So... Kratos kills his family to avenge his family?

As the latest (and possibly last) entry in the God of War saga begins, Kratos is dead-set on finally killing his dad - along with everyone else on Olympus, if he has to. It won't end his nightmares or his torment, but somehow it'll avenge the deaths of his family (which, again,he caused).

Above: The house of Zeus must fall!

So there's a lot of ground to cover here. The first one to die is Uncle Poseidon, who shuffles off this (im)mortal coil in one of the most spectacularly gruesome beatdowns ever to appear in a videogame.

Above: "YOU WERE ALWAYS MY SECOND-LEAST-FAVORITE UNCLE!"

Next, in Hades, Kratos encounters Peirithous, a seemingly pathetic soul held in eternal torment by a wall of bramble. What the game doesn't tell you, though, is that Peirithous is another son of Zeus, which makes him another half-brother to Kratos. Showing his usual level ofregard for his relatives, Kratos burns him alive. Then comes Kratos's other uncle, Hades, who gets chunks sliced off him before Kratos steals his soul outright.

Above: You can almost kind of see the family resemblance here

Only getting started, Kratos then moves on to the first cousing, once removed who he rescued way back in Chains of Olympus: Helios, who gets his head torn off.

Next up is Hermes, another half-brother to Kratos, who follows his sonCeryx into oblivion when Kratos chops his legs off.

For a little while after that, Kratos manages to avoid killing any more relatives. That is, until he meets his half-brother Hercules, the only one of his many half-siblings to actually address him as "brother." Kratos repays his acknowledgment by smashing his face into a pulpy mess.

Above: Gross

Not content to stop there, Kratos pays a visit to his grandfather, the massive Titan Cronos, in the Pit of Tartarus. Rather than listen to any of his boring stories, Kratos disembowels him before stabbing him through the forehead with the Blade of Olympus.

Above: You wouldn't treat your grandfather this way, would you?Then again, your grandfather probably never tried to eat you alive

Shortly afterward, Kratos murders his first cousin Hephaestus, the stunted smith god, by electrocuting him and stabbing him throught the chest with his own anvil.

Then it's on to a confrontation with Kratos's drunken aunt/stepmother Hera, whose neck he snaps like he would a puppy's.

Later still, his rage gets the better of him, and he unintentionally allows Pandora - Hephaestus's adopted daughter and therefore Kratos's first cousin, once removed - to die in the Flame of Olympus. Driven to near-incoherence, he then sets out to finally murder his father, Zeus, pausing only to stab his great-grandmother, Gaia, through the heartalong the way.

With Zeus finally dead and most of his family destroyed, Kratos finally forgives himself for the murders of the two family members whose deaths he killed the rest of his family in order to avenge. Then, apparently because he had nothing better to do, he commits suicide with the massive Blade of Olympus. Which, if you stick around until after the credits roll, doesn't necessarily mean he's dead.

Above: C'mon, he's survived worse injuries than this

So ends - for now - Kratos's bizarre quest to murder his entire family. This may be the only time we've ever cheered at a story in which a character did something similar. For the record, let's see how he did:

That's not half-bad, but as you can see, there are still a few loose ends to tie up. Will Kratos return in the future to completely expunge his kin from the world? Are his half-siblings Apollo andArtemissafe for long? How about his great-aunt Aphrodite, with whom he has off-camera sex? For that matter, what about his remaining cousin Eos, or the rest of the Titans?

We'll just have to wait and see where the series goes from here. But we do know one thing: Zeus was married to his own sister and had a daughter with another sister, who in turn married his brother/her uncle. And that's icky.

Mar 18, 2010

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