Shocked the GoW and Twisted Metal guy is a manchild. Loved those series but glad video game narrative is slowly evolving past that.
I think there's a place for campy bullshit, it just shouldn't be the main mode of operation
I genuinely enjoyed the Twisted Metal tv series, so I won't complain too loudly.
There's definitely still a place for man-child gamelets full of exploding corpses and blood-drenched screens. But when your franchise is 20 years old, your target audience isn't going to be horny teenagers anymore.
His problem is that he's also an old dude. He doesn't know how to make a game that appeals to a bunch of horny teenagers anymore, because he still conceives of "horny teenager" through the '90s/'00s era lens and not the '10s/'20s revival. Jaffe will never make the Vaporwave Transfem-Catgirl FALGSC climate apocolypse game that the modern generation craves. So he either has to mint off the Millennial Greek Classic nerds who all grew up and turned into family guys or retire to his mansion in SoCal and give up on releasing another platinum title.
How could he stay young and mad and foolish forever. He beat to death every living thing he could find in Greece, he killed everybody who ever wronged him, the people he loved, and everybody in between. He killed everybody and then he killed himself. How could he not be tired?
But yeah lol decades later Kratos should still be a Monster guzzling snapback wearing dudebro and just uhhhh beat his wife and child for minor annoyances and punch Baldur into space the first time he was insulted by him and then run in a straight line to Valhalla killing everything he sees because he doesn't want to look like a pussy in front of Atreus who is now named Kratos Jr. because Kratos is too manly for sentimental shit like honoring another Spartan and using his name
There is the direction of being a cold and bitter old man who doesn't have the youthful murder zeal but still is basically devoid of remorse and human empathy. I don't think it's as interesting as what they did with it, but it's a viable direction, basically transitioning from being a God of War to what he really was anyway, a God of Death.
“I’m going to become the God of War.”
Go home and be a family man!
Well, Kratos is still relevant, unlike David Jaffe
If only there was some sort of term for a literary device of a character changing and developing over time. "Character en-changening" maybe?
The original developer wanted Kratos to be a 20-something blood-drenched murder machine forever. But subsequent producers recognized the original God of War demographic as no longer being 20-somethings exclusively fixated on fuck-murdering and murder-fucking everything in their path. So they evolved the franchise to fit an audience of older, more mature, more parent-focused gamers.
Also, the original premise was... worn a bit thin, maybe? You can only murder-fuck your way through the Greek pantheon so many times before it gets a bit stale. GoW 3 was a remake of a remake and certainly felt it. So I don't even know if it was "Character en-changening" as much as it was "Marketing Re-upholstering". The dad-and-son dynamic was intended to (in some sense literally) inject new life into an old, exhausted franchise.
Imagine being mad about that and not that the game game is ridden with useless loot, collectables, equipment; shallow, repetitive fights; and cliched, copy-and-paste puzzles. The first game dragged so much I didn't even finish it
Hmm, that’s weird. They rounded his shoulders, made him look… soft
David Jaffe has been an absolute crank for decades and has only gotten more desperate and pathetic for the worst kind of attention.
This is a man who constantly gets into fights with journalist he was even once friends with if they criticise his games (when he still made them). Who posts Twitter poll thought experiments about imagining games that reward you for massacring nightclubs full of explicitly racial or sexual minorities. Who makes up stories about video game companies emailing him to give him $100m to come out of retirement, gets called out on the obvious lie, and then posts a respond 'he was going to send' written in a text file with no evidence of the supposed email. Who once said to someone I knew in the industry that the person "must be excited to meet him" before getting very pissy when told the person had no idea who he was.
I don't 100% love the direction and tone they went with the series, sometimes I think some of the newer aspects lay it on a bit thick (over gametime), but I think we're also - rapidly? - moving past Gen X edginess (not Gen X, not edginess, but just this particular flavor) and that includes whatever contributions Jaffe may have wanted to include. I feel similarly about Mac Walters with Bioware/Mass Effect. I tolerated it in ME2-3, noticed it annoyingly in the shadows of MEA, and by now I just want it gone and the series to actually evolve like it should have several years ago. God of War did, Bioware's still stuck until at least next year.
Ok Majin Vegita
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
