Big Baddies Breakdown: The Stranger (God of War (2018))

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

This article contains spoilers for the beginning of God of War (2018). Some images also contain violent imagery.

It was 2018, and Sony Santa Monica Studies had something to prove. For their fantasy action game God of War, they adopted a rather intriguing gimmick, that the entire game would be presented as a one-shot experience. It was the equivalent of one of those “one-shot” movies which feign being only one continuous take. The concept is genius in film. As viewers, every shot is a story we need to see finish, so ending it and moving to the next lessens at least some tension. But without that end, the tension ratchets up and it gets harder to turn away. An expertly crafted long take, even one that last just four minutes, can be captivating as we wonder what could possibly come next.

Used in a game, it’s somewhat weirder. We expect menus, loading screens, and cutscenes that regularly cut between shots. But the vast majority of games already have “one-shot” footage in the basic gameplay, so the value of taking it further isn’t easy to ascertain. For its part, God of War doesn’t bother to use diegetic menus (which is to say that a menu just pops up, breaking the premise a bit) but otherwise follows it. Every cutscene, rendered in-engine, softly flows into gameplay. Every loading screen is hidden. It’s functionally a gimmick, but it has its uses. And its second boss fight, happening less than an hour in, shows them quite well.

The protagonist of God of War is Kratos, a warrior who some time ago immigrated to the Midgard of Norse Mythology. He has a son, Atreus, and the two are nursing the loss of Kratos’ wife Faye. Boy is headstrong but sickly, and while dad is good at teaching him to fight he’s a poor emotional caregiver (often shown through tight compositions stemming from the game’s “behind the back” camera position). But they’re forced to go on a perilous, soul-searching trip after a stranger threatens their safety.

Image: Source Gaming. Kratos walks into his home after starting the game and fighting a boss. No camera cut.

By this point, only about twenty minutes after Kratos picks up his axe and starts the game, the gimmick hasn’t set in. It’s easy to ignore, especially if you’re not looking for it. There hasn’t been a need for a cut as you see Kratos go about his day, fight a troll boss, and be rude to his distraught child. You go into their house, and he tries to teach Atreus about strength in his limited way. We get a good close up of it as the camera gently swerves to their side. And right after Atreus trips, which would be a climax to a conventional shot, the scene keeps going to pipe in the sound of a knock at the door. Tension stays.

Image: Source Gaming. Kratos and Atreus in the house; the camera has fluidly transitioned from the standard “behind the back” position to something better suited for cutscenes.

Most games would, in this scenario, cut to Kratos’ face as he looks back at the sound. Some would show the newcomer. But without either, we’re as blindsided as our character. The camera swivels repeatedly to follow Kratos’ line of sight as he looks back at his son and tells him to hide in the cellar. The process of this—Kratos looks around, walks toward the door, and moves the fur rug that hides the cellar—is intense because we’re restricted to his awareness. It doesn’t go as far as making the game fully first-person (which would not fit the gameplay at all), but it’s still fairly extreme by the standards of most third-person games.

Image: Source Gaming. Now, the camera has moved to be closer to the standard gameplay position, hinting that a fight is imminent.

Why should a knock be this scary? Well, our heroes deliberately live away from all other human life, so anyone coming by is suspicious. But this Stranger knows a bit too much. He wants something from Kratos, rudely and vaguely, but he also knows our protagonist isn’t just an immigrant, but a lost Greek god with skeletons in his closet. A jab that mocks the Olympians for presenting themselves as more “enlightened” tells us he’s probably tight with the starker, dour Norse Gods. And he’s more than happy to make a threat out of noting that the house clearly has more than one occupant.

The actual move from cutscene to fight isn’t in itself unique. Kratos and the Stranger make threats, one tries to get the other to back off, and hits start to land. But waiting for who’s going to throw the first punch (it’s the Stranger, twice before Kratos decks him) keeps a hold of the tension that’s been building. When our interloper’s third punch knocks Kratos through his own house and us along with him, since our camera has to follow the character, it’s only so much of a release before the actual fight starts. Each of the several mid-battle cutscenes works like this; with no break in the action, one character will knock the other into the ground, toss them like a weight, or drive them into a wall at the end of a tree. It’s visceral.

Image: Source Gaming. Close-up combat. Apologies for the image quality; it’s much harder to capture precise screenshots on PS4 than it is on Switch.

They also fold into the combat parts beautifully. The fight’s no less cinematic than the cutscenes as the Stranger punches, jumps, and lands to summon a trail of ice. Typically, you’ll pelt him a bit from afar—Kratos can throw his axe and call it back, like Thor’s tiny-handled hammer Mjolnir—as you walk into melee range to start really doing damage. But even the tinier throws are just as impactful as the up-close strikes. The camera makes sure of that by keeping you close to Kratos and making every cutscene feel like part of the action. You only get a release with the last move in the fight, when Kratos snaps the Stranger’s neck with a button prompt. It doesn’t take, and the boss continues to hunt you throughout the game, but it still hits. That alone makes the gimmick feel valuable, and it’s something every successive fight has.

The fight’s also a great way for Kratos to show off his weapon. By this point, the Leviathan Axe has already been used for puzzles (it can freeze weights in place when thrown) and combat (summoning it out of a target’s body is a second hit, and it damages any enemies in its path as it flies back to your hand). Typically, you’ll fight by repeatedly throwing and retrieving it, hopefully getting some bonus hits as it spins back. The Stranger limits that mid-range utility a bit; there’s no other enemy to hit and he moves too fast for it to be as reliable. But that helps you focus on your melee game in a way you haven’t needed to yet, and it meshes with the tighter and closer camera. And you can still take some pot shots at him if you need to stay away.

Image: Source Gaming. Kratos can summon his axe back whenever he wants; it’s not applicable here, but he can wait in other fights for it to spin through multiple enemies in a row.

The Stranger is actually Baldur, by the way. You know, the Norse god whose main story involves him being made immune to everything in the world before Loki kills him. His identity is first hinted at here, when our villain boasts that he can’t feel a single hit Kratos lands (but that Kratos feels everything, setting them up as foils). God of War recognizes that by setting itself in the Norselands it’s treading popular mythological ground, and using a C-tier Aesir—just twisted into a nasty scumbag—is a good meta twist. It’s another way the fight grabs your attention.

A one-take rule, throwing axe, and Viking pantheon weren’t the only things the game had to sell. It also had to justify digging up that title—after all, it wasn’t the first God of War. That would be a 2005 beat-em-up starring a younger Kratos in his Grecian days. It lacked the over the shoulder view, the hatchet, and any sense of maturity. Throughout it, its two sequels, and four spin-offs of less import, Kratos regularly gouged eyes, engaged in embarrassing sex mini-games, and slaughtered civilians for health. The games leaked this awful nü-metal sensibility as Kratos murdered almost every single god and man of Ancient Greece. At least, until the series stopped thanks to oversaturation, changing tastes, and a plot that really had nowhere else to go.

Image: YouTube. Kratos using Helios’ head as a flashlight was a particularly notorious point of God of War III. Weirdly, God of War (2018) comes up with a much more humanistic take on the idea.

It wasn’t exactly sad to see it end. God of War was misanthropic, misogynistic, and fixated on a mean edgelord attitude. It’d be like if, say, the original No More Heroes was neither aware of how much of a creep Travis Touchdown could be nor ever willing to call him on it. Even within each entry, it was never clear if Santa Monica saw Kratos as a tragic hero manipulated by the gods (in a way that cheaply absolved him of his many misdeeds), a full villain, or just a “badass.” Plus, it was diminishing returns as the side games tired themselves out finding increasingly obscure gods to off. When one big bad is the D-list deity Morpheus, you’ve perhaps drank too deep of this well.

This isn’t to say the God of War trilogy had nothing. It was unparalleled in spectacle, with bosses the size of cities and exquisite gameplay. And the self-serious hypermasculinity has at least some camp value. But it’s insane that Kratos was Sony’s mascot for like four or five years (before Nathan Drake took his role, and Joel & Ellie after him). The intense cinematic flair of his games was important for the Sony brand, but this was still the main icon of a hardware publisher ripping off someone’s head with his bare hands like the Mortal Kombat character he inevitably became.

Somehow, though, that made Kratos surprisingly well-situated for Sony’s new model of hero: the crappy father trying to raise a kid in a hellish world. Those of us who sent him through each horrible escapade know how ugly he is—and, perhaps, how ugly Sony Santa Monica can be. We know his failures as a father (his chalky skin is the ashes of his last family, who he murdered). Maybe we chose to butcher an innocent Athenian for health points. So his attempts to nonviolently rebuff Baldur, his resignation at the inevitability of the fight, and the fatigue that comes from his rage are genuinely powerful. He’s not chopping off Hermes’ legs or beating Hercules’ face into mush; he’s struggling against a god as awful as him.

Image: Source Gaming. Kratos tries to beat Baldur to death in a cutscene that bridges phases of the fight. If you know Kratos from his older games, you know nothing good can come from this.

So while the camera work is creating this constant visual tension, the storytelling is creating this constant narrative tension. To people unfamiliar with Kratos, it’s still a frightening sequence of a man desperately trying to keep his son safe. But it takes on this metatextual dimension as well, because we’re also seeing the man barely holding back rage that has been exhaustively shown on screen. Being so close to him is… kinda scary, because it puts us closer to his world.

These two ideas intermingling match how frequently and fluidly the game switches from cutscene to combat. It’s sometimes hard to immediately tell when the shift happens. Of course, the two sometimes merge via button prompts (which are more accessible than the original games’ famous quicktime events). That’s how you learn the “Spartan Rage” mechanic; you use it to break free of a mountain crack. But even the cases that just go from “playable” to “nonplayable” do so in a way that hides their artificiality. It all feels real. This world doesn’t stop.

The fight is also a very different kind of spectacle than God of War was known for. Kratos’ old bosses were humongous; you typically couldn’t even see most of them. Sadly, this did not make the reboot other than one spectacular dragon. But the intimacy of this beatdown offers an enchanting alternative. Whether you’re fighting Baldur, his nephews Magni and Modi, or the elves and draugr that serve as generic mooks, you’re doing so at an angle with more personality than the original games’ top-down view. You can be blindsided from the back (though there are prompts for incoming attacks) and focus on whoever’s at your front. It’s a perspective that calls for chucking your axe into an angry god’s chest. Things were lost in the transition, but the behind the back camera provides a satisfying tightness.

Image: Source Gaming. You can’t ever remove yourself from Kratos when the camera never cuts and we never leave his side. Fortunately, he’s far easier to take this go around.

The camera and direction aren’t all that makes God of War a good game, or a good reboot. The yarn is packed with compelling characters, worldbuilding, and strong writing. It’s a great time exploring Midgard and its surrounding realms. Bear McCreary’s score is beautiful; Christopher Judge’s lead performance is spectacular. And the Leviathan Axe and Kratos’ old Blades of Chaos make for a phenomenal team of weapons. It’s not perfect (we didn’t need this of all franchises to get stuck waist-deep in the bog of incremental upgrades), but it’s commendable nonetheless. But that feels… odd.

In 2005, Kratos introduced himself to us by dropping a man to his death for no reason, having a threesome (with nameless sex workers who refuse his payment because he’s just that good in bed despite his being as joyful and caring as a brick), and impaling the Lernean Hydra’s upper jaw on a boat’s mast. It was asinine, juvenile, and… well, the Hydra part was undeniably cool. That was the thing. God of War could be as hateful as it wanted as long as it served up jaw-dropping fights against the Hydra, Poseidon, or the Kraken from Clash of the Titans. At least, until the bombast got too hollow and the toxic masculinity too sour.

Image: Gfycat. And for whatever it’s worth, it’s not like modern God of War is any less uproariously violent. It’s just less psychotic about it.

Franchises come back from the grave all the time, and this one’s eventual return was inevitable. But how it came back was somewhat unbelievable (its 2022 sequel God of War: Ragnarök, which has its own uninvited guest of a boss and is disappointingly not titled Twilight of the God of War, is just as good). There’s a lot of reasons for that: vision, gameplay, and a camera that was far better than its gimmicky pitch would suggest. But these ideas needed to synthesize, not just exist. Fights like Baldur’s did that, but they also sold them. An over the shoulder reboot that turned one of gaming’s most monstrous leads into a sad dad? And it’s all in this artsy “one shot” form?

Yeah. Yeah, that actually worked. That made a boss fight that was a spectacular antithesis of what God of War was, and a hint of something a new God of War could be. Every pained strike, every whip of the camera, every time the axe wrenches itself out of Baldur’s chest is a statement of intent. And it’s a statement held up by every hour and fight to come.