god of war: ragnarök
a 20 hour game that somehow feels like it's 60, for good and for bad. beautiful, poignant, and respectful to both its characters and the legends they draw upon, god of war:r does tons of stuff well. it just does tons and tons and tons of stuff, nonstop. it's a world I'm both deeply glad to have revisited and utterly exhausted of. I do not know how they managed to dilate time in this way. in looking up my playtime for this post, I'm honestly sort of stunned that I only spent 19 hours traipsing across the realms and flailing at helwalkers.
emphasis on flailing. is god of war combat fun? I honestly don't know. do I do an awful lot of it? I sure do. do I constantly get dripfed new runic attacks and ways to combine the efforts of my allies and weapons? 100%. the earliest hours of this game inspired a real "the emperor has no clothes" moment - sure, kratos's axe has heft, but is this FUN? do the blades of chaos somehow feel like twerpy little ribbons in comparison, by virtue of having them right away?
the blades - and lots of stuff from the previous game, including entire mechanics - simply carry over, as if you finished playing 2018's god of war last weekend. it's bold, in a way - we're not going to rehash this stuff because it's an accepted part of the world - but also jarring, because video games don't do this very often. there's lip service given to your previous horde of magical items being eroded away by magical winter, which I thought was a clever touch.
the character are good, and well performed, and often well written. Sunny Suljec's Atreus holds the whole thing together by being a believable, endearing, never-irritating teenager who is desperate to find his place in the world. it is genuinely difficult to think of where they go next with this franchise, which is a good sign of a satisfying ending.
footnote: all props to richard schiff for his rendition of a cruel, cunning, often deceptively kind Odin All-father, but I definitely still felt like I was beating the ass of white house communications director toby zeigler