A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Great - now I've become a fan of a second GRRM series that may never be completed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a compilation of three novellas set in Westeros a good ninety years prior to the events of A Game of Thrones. They follow the adventures and exploits of a baseborn hedge knight called Ser Duncan the Tall and his cunning little squire, Egg. Before being compiled under this title, the stories were simply referred to as "The Tales of Dunk and Egg."

I really liked these. I was skeptical at first - why should I care about what was happening in Westeros a hundred years ago in the midst of the Targaryen reign? But sure enough, Martin roped me right in. These are happier and more lighthearted than the five books that comprise A Song of Ice and Fire - though really, is that a hard bar to clear? - and they largely focus on smaller conflicts among lesser lords and common folk. My favorite tale of the three was probably the second, in which Dunk and Egg find themselves in the middle of a quarrel between two houses after one has damned and redirected a stream that the other desperately needs.

Several people have described these stories as Martin's attempt at writing some kid-friendly Westeros stuff, but that absolutely isn't the case. Sure, there aren't any graphic rape scenes, but there's still coarse language and nudity and violence.

I love A Song of Ice and Fire, but there's no denying that the last two books in that series were sagging pretty heavily under their own weight and misery. It was nice to read this set of stories, then, and be reminded that Martin still has a talent for writing about jousting tournaments and puppet shows and drunken revelry. I'd definitely strongly recommend these stories to GRRM fans who haven't found them yet. There will allegedly be between three and nine more of them one day, which, ha, wow, oh man, no fucking way, this man is sixty-seven and three hundred pounds and only slowing down... but even if Dunk and Egg are never revisited again, hey, at least we'll always have these three stories.

Crimson Shroud

Decades ago, when video games were in their infancy, the concept of an RPG was limited to tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons in which the results of sword fights and the effects of fireballs were simulated by dice rolls and look-up tables. Even in 2016 that's still how video game RPGs work at their core - but random number generators and lookup tables are hidden deep inside a CPU and we're treated with fancy and beautiful visual flourishes that, thirty years ago, had to be completely imagined in the minds of players.

Crimson Shroud comes full circle on the evolution of the RPG. It's a downloadable game for the 3DS that essentially simulates the experience of playing a tabletop RPG, right down to the statuesque figures and the rolling of dice in order to calculate damage. I know Crimson Shroud isn't the first video game to incorporate actual dice as a form of random number generation, but it's the first game I can recall playing in which the entire aesthetic is meant to mimic a Dungeons & Dragons experience.

And honestly? It wasn't really for me. I've only barely dabbled in actual Dungeons & Dragons gameplay before, and what I enjoyed about it when I played was interacting with friends and sort of free-lancing as I went along. (God, I bet I was an annoying dungeon-exploring comrade.) But the rolling of dice and the constant bookkeeping of character sheets? Those weren't really my jam. Still, I think the concept behind Crimson Shroud was a really cool idea for the right demographic. I'll stick to JRPGs from the likes of Square and Atlus.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas contained - brace yourselves - a story within a story within a story within a story within a story within a story. The 500-page novel was essentially a collection of six short stories arranged like Russian nesting dolls, with each one interrupting the last one halfway through. I had high hopes for this one and I'm still excited to see the movie, but I think the best way to review it is to review my experience reading it. Roughly speaking, here were my thoughts after each, I dunno, quarter or so of the book.

One fourth done

Interesting - the author is using a different framing device or genre for each of the six stories. The first one was written like the diary of a man sailing around the South Pacific in the 1800s, the second one was a series of letters written from a pianist to his boyfriend somewhere in Europe in the 1930s, and the third story read like a conspiracy thriller - makes sense, as it's set in the 1970s. It isn't clear to me how these stories relate to each other, but maybe that's what the back half of the book is for. I'm on board, at least, for all three stories so far, and we'll have to see how they conclude.

One half done

Yeah, still no idea what makes this a novel and not just a collection of six short stories. I don't know if I like the way all of the stories have interrupted one another so far. Like I would never start reading six separate short stories before finishing them in reverse order - that's a lot to keep track of. But people rave about Cloud Atlas. Everything must come together in the end like a beautiful tapestry. Maybe this is even one of those books where reading it a second time lets you pick up on all kinds of new things. That's gotta be the case.

Three fourths done

Hmm... That's three of six stories wrapped now, and while I liked them just fine - especially those two set in the future - I'm still not seeing what links them all together into a novel beyond each story containing a very vague reference to the previous one. Those two stories set in a dystopian future - the fifth and sixth - were enjoyable and all, but nothing special. Maybe everything really comes together at the end.

All done

Meh. No such coming together. Oh well. The final story - so, the first story we started - ends with a poignant thematic thesis of sorts. People prey on weaker people, and that's the central flaw with humanity. That's true, and that matters, and I guess all six stories dealt with this theme to varying extents. (But what story doesn't?) I hoped for more, honestly. I can't call this a bad book by any stretch, but for all the acclaim that preceded it, I'm really left without anything memorable. Oh well!

2013 World Series

I don't really have a ton to say about this one, but I'm glad I finally watched it. 2013 seems not only like it was a long time ago, but I was barely able to pay attention to the incredible Red Sox postseason run. (I spent most of October getting married or going on my honeymoon.) This DVD retrospective started the way the 2013 season did - with the Boston Marathon bombings in mid-April. Hey, it makes sense. The bombings - and really more so the response to the bombings (#BostonStrong) - went a long way toward shaping the narrative of the season and the playoff run.

The rest of that narrative? Well, Ortiz batted .688 in the World Series, which was insane. Shane Victorino had the best WAR on the team in the regular season, which is easy to forget now since he absolutely fell apart from 2014 onward. Jonny Gomes was - ugh, I hate to say it - maybe just maybe the heart and soul of the team, or at least its goofy mascot. (Everyone on the team growing a ridiculous beard was his idea, and he definitely injected some life and personality into the team with his dumb antics.) Xander Bogaerts had some big moments as a 21-year old. Stephen Drew was there. Jacoby Ellsbury was there. Saltalamacchia was there. Oh, and Mike Napoli - another guy whose contributions are easy to forget with hindsight since he struggled so badly after the magical 2013 season. Hell, even Dustin Pedroia  has struggled pretty badly in the aftermath of the 2013 season. This team really seemed to catch lightning in a bottle, capitalizing on late-career peak seasons from a handful of guys.

On the pitching side, there was the emergence of Koji Uehara (lights out closer who was never supposed to pitch on back-to-back days when the season started), the redemption of John Lackey (great season and postseason in his final year of a tumultuous stint with the Red Sox) and maybe even the early brilliance of Clay Buchholz (sub-2.00 ERA before getting  shelved for most of the season with some ailment or another). And of course, there was ace Jon Lester in his final full season with the team.

Also, this was Farrell's first season with the team. And they never lost more than three games in a row at any point, which is absolutely crazy.

It was a great year and I still can't really believe it happened. It stands alone as an island of sorts in a sea of rough times for the Sox, who otherwise haven't won a playoff game since 2008. And that trend looks to continue since they're 7-8 so far this year with more cause for concern than optimism. Oh well! We'll always have 2013. (And, more importantly, 2004. And '07 for good measure.)

Kafka on the Shore

If any book written by Murakami has stood out as below average to me it was 1Q84, a sprawling mess of ideas with the narrative gimmick of alternating chapters about two characters who never meet up yet directly influence each others' lives. Years before he wrote that one though, Murakami pulled off the gimmick much better in Kafka on the Shore, a book that roughly follows the plot of Oedipus, but with so many of the weird plot points Murakami loves- ghosts, parallel dimensions, reincarnation, talking cats and more. Like most of his books, you could easily make it sound like a pile of crap- I mean, there's a villainous character named and modeled after Jack Daniels who murders cats to create a magic flute (what?), and another character named and modeled after Colonel Sanders who tells our characters what to do when he's not busy with his day job- pimping out prostitutes! Little of this is given any explanation. Still though, this is pretty great Murakami. One of the things Stan mentioned in his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle post was all of the connections between seemingly unconnected events- they hint at themes but its up to you to decide what they really mean. After all, one brand-mascot character is a weird addition, but two is a deliberate pattern. Many reviews point out that understanding Kafka on the Shore is a bit easier if you've read one of his earliest works, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, so that will be my next one from Murakami.

Foucalt's Pendulum

I always meant to get around to reading some Umberto Eco, and with his death this past February, I finally buckled down and got to it. I'll get to The Name of the Rose eventually, but first up is Foucalt's Pendulum. Published in the 1989, this book caused a bit of a stir much later in 2004 when The Da Vinci Code was the biggest book on the planet, because as the two dealt with similar subjects, some considered Foucalt's Pendulum the better book, one worth a read for anyone whose interest had been piqued by Da Vinci Code. It's a similar bit of speculative fiction dealing with the Knights Templar, but as far as I'm concerned, that's where the similarities end. Sure, there's a bit of a thriller built around the story too, but nothing close to the plot-heavy exposition of Da Vinci Code- we start in media res, with a protagonist named Casauban hiding away in a museum minutes before it closes, expecting some amount of action to play out at the titular Foucalt's Pendulum, but what will happen and why is something that won't be known for another 500 pages. Instead we get a lengthy tale of three publishers who decide to come up with their own conspiracy theory, seeking to answer what ever happened to the Knights Templar in the 1300s, and whether they still existed today. The rest of the book sees them working on this conspiracy, swaying back and forth (like some kind of weight on the end of a string...) between making it up, and believing their made-up stories to be true. While I found the idea interesting, the book was incredibly dense with historical references. Eco certainly did his homework, and I respect him for that, but it made things drag now and then, and I did plenty of skimming over sections of history. The ending was a little weird too- I can buy conspiracies about secret societies laying in wait, hatching plans that take centuries to pay off, but the pseudoscience introduced late in the book ruined my immersion. Still though, it gives the last fifty pages or so some high stakes as we return to Casauban in the museum, finally seeing what all of this was for. While the ending had a pretty great payoff, it seemed to take too long getting there. But I'll read The Name of the Rose as well anyway before I make any judgement on Eco.

The Man Without a Shadow

So I've mentioned several times that I've wanted to branch out of my comfort zone with the books I read, and one easy way to do that is by switching up the demographics of the authors I'm reading. I've posted books by almost nothing but white men, actually I can only specifically recall one other book I've posted by a woman. So maybe that will change? Here's the latest from Joyce Carol Oates- a famous author I've never actually read before, but I do know that her twitter account is pretty terrible. The Man Without a Shadow, however, was pretty good! It's basically a love story concerning a neurologist and her patient, a man twenty years her senior who is experiencing anterograde amnesia, also known as short term memory loss. This concept has been mined pretty thoroughly in a mere two pop-culture examples- Leonard from Memento exists in a thriller where he can't be sure if he's avenged his wife's murderer, and Finding Nemo's Dory wrings out just about every possible joke from the concept for a comedy. The Man Without a Shadow takes a more realistic look at the condition, however, focusing on the daily lives of a confused man who never seems to understand why he's being tested in a laboratory, and the brilliant neurologist ignoring all codes of ethics to try to make a secret relationship work with a man who will forget she exists in less than a minute. Oh 50 First Dates! That's another one, and probably the closest example to this. Except having never seen it, I'm sure that movie was shit, but this was worth a read. The struggle with scientific ethics, the never-ending confusion, the family that just stops caring, it's all pretty heartbreaking  I'll add more Joyce Carol Oates to the booklog.

Prey

The year of #BigReads is back on track thanks to the quick and easy 504-page Prey. This is the third Michael Crichton book I've read, following Jurassic Park and its sequel, and so far I've been a fan of his stuff. The "science" in his sci-fi thrillers is easily dismissible and sometimes laughably inaccurate, but that's okay! Crichton was never trying to pen any captial-L "Literature" - his work instead was easy and engaging and addicting. And hey, all the better if he could tack on a little preachy moral to his stories, scientific accuracy be damned. Jurassic Park wasn't a good book (or movie) because the concept of genetically engineered dinosaurs is at all plausible, but instead because, hey, fuck, it's about dinosaurs. And the story gets to feel like a smart one whenever Ian Malcolm opens his mouth to express concern. ("You were so busy wondering if you could do it you never stopped to ask if you should." Yes!)

At any rate, Prey is about a crisis at a lab in the Nevada desert. A group of advanced nanomachines has been designed to evolve random quirks in their behavior. Apparently this was a hot idea in software design back in 2002 - add randomizing factors to your programs in order to see them "evolve" in order to solve certain problems. Anyway, one group of these nanobots has turned into a predatory swarm of killing machines. It's learned how to do lots of things - including reproduce - and it's evolving rapidly, and at an accelerated pace at that.

Remember Lost? Remember the Smoke Monster? Yeah, so Prey is basically all about little robotic smoke monster swarms that hunt and kill and consume and reproduce and evolve. The result was a mixed bag for me. Nothing here ever felt as gripping or suspenseful as being stalked by dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or The Lost World, and it was pretty hard to take smoke clouds seriously. A scene late in the book where the characters had tracked the swarm back to its nest in the desert should have been suspenseful as hell, but instead felt completely anticlimactic. The nest turns out to be crawling with worms and bacteria that have somehow coevolved in a symbiotic relationship with the nanobots, which doesn't really make any sense. If the moral here is not to fuck around with randomizing AI components because of how quickly they can evolve, why include these worms and bacteria evolving at the same rate? In fact, the whole third act of Prey fell kind of flat for me because - and I won't spoil it specifically - Crichton seems to recognize that his particle swarms aren't compelling villains, so he brings in some new antagonistic forces at the eleventh hour, and, well, let's just say that Stephen King has managed more graceful endings.

But all in all, I liked this book! The first hundred or two hundred pages in particular did a fantastic job at setting up a vague "problem" and allowed me to make all sorts of guesses and predictions - about half of which came true, which is probably the rate you want to shoot for as an author teasing a reader. The pacing was excellent, even if the conflict itself wasn't, and I'd happily come back for a fourth helping of Michael Crichton someday.

Game of Thrones: Season 5

Hey, an honest-to-goodness Blu-ray post. Wow! Game of Thrones has been one of the best and most addicting shows on TV for five years now, but here in its fifth season it really started to feel like a show that's past its prime. And that's a shame, because HBO wants the series to run for at least eight seasons - which is at least three more - plus series author GRRM has at least two more books' worth of content coming. (You know. Allegedly.) So what went wrong in Season 5? Has the series truly jumped the shark, or are there reasons to believe this was just a temporary dip in what will ultimately end up being a fantastic television show?

I'm honestly not sure. I'm rooting for the latter - I want to love this show with all my heart, as often as I complain and nitpick about all kinds of great games and movies and TV on this blog - but I've got this nagging feeling that the "magic," so to speak, has worn off. When [REDACTED] lost his head in the first season, it was a huge moment that boasted, "this is not Lord of the Rings or any other typical fantasy show. Your heroes are going to die here." When [REDACTED] and his wife and mother got betrayed in the third season and an entire bloodline was wiped out, it was another great "holy shit!" moment. Yet here at the end of Season 5, when [REDACTED] was betrayed by his comrades and stabbed to death Julius Caesar style, it was just kind of like, "eh... he'll be back." The series - both the written one and the televised one - is more than halfway finished now, and thus we're slowly winding our way toward a conclusion. This means that the principal characters who've made it this far probably aren't going to die at this point - at least not before the very end of it all. It also means that we likely won't see many new locations or families introduced (although based on how the whole Dorne arc went in Season 5, that might not be a bad thing).

My main point here is that a series as epic and sprawling as this one can't keep expanding - soon it'll have to collapse back in on itself, connect all of its disparate plot lines, and reassemble its heroes and villains. And honestly, that should be awesome. I can only begin to fathom the (surviving) Starks, Lannisters, and Targaryens teamed up (perhaps) against an invading army of white walkers, with dragons on their side. That should be fucking awesome, right? Like bringing all of the Avengers together. Or who knows? Maybe these families will take up opposite sides in the presumably climactic conflict. But they should all be in one place - maybe two or three - and that should be pretty hard to fuck up.

In a way, Season 5 felt not like the beginning of the end, but like a transition season. When you compare where we are now to where we were at the end of Season 4, it's actually quite different, which means a lot of this season featured people moving around, realigning themselves, and "setting up" for the next big conflicts in general. But watching all these characters maneuver themselves both figuratively and in a literal geographical sense doesn't necessarily make for compelling television. In fact in some cases it was downright clumsy. Season 5 introduced a ton of new conflicts and changes, but it lacked the memorable moments that shaped the first few seasons - and the last two seasons in particular.

I'll try to demonstrate what I mean. Here - thanks, Reddit - are the final scenes from every episode in Seasons 3-5. Spoilers will obviously follow...

S3E1: Barristan Selmy saves Daenerys and reveals himself

S3E2: Brienne and Jaime captured by Locke

S3E3: Locke cuts off Jaime's hand

S3E4: Daenerys purchases and frees the Unsullied, then flame-roasts their former master

S3E5: Tyrion and Cersei learn of their respective wedding arrangements

S3E6: Jon & Ygritte climb the wall and then kiss

S3E7: Jaime saves Brienne from the bear

S3E8: Sam kills a White Walker

S3E9: The Red Wedding

S3E10: Daenerys crowd surfs

S4E1: Arya and the Hound kill Polliver and his men and Arya reacquires Needle

S4E2: The Purple Wedding

S4E3: Daario kills the Mereenese champion and throws chains over the walls

S4E4: White Walker baby

S4E5: The battle at Craster's keep

S4E6: Tyrion demands a trial by combat

S4E7: Lysa out the moon door

S4E8: The Red Viper vs. The Mountain

S4E9: Battle at the Wall; Jon Snow leaves to find Mance Rayder

S4E10: Arya sails for Braavos

S5E1: Mance burns at the stake

S5E2: Drogon flies away from Daenerys

S5E3: Jorah captures Tyrion

S5E4: Barristan and Grey Worm collapse after the Harpy attack

S5E5: Jorah has Greyscale

S5E6: Ramsay rapes Sansa

S5E7: Cersei is arrested by the Faith

S5E8: Battle of Hardhome

S5E9: Drogon rescues Daenerys from the fighting pits (also, Shireen burns at the stake)

S5E10: "For the Watch"

I dunno, is it just me? It felt like every other episode in Seasons 3 and 4 ended on some kind of huge water cooler moment. This time around, when a primary character was raped, or when a child was burned at the stake, it just didn't register as ballsy or shocking or jaw-dropping. The lone exception to my apathy was the Battle of Hardhome, easily one of the most intense and thrilling and harrowing sequences the show has ever created.

But again, what really happened this season? Let's observe the principal characters and their arcs.

Tyrion spends the season getting to Mereen.

Daenerys spends the season struggling to rule Mereen.

Jon spends the season struggling to rule at the Wall.

Arya spends the season training to be an assassin.

Sansa spends the season as a miserable pawn in a political marriage.

Bran is entirely absent this season.

Brienne spends the season looking for something to do or someone to serve - seriously.

Stannis spends the season preparing to attack the Boltons.

Jorah spends the season trying to get back in Daenerys's good graces - and also contracts a terminal illness.

Cersei spends the season trying to undermine her new daughter-in-law and ends up pissing off the Faith.

Margaery spends the season being undermined by Cersei and targeted by the Faith.

Jaime spends the season milling around in Dorne and accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Theon has perhaps the lone interesting arc this season, as he slowly overcomes the torture and anguish he's been put through. It's an internal conflict more than an external one, but over the course of the season he stops being the meek and subservient Reek and reclaims his identity as Theon Greyjoy. The problem is that this plays a lot better on the page, where we're given access to Theon's point of view, than it does on screen.

That's pretty much everyone. All the rest of the characters just act as secondary participants in the above "storylines." The question now is whether or not Season 6 (and Seasons 7 and 8) will eschew this wheel-spinning in favor of forward momentum. I hope so! I really do. But I have my concerns...

...

..."You want the good girl, but you need the bad pussy!"

The Tommyknockers

Given that I've now read about 30 Stephen King books, I have some sense of the full spectrum of his abilities. I've read some great ones (Misery, The Long Walk, Wizard and Glass), as well as some crap (The Gunslinger, Insomnia, Black House). King also knows he's written some great ones and some not-so-great- see Stan's Song of Susannah post that posits his self-insert in the Dark Tower series as a pseudo-apology for how weird and sloppy that series got sometimes. Here's The Tommyknockers, a book King himself called "awful". Yet, I was a big fan! It dragged a little towards the end, but there were a lot of great ideas here. It's a bit more science fiction than usual, as a huge piece of metal is discovered buried in the backwoods of Maine, and as it's slowly un-earthed, the whole surrounding town appears to be falling under its spell. This is one of those grand, town-wide epics King likes to write up sometimes where he can bounce around and focus a chapter or two on a few minor characters just to see their reaction to an apocalyptic situation- a few chapters about two young brothers performing a magic show were more creepy than anything else I've read of King's. The book is also a bit more coherent thematically than usual, with the buried metallic structure's effects a pretty clear allegory for nuclear fallout; this is all combined with another protagonist struggling with addiction, a topic King always seems to do well with, likely due to his personal experience. Maybe the nuclear waste metaphor was too obvious, or maybe King agrees that he should have cleaned up the ending a little, but for whatever reason, he didn't like this book at all. I did. Your results may vary!

Son

Here's the third sequel to The Giver, the fourth and final book in what can loosely be called a series. This is the longest book of the four, coming in at 393 pages. (It's also the shortest book I've read yet this year, and for a little while I flirted with the idea of making 2016 a 500+ page-only year. #BigReads! Oh well.)

It's tough to describe Son without just jumping into some plot details, so let's do that. The book is split into three separate and fairly standalone parts - "Before," "Between," and "Beyond."

Before

The book begins with a girl named Claire giving birth to a baby boy. Before long, we realize that this is taking place in the same community as the original Giver book - a world where everyone is given a predefined role and everyone is adopted. One such role is "birthmother," and that's exactly what Claire is. Her son is taken away from her immediately as that's the way things go in this society. Claire spends the rest of "Before" missing her son and longing to get him back somehow - a highly abnormal way for a birthmother to feel. Meanwhile, in the background and on the margins, we learn that the events of The Giver are taking place. Jonas is chosen as the new receiver and he decides to run away from the society in order to save a baby boy that they're planning on executing. That baby boy? Of course - it's Claire's son. So right away, Son establishes a link back to The Giver that neither Gathering Blue nor Messenger ever really did. The first part of the book ends with Claire running after Jonas and her son by stowing away on a ship that crashes and leaves her stranded in a foreign, alien place.

Between

It turns out, the foreign and alien place Claire winds up just looks a lot like what we'd typically recognize as a basic, maybe slightly primitive human society. People have mothers and fathers and deal with death and make their own friends and relationships. It's all very normal stuff. Marissa and Keith both agreed in their posts on Son that this middle portion was just total crap. And I see where they're coming from. It's like the part of The Dark Knight Rises where Batman is just stuck in the big pit, trying to get back his Batman swagger. Claire spends years in this society and is told that she'll have to climb a giant cliff in order to get away from this place and continue to seek out her son. And that's the whole middle chunk of Son - Claire grows stronger and wiser and learns about how people interact. And then she makes that climb, and then she's off to find her son. That's all.

Beyond

I'm down on the ending. I get that Marissa and Keith found the middle third of the story to be boring and unrelated to anything else from the series, but for my money the ending was a complete snoozer. Claire comes across this guy called the Trademaster who tells her where her son is in exchange for her youth. So Claire becomes an old, frail lady (right after working for years to get such a cut cliff-climbing bod, too!) and goes off to find her son. He lives with Jonas in a village where people who've escaped from the various dystopias of The Giver series tend to go. The girl from Gathering Blue lives there and the guy from Messenger is buried there. So, yeah, nice - we've finally linked all these stories. But how does this one conclude? Claire finds Jonas and explains her situation to him, and Jonas decides they've got to defeat the evil Trademaster. But none of them are really very violent, what with all of them being heroes from a children's series. Gabe - that's Claire's son - is like, I dunno, ten years old by now. And Gabe can read minds. And Gabe meets up with the Trademaster, reads his mind, and learns that all he wants to do is cause suffering. And Gabe tells the Trademaster about all these people living happily together in the village, and how they've all overcome the Trademaster's attempts to ruin their lives. And learning of this happiness literally destroys the Trademaster, which makes Claire a young woman again. And presumably they all live happily ever after. Weak, right?

God of War III

I'm late to this party, but that's okay! Right? Keith and Sween both posted about this game five years ago and I've also made posts on four other games in the series since then. There really isn't a ton left for me to say here, so let's just check out a list of every notable god, demi-god, or titan Kratos ends up killing in this series.

God of War: Chains of Olympus

Charon, the ferryman of Hades

Persephone, Queen of the Underworld

God of War

Ares, the original God of War

God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Erinyes, daughter of Thanatos

Thanatos, God of Death

God of War II

Prometheus, former Titan who gave the humans fire

Thesius, King of Athens

Perseus, killer of Medusa

Icarus, son of Daedalus

The Sisters of Fate: Lakhesis, Atropos, and Clotho

Athena, Goddess of wisdom

God of War III

Poseidon, God of the Sea

Hades, God of the Underworld

Perses, Titan God of Destruction

Helios, God of the Sun

Hermes, son of Zeus

Hercules, son of Zeus

Cronos, Titan God of Time, father of Zeus

Hephaestus, God of Metallurgy and Volcanoes

Hera, Goddess of Marriage, wife of Zeus

Gaia, Titan Goddess of the Earth

Zeus, leader of the gods

Kratos, the new God of War

Yes, that's more or less everyone. I'm not even sure what a God of War IV would look like - and not only because Kratos ends this game by running a sword through himself. Hey, I like it - the first game used restrained storytelling. Kratos was hellbent on killing Ares, and that's exactly what he did. Looking back on my post for God of War, it's kind of funny to see how excited I was about killing things like the Hydra and Medusa. By God of War III, if you weren't killing multiple gods per hour, you were doing it wrong.

So yeah, this game was fairly conclusive. It also went all out on its gory quick time events, a real staple of the God of War series. There was a whole lot of decapitation and disembowelment. Hell, Helios's head becomes a key item you need to use in order to illuminate dark passages, and I never got over Kratos just casually pulling out a screaming severed head to use as a flashlight. The gore was one thing - this is a video game - but I truly wasn't prepared for the nudity here. Tits, tits, tits. I'm not sure there was a single adult woman in the game who wasn't bare-chested at least once. You know, come to think of it, there were naked women in earlier God of War games - maybe I was just taken aback here by the "stunning HD" aspect. There's also a sex minigame here, as there is in every God of War game. This time around, you're not nailing slave girls or your wife or anything - you're straight up getting it on with Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love. In fact, Aphrodite is probably the most high-profile Olympian to survive the events of God of War III. Instead of killing her, you just fuck her.

Alright, time for some quick closing takes - mostly nitpicks.

• The controls felt disappointingly sloppy here. I played the game on easy mode and never once died during combat. I did however die 64 times over the course of the game (yes, they track it) exclusively from jumping to my death. Half of these came when my double-jump just didn't deploy. I also got stuck in a wall once, all glitch-like, and had to restart from the last checkpoint.
• Not helping matters were the camera angles. God of War III uses a fixed camera, like all God of War games, which really screwed me up several times when it came to gauging whether or not certain jumps could be made. I understand the fixed camera angles in such a cinematic game - and they also probably cut down on production costs since they didn't have to design an entire surrounding environment - but they were a nuisance at times.
• Combat has never been a strong point for this franchise, but here more than ever before it just felt stale to me. By the twelfth time I take down a minotaur or a siren with the same quick time event button sequence, the badassery of the kill is completely lost on me and I just kind of want to mash my way through hordes of enemies.
• That's all I've got, really. I still have God of War: Ascension waiting on my shelf, but it's a prequel to the series (and a poorly received one at that) - so it seems safe to say I've seen everything this franchise has to offer. I liked it overall, but a few technical issues (from lack of polish to game-ruining save glitches) prevent it from being an all time great franchise for me. Ironically, the two PSP games were probably the best from a gameplay perspective - they were just far too slight and minor from a storytelling perspective for me to consider them my favorites of the franchise. Lots to love about all these games, really - and anyone reading this who hasn't checked them out yet would do well to do so.