This just infuriates me even more because they're really showing they never tried the original playstation trilogy of the game. Kratos was initially painted as a man focused on his job, being a soldier, but as the games progress, they slowly flesh out his deep connection to his wife and his child which made the tragedy of their deaths even deeper, further fuelling Kratos' immense anger and desire for war. The more he got screwed over by the gods, EVERY god he interacted with except for Athena (and even she, in typical Greek God
fashion) used him to their own advantages, the more he desired vengeance.
The original trilogy's storyline is wobbly at best when you begin to dig into it
(like Zeus directly helping Kratos in the first game, only to be evil in the sequel and I know it's because of Pandoras Box, still), but you're supposed to focus on Kratos and his reactions to the world as a whole. In the third game, Kratos meets Pandora, a construct made by Hephaestus in the image of a human girl, and suddenly all of the softness that existed in Kratos resurfaces when he reluctantly has to save her.
Kratos had lost his humanity during his quest for vengeance but the whole point of his story, aside from revenge, is him accepting and moving on from the fact that he killed his own family.
There's even a call back sequence in the third game where you have to wade through Kratos' trauma while Pandora calls for help, which echoes parts of the ending of the first game where Kratos has to hug the ghosts of his family and protect them from clones of himself.
You're even told by the third game that his wife and daughter are living in bliss in Elysium, that they miss him and that they forgive him for what Ares tricked him into doing.
Yes, by and large the original God of War games have themes of misogyny and extreme machismo, Kratos has sex with beautiful women in all three games and he even callously kills a woman to proceed in a section in the third game, but damnit it's a good trilogy. Flawed, but better than whatever DEI nonsense the Norse games have. And that's without me going into a tirade over how bullshit the portrayal of norse mythology in 2018 and Ragnarok are.
