Dopefish Reviews God of War: Ascension

You have almost certainly heard of the concept of ‘So Bad It’s Good’.

Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’. Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’. The entirety of the game ‘Ride to Hell: Retribution’; there is something extremely fascinating – and amusing – about easily-consumable abject failure. What makes these projects so interesting, and so accessible, despite being terrible by most measurable standards, is that they are functional, which means that the failure comes entirely from poor creative decisions. If ‘The Room’ had a low-pitched buzzing noise throughout the entire film that drowned out all of the dialogue, and half of the scenes had been filmed with the lens cap still on the camera (both cameras, since Tommy Wiseau insisted on filming it in two separate formats at the same time, even though only one was used; I would really just recommend reading The Disaster Artist, great book,) then it would not be so bad that it was good, it would just be so bad that it was terrible. Ditto with ‘Friday’, which despite being lyrically awful, is genuinely catchy. And while ‘Ride to Hell: Retribution’ is one of the most laughably terrible games I’ve ever played, it’s surprisingly un-buggy. It’s hardly a high bar, but if I had to choose between Ride to Hell and launch-day Cyberpunk 2077, I’m going to go with the one that actually works.

There are other variations of ‘So Bad It’s Good’. ‘So Unfunny It’s Funny’ is a staple of anti-humour, in which a traditional and conventional punchline may be subverted for the sake of something that is so shockingly realistic – or more often, mundane – that it circles around to become amusing again. I, uh, honestly thought that I would be able to come up with a third example of ‘So X It’s Un-X,’ but I’m at a bit of a loss. Several projects can be too ambitious, or want to cram so much into them that they lose some of their identity, I suppose that could be a form of ‘So Over-Designed That It Becomes Bad’, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.

It’s immediately worth noting though that it’s entirely possible for something to just be so bad that it’s terrible. As mentioned before, if The Room was filmed with the lens cap on and the audio filtered through a fishbowl, it wouldn’t be entertainingly bad; it would just be bad. There’s no point at which something becomes so expensive that it’s suddenly cheap, at which food tastes so bad that it wraps around to being delicious again, or that someone grows so old that they suddenly become young again, theories of reincarnation notwithstanding.

But I bring all of this up because I played God of War: Ascension recently, and I believe that this falls into a category which is similar, but harder to explain. I imagine that a lot of you have not thought about this game in quite some time, and many of the people reading this (Hi! Thanks for doing that, by the way,) probably had a reaction along the lines of “… Huh? Oh yeah! Ascension. That was, like, the middle-y prequel one, wasn’t it? I forgot that that was a thing.” And that’s the essence of what I would like to talk about today.

God of War: Ascension is so forgettable that I will always remember it. It’s so generic that it stands out. It is so utterly, wholly un-fascinating, that I am truly fascinated by it. And the reason for this is rather a self-fulfilling prophecy; how did Santa Monica Studio, the team behind the original trilogy and the even more well-received Norse revival of the series, make something that is so easy to forget exists? How did Sony publish a game in arguably their flagship series, which barely anyone remembers? How did God of War: Ascension end up selling fewer copies than God of War: Chains of Olympus, the PSP tie-in? Ascension didn’t just get outsold by God of War III by more than two million copies, oh no; it also got outsold again by God of War III: Remastered on PlayStation 4 two years later, by another million copies.

Obviously, the hype from concluding a trilogy couldn’t be replicated, but it’s no secret that getting outsold by the PSP game did not meet Sony’s standards. Ascension still sold three million copies, certainly nothing to sneeze at, but I can see why Santa Monica Studio took a five-year break to develop God of War: The Norse One, which ever so slightly blew Ascension out of the water with a teeny tiny twenty-three million copies sold. If it wasn’t for the mobile game that everyone forgets, and the PSP sequel Ghost of Sparta selling a measly 1.2 million – still pretty decent figures for a handheld – then Ascension would be the lowest-selling game in the entire franchise.

And it’s easy to see why. The story was over! The trilogy had concluded. And it was a prequel, meaning that absolutely no new information would be revealed except for “Hey, did you know that angry-man had a history… where he was angry?” which killed the narrative interest from all but the most diehard lore fans, who would probably pay an obscene amount just to find out what colour of Spartan loincloth Kratos was wearing five days before he killed his family. My uncle who works at Nintendo Sony told me that it was beige, by the way; please donate that money to me via my Patreon.

So, the way I’m going to justify talking about arguably one of the least-interesting games of all-time, is that I’m going to try to find five notable things to say about something that is notoriously un-notable. And I’ll start with a recap and explanation of the story, because statistically speaking, none of you played it – hell, I did play it and I can barely remember what happened – so I can let you know if you missed anything interesting. Spoilers: you didn’t.

Truly, one of the plots of all-time

It should come as no surprise that as a prequel, Ascension builds upon the backstory that we already know about Kratos; namely that he got into a big fight with some barbarians one day, was losing horribly, and in desperation, cried out to the heavens for assistance. “ARES! Destroy my enemies, and my life is yours.” When the heavens responded and the God of War deigned to grace the mortal Kratos with his presence, Kratos again vowed, “My life is yours, Ares. From this day, I shall carry forth your will.” He then added under his breath “Heh, ‘carry forth your will,’ huh? I hope you don’t make me, like, murder my family or something. That would suck. Can you imagine, Ares? Can you imagine how much it would suck for me if you did that? Crazy. Anyway, who do you want me to kill first?” At least, in my version of the story.

Surprise surprise, Ares tricks Kratos into killing his family, and Kratos understandably submits a rather angry letter of resignation, which unfortunately goes against that whole ‘my life is yours’ deal that he made. I hate to admit it, because this game was very clearly made just to capitalize on the brand and keep the hits coming, but this is genuinely a pretty good part of Kratos’ journey to expand on. In the beginning of God of War – the first one – then Kratos has already renounced his servitude to Ares, but… how do you renounce your servitude to someone you pledged “My life is yours; from this day, I shall carry forth your will,” to? Ascension shows that it’s really not enough to just hand in your two weeks’ notice and make an effort to smile when the rest of the office presents you with a muffin basket on your last day.

Kratos begins the journey of Ascension being pursued by the Furies, three sisters who, as narrated by Gaia, were “neither Titan nor God, mortal nor shade. the Furies were bound to no one. For they were the guardians of honour. The enforcers of punishment. The bane of traitors.” Well, actually Kratos doesn’t begin his journey being pursued by them – it starts in medias res, with him already arrested and imprisoned, and then it flashes back to his epic journey building up to this – but still, that’s not a bad set-up. Kratos going up against three sisters, bound to no one, who enforce the- wait, no, hang on. This is just the Sisters of Fate from God of War II again. A trilogy of all-powerful sister who are technically not bound to the Gods but just coincidentally happen to be absolutely doing what they want. It’s just three sisters again. A little bit of a let-down there, but okay. It doesn’t help that in God of War II, the Sisters of Fate were just the secondary antagonists behind Zeus, top God of the pantheon and undeniably a huge, hype figure to take down. The Furies are just… less impressive versions of the secondary antagonists of the game released six years prior.

But forget ‘The Fast and the Furies’ for a second; what God of War is really known for in general, is a nice big, juicy opening boss fight against someone epic. The first game had a hydra, the second game the Colossus of Rhodes, and the third game had Poseidon… which I actually think was a huge mistake, because you spend the rest of the game thinking “I literally already killed the second most-powerful God, how am I supposed to feel any tension at all fighting *checks notes* Helios? Oh, please.” But anyway, the big opening fight in Ascension is a doozy. It’s time for Kratos to face… Aegaeon the Hecatonchires! That’s right! I bet you’re surprised to see such a huge name appear in this game. Aegaeon the Hecatonchires! The one and only, Aegaeon the- alright so I’m a bit of a Greek Mythology buff and I have no who the hell this is. According to Wikipedia, the Hecatoncheires – that’s right, God of War didn’t even spell their names right – were three monstrous giants, the sons of Gaia and Uranus (stop giggling,) and they helped Zeus and the other Olympians overthrow the Titans. There’s no record of Aegaeon being turned into a giant living prison.

Speaking of which! Aegaeon in Ascension actually is the giant prison that Kratos finds himself… imprisoned in. In this universe, he betrayed the Gods and as punishment, his giant body was hollowed out and he – still living – serves to contain other traitors, as a warning and an example of their extreme power. As you might expect from someone much too large to conventionally fight, it’s a bit similar to the Cronos boss fight in God of War III… except at least that boss fight explicitly ends with Cronos dying. Aegaeon only really moves at all because of the multitude of parasites that reside in him, courtesy of the Furies, and it’s only the brief movement of one of his gigantic eyes that indicate that he’s even still alive. According to the God of War wiki – which also contains 1,300+ words alone on the multitude of plot-holes caused by the Sisters of Fate – then Aegaeon does indeed die at the end of his boss battle, but this is incredibly poorly-communicated, because he never appeared to be that alive in the first place, and you really don’t do a tremendous amount of damage to him. The boss fight really concludes with Kratos killing one of the Furies, and he dies… out of sympathy to them, I suppose?

This is to say that the villains are a bit rubbish and the opening boss is a bit rubbish, but hey, what about the actual story of God of War: Ascension? What actually happens in it? Well, chronologically, Kratos begins his adventure hanging out in the village of Kirra, haunted by visions of that whole ‘murdering his wife and daughter’ thing, where he’s confronted by Orkos, son of the Furies & Ares, who advises him to seek the Oracle of Delphi. Killing Castor and Pollux along the way (hey, they were my friends in Spartan: Total Warrior. You dick,) he reaches the Oracle – who dies – and collects a magic MacGuffin, then heads to the island of Delos, bumping into Orkos one more time, who delivers some clumsy exposition that the player already knew; namely that Ares wanted to turn Kratos into the perfect warrior so that he could help Ares overthrow Zeus. Why Ares chose the guy who was losing to a bunch of barbarians, I’m not sure. Maybe he likes the underdog. Don’t we all?

In Delos, Kratos is captured by the Furies, and then freed again by Orkos, who reveals that he is extremely anti-Furies because he tried to warn Zeus of their/Ares’ treachery, so they blinded the Oracle of Delphi, who was also his girlfriend, and the Oracle’s eyes are in fact the artefacts that Kratos seeks, because only they can see through the dastardly Furies’ Infinite Tsukuyomi jutsu. Kratos recovers the eyes, but is captured again, bringing us back to the beginning of the game.

You might be wondering how Kratos breaks out of this prison, and he does so by… breaking out of the prison. One of the Furies hits him a little bit too hard, his collar breaks, and he just easily breaks out of the rest of the chains. They’re not very good at the whole ‘prison’ thing really. Anyway, Kratos kills the Furies, gradually recovering his items along the way, and… that’s about it really.

BUT THEN

Orkos shows up at the end and reveals to Kratos that the only way he can ever truly be free of Ares’ bond is by killing him, because the Furies made him Kratos’ oath keeper. Kratos is horrified at the prospect of killing his best friend, who he has encountered an entire three times over the course of the game, and also horrified because he’s a very good person now and he doesn’t want to kill anyone, in stark contrast to his complete indifference to the many innocent people he sees slaughtered over the course of the game, none of which he seems to care about, and nor will he seem to care about in the upcoming God of War trilogy. However, Orkos says “Please?” and Kratos finally relents, freeing himself from Ares’ control by killing his new best friend, who he will never ever forget as long as he lives. Uh… Orbot? I think his name was Orbot or something.

I feel like I could go into more depth – not just into the story, but into my reaction to the story, why it doesn’t really work, etc – but ultimately, I just don’t feel like it’s even necessary. In regards to the timeline, Santa Monica were hamstrung by the fact that narratively, they couldn’t even raise the stakes to be at the same level as any of the preceding games, and they couldn’t force in any character development, since Kratos at the start of God of War is Kratos at his least character-development-y. So it’s just a low stakes story where not a lot happens and the characters don’t change or affect the franchise in any meaningful way.

In summary, if you were wondering if you missed out on anything interesting in the narrative… you didn’t.

Unnecessary changes to the combat

I understand that it’s hard to improve on a successful formula. If you just repeat the same thing over and over again, people will gradually get tired of it and assume a lack of creativity on your part. If you change something that people liked, they’ll complain about it, even if you replaced it with something better. God of War: Ascension has a very creative solution to this catch-22, which is… not replacing them with anything better.

Remember ‘Rage of the Gods’? It was a really useful power-up that you built up by attacking enemies, and then you could activate it whenever you wanted. It made Kratos invincible for a little while and also greatly increased his attack. It was very useful to have that in your back pocket when facing a particularly challenging threat, or wanting to deal some easy damage to a boss to speed up an irritating phase of the fight. You might think from this foreshadowing that Rage of the Gods was removed from Ascension, but fortunately, you couldn’t be more wrong; it’s still in the game! It just… doesn’t function in the same way at all, and as a result is nowhere near as useful.

So how did they improve Rage of the Gods, eh? Well, first of all, it activates automatically as soon as you earn it, and cannot be saved. I can tell by your stunned silence that you are very impressed, but there’s more! You start at zero – because the gauge empties if you haven’t been in combat for a while – and have to attack enemies without being hit. If you are hit a single time, it’s over; you have to start again, no Rage of the Gods for you. But when you do activate it, it boosts your attacks with some extra strength and abilities – I mainly just used the Fire of Ares, because it concludes every heavy attack with a delayed explosion that deals a lot of extra damage – but you might have spotted the obvious flaw here. I can completely understand the incentive of providing the player with a reward for playing skilfully, but… this ability was previously used as something of a safety net. Something to help players through particularly difficult spots. If you ever activate Rage of the Gods in Ascension, then by definition, you’re doing well enough that you probably didn’t need the assistance in the first place. And even when it shows up in harder fights, you just need to take a single hit and it’s gone again; not great when you’re fighting five enemies at once, two of whom have multiple-projectile ranged attacks, and are also surrounded by environmental hazards.

It didn’t help that the magical attacks bluntly don’t seem to work. You have your traditional Zeus’ lightning, Poseidon’s ice, Hades’ weird soul-shit magical attacks, but choosing which of these elements the Blades of Chaos are currently imbued with has an effect on the combat… at least, hypothetically. I say this because Poseidon’s ice allegedly freezes enemies sometimes, and you can get bonus red orbs by killing them while they’re frozen. I don’t think that this ever actually worked for me; on the rare occasions when I did actually freeze an enemy, they always defrosted before I could kill them for that sweet bonus EXP. And I’m talking about freezing basic enemies who take two hits to kill. Much like dopefishblog to the general public, it just didn’t do anything for me at all.

But! There’s also a new system for temporary sub-weapons! At various points in the game, Kratos will stumble upon a weapon – sword, club, javelin, sling or shield – and he can grab these and use them to attack enemies too! They are – all of them – not particularly useful, especially when compared to the very versatile Blades of Chaos. Also, you can only carry one at a time. Also, while the javelin and sling give you a ranged option, they understandably couldn’t make it too strong or else it would be significantly more useful than the other options, so it’s more like scratch damage. Also, if you press the ‘sub-weapon attack’ button without holding a sub-weapon, Kratos does a pathetically weak and short-range punch or kick, which really just emphasizes what a stupid idea it is to attack in such a way when you have two swords literally chained to your arms that can be swung in a surprisingly large radius.

But! There’s also a new ‘tethering’ system! Now when you grab an enemy, you can… just leave it grabbed and attack another enemy until the first one breaks free again! This is clearly a significant improvement from earlier titles, which allowed you to grab an enemy and attack them, or grab an enemy and throw them (usually into another enemy.) We desperately needed this third option, which I can think of no practical use for. Just throw them into each other, it’s really fun.

The tethering system is not to be confused with a new brand of Quick-Time Event that doesn’t tell you it’s a Quick-Time Event. Sometimes when attacking an enemy, you’ll go into a close-up QTE mode, but no button-prompts appear and you will promptly be swatted away like a very angry Spartan fly. It wasn’t until my fifth or sixth time getting hit by this that I realised that the enemies were rearing back like boxers in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out preparing to hit you, and I was actually supposed to dodge them – which you can, left or right, it seemingly doesn’t matter which – and then continue to attack them to death. It’s… variety, I guess? A tutorial wouldn’t have gone amiss. It makes me feel very stupid in retrospect – and I need no help in that regard – that I was instructing Kratos to just stand still and wait to be hit, but I was only waiting for the QTE prompt because God of War has practically trained me to wait for the QTE prompt in situations like this. I should point out for the sake of honesty that I’ve already forgotten so much about the game that it is entirely possible that there was a tutorial for this and I simply forgot it fifteen minutes after I encountered, which I still maintain would at least be a further testament to the sheer forgettability of the game, and not just my brain being indistinguishable from a rotting potato.

Also! Remember parrying? Everyone loves parrying! You press the block button at the perfect moment to deflect an enemy’s attack, leaving them open to a counterattack. Parrying makes a welcome return in Ascension… not that I was aware of it, because unbeknownst to me, it now requires two buttons to be pressed at the same time instead of just one. Completely unintuitive, and similar to the Punch-Out style QTEs, I can’t recall if this was ever explained in a tutorial, but I can tell you from my personal experience that I just went through the game thinking that parrying had been removed entirely.

Also – a lot of ‘also’s in this section, I’ve noticed – while I think that this occurs in every God of War game – except for the very first, obviously – then Ascension feels like it has way more repeats of enemies from earlier titles. By the end of every God of War game, you might find yourself getting a little tired of performing the same quick-time events on the same chimeras, cyclopses… cyclopes? Cyclops’s? Uh, big one-eyed thingies with clubs, and also those bronze/gold statues that come to life and try to hit you with their hammers. I recognized them immediately from God of War III. They didn’t even shake-up any of the QTE animations. And given that there had been three years since the conclusion of Kratos’ original trilogy, it’s a little disappointing, but not surprising, that so many of the enemies and mini-bosses were recycled directly from the last title. Of all the things not to change, they chose the QTE animations you would be seeing a minimum of twenty times each over the course of the game.

To be honest, when I started writing this section, all I could recall about the combat was that the changes to the Rage of the Gods power-up were annoying, and also that I fought many enemies from earlier instalments, but the more I wrote, the more I remembered that they actually made a lot of changes to the combat in God of War: Ascension… it’s just that none of them were particularly good.

“Time, huh? Thanks for the tip.”

Apologies to the Ben 10 fans currently experiencing PTSD. You might be aware that I started writing back on ScrewAttack, which later merged with RoosterTeeth, and then later became Death Battle, and then later all of RoosterTeeth was shut down because David Zaslav is a hack who cancels finished movies to get lucrative tax breaks. Anyway, I became mildly interested in ‘Who would win?’ debates thanks to Death Battle, and then I became mildly disinterested when I found out how insanely stupid ‘power-scaling’ is (“If A beat B once and B beat C once and C beat D and D once ate the Sun, then logically A must also be able to eat the Sun!” Yeah, I’m sure that will cause no problem in comic books, where every established character can chain-scale to having beaten every single other established character,) and what a firm grip it has on the community, but then I reluctantly became interested in it again, because… well, because I was still watching every episode of Death Battle, I was just occasionally tutting and shaking my head in case anyone was watching me.

You might rightfully wonder what the hell this has to do with God of War: Ascension, but it explains why I groaned and let out an exasperated “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” when a relic acquired roughly a third – maybe two fifths? – into the game gives Kratos the ability to control the flow of time itself! It’s not even a particularly useful ability in-universe, but as soon as I saw it, I just knew that I was going to read about it again in a prediction blog explaining why Krat-gos solos Asura, Dante, Goku and Bill Murray all at the same time or something.

The relics in this game are legitimately interesting though, hence them getting a section all to themselves. The first one is the Amulet of Uroborus (somewhere, Albert Wesker’s ears just perked up) and it allows you to control time… in relation to the environment, and in no other way. Which for the record, is still cool, and allows for some interesting gameplay scenes without turning Kratos into a Time Lord. If Kratos comes across a collapsed bridge, or a dilapidated aqueduct, just give him a few seconds with the amulet and he should be able to restore it to its former glory. This is your main goal of the second half of the game; Kratos’ trip to the isle of Delos seems him trying to rebuild a huge statue of Apollo; ‘huge’ in the sense that it would make the Colossus of Rhodes look like a baby in comparison. The brilliant mind behind this ambitious project went mad long ago, probably not helped by the fact that at various points in time, every single individual element of the statue was complete, but never all at the same time.

The practical use in combat is to eat up one of your magic bars in exchange for considerably slowing down any targeted enemy, and it’s probably worth it if you’re facing one particularly tanky mini-boss, or just two mini-bosses and you’d rather focus all of your energy on one of them for a moment. Keep in mind, however, that ‘slowed down’ does not mean ‘stopped’. Also, they spelt it ‘Uroborus’, not me. Wikipedia says it was known as either Ouroboros or Uroboros, so I have no idea where they got that second ‘u’ from.

The second big new relic is the Oath Stone of Orkos, since… you know, he was the oath-keeper or whatever of Kratos. And he gave him this stone, and the stone represents- look, the plot reasons behind this being a powerful relic that assists Kratos in combat are completely non-existent, but it’s also probably the most fun relic to use in the game, so I’m willing to give it a pass. It creates a shadowy second Kratos who fights alongside you for a short time, and while it isn’t the most reliable thing in the world and will rarely interrupt your enemies while they’re already combo-ing you to death, then it’s also applicable in just about every situation; whether you could use a hand keeping a crowd of enemies occupied, or perhaps need to distract a single other enemy, or if you’re only facing one foe to begin with and you want to do double the damage with double the stun for a short but satisfying period. The Oath Stone of Orkos was probably my favourite relic to use.

The third and final relic is virtually the opposite, having a ton of discernible plot relevance that actually makes sense, but it’s also nowhere near as useful. The relic that Kratos travels to Delos (and time-travel builds a statue) to retrieve is ‘The Eyes of Truth,’ which allow him to see through the illusions of the Furies. Its practical use in gameplay, however, is just a flash of light that temporarily blinds and stuns some enemies. It’s basically a less impressive and less useful version of Helios’ head from God of War III.

So, there you have the new relics, and while none of them are particularly groundbreaking, I will admit that coming up with three new relics at all after a trilogy and two PSP spin-offs does show a level of originality and creativity that is to be applauded. Except for the one which is just a worse version of a previous one.

The hardest section of any God of War game

The God of War series is no stranger to irritating gameplay sections. Who could forget Kratos’ trip near the end of the original game, which felt like a journey through Hell, and not just because it was quite literally a journey through Hell; Ares kills Kratos, Kratos is claimed by the underworld, but while falling into the endless abyss, Kratos just… grabs onto the side? And then climbs out again, as if exiting off a busy motorway? I didn’t realise that everyone else canonically who died in God of War had that option. Kratos’ wife and daughter would still be alive today if they’d just grabbed the edge and climbed out.

But the point is, Hell in God of War was filled with platforms with obnoxious spiky edges, tightrope-paths for Kratos to very slowly walk across while avoiding more spinning obstacles with spikes, and just generally an absolute shitload of spikes. More spikes than if a venue hosted an Ape Escape cosplay contest, judged by James Marsters’ character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It obviously didn’t seriously prevent people from finishing or even progressing through the game in a timely manner, but it’s become infamous for being one of the least-fun parts of any God of War game; not helped by the fact that it involves a large amount of platforming, without any of that slick, stylish combat.

Incidentally, there’s a part near the end of Ascension named ‘The Trial of Archimedes’ in which, after doing more wacky time-amulet shenanigans, Kratos travels down a large ancient Greek elevator – or possibly back up, after going down in the first place – fighting occasional waves of enemies as he goes. There’s no platforming, just more of that combat we all love. And it is, without question, the most annoying, frustrating and difficult section of any God of War game so far.

On paper, The Trial of Archimedes is just another standard God of War endurance test; fight three waves of enemies on a slowly ascending elevator. Nothing too difficult about that. The first wave consists of two medusas at a time – alright, that’s a little annoying, because while you’re fighting one, the other is probably trying to petrify you, which means instant death if you don’t avoid it or break out in time – and four medusas total. But after you defeat two of them, they’re also joined by lightning-shooting harpies, who love to pelt you with ranged attacks that will not only hurt you, but stun you, requiring you mash buttons to recover, all while two medusas and two harpies are trying to kill you. Also, the platform Kratos is on is rather limited to begin with, but then fire-spewing pillars erupt near the front, leaving you with even less room to dodge and parry, if you’re one of the lucky few who even realised that parrying was still an option.

When the medusas are injured enough, you can at least QTE them to death, but this takes a while and you’re stuck in two consecutive variants of Punch-Out, where dodging isn’t too difficult, but it is still a chore. At least you can’t be attacked in these animations, but the medusas can trap you in QTEs too, and the range of them swinging their tails is much larger than you would expect; I think they have longer reach than Kratos’ Blades of Chaos. The lightning harpies are annoying too, since they don’t just target you with projectiles, but multiple projectiles. Have fun blocking four consecutive lightning-blasts while also dodging out of the way of a petrification beam, and into the way of another petrification beam, all while somehow finding the time to kill everything without taking too much damage. Because this is just wave one. Of three.

Did I mention that there are no health refills for the entire sequence? I should probably mention that too. At least, not before they released a patch that gave you a small refill between every wave. I was not playing a version that had been patched. Lucky me.

Wave two begins, and while the enemies aren’t as bad, the environment is much, much worse. In the first wave, there are some fire pillars at the back of the arena, but you can always just… not go over there, unless you’ve decided that you don’t want to give the medusas the satisfaction of killing you and will be departing the realm of the living on your own terms instead. It doesn’t matter, when you fall into Hell, you can just grab the side and climb out again. My point is; for wave two, you are now trapped in a narrow corridor formed of more fire pillars on both sides, which intermittently try to burn you to death. Admittedly, they don’t start up immediately, giving you a chance to be combo’d to death by Amazonian warriors who have a highly-damaging attack that it is possible to counter, but the QTE requires frustratingly fast reaction speeds, especially because you were probably already button-mashing while they were attacking you.

Four Amazonians and two harpies (non-lightning, thankfully) later, the fire-pillars join the party while you fight off another three harpies. Then, the wave two boss appears; one of those bronze statue guys from God of War III who was clearly called up late and asked to return to the series because none of the more iconic enemies were calling the developers back. He’s slow, but the constant fire makes it hard to consistently avoid him, and being made of pure metal makes him nigh-impossible to stagger, so even in the best-case scenario that you don’t take too much damage or get burnt to a cinder, it’s still a tedious affair. He also has a bizarre area-of-effect attack where he just roars and surrounded himself with a deceptively large circle of… I’m assuming lightning, but it’s a lot brighter than the harpies. This also puts him into a brief super-mode which makes him invincible until it wears off, because this just wasn’t difficult enough yet. So concludes wave two.

Wave three is probably the easiest, but it’s far from easy, especially since you are probably low on health, magic, and patience. You’re confined by spike-covered pillars to an arena which is larger than wave two but smaller than wave one, and you immediately have to fight a centaur whose immediately vicinity takes up around 40% of the occupiable space. Have fun dodging when dodge-rolls from 75% of the arena will send you into the spiky walls. Still, at least there’s only one centaur. … Followed by three of those blade-handed thingies – they look like living versions of the Marionettes from the first Devil May Cry – which love to go underground and pop out at you, and you can grab them out of the ground, but that’s hard when you’re fighting multiple enemies, and again, you can barely dodge-roll from one side of the limited arena to the other without impaling yourself on a friendly wall of spikes.

Fortunately, that is all, but outside of the orbs you get from killing enemies – which is a lot less than you are thinking – then you have to do this all in one go, with no checkpoints, no recovery, and if you were playing like me, no parries. I estimate that I used more retries on this section alone than I did in the entirety of God of War III. Admittedly, I only died once on wave three, and because the entire section is only ten minutes long – and most of my deaths were either wave two, or giving up early on wave one because I’d already taken too many hits – then it didn’t take me too horrendously long. If anything, it was a nice reminder about how usually well-balanced the combat in God of War games is, even in the rest of Ascension! But that doesn’t mean that the Trial of Archimedes isn’t significantly less fun and more frustrating than God of War’s most annoying section, which again, was literally Hell. That wasn’t a particularly high bar to clear, Ascension.

An online multiplayer mode that nobody played

… Alright, so I swear this isn’t just a VS Debate rant in disguise, but since I brought it up earlier, I’ve seen multiple people say that Kratos is at least multiversal in power, because he scales to the Primordials who created the universe, and one of the sources for this was Kratos beating Helios, which was very surprising to me, because a) Kratos barely beats Helios in God of War III, he gets smooshed by a Titan and Kratos just finishes the job with a casual head-rip, and b) … Helios is one of the weakest Gods in the God of War series! He got one-shot by a single attack from a Titan. When did he beat a Primordial? I asked this on a VS Debate subreddit, and was immediately provided a link to – to my surprise – God of War: Ascension. Namely the introduction to a multiplayer map.

It’s hard to find a link because all I have to search for ‘God of War Ascension Multiplayer Helios Dumbass Bullshit,’ but I did eventually find the direct quote. “On the edge of the Aegean, where the great God Helios banishes Nyx from the night sky, an epic battle rages within the great-walled city of Troy.” So… just to be clear, this is incredibly vague, could easily just be flowery language, it’s something that is never shown, is wildly inconsistent with Helios’ other appearances, and most important… it’s the fucking intro to a multiplayer-only battle in a poorly-selling prequel game in which neither Helios nor Nyx even appear! You would think that if literally every single day in the God of War universe – pre-Kratos’ murder spree, at least – a God fought a Primordial being for the right of the sun to rise, then more people would comment on it than that. Also, when Helios fucking dies in God of War III then the day-night cycle continues as normal because it’s daybreak by the time Kratos fights Zeus. Anyway, this all belongs in a longer rant that I will never publish, named ‘The Problem With Death Battle AKA Why Are VS Debaters So Allergic To Basic Media Literacy Skills?’ so I will move on to discussing the actual multiplayer now.

And that discussion begins thusly; I never played the multiplayer. I had absolutely no interest in doing so. God of War is not a series well-suited to the online multiplayer experience; the fundamental foundation of combat in God of War games is landing – at minimum – a seven or eight hit combo with whatever weapon you are using. If you’re only landing one hit at a time, it’s going to take you so long to kill anything that by the time you get past the first boss fight, time-travel will have been invented, and you could actually travel back to ancient Greece and manually kill a Minotaur in a shorter time than it took you in the game. Yes, the implication here is that I think Minotaurs were real. But one of the worst parts of combat in any God of War game is getting combo’d by an enemy. Hitting you multiple times without giving you a chance to dodge or block is just unfair; I’m allowed to do that because I’m the protagonist, and you are not. So we’ve already discovered a flaw; God of War combat without landing multiple hits is slow-paced and lame, but being on the receiving end is irritating and also lame.

But these are just assumptions, I haven’t even seen gameplay, so I’m going to look some up and let you know whether it made feel like I had missed out on something, or whether I had dodged an ancient Greek bullet. A trebuchet, perhaps. So, looking into the basics of the multiplayer, there are different teams with their own weapons and advantages. You can align your chosen warrior with Zeus, Poseidon, Hades or Ares – which is a little surprising to me; Ares is the God of War – or was – but he’s genuinely not that high up the chain of command on Mount Olympus. Athena, Apollo and Demeter are all considerably above him, although now that I think about, I’m not basing this on any specific knowledge of Greek Mythology, but rather on how the Gods were ranked in Zeus: Master of Olympus, one of the greatest city-building games of all-time.

If you ally with Ares, your specialties are brute force and close combat. If you side with Zeus, you specialize in magic, giving you more of an area-control approach to fights. If you worship Poseidon, you’re more of a support in the team, focussed on buffing and healing others. And if you worship Hades, your unique ability is ‘versatility,’ which I think is code for ‘clearly the best one in the game,’ because you can put curses on other players, cast life-steal magic, and… stealth? It says that stealth is an option. I have no idea how. I hope it comes across in the gameplay.

…

It did not come across in the gameplay. Very few things did, to be honest. To their credit, Santa Monica Studio legitimately did find a way to balance the issue of getting hit too much or too little; much like Baby Bear’s porridge, they met in the middle and found a temperature that was just right, allowing for multiple attacks, but not too many, and also each player is weak enough that taking even a single attack is still a victorious assault, but… that’s about all that I can say about the gameplay, because I generally had no idea what was going on. Some of the special attacks fill the screen with blinding colours, everyone jumps in a weird, floaty way, and trying to translate tasks like opening chests and pulling levers into a competitive multiplayer environment just doesn’t look like it’s working. It looks very much like a hack-n-slash CoD: Warzone, especially the awkward moments when you’re nowhere near another player, so you’re just stumbling around the environment looking for something to do.

Out of five different multiplayer modes, four of which are just variations of ‘punch the other guy better than he punches you,’ there’s also a co-op mode against enemies and mini-bosses, and once again I felt like I wasn’t doing my due diligence by ignoring them, but then it struck me. The fact that I have to force myself to be interested in the multiplayer is in no way an indictment of my laziness and/or refusal to give every aspect of Ascension a fair shot; the fact that I’m not interested in the multiplayer mode of the single-player game that I played just reinforces what a stupid idea it is to put so much effort – and there is a lot of effort on display, at least in how pretty the arenas look – into something which is going to be treated like the gherkin on a McDonalds burger. Sure, it’s a free addition to the thing that I actually wanted, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to either ignore out, or just throw it in the trash!

The biggest problem with the multiplayer in God of War: Ascension has nothing to do with the quality of the multiplayer; it’s just that they bundled it with God of War: Ascension. That’s not a dig at Ascension, like “You bundled it with a bad game! No wonder it flopped!” It’s just that people who seek out games with a strong, narrative-driven single-player campaign, are usually not that bothered about trying the generic online mode… of a single-player game. A very famously single-player game. It reminds me of how the Resident Evil 2 Remake had five additional bonus campaigns (and I’m being strict there by counting all five Tofu campaigns as one,) and the Resident Evil 3 Remake had… zero additional bonus campaigns, but it did have the added benefit of… an online multiplayer mode that nobody asked for, or gave a shit about. Maybe, various video game companies, instead of forcing these additional modes onto people who don’t want them and didn’t ask for them, you should release them separately, so that the people who actually want to play them can seek them out and play them. Because all this does is remind me of that U2 album that was released for free, and all anyone remembers about it is that it was forcibly added to users’ iTunes libraries without users asking for it.

I do feel a little bit mean for not giving the multiplayer much of a fair shot – I have literally not played it, I do not intend to play it, and the gameplay that I watched to get an idea of how it worked was more out of professional obligation than any genuine interest – but I don’t think the developers gave it a fair shot either, by attaching it specifically to a game that people were only buying in order to play the single-player campaign. That’s just asking for this to be a failure. Nobody is buying a God of War game to play another fucking round of ‘Capture the Flag,’ Santa Monica.

Conclusion: Most forgettable? Or least unforgettable? (This is terrible, rewrite this bit before you publish)

Sometimes, right after I finish a video game, I rewatch the Zero Punctuation review of it. Should I still call it that? I mean, that was the name of the series, but then The Escapist imploded and now all of the talented people have moved onto Second Wind and- you know what, it isn’t important. The point is, after I finished Ascension, I went to watch Yahtzee’s review of it, and… it wasn’t there. He never reviewed it. And while that’s hardly a scientific approach as to the relative notability of a product – I’m pretty sure he’s never reviewed Fortnite either – then it does really sum up the utterly forgettable-ness of God of War: Ascension. An entry in Sony’s flagship franchise following a hugely successful trilogy, and to the world’s most famous trilby-spokesman and part-time video game reviewer, it wasn’t even worth acknowledging.

That being said! I was wondering how to end this review, and I’d like to be unexpectedly positive a little bit. Because I completely stand by everything I said in this review – the story of God of War: Ascension is filler at best, at least when it’s not just reusing old enemies and rehashing the same ideas, the ‘improvements’ to the combat only made it worse, and the majority of the effort was poured into a service that no-one was interested in playing – but… there is something still inherently complimentary about being the most forgettable game that I can remember. Because at the end of the day… I still remember it.

I don’t remember it for the right reasons, and I only really recall it because it’s notable how overwhelmingly un-notable it is, but it still occupies room in my memory, for the time being at least. Let me go over some other titles by comparison. Far Cry Primal is my second-highest choice for the most forgettable supposedly big-name video game out there, but unlike Ascension, I’m not planning on writing a review of it, because I have no interest in even playing it. At least a filler God of War game is going to give you some decent combat and a few visually epic boss fights; Far Cry Primal is just Far Cry but without the guns, so… bows and arrows and melee attacks. So just a regular Far Cry game, except you’re limited to the most basic and unsatisfying weapons. ‘Just like our regular games, but worse,’ is not a particularly convincing pitch.

And then there’s Tomb Raider: Legend – not the amazing console version, don’t worry – the DS version, which I only still own because if I traded it in (not that I would get much for it,) I would stumble across it again, completely forget that I had played it before, and buy it back only to realise half an hour in “… Wait, I’ve experienced this disappointment before.” They seriously just ported the Game Boy Advance version to the DS. There was this weird mid-2000s period where games that fundamentally could not work on handhelds came out with GBA versions – Tomb Raider, SSX… I hate to admit it but Splinter Cell – so there’s some foreshadowing to a future blog I’ll never get around to writing.

Anyway, you might have been thinking about that Tomb Raider: Legend worry of mine “Don’t be silly, you wouldn’t actually forget that you played and completed a game, would you?” To which I say… New Super Mario Bros Wii. Played it once from start to finish, put it down, picked it up again six months later because it was so forgettable that I actually forgot that I played it. It wasn’t until I had warped back to World 6 that I realised that I had done this before. No disrespect to 2D Mario games in general, obviously – much love to the criminally-overlooked Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins – but the New Super Mario Bros series desperately needs a shot of adrenaline. I’ve heard good things about Wonder, maybe that did the trick. But to return to comparisons with Ascension, if I wanted to write about something truly forgettable, I could have reviewed New Super Mario Bros 2 on 3DS, except that unlike Ascension, there is no way I would have been able to come up with anything interesting to say about it. It’s not so forgettable that it becomes interesting again, it’s just forgettable.

And that’s my closing positive point in relation to God of War: Ascension. Maybe my fascination – well, enough to write a review – with the game isn’t because it’s ‘so forgettable it’s memorable’, but because it pinpoints the exact scientific moment at which something is still worth remembering, even if the most notable thing about it is just how incredibly close it comes to that threshold. And that’s not the worst thing to be. Better than being forgotten altogether.

God of War: The Norse One was released in 2018, sold twenty-three million copies, and was a giant critical and commercial success. Needless to say, this was a huge improvement on God of War: Ascension. But one of the best ways to improve in the first place, is by making the mistakes that you learn to avoid next time. I think that it would be seriously pushing it to suggest that without Ascension, Santa Monica Studios wouldn’t have knocked it out of the park in 2018, but… it’s not completely outside of the realms of possibility. I like to think that old, wise Kratos is thankful for this last exploration of angry, two-dimensional Kratos; it was the final step in learning that they absolutely had to significantly develop the character further if they wanted to achieve any lasting success.

Not strictly relevant, I just love using that image wherever I can.

God of War: Ascension is a completely acceptable, middle-of-the-road game, with a generic story, average combat, and some visually stunning setpieces which are great, but significantly less-great than what the series had done before. It’s filler, it’s missable, and it’s the very definition of ‘just alright, I guess.’ But being alright is better than being terrible, and just barely limping over the finish line is better than not finishing at all. God of War: Ascension, although you only scarcely met the minimum requirements for taking up space in my brain, you met them nonetheless, I can honestly say that my time with you was still fun. Just because something is missable, doesn’t mean that you should miss it.

Thanks for reading!

-Dopefish