God of War

Getting through the first third of the game was a chore. After the boat escapade, Kratos is tasked with finding the Oracle of Athens, which first requires he wander around the town forever. This part of the game - running down streets and slashing up swarms of enemies - felt a lot like EA's The Two Towers and Return of the King, but without the levelling up, which was really the only fun part of those games. There was nothing more to it than mindless button holding and tapping, and I was severely underwhelmed.

Then, when Kratos finally managed to find the Temple of the Oracle, things started to turn around. An NPC gives Kratos a mysterious message. More of his blood-soaked backstory is revealed. A new quest: to find Pandora's Box, hidden in a temple in the desert. This is where things became less dumb and much more interesting. At this point there are finally enough enemies that combat has some level of variety. The puzzles have become better too; where before that point, there was perhaps one puzzle in the game (and I never would have figured it out in a million years had I not looked it up), they're now of the caliber that I feel proud of myself for unraveling them.

It helps that so much of the game (after some cool desert stuff) is in Pandora's Temple, which is really a giant puzzle consisting of several smaller puzzles, and has really tested my battle skills several times so far. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the game now and still not done with this massive dungeon. Branching off of the central temple structure are a few different wings, each representing a challenge from a different figure: first some warmups in the Atlas wing, then underwater adventuring in the Poseidon wing, and now I'm just entering the Hades wing, which has fire and lava and shit. Cool stuff.

Two things that are particularly striking about God of War are the level of violence and the amount of nipples. By 'level of violence' I refer to impaling zombie warriors, beheading minotaurs, slaughtering townsfolk, and sacrificing Roman soldiers to progress; it is really quite astounding. And by 'amount of nipples' I do not refer to male nipples - there is a perhaps surprising amount of breast non-coverage, in cutscenes and gameplay. In the early game these factors really enhanced how cheap and trite I felt the whole thing was, but now they are just cool tertiary features.

Progress: Pandora's Temple - Hades' Wing