God of War II
This review contains spoilers
The Spartan and the Stone: On God of War II and the Limits of Revolt
There is a moment, early in God of War II, when Kratos is hurled from the summit of Olympus by a Zeus he had served, bled for, and—in the precise vocabulary of the betrayed—loved. He falls. The camera follows him down through cloud and ruin, and what should be a death scene becomes, instead, the founding gesture of the entire game: he refuses to die. He claws his way back. He will, over the next ten hours, climb a mountain whose summit is the throat of his father.
This is not subtle storytelling. God of War II is not a subtle game. But beneath its operatic gore and its pectoral theology lies a question that the twentieth century's most lucid moralist would have recognized instantly: what does a man do when the universe, having promised him meaning, reveals itself as a rigged casino run by sadists? The answer the game offers is one of the most thrilling, and one of the most morally compromised, in the medium's short history.
Begin with the absurd. The absurd is not, despite a thousand undergraduate misreadings, the feeling that life is meaningless. It is the more specific anguish of a creature built for meaning who finds himself living in a cosmos that refuses to provide any. Kratos's particular hell is that his cosmos does provide meaning—and the meaning is contempt. The gods exist. They are watching. They are laughing. Olympus is not silent in the way that Camus's universe is silent; it is loud with mockery. And yet the structural problem is the same. Kratos, like every absurd hero, is a man who has been promised a coherence that does not arrive. The Spartan code, the warrior's bargain, the divine contract by which service yields grace—each of these is revealed, one by one, as a confidence trick. The question becomes: now what?
The game's answer, in its first and best act, is magnificent. Kratos chooses revolt. Not the resigned shrug of the disillusioned, not the suicide that is always the first temptation of those who have seen behind the curtain, but active, articulate, murderous defiance. He will find the Sisters of Fate—the literal personification of cosmic determinism—and he will kill them. Consider the audacity of this as a narrative gesture. Western literature spent three thousand years counseling resignation before destiny. Oedipus runs and the prophecy catches him. Achilles knows his death and walks toward it. The whole tragic apparatus of the Greeks insists that Moira cannot be edited. And here is a video game, of all things, in which a man walks into the loom of fate and butchers the weavers. One does not have to admire the execution to recognize the philosophical violence of the premise. This is Sisyphus not merely pushing the rock but turning around and going for Zeus's neck with it.
And here we touch what is genuinely radical in the game. The myth of Sisyphus, in the canonical reading, ends with the famous instruction to imagine him happy—happy because his lucidity, his refusal of false consolation, his ownership of the absurd labor, constitutes a freedom the gods cannot revoke. Kratos refuses even this consolation prize. He will not be happy with the rock. He wants the mountain dismantled. He wants the gods who designed the rock dragged down into the dirt and made to answer. There is something almost embarrassingly American about this—the refusal to accept the European philosopher's ironic equilibrium, the insistence that if the system is rigged, the system must be broken rather than transcended. God of War II is, in this sense, the most Promethean game ever made: not Prometheus the gift-giver but Prometheus the arsonist, returned to settle accounts.
But this is where the analysis must become harder, and where the game's real interest emerges—largely, it must be said, against its own intentions. Because revolt has a logic, and the logic does not stop where we would like it to. In The Rebel, the same writer who taught us to imagine Sisyphus happy spent four hundred pages warning that rebellion contains its own catastrophe. The man who says no to injustice begins as a hero. The man who, in saying no, forgets every limit, who decides that because the gods were murderers he too may murder freely, who treats every obstacle to his vengeance as a legitimate target—this man has not transcended the tyranny he opposed. He has only inherited it. Rebellion without measure becomes the very nihilism it set out to refute.
Watch Kratos play this trajectory in real time. In the game's opening hours, his violence has the clean righteousness of the wronged. By the middle, he is shoving anonymous soldiers into spike traps to solve environmental puzzles. By the end, he is using a dying, weeping Titan as a piece of climbing equipment. The game presents these moments as cool. They are, if we are honest about the craft, cool. The level design that requires you to feed a screaming nameless man into a grinding gear in order to lower a platform is genuinely ingenious. But the cumulative effect, for any player paying attention, is the spectacle of a rebellion that has lost its object. Kratos no longer kills the gods because the gods are unjust. He kills because killing is now what he is. The wound has eaten the man.
This is the deepest reading the game permits, and it is one the game itself does not quite make. God of War II wants us to ride with Kratos all the way to the credits, fist-pumping. And in 2007—a year deep into a decade in which the West was working through its own confused fantasies of righteous, unbounded vengeance—the cultural appetite for exactly this fantasy was bottomless. Here was a hero who had been wronged and who would never, ever stop. Who would never pause to ask whether the rubble at his feet was strictly necessary. Who treated the suggestion of restraint as cowardice and the suggestion of forgiveness as insult. One did not need to squint to see, behind the pixelated Aegean, the contours of a more local and more recent imperial mood. The game is a document of its moment in a way few games are, precisely because it does not know it is one.
What, then, do we do with God of War II? Dismissing it as adolescent power fantasy is too easy and slightly dishonest, because the craft is real and the philosophical premise is genuinely arresting. Celebrating it without reservation is worse, because it requires pretending that the second half of the game does not happen, or that the cost of Kratos's revolt is not paid by countless figures who never agreed to be paid with. The honest reading, I think, is that the game is a tragedy that mistakes itself for a triumph. It stages, with enormous technical brilliance, the exact failure mode that the philosophy of revolt has always feared: the rebel who, having seen through the gods, decides that the only mistake the gods made was insufficient cruelty.
There is a final image worth holding. At the end of God of War II, Kratos has not won. He has cracked the world open but not redeemed it. The Titans climb Olympus, and the screen cuts to black on a war that will require another game, and another, and another, to finish—a war that, the franchise's commercial logic guarantees, can never finish. This is the perfect, accidental allegory. The man who refused to push the rock has become the rock. The man who would not be Sisyphus is condemned, by the very intensity of his refusal, to a labor more endless than Sisyphus ever endured: the labor of vengeance that can never reach a final body. The gods, somewhere, are still laughing. They have lost Olympus and kept the joke.
One must imagine Kratos exhausted. One cannot, I think, imagine him free.
There is a moment, early in God of War II, when Kratos is hurled from the summit of Olympus by a Zeus he had served, bled for, and—in the precise vocabulary of the betrayed—loved. He falls. The camera follows him down through cloud and ruin, and what should be a death scene becomes, instead, the founding gesture of the entire game: he refuses to die. He claws his way back. He will, over the next ten hours, climb a mountain whose summit is the throat of his father.
This is not subtle storytelling. God of War II is not a subtle game. But beneath its operatic gore and its pectoral theology lies a question that the twentieth century's most lucid moralist would have recognized instantly: what does a man do when the universe, having promised him meaning, reveals itself as a rigged casino run by sadists? The answer the game offers is one of the most thrilling, and one of the most morally compromised, in the medium's short history.
Begin with the absurd. The absurd is not, despite a thousand undergraduate misreadings, the feeling that life is meaningless. It is the more specific anguish of a creature built for meaning who finds himself living in a cosmos that refuses to provide any. Kratos's particular hell is that his cosmos does provide meaning—and the meaning is contempt. The gods exist. They are watching. They are laughing. Olympus is not silent in the way that Camus's universe is silent; it is loud with mockery. And yet the structural problem is the same. Kratos, like every absurd hero, is a man who has been promised a coherence that does not arrive. The Spartan code, the warrior's bargain, the divine contract by which service yields grace—each of these is revealed, one by one, as a confidence trick. The question becomes: now what?
The game's answer, in its first and best act, is magnificent. Kratos chooses revolt. Not the resigned shrug of the disillusioned, not the suicide that is always the first temptation of those who have seen behind the curtain, but active, articulate, murderous defiance. He will find the Sisters of Fate—the literal personification of cosmic determinism—and he will kill them. Consider the audacity of this as a narrative gesture. Western literature spent three thousand years counseling resignation before destiny. Oedipus runs and the prophecy catches him. Achilles knows his death and walks toward it. The whole tragic apparatus of the Greeks insists that Moira cannot be edited. And here is a video game, of all things, in which a man walks into the loom of fate and butchers the weavers. One does not have to admire the execution to recognize the philosophical violence of the premise. This is Sisyphus not merely pushing the rock but turning around and going for Zeus's neck with it.
And here we touch what is genuinely radical in the game. The myth of Sisyphus, in the canonical reading, ends with the famous instruction to imagine him happy—happy because his lucidity, his refusal of false consolation, his ownership of the absurd labor, constitutes a freedom the gods cannot revoke. Kratos refuses even this consolation prize. He will not be happy with the rock. He wants the mountain dismantled. He wants the gods who designed the rock dragged down into the dirt and made to answer. There is something almost embarrassingly American about this—the refusal to accept the European philosopher's ironic equilibrium, the insistence that if the system is rigged, the system must be broken rather than transcended. God of War II is, in this sense, the most Promethean game ever made: not Prometheus the gift-giver but Prometheus the arsonist, returned to settle accounts.
But this is where the analysis must become harder, and where the game's real interest emerges—largely, it must be said, against its own intentions. Because revolt has a logic, and the logic does not stop where we would like it to. In The Rebel, the same writer who taught us to imagine Sisyphus happy spent four hundred pages warning that rebellion contains its own catastrophe. The man who says no to injustice begins as a hero. The man who, in saying no, forgets every limit, who decides that because the gods were murderers he too may murder freely, who treats every obstacle to his vengeance as a legitimate target—this man has not transcended the tyranny he opposed. He has only inherited it. Rebellion without measure becomes the very nihilism it set out to refute.
Watch Kratos play this trajectory in real time. In the game's opening hours, his violence has the clean righteousness of the wronged. By the middle, he is shoving anonymous soldiers into spike traps to solve environmental puzzles. By the end, he is using a dying, weeping Titan as a piece of climbing equipment. The game presents these moments as cool. They are, if we are honest about the craft, cool. The level design that requires you to feed a screaming nameless man into a grinding gear in order to lower a platform is genuinely ingenious. But the cumulative effect, for any player paying attention, is the spectacle of a rebellion that has lost its object. Kratos no longer kills the gods because the gods are unjust. He kills because killing is now what he is. The wound has eaten the man.
This is the deepest reading the game permits, and it is one the game itself does not quite make. God of War II wants us to ride with Kratos all the way to the credits, fist-pumping. And in 2007—a year deep into a decade in which the West was working through its own confused fantasies of righteous, unbounded vengeance—the cultural appetite for exactly this fantasy was bottomless. Here was a hero who had been wronged and who would never, ever stop. Who would never pause to ask whether the rubble at his feet was strictly necessary. Who treated the suggestion of restraint as cowardice and the suggestion of forgiveness as insult. One did not need to squint to see, behind the pixelated Aegean, the contours of a more local and more recent imperial mood. The game is a document of its moment in a way few games are, precisely because it does not know it is one.
What, then, do we do with God of War II? Dismissing it as adolescent power fantasy is too easy and slightly dishonest, because the craft is real and the philosophical premise is genuinely arresting. Celebrating it without reservation is worse, because it requires pretending that the second half of the game does not happen, or that the cost of Kratos's revolt is not paid by countless figures who never agreed to be paid with. The honest reading, I think, is that the game is a tragedy that mistakes itself for a triumph. It stages, with enormous technical brilliance, the exact failure mode that the philosophy of revolt has always feared: the rebel who, having seen through the gods, decides that the only mistake the gods made was insufficient cruelty.
There is a final image worth holding. At the end of God of War II, Kratos has not won. He has cracked the world open but not redeemed it. The Titans climb Olympus, and the screen cuts to black on a war that will require another game, and another, and another, to finish—a war that, the franchise's commercial logic guarantees, can never finish. This is the perfect, accidental allegory. The man who refused to push the rock has become the rock. The man who would not be Sisyphus is condemned, by the very intensity of his refusal, to a labor more endless than Sisyphus ever endured: the labor of vengeance that can never reach a final body. The gods, somewhere, are still laughing. They have lost Olympus and kept the joke.
One must imagine Kratos exhausted. One cannot, I think, imagine him free.
Mini Review: Beneath its operatic gore, God of War II asks an absurd question: what if Sisyphus attacked the gods with his rock? Faced with divine mockery, Kratos chooses absolute revolt—becoming Prometheus the arsonist. But as Camus warned, rebellion without measure becomes nihilism. As vengeance turns indiscriminate, the game becomes an accidental tragedy: a rebel inheriting the very cruelty he set out to destroy. One must imagine Kratos exhausted.
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