For what a high point of storytelling in games the franchise it spawned has come to be seen as, it feels underdiscussed how effortlessly God of War married its narrative with its mechanics on its very first try. What I’d wager is the peak of this entire series in that regard’s present here, specifically during the final boss, at which point there’s a masochistically difficult segment where Kratos has to defend his family from an army of himself and can quite literally sacrifice his life (bar) to restore theirs.

While a sequence near the end of Chains of Olympus comes close in terms of catharsis, I find this section especially interesting not just for its music being a top 5 track in any action game or the 1:1 emotions it induces in both the player and Kratos, but also because of how neatly it wraps him up at the very start of what went on to be arguably Sony’s premier franchise, to the point of being its guinea pig for expanding outside of its own consoles. It’s become unfortunately common to mischaracterise the Greek games’ Kratos as an avatar of mindless anger, this being just one example of any number of counterpoints to that notion which existed as early on as his debut (you’d hope the introductory cutscene alone would’ve been enough). Were he not a compelling leading man with just enough depth to maintain interest over the course of a game relatively lengthy for its genre, it’s doubtful that he would’ve become probably the closest thing PlayStation’s ever had to its own Mario or Master Chief, if not in terms of sheer recognisability or an on-brand colour scheme then certainly in being a distilment of his parent company’s core draw – in this case, complex scenarios made accessible to as wide an audience as possible by way of presentational, cinematic flair.

God of War achieves this partially through its fixed camera, which is a huge boon to its sense of adventure. Even something as mundane as trotting down what’s functionally a featureless corridor feels momentous whenever it’s paired with a rampaging Ares in the background occupying two thirds of the screen, or when it pans out to the point of Kratos being barely visible to drive home the gargantuan scale of places like Pandora’s Temple and the Desert of Lost Souls. The in-game levels encompassing these areas are only so big, but the bespoke camera angles do a stellar job of selling the impression that there’s something more out there on the horizon (accentuated by how they enable the level designers to hide important collectibles out of view) and stoking the player’s imagination, the latter of which increasingly seems to be a lost art in games of production value comparable to this as they hone in further and further on photorealism. This isn’t to suggest that God of War isn’t likely trying to look as realistic as the PS2’s hardware allowed for – the amount of real-time reflections, volumetric water effects and NPCs running around during crowded scenes are pretty insane considering how smoothly it runs – but I do think this is a case where technical limitations helped bring about the best of both worlds, where it’s simultaneously cool how lifelike it can often look while still leaving room for mental abstraction on the player’s part.

The other half of the equation’s the combat system. The lack of any pesky directional inputs coupled with the Blades of Chaos’ gigantic range help reduce the skill barrier a decent margin by de-emphasising positioning (though not nearly to as egregious an extent as the Norse games’ slip ‘n’ slide attack magnetism) and technicality, but it’s still got layers which this surface-level simplicity belies. The hardest difficulty particularly necessitates a balancing act, where you’ll be pretty much constantly weighing up whether to get in as many weak hits as possible and milk the combo counter for all the red orbs it’s worth or to risk chucking out slower, stronger attacks to quickly dispatch the most annoying enemies. It has a few of those for sure; if you can believe it, Sony Santa Monica actually put my reaction to a gorgon appearing onscreen into one of these games. The enemy roster’s largely good and makes creative use of Greek myth, but other, more minor irritations do occasionally rear their heads in soldiers’ unreactable wakeup attacks and how there doesn’t seem to be any reliable way to predict when sirens or minotaurs decide to respectively dodge or block.

Despite these blemishes and the Blade of Artemis feeling slightly undertuned for being the only other weapon in the game, God of War’s combat system has enough other strong points to outweigh them. The grab system in particular deserves more attention than it tends to get and could stand to be cribbed from more often by other action games. At the press of a button and depending on the context in which they’re used, grabs are a tool for combo extension, crowd control, orb maximisation, invincible instakills (at the cost of receiving no orbs) and non-mandatory QTEs which net you specific resources from certain enemies should you need them; complemented by the wealth of magic abilities Kratos obtains over the course of the game, it enables more room for experimentation than one’d expect. It also can’t be stressed enough how great it is at fulfilling a power fantasy; the chunkiest hitstop in all of Athens and a striking amount of enemy hit reactions makes feedback on attacks feel fantastic whether you’re ripping into entire hordes or a single measly harpy.

As sobering as this being my 50th review was the fact that, according to my memory card, the last time I’d played God of War on original hardware seems to have been 2008. Gamer carbon dating places that roughly in our own equivalent of ancient Greece, but as with the real deal, we shouldn’t arrogantly look down on that era. There’s a tendency in gaming and other media to purport that standards only ever increase as time passes, but even in the face of the leaps and bounds action games have come on in the time since God of War’s release, I reckon there’s still not many that outdo it in all of its key selling points, one of which includes the ability to put Kratos in a cow costume. It remains not just the game I might not’ve gotten into my favourite genre without, but also a solid exemplification of why you probably shouldn’t trust anybody who uses “like a PS2 game” as a pejorative. Or, in my experience, the first sentence of this old promo video. The second one’s true enough, though.