New God of War is WORSE than You Think | Part 01 

Except there's no semblance of structure there either. The entire second act is a jumbled mess.

@@whattheegad It's not perfect, just how I feel when watching the scenes through out the game. I'm looking forward to future parts of your analysis on GOW.

@@khairilanwar3916 what are your thoughts on the game as a whole?

@@poppag8281 I quite enjoyed the world that you get to explore, I don't mind this Kratos since he gets a bit of fun moments playing off his son and the few recurring side characters. The leviathan axe is a fun gameplay mechanic, I like how it's utilized in some of the puzzles.

Roger that, I'll keep that in mind for future videos.

In fairness, the old games do have quite a few plot problems. But to call old games Kratos one dimensional is still nonsense. Thin, perhaps, but definitely not one dimensional.

@@aaronmueller1560 yeah kratos went through quite a bit and had some pretty screwed up stuff in the original games and would definitly not call him one dimensional

I'll probably get into that.

I think they wanted to continue to follow kratos story

@@poppag8281 No, they built a story off nostalgia and popularity.

@@whattheegad that was definitly a motivating factor though I personaly think what they did with kratos in this game was interesting (though I know you dissagree)

@@whattheegad yeah, just like GOW2 did! Oh wait, you think well of that game, don’t you….what’s the difference again (specifically in making the story focus on Kratos rather than another character, since Kratos already had a complete story in GOW1)?

personaly I kinda like the structure but I cen see why some people disslike it

And it's used to slash the troll in anger. And it's used to kill the deer. And it's used when Atreus kills someone for the first time. And it's replaced later on by Kratos's knife when Atreus loses his mother's knife. And that knife is later used to kill Modi. The knife is thematic and symbolic. Otherwise he wouldn't be compelled to pull it out when his bow and arrows would have sufficed.

@@whattheegad I mean bows/arrows are better used from a distence while knives are good for up close combat so no I don't think bows and arrows would suffice in thoes senairos

@@whattheegadthat is true, but it being connected to his mother and symbolic of a passing of a torch doesn’t make it a “deconstruction of knives.” You are taking a symbolism that is just common, not ubiquitous, in media and saying that if something doesn’t adhere to that symbolism it is automatically a deconstruction. It’s an incredibly narrow and restrictive view on storytelling. More broadly, a knife is a tool that can be used in many ways. Just because it gets used as a deceitful tool in some instances doesn’t mean that using it for non-deceitful purposes is somehow betraying what a knife is. That’s essentially the level of what you are trying to argue here.

@@aaronmueller1560 It is a deconstruction because he's also Loki. Loki, the god of mischief, is being deconstructed. That's rife throughout GoW2018 and GoWR. Norse myth baddies and goodies are being reversed.

@@whattheegad i'd say at most its a subversion or a different take on the characters (like how there have been many spiderman's, superman's, etc over the years)

Going to stop you at the second paragraph. None of the information you've given me is illustrated to us in these initial scene and so you're working off knowledge you know after you've played the game. That's the problem. Kratos, at that point in the game, knows nothing. Yet, he acts as if he DOES know something which means his actions are being dictated in a manner that assumes Kratos has read the script beforehand and is just following the steps. Your entire argument exists in hindsight.

His two goals are not that. 1.) To fulfill to kill a giant, no Odin sent him down to find information on the chances he could find the realm of the giants, why would you kill somebody Odin deems holding vital information? 2.) To feel finally something, that’s not a tangible goal even if you phrase that as a unfulfilled desire, it doesn’t actually do anything for the narrative since we’re hardly given what’s he’s suffering from or what his mother took from Baldur, basically he’s like a worse version of Metalllo from Superman TAS. Baldur’s biggest problem is he’s suffering from the fact he isn’t suffering, and that’s a problem since he’s absent for a major portion of the narrative and he gets defeated all the same from the beginning and the finale, destroying the narrative climax thus he’s not a proper antagonist for the story. As a little nail to the coffin I’ll do a comparison on a character that might seem iffy to compare for some, but it’s worthy to note. Abomination from Hulk Ultimate Destruction is everything Baldur from GOW 4 isn’t, despite suffering from the same flaw of being the first/final boss you manage to defeat since he supports the narrative climax and bounces back with the turmoil with his wife and unborn child dying from Bruce’s experiments and he ended up winning by the end, he lost the fight, but he left an impact that made Bruce lose his chances for a cure for the Hulk.

@@whattheegad so, first of all, my explanation for Kratos’ actions does not depend on him knowing Baldur’s motivations, so that point is moot. If you’re just referring to the audience not having any idea what those motivations are, you get implications of them in his introductory scene. He says “I thought you’d be bigger, but you’re definitely the one” indicating he has been searching for Kratos or at least this place specifically, this is no chance encounter. And just before Kratos punches him he says “finally” followed by disappointment after the punch, later put into context by when he says “I can’t feel any of this” allowing you to infer that that is what he was hoping for at the beginning. All the clues are there for the audience to know what they need to know, if you are concerned about that.

The audience IS Kratos, for all intents and purposes. We are experiencing the game through him. Baldur's dialogue doesn't give us anything other than vague inclinations that he is there for reasons. We don't know what those reasons are and so we can't be invested in those reasons. None of what Baldur says clues the audience in to anything that really motivates him unless you think all that really mattered was that he was just looking for an excuse to brawl. In which case he is exactly what I said he was--a thug. He isn't interesting or compelling. He's just a glorified mob.

@@whattheegad in the beginning, I would agree that he doesn’t get enough time to be a compelling character in his own right. Because that isn’t needed for the story at that point. I do think they could have done more to establish him early on, but it is not a detriment to the story to have him be not much besides a threat for a large portion of the game. The game fills it’s time with development for Kratos and Atreus first and foremost.

I have an objective view. A story is not an arbitrary sequence of events. Otherwise every game can boast it has a story and therefore all would be equal. Clearly that's not the case because games win awards for quality and people score games based on their story. The classic construction of a story is, for all intents and purposes, THE template for storytelling. It has been throughout history. If you deviate from it, you're going to have to use another template or standard, but in modern times none exist because no other standard remarks on the human condition as acutely as the classic structure. That WHY it has lasted so long. You can fit anything into a "reasonable" 3-act structure if you try hard enough. I can make picking my nose a 3-act structure, but just because I force something on a series of events does not mean that such a structure then exists. It must come about organically. All you've done is sequester events according to an arbitrary series, but you haven't attributed such aspects as rising action, major plot points, catharsis, etc. to all of them. They aren't there. There's no chiasmus either. The game has no story.

@@whattheegad a bit off topic but would films like Memento and Pulp Fiction count as films that don't follow the three act structure? I ask since they are both well reguarded while telling their stories out of order (something most typical three act structure films don't do)

@@whattheegad “otherwise every game can boast it has a story and therefore all would be equal.” Alright, so by your own definition there are now only two possible levels to things that attempt stories in the world. It is either a story or not a story, and once something is a story it is exactly the same as every other thing that is a story. I on the other hand say that every sequence of events is a story, and some are of better construction and thus of higher quality than others, allowing for a full scale from well made to shittily constructed. I would say that Lord of the Rings is a well made story, and The Batman is a decently made story, and Thor Love and Thunder is not a well made story. But they are all stories. Meanwhile under your definition The Batman and Lord of the Rings are exactly the same.

I guess I'd have to do an analysis and figure that out.

You could look at the question this way: Because every living person has blood in his or her body, does that mean every person is exactly alike? No, but there's a particular simulacrum that is in common among us. What NuGoW is begging us to do is look at a heap of bones and flesh and convince us it's a living person. As for your examples given, I have not analyzed them so I can't say one way or the other. I do know several of James Cameron's movies purposefully use the 3-act structure given Syd Field popularized it. George Lucas also uses it.

A multi-strand plot features a variety of characters and events happening all at once. This isn't the case for this game. Therefore, a basic structure is all that is required yet is not implemented. One suspects this is because players associate long cutscenes with "story" rather than actual structure. Stories do indeed need structure. Not to be "good" but to be stories. The thread you mentioned are tied together by the writers. They are left obfuscated thanks to the writers wanting to induce a mystery box at the cost of making the characters look stupid and making the dialogue seem stunted. The Baldur plot intersects too late to warrant Baldur's becoming an adequate antagonist and Magni and Modi aren't even properly established at all. The game summarily throws them away and although Kratos talks about "consequences" there are no consequences. The story is robbed of its catharsis. Kratos has felt grief before. He had a family before. That's why this instance make no sense--not because he is in grief but because he hasn't collected himself despite his grief. It's emasculating and that's not the Kratos we know. Kratos didn't respond to his son's pertinent questions about their current situation. This had nothing to do with his being stoic, it had everything to do with the fact that things that shouldn't be happening were happening. Kratos had just fought a bunch of zombies he had never seen nor heard of before and he's like, "Meh, let's just return home." Like, what?! This isn't even about Atreus because this clearly is anamalous. There's no story here. It's a series of events playing out from the game's open to inevitable finish. It's a "game" to be sure since I guess you can play it. But a story would have far more thought put into it than whatever this mess is. Part 02 coming soon...

@@whattheegad Do you think that any story having any mysteries that aren't solved right away is a story setting up a 'mystery box'??? The entire point of the mystery box is that it never gets a payoff. We do get a payoff in Baldur's identity. We get it in one of Atreus' and Kratos' first conversations in the boat, in fact, where Kratos asks Atreus about any stories about someone who doesn't feel any pain, and Atreus immediately says its Baldur. We are less than 2 hours into the game and we already know Kratos is being hunted by an Aesir god, who might know his past. That's a payoff for 'who is this stranger?' which is going to obviously set Kratos up to where he is going to piss off another pantheon - something he is actively trying to avoid. We also learn Baldur's motivation for attacking Kratos by the end of the story - he's hunting a giant warrior and mistakes Kratos for that warrior. There is no 'mystery box' here. There's a mystery, and it gets paid off. Baldur doesn't need to play the antagonist role that you want. The main plot of this game is climbing the mountain, as you can see by the fact that the literal main quest in your journal is climbing the mountain, not finding the mysterious stranger and killing him for good. Fighting Aesir gods is the last thing Kratos wants and he avoids it as much as possible. The primary antagonist might even be considered the journey itself, in this sense. Man vs Nature is a common motivation. The plot doesn't need to be Man vs Man to be good. What you want is a different story, not a better one. The consequences for killing the Aesir gods is paid off in Ragnarok. This game has a sequel and it set up for that sequel. The consequence was Odin and Thor visiting them - Thor got to take a blood debt from Kratos and Odin got to manipulate Atreus by inviting him to Asgard, things that neither would have done if Aesir blood hadn't been spilled. If you want to critique 2018 for not being its sequel, then go ahead, but I feel like that's not really a criticism now that we know there were consequences. Arguably, there were already consequences in 2018 by Fimbulwinter coming about a hundred years early, as Mimir explains right after the main plot finishes up. It is not emasculating to have emotions. Sorry. I think it's okay for men to be sad when their families die. My bad for expecting characters to act like real people, even if that character happens to be a man instead of a woman. When my mom dies, I'll be sure to tell my dad that he can't mourn or be sad or feel lost or say something vulnerable because he's a man. I'm sure this isn't contributing to the current mental health crisis being experienced by men all over the world lol. And why would having 2 families die make Kratos more immune to grief? Surely this is just adding to his grief now that there's even more people for him to mourn? Kratos has no idea why monsters are showing up at the house. He doesn't know how to stop it, and he doesn't particularly value Atreus' opinion on the situation. Why would he have anything to say here? He doesn't need to say anything, and he's more of a man of action than words anyway. He's not gonna waste time trying to reason with a kid on why the monsters are showing up, he's just going to beat them up. We figure out why the monsters are here pretty soon anyway, because the protection staves were taken down. It's a mystery that's paid off like, 20 minutes later. I feel like this is the same thing again, where Kratos not saying anything isn't bad, just different from what you want. I don't think there's a reason why he should or shouldn't say anything, nothing is improved by him commenting on it, nothing is lost by him staying silent. I'm looking forward to part 2 just because this was a great video to have a drink and rant to my friends about how you're abusing my blorbos lol. Makes me want to replay the game.

A mystery box is not the same as a mystery. A mystery box intentionally hides details throughout its course in order to keep you from reaching any conclusions. The problem with this is twofold: 1) the characters need to have their interactions purposely stunted in order to keep things vague and 2) there's no clues to solving where the game leaves you guessing. The question isn't that Baldur isn't play a role that I want, he simply isn't falling into the role, period. There is no main plot in the game, period. There's things that the characters are doing but there's nothing really driving that as I said in the video. There's nothing expedient about climbing the mountain at the point at which they do--they just do it because the script tells them to do it. Kratos has no idea why the monsters are showing up, he doesn't know how to stop it, yet he takes his sweet time gathering the ashes and then letting Atreus punch his open palms. They could be attacked at any moment but Kratos is treating the entire situation very briskly. Kratos shouldn't be mourning the loss of his wife after he'd just been attacked by some randy at his door, indicating (in his mind) that he and his son were in jeopardy. Kratos would steel himself and adapt.

“In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times they fight at all. Baldur can’t die. Kratos literally can’t win a fight against him, even if he didn’t lose. If that was the case, WHY DID BALDUR LEAVE!? From the sounds of it he could’ve just got right back up from that neck snap in the first fight and try again, but no he just leaves for whatever reason. And no, if you say “cause he wanted to see Mirmir” that entire exchange with him was pointless and all it did was force Thor sons into the narrative, they just popped into existence because of course. They were going in the same path Kratos pushed Baldur off of.

@@whattheegad “Kratos has felt grief before. He had a family before. That’s why this instance make no sense-not because he is in grief but because he hasn’t collected himself despite his grief. It’s emasculating and it’s not the Kratos we know.” Ah, I’m sorry, you must not have played the old games then. That or you have completely forgotten them. Because the main point, one could even say the entire point, of that series is Kratos taking revenge on Ares and the entire Greek pantheon in rage to to the grief at the loss of his family. This is what we call not dealing well with grief. At the end of GOW3, Kratos sees what the end of the revenge line brings (the destruction of Greece in that case) and sees the folly in taking revenge. As such he wants to avoid that kind of anger and desire for revenge in the future, which is exactly what he does in 2018. He represses his grief and distracts himself with things like training and tasks that need to be done, which is healthier than killing a pantheon of gods but still not an ideal way to move past grief. If you think Kratos is a person who is extremely good at quickly collecting himself from massive amounts of grief, I have no idea where you gathered that from.

And if you don't like the story or the game itself... Fine, whatever. But don't criticize it in a way that does not make. And here are some actually good thing's to criticize the game: lack of enemy variety, armor looking really bad and gives strength but you lose like half of your defence and some armor will make Kratos look ridiculous. And Freya being a total dumbass and somehow knowing Kratos's name even if Kratos never told her his name. And the combat being very boring slow at the first 2 hour's of the game.

This is about the game.

@@LalalaE15 Thanks for the tips!

@@whattheegad the novel expanding the story. While adding thing's that is only cannon in the novel. Or are you talking about the novel?.

@@LalalaE15 This video is about the game.