Sorry there are more enemies in God of War than grunt and minotaur? They must've been hiding behind the sheer millions of grunt and minotaur corpses when I was playing. You haven't even gotten to the part where it's two straight hours of grunt fights ("the whole game lol!" no you don't even know). Pretty much everything about God of War's brawling is wrong, so starting from enemy variation is far too high on the chain. I think that's one place where it's bad, but not unforgivably so. The fact it's so noticeable is more a symptom of the failure of everything else.
Why doesn't combat with a single enemy work? The omnidirectional i-framed-up dodge move means position doesn't matter, so the game space is reduced to one dimension. Then the grab trumps everything (if you haven't already discovered), so we're in a volitional difficulty situation. Survival is only challenging so long as the player voluntary limits their options. Feedback on moves is near impossible to read because the chain is just a giant swath that hits eight enemies at once and conflates all their states (plus might have different effects based on distance). Who fucking knows how much damage anything does. Not to mention every combo looks like the exact same noisy mess. Then dial-a-combos for button mashing heaven, but also free interrupts (dodge) because it started to get hard. Stuff like "there's a launcher" is typical "we don't understand what is happening in the combat and why it isn't fun, what's something else that Devil May Cry has?" I couldn't tell you exactly from game to game within the series, but I believe the launcher is completely useless almost always. You can dodge to get out of combos, why would you need to be in the air? 1D game space. I think the toughest the game ever gets is when there's a boss that has an attack you're supposed to block, and you have to remember what button is block again.
But all that is totally beside the point, because God of War doesn't expect the player to take initiative and explore offensive capabilities within the combat. God of War is a game about having violent semi-realistic animations applied to spectacular mythological creatures. Everything else about the game flows from that. You can contend that Devil May Cry is a game about having a cool anime guy do stylish sword swings at demons; granting that this is of course wrong, the difference is that Dante's "style" is his offense, it is the sequence of moves he performs and that the player controls. God of War is centered on the baddies. This is why its primary novelty is extended cutscene kills, and why executions are the only thing it bothers to incentivize. It's why the boss fights aren't even beat-em-up style half the time. It even kind of explains why grab is so OP (it has a unique animation). The button mashing is just there to connect the dots.
I've played a few dozen 3D beat-em-ups at this point, and I can fairly confidently say that God of War is the worst. The only thing giving me pause is that I can't clearly remember the story mode from Tekken 6. But I don't think God of War wants to be compared to Devil May Cry - in its mind, it belongs to the same genre as Uncharted. To be clear, I don't think it's successful as a cinematic experience either. There's no excuse for filler, and it has especially arbitrary quick-time events (on part with RE4). Asura's Wrath is basically the same idea done correctly, though I think GoW2 and GoW3 are a lot better too.
No comments:
Post a Comment