap him with a rainbow trout, while telling him that Blade ate the last of the chicken nuggets. There, the Marvel universe shall finally collapse from that.

🌮🌮

On that note, deadass thought it was Jeff Goldblum playing him in the actual game

I'm never going to be able to get that image out of my head anymore.

kind of makes sense tbh.

I am not sure that i understand the joke past the funny visual

I love "asshole used car salesman by day, loan shark bastard by night" Mafi-Odin.

Cuts are actually good for these kinds of things

Well yeah, that's why it switches POV to Atreus every now and then, so Kratos can go use the privy.

What do you think his frost attacks are? Just frozen liquid released in battle.

Do magical creatures and gods pee?

“Gods do not wee”

Agreed! A major issue in the Horizon games too. More games should have a feature to extend the timer before the solution is handed to you (or allow you to turn those hints off entirely

There's a puzzle assist setting in the options and I had to double check it was switched off a few times. What's the point of having puzzle assist if you get assistance with the puzzles no matter what

@@AverageSneedEnjoyer The “Puzzle Assist” settings are more for people who have troubles with the precision involved for puzzles. When switched on they can enable things like the axe hit detection being bigger for puzzle elements, or time-sensitive mechanics being more generous. But no matter what you pick, the game will tell you the answers to the puzzles before too long.

@@leightonpetty4817 ah I see what you mean, that makes sense. still, there should be an option for shutting up Atreus. feel like he annoyed me during puzzles way more than Freya did

Hey, it's not the game's fault that you were more focused on surviving a fight than surveying your surroundings for potential puzzles! You clearly need to figure out your priorities! haha

@@Torque_Mk1 what's that last one referring to?

"You know what's bullshit? greek gods that come into your house, turn your family against you, and bring the end of times. Fuck you, fuck off!"

I thought it would've been cool if that was a disguise and he ended up being at least a bit younger, bigger, and more imposing

Wait, that wasn't Carlin??

I got Dennis Hopper vibes, but this also works.

Went from laughing to a sense of dread the second I saw that hole in the wall.

I knew it was coming after “I don’t like where this is going” earlier in the video (0:32).

Grrrr this hole was made for me rrrrrgh...

@bannerman when?, what video?

I recognized the reference but couldn’t think of the name. Thank you.

Lmao yes. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. The powers that he shows in cutscenes should make the game itself irrelevant.

Because he can literally flip the entire temple in the last game but OH NO NOT A SMALL RUSTY METAL GRATE HOW UNBREAKABLE

@@leightonpetty4817 the temple is designed to be flipped, the rusty metal grate isn’t designed to be broken.

@@SorowFame Is this meant to be sarcastic?

I'll help you with that. It is a videogame and that is how it does it's loading screens. It's a necessity because of the medium the story is told in.

Because it's longer? More for me

If something has a tendency to be such a slog maybe, maybe it's actually not objectively good at all

@@F0rever.B0red I bet you anything you are not going to be able to play through this game twice.

That's Yahtzee in a nutshell. There are plenty of spunk-gargle-wee-wee games out there that deserve to be shat upon, of course, but it seems clear to me that he's either giving the people what they want in the form of endless negativity, or he just...doesn't really like games anymore. His hobby became his job, and now he's stuck doing this to pay the bills so he can't just stop. I mean, I could also be full of shit, but you pretty much know exactly what you're going to get every time you click on a video, and if he really dislikes all games as much as it seems he does based on these ZP videos, and isn't hamming up the negatives for laughs, then I feel kinda bad for him.

@@instantstupor He loves games my guy. Basically every stream has him gushing about some game that he's been playing recently. He doesn't like AAA / AAAA games, that's what he doesn't like.

Howso?

Credits.

@@a_level_70_elite_raccoon It’s a reference to “the Enigma of Amigara fault”, a short story by Junji Ito, who’s a well known Japanese horror manga author.

My exact same thoughts. Too bad Santa Monica don't read Junji Ito, cos that would have made the game remotely interesting.

This is my hole. It was made for me.

That shit was funny

I feel so out the loop with all the comments mentioning it

@SmileyBones Watch a special or two of Carlin's. You'll understand then.

True, but what I hated most is the nornir chests puzzles where they say absolutely nothing and I have to play where's waldo before I can do the puzzle. I wouldn't mind a hey look over there, and then figure it out myself.

Playing the first game over the last few months, and what I hate is that the game doesn't give you hints when it would actually help. Yes, Atreus, I know to hit the big thing over the door with the axe. But why aren't you telling me where the seals are for this Nornir chest?

You can change that in the options.

@@FineYungCannibal. if you’re referring to the “puzzle timings” setting; that actually relates to the length of time the chest seals stay active for (not the amount of time before an NPC tells you the answer to a puzzle). I thought / was hoping “puzzle timings” would relate to the latter, too

@Jud Vandy Ah no way, I honestly thought that changed it but I didn't realise until right near the end of the game so never bothered to change it myself.

Indeed.

Utterly lost it at that line 🤣🤣🤣

You can turn that offf in the settings. It really helps with the gameplay

I shut most things that said assistance or tutorial off

I dont think i really noticed them, the only ones i have a problem with are the puzzle hints

You know what game was really terrible about that? Doom Eternal. They built all this depth into the combat and enemy systems but every time you met a new enemy you had a forced tutorial immediately stop gameplay to tell you exactly how to beat it

@@VeritabIlIti Not to mention they were video files that were just projected over your screen in barely 30fps so they looked dramatically worse than the rest of the game

Its a reference to a horror manga called Amgira Faults, its really creepy although you've technically been spoiled by the video

_drr_

@@vingadivo8707omg it’s been said 100 times already

@@HoraceInkling and this person commented it on a comment that clearly hadnt seen the other comments, therefore helping out with context. how about you shut up and get a life

Kratos is in Callisto Protocol?

@@infernez I think the tight corridors definitely are.

Given how Callisto Protocol turned out, I'm looking forward to how he reacts to it.

@@Daretobestupider he is going to tear that game a new one just watch

@@Daretobestupider I mean he shit on Dead Space 1 pretty hard. CP was definitely a shitty version of Dead Space.

Gyros are better than tacos as well

According to Arby's they're "Mediterranean Tacos".

@@paulrus-keaton439 The only thing related to Arby's that I actually believe is whatever Nihilist Arby's is on about.

With olives.

@@gogauze because Arby's is "fuck it" food.

Yeah, when I saw the bit with him looking at a hole his exact shape I thought “is that a Junji Ito reference?” and the credit’s confirmed that

I think the internet is getting a bit lazy. This is only the second reference to Ito I've had this week. It used to be more common...

Well blame Namco for putting a patent on “auxiliary games in loading screens” in 1995. This pretty much meant for 20 years the idea that could have helped bandaged numerous games with long load times was held out of reach by some smarmy businessmen who didn’t even come up with the idea. It expired in 2015 and by then loading screens with games in them aren’t commonplace enough for everyone to be doing them. So blame Namco for all the hours of your life you spent looking at a bar filling up. Could have been nice to have a game where it loads a lot of things in big chunks but has a fun mini game between each section.

The DBZ games had my favourite loading screens

Batman Arkham Knight has arguably more detail in its character models and environment than these newer God of War games, and yet the hidden loading screens are significantly shorter. You can travel from one corner of the detail-heavy Gotham to the other in less than 2 minutes by flying or driving and I have yet to see the environment have pop-up whereas in Ragnarok on my PS5 I had pop-up occur multiple times. Keep in mind that Santa Monica has only one brand of hardware to develop on, while the team that made Arkham Knight had several to work with; I will acknowledge that the PC launch was broken, but the two consoles worked perfectly from the beginning and the PC versions work great now. At some point while developing Ragnarok, Santa Monica should have realized that they were doing something wrong by packing in all of these details that required so many loading gates. It drove me nuts and made me wish this game had been developed solely for the PS5.

nah man, we just getting older.

At least that means your ears aren't getting worse.

Literally what I thought. Did he forget his own term?

Hey everybody, the GHOST TRAIN guy is gonna summon a GHOST TRAIN. Real original.

Ehh, it's got explory bits. You can in fact get off the train and go do side quests. I mean like a fifth of the game is an optional area.

@@gormanls So it's more of a Jiminy Cockthroat?

@@gormanls that's a train ride with extra stops

And more than anything, it just annoyed me how they handled the character goals Kratos explicitly went searching for the Norns _for a way to enter Asgard._ He basically says “I need to know a way in, they know everything, I will go beat them up until they tell me.” After dicking around for 2 hours he finds them, they say “Heimdall is gonna kill Atreus in Asgard, better hurry!”, and then he just leaves What was the point of that? Why does he completely forget the real reason he came in the first place? Is it that much of a twist that an Aesir wants to kill Atreus? Why does the group immediately start planning on how to fight Heimdall and working on that project when they all openly admit that they _have no clue_ how to get there?

Yeah, and once they get their "mean to kill Heimdall" they just restate that they dont freaking know how to get to asgard! The story only progresses because atreus finds his own way out and Heimdal is kind enough to come to them

Literally cheered when I saw it

Also remove the bloody RPG system all it does is draw out the game with needless upgrades and crafting You want crafting have the starting stuff be perfectly balanced for the game and offer side grades that work in some situations but are a detriment in others Don’t, and this is the key part, be a melee lootershooter

The unnecessary shield mechanics was the funniest addition. I honestly think GoW18 may have one of my favorite shield/parry mechanics ever in a game-it just flows beautifully once you captured the feel, the rhythm going in and out of combat with a rather generous window. But it also has great defense alone, if you’d rather play it safe. In Ragnarok, they give you the option of a slightly more powerful parry with a significantly less forgiving window, and a more defensive option that removes parrying altogether. Both of these feel significantly worse than the base game shield… so the game shatters your perfectly-well-functioning shield in the first act and you don’t get it back until 3/4 in. You know, to make sure you don’t miss out on these far-worse shield options they made. But god, getting that shield back was the most satisfying thing in the world.

God of War 3 was amazing and still stands as my favorite GoW game I've played, the bosses are grand and dynamic, the gameplay loop is satisfying and tight, and it felt like you were playing a movie. It's really sad that the closest spiritual successor of the Greco-Roman trilogy gaming-wise is Hi-Fi Rush (which I'm really excited to play), an _XBOX_ game. The Norse games feel like you're just _watching a movie_ most of the time, with all the annoying open-world tropes. They stripped so much of what made the original games so fun to play. Sure, it has a good story, but I wish the gameplay was up to snuff.

I was so frustrated by that. They did a great job with her visual and mechanical design (love the color magic), and the actress puts in a good performance. Then they just completely waste her on an extremely boring portion of the game, and she only pops in a few more times.

Stop

DRR... DRR... DRR...

This was naughty dog right? Makes sense because a good example is last of us 2, where you'll find certain areas with a large amount of enemies and the "end" of that area has the mc climb to a new one or open a door slowly and it isn't because they couldn't load the new area but because they don't want the enemies following you to a puzzle area

@@Ak-sm2qu Yeah, now that you mention it, I believe it was a Naughty Dog dev in an interview right around the release of Last of Us 2.

I think I remember a GDC talk or two about that. It's a symptom of having so many action set pieces then

Couldn't they just set up an environmental trigger to go "If you reach this area, stay within radiusuntil the player leaves"

it dawned on me recently that the crafting and micro managing of armor and upgrades are not to make the combat more engaging, but to make it feel like you're actually playing a game instead of brute forcing your way to the next cutscene.

This was one of main issues with "Dragon Age: Inquisition". The combat is fine but can't really support a 120+ hour game.

Meanwhile, Miyazaki (souls games) difficulty settings are LIFESTEAL mode (??? hrs)

"No marketing executive will ever convince Miyazaki that players don't like feet and swamps, bless his heart" Underrated comment

The entire loading cave ramble was the reference, but I didn’t expect him to double down in the outro. XD

@@ryonalionthunder It's so explicit that I second guessed myself. "No, it's not a reference, I'm just desperate to see things that aren't there. How could there possibly be a Junji Ito reference in a GoW review?"

Meh I'm more for it

I filled his skill tree before it ended but then again i beat the main story In four days after it released so it just felt kinda short cause I plowed through it and a little bit of side content

@@Bepanthen3HTeamOffi you act as if Vampire Survivors isnt an abject masterpiece of gameplay design

Nobody's saying you gotta like these mostly story focused games, there are plenty of games that go 10hours and be done with it

Red Dead Redemption 2 made exploring fun, though. God of War Ragnarok wasn't. If I had to pick a game to 100% I'd go for RDR2, God of War doesn't do as good of a job making the game length actually work for it.

He should do a twofer - Signalis and Callisto Protocol. Different sides of the quality horseshoe.

Is it really that good? I played the first hour on gamepass but wasnt really about it. I love old RE with the tank controls and all that clunk but this was very slow. Any reason to be motivated for it? Is it more the story or does later on the action get better?

@@gatelessbarrier89 First, I would recommend running with "standard" controls rather than tank. Gameplay generally flows better and even the options screen doesn't specify either as the "intended" way to play, so go with what works. I'm not sure how far you got in that hour, but I would say the intrigue starts to really ramp up after the cutscene following the first boss. Another big thing is just how to make the most of your inventory space. Ammo is rather common (except on Survival difficulty which halves each amount), so if you're careful you can totally get by with just picking up whatever ammo you find along the way for whatever gun you're carrying. Don't sleep on Stun Rods either. They're great to just delete enemies you can't be bothered to waste ammo on. I'd say it's area after the mines where shit really takes off psychologically and the game goes full Silent Hill 1/2. And you just come out of everything with this very clear image of the world and the emotional context of what's going on, even if the physical context is something that's hard (if not impossible) to parse.

@@FurnaxIkki thanks actually, i didnt reach the first boss itself so ill give it a second shake. And yeah i had it in tank mode so I'll swap that. Ill update if things change. Take care

@@gatelessbarrier89 Other 2 things I'll toss out are that you have very limited health regeneration and your max HP is boosted by continuing after dying. With the regen, your health has four states: Nominal, Caution, Danger, and Critical. When in Critical, it will slowly regenerate back up to Danger, and on Standard combat settings you are functionally immortal so long as you don't eat a hit while in Critical. Also each time you continue after dying, one of the empty triangles on Elster's diagnostics screen is filled in, and from what I understand that increases her overall health level, so when all sixteen are filled in you can take quite a bit more punishment.

Ragnarok sort of has the opposite problem: they were planning on three games, but felt the pacing in the second game would be weird so they just combined both games. Ragnarok is bloated because you're playing everything they had for the third game too

A drop from a high ledge also does that lol

The reasoning doesn't make those corridor squeezing any more bearable or justifiable.

@@steamtasticvagabond474 it would ruin the pace of the movi- i mean game

I don't see why they would have the kid rush first and make Kratos wait a couple seconds more if the whole thing wasn't about loading.

No. They are there to stop you from running away from certain fights since you can squeeze back but now while in combat...which is stupid and poor game design.

sounds like a case of "im 14 and this is deep"

@bob mana Not as deep as you moving that goal post. Talking whether or not there was more to meeting the Fates then just learning heimdall was going to kill atraeus. There was, then there was Kratos willing to let Heimdall live if he didn't plan to kill Atraeus. From which Heimdall was to prideful to feel like he was below Kratos, so Kratos killed him. All this going back to the fates talking about how one's actions tends to dictate their fates. I don't know if your 500iq considered that low brow writing, but it was deep writing regardless of your opinion.

No shit

@@F0rever.B0red well if you go in with only knowledge of the olg games you dont expect a fuckin movie

Because it is! Thats how 99% of sony games are lol. Get ready to meet the angry fans though XD

Ghost of Tsushima Directors Cut was on sale this Black Friday for $20 on ps4 and i couldn't even bring myself to buy it because I knew it would feel like an overlong chore. I'm absolutely done with these open world games with a million markers of nonsense when I could have a better time replaying a smaller, more focused game. The only one that's really gotten a pass from me was Spiderman because the method of traversal via webswinging is the most fun aspect of it, making the game world itself feel fun to explore.

@@ningensan8198 The only good Sony game from these past two gens was Bloodborne. It's a hill I'm willing to die on.

I mean, that kind of is all Ragnarok was. A war, and all the key Gods die. Baldur died in the first game, you killed Heimdall to get Sutr involved, and then all that's left is Freyr, Tyr(who's already dead at this point), Thor and Odin. And if it were more accurate, you wouldn't fight Thor or Odin. Thor would be dead to poison, and Odin would have been eaten whole.

@@SakuraAvalon I take it you haven't finished the game if you think Tyr is dead. But tacking on to what you said, they still could have made the battle last longer and even had Kratos team up with the World Serpent while fighting Thor and then with Fenrir while fighting Odin. That would have been much better than fighting in their front yard and in their basement.

And don't forget that half of the battle is taken up by cutscenes, most of them lasting 4 minutes at a time. What's really irritating is that Kratos and his team know that they are on a time limit because Surtr is out of control and will eventually destroy the realm; unfortunately, they still go on to have slow and long dialogue sessions when they know they could all die any minute.

Interesting take. I like a long game if it has a story to tell

Depends on the game More than 15 hours of a dmc playthrough? Fuck no 80+ hours of a crpg with good worldbuilding? Take my fucking money

And with improving hardware, they get shorter. These fake sections will never go away.

Somethings can actually be objectively bad such as NFS 2015's physics because it has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Tho being objectively good is really hard to define as what people like is usually much less commun than what they tend to hate.

The meaning of the word "objective" has been dragged through the mud by the internet, right next to the gravestone of "satire". Seriously, people genuinely need to do some research not based off from weirdos on the internet, and learn what makes an objective statement vs. a subjective statement. If you want an "objective review", you're not really looking for a review. You're looking for a synopsis. So yeah, you're far from alone on that one.

And they should have never strayed from that. Kratos preaching peace is such a veneer for the eventual destruction he causes. Why not just let him be the bloodthirsty monster he's always been and always will be?

@@DarkAngelEU because the creators behind the new games believe in that "toxic masculinity" crap and think Kratos needed to be neutered.

@@DarkAngelEU Because the God of War developer's want to tell a story with these new games. They wouldn't really work as well if Kratos as a character had literally not changed and developed across like 17 years of games.

@@modernmobster Have you played this game?

@@modernmobsterwhat an embarrassing take

I mean, it IS a movie game, so I can't say I'm surprised that people enjoy watching it.

After the Portal Review, Yatzee will never do a review where he doesn't find something to nitpick. You can still get the feel of how good a game is by what he ends up nitpicking.

When he criticizes a game he uses really extreme analogies to exagerate the problem (all in good fun) so it sounds like a huge deal. But if you peal all that back than what he is saying isnt actually that bad. He doesn't like the customization, he thinks the game is padded, and he doesnt particularly like the whole cinematic camera mode thing.

@@animatorofanimation128 the padding is a pretty big issue and probably the one that cost it goty. Turning a 15 minute ironwood mission into 2 hours just so the only diverse character has more screen time? Nah thats just too much.. And theres padding in almost every mission, just that ironwood mission it made it so criminally boring. And they rush ragnarok day when every mission prior was padded. Nah this padding actually ruined the game from a game of the decade type of game to just being a good game. And you can tell, just look at most god of war videos and compare them to elden ring videos when it released. Its just not a great game as it was meant to be, its just a good game

@@lovedeepsandhu8502 I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought the actual Ragnarok portion of the game was rushed. Every game seems to want to do an Avengers Endgame moment but none of them can pull it off because none of them have the proper build up to make the final battle satisfying. Ragnarok happens and every army in the Realms allies against Asgard in a literally world-shattering battle with giant Kaiju sized monsters and I almost didn't care. The fixed camera perspective sapped the life out of the battle; when armies started getting routed by Asgard, we get told about this rather than shown. Indeed, when the armies get gathered together, we're barely shown this happening. I had no emotional connection to the majority of the people in the fight. The two Elven races join the battle and I'm just like "I just spent the last two games killing them and now they're here to throw down with me at the head?" Kratos gives no orders despite being the general, there's no sense of stakes beyond the very narrow (albeit meaningful) stakes of Kratos and Atreus' personal journeys. The scope of the story is too limited for a grand epic final battle to feel like the grand epic final battle it wanted to be. For such a slow game, everything happens super fast. Atreus speedruns a lot of his mythical role as Loki with Angrboda in that one Iron Wood scene, creating the World Serpent, which I'm assuming is the version of the Serpent that we see just show up out of nowhere at Ragnarok before being punched so hard he flies through time. The first game did such a good job of slowly introducing the mythology of the Norse Gods in a very measured way; rather than going ham and throwing the big name characters like Thor and Odin at you all at once, we get a lot of the smaller, less known gods at the forefront to ease the player into the wider world. The first game worked because it kept the focus of the story tight and small, befitting the theme of fatherhood that story was built around. Then Ragnarok just blitzes you with the entire Ragnarok arc all at once, backloading it heavily in the final act without much build up in the story's scope to get a sense of how Odin has ruined the world, and why the Realms would unite against him. We get TOLD a lot of stuff, but rarely shown much of anything. What once felt like a grand epic that should probably take 3 games to tell, gets resolved relatively easily in two games. All the prophecies about Kratos' death, the end of the world and so on get undone, and I'm honestly not clear why. It seemed pretty obvious that the prophecies were coming true throughout the game, and the characters seem to resign themselves to the inevitability of Ragnarok just as long as they have each other, then they just sorta...stopped coming true? I wasn't sure if the almost perfectly happy ending (sans Brok) we got was deserved after all of the fatalism the story had been throwing at us up to that point. Somehow it was the battle at the end of the world, and nobody died. If Ragnarok wanted to be GoW's Endgame, we needed a Tony Stark moment to cap off the emotional climax. I went in prepared to watch Kratos sacrifice himself; instead I got a happy ending that seemed totally at odds with the stakes we'd been presented.