Hello everyone!
I always enjoy looking up novelizations of certain videogames because they usually offer up additional information on a character, their story, and of course the central plot you can get familiar with if you play the game.
So when I fell head-first into the God of War franchise, I ended up finding not one, not even two, but THREE novelizations of three game titles.
I got into it with the latest installment, which means I'm really interested to read about it from that particular point, but that said I have a slightly OCD mind, and so if I see there are other books prior to the one I want in a series, I have to read those first.
I just ... I can't lol.
Which also helps me in a way as I learned a whole lot more about Kratos than I knew before I watched that gameplay on Youtube! So without further ado, here we go with the first book of God of War.
There will be links to some other game-related content down at the bottom of this page, as always, because I've somehow managed to accumulate a bunch of it over the years. Goes to show how much I seem to enjoy certain things!
Anyway, on with the show, and I'm not going to follow along strictly with how the book is written, because it's a bit confusing and you need to sort things out into a timeline yourself. I'm just going to do that for you guys in this post, okay?
So Kratos of Sparta begins his story (though not in the book directly as this is told through flashbacks) as a mortal, an incredibly strong mortal, who faces defeat and death on a battlefield one day and swears to give his life to Ares if the god spares him and his men. This lands him in servitude to said Ares, with the Blades of Chaos, grafted on chains to his forearm bones, to prove it.
For ten years he commits atrocities in the war god's name, until one time when Ares transports his wife and daughter to a temple Kratos is decimating, and Kratos kills them, too. At that point, while Ares believes that will make him the perfect soldier, Kratos breaks his vow to Ares and swears vengeance, right after an Oracle takes the ashes of his family and binds them to his skin, which is why he's got white skin to this day.
And so the Ghost of Sparta is born.
At the same time, Athena has noticed that Ares is becoming increasingly belligerent and unstable, and that something will have to be done about him, so she goes to Kratos and tells him that if he kills the god of war, he will be free of his personal torment (aka, he has nightmares about the murders he committed, and hasn't had a decent night's sleep since).
Kratos is all for this, because his desire aligns with Athena's, and so off he goes to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, tensions in Olympus mount as Zeus has decreed no god may kill another god, but Ares is going to retaliate differently and so goes to attack Athens so that he can erase the city from the map, destroying much of Athena's power that way.
Athena seeks help from Poseidon (which, let me tell you, the scene where he figures out there's a Hydra loose in his favourite ship graveyard, is priceless, because he's outraged that Zeus doesn't discipline his kids better) and the sea god gifts Kratos with a portion of his power - his rage - so that he can get rid of the Hydra and then continue on to Athens by sea.
Once there, his job is to find the Oracle so that she can tell him how to kill a god, but in the process he gets entangled in the city's fighting, for one, and also Aphrodite yanks him out of the action (again at Athena's request) to go kill Medusa so that Medusa's power can then be his with the severed head dangling on his back.
Returned once more to Athens - at which point Athena has also bargained with Artemis so that the Huntress added a few of her own threats into Ares' face - Kratos gets to the Oracle (FINALLY!) ... and of course she's horrified when she sees just who Athena sent to help her city, but she does open up the portal to something called the Desert of Lost Souls, which is where he'll find the Temple of Pandora.
Yep, you guessed it, he needs Pandora's box to kill a god.
And so off Kratos goes into a sandstorm, fighting off some sirens who want to eat him and summoning the Titan Kronos, whom Zeus punished in this iteration instead of killing him, and chained the Temple of Pandora to his back before forcing him to crawl through the desert forever.
Kratos, against all odds, gets through all the obstacles and puzzles in the temple to finally reach the box - and shows us that even a Spartan retreats every once in a while, when he faces a mirage of Ares and decides to back off before said mirage kills him. In the end though, he does get the box - only to end up killed by Ares himself so that the harpies can bring him the box themselves.
A little side-note: why does Ares employ harpies and Hydras and Minotaurs and undead legionnaires, you ask? Well, he lost a competition to Athena, and so her field of war is stratagem, tactics, and all living things, while he can only command monsters and undead now.
But is this the end of the Ghost? Not quite, as he stops his fall into Hades and climbs right back out of there, into a grave he'd seen earlier with a grave-digger near-by (this would be Zeus, who also stealthily gifts Kratos the use of his thunderbolt while he's at it ... and yet none of the gods wonder about THAT at all LOL).
He gets the box back from Ares and finally opens it, finding himself imbued with power and standing at the same height as the god, which then elicits an epic smackdown between the two after Ares detaches the chains from Kratos to leave him weaponless, and this does eventually end with Ares' death.
One other thing to note here is that the Olympians view all of this as some sort of prime daytime drama instead of an actual threat or war or whatever, and Zeus even comments at one point that Kratos has to kill 300 more monsters to get to the Oracle - which is probably some sort of nod to a game mechanic I don't know about, but comes off as HYSTERICAL in the book.
So Ares is dead, and Kratos now wants his just reward - only, he's not getting it.
See, Zeus is fine with FORGIVING Kratos his sins - but he has to keep his memories because nobody can take those away from him, and they're his punishment.
Now, it could be said that the devil is in the details, and that Kratos and Athena's deal never did include his memories, but KRATOS was operating this entire time as if it did, and expected to be rid of them. When he isn't - and the gods sort of just ... thank him for his service and tell him to have a good day - he goes to yeet himself off a cliff so that he can die and drink from the river Lethe, which would definitely bring forgetfulness.
Except he can't even die in peace because Athena saves him, and tells him Zeus has decreed him worthy of taking Ares' spot, so Kratos ascends to the empty throne on Olympus (in a brilliant scene which shows different aspects of war through time, all the way up to modern day).
Once there though ... you as a reader (and probably the player) can tell that, while Zeus thinks this will make everyone happy, Kratos is plotting his revenge against those who failed to keep their word.
Which is where the first book ends, but I DO have the second one already in the lineup, so I'll probably be adding it to this review collection eventually!
And man oh man, but this story is something else.
Kratos starts off as this arrogant, impossible human being who I want to wallop over the head, but through his quest for vengeance he actually grows on you and you feel his pain - and are just as outraged as he is when Athena denies him the peace he seeks.
Literally, this is how it goes:
Kratos: I want to sleep and forget, please
Gods: go do these things for us and we'll do something about it
Kratos later: done, can you make me forget?
Gods: LOL we never said anything about that, but here, become an immortal god to remember forever!
I swear these morons are just asking for it, and I don't feel bad about their upcoming fate at all given how they're twisting words and making promises they don't intend to keep. It's an interesting take on the Greek Pantheon that isn't as happy-go-lucky and nice as you'd see in other iterations, but rather shows the gods as fickle, cruel beings only using humans for their own amusement, flicking them aside the moment they're done (another proof of fact here is Poseidon going through a list of demigod heroes, from Hercules to Perseus, and noting none of them are available, some are old, and some are just plain unreliable!).
The book does a really good job showing that the gods just don't expect someone to fight back against them, and they've literally let a wolf in among sheep at the end, because Kratos has this thing about vengeance.
And he happens to be a son of Zeus, too, which is where he gets his power from originally.
The writing is engrossing and pulls you right into the action along with Kratos as he mows down his enemies and whatever else stands in his way, though I will say the killing bits get a bit repetitive at times, and I suppose it's just a reflection of the game mechanic and what players have to do so they get the main character from point A to point B.
Props to the authors, however, because they make the best out of a slog through the undead, and a book very much worth reading.
So if you haven't checked it out yet, go ahead and do so! Because Ragnarok is coming in 2022, and you better be up to speed before it does. Check back here soon for the review of God of War II, and we'll see just how Kratos unleashes his revenge.
xx
*image not mine
No comments:
Post a Comment