Set at some unknown point during those ten years, Kratos is sent to assassinate Morpheus, the god of er... sleeping. Mischievous Morpheus is causing the Mount Olympus massive to fall into a dream-like slumber, which obviously isn’t good. So Eos – goddess of the dawn – asks Kratos to rescue her bro Helios – god of the sun. Helios can make everything better with his lighty powers, but the poor chap’s been abducted by the titan Atlas and needs rescuing.
All this malarkey leads, in a roundabout way, to cueball venturing to horrid Tartarus and murdering Greek mythological institution Charon, ferryman of the dead. Kratos also discovers that it was Persephone – Queen of the Underworld – that kicked this whole shebang off. (To be fair, the bitch had her reasons.) More pissed than ever, he sets out to whack her...
...but not before we’re subjected to a rare bit of sentimentality, as Kratos catches up with dead daughter Calliope in the Elysian Fields and we partake of one of the best, most random minigames ever. Mind you, this is sentimentality, God of War-style, so the touching scene ends with – yep – Kratos murdering everyone in sight. Then ripping Persephone to bits. Chains of Olympus ends.
Right, we revert to the original God of War. Kratos, now well up for offing Ares, learns that Pandora’s Box will provide him with the tools necessary to finish the job. Cue a relentless swathe of combo-based butchery and QTE bits which sees turtle waxer cleaving up hydras, gorgons, harpies and minotaurs, Spartan-stylee. With a bit of sex and some boobs thrown in, too.
After scaling the back of the titan Chronos (condemned by Zeus to endlessly wander the Desert of Lost Souls yada yada yada) and locating the Temple of Pandora, Kratos finally locates his prize...
...only to succumb to a stake through the heart lobbed from half the world away by Ares. Banished to Hades, Kratos only goes and fights his way out of the underworld, before going on to nab the Box back and use it to vanquish Ares. Whadda guy.
The erstwhile God of War a goner, Kratos begs Athena for his long-awaited redemption – only to be told that he’ll never be able to forget his sordid past. (Cue violins.) So we revert all the way back to the game’s prelude, where Kratos is about to chuck himself off the highest mountain in Greece and into the Aegean Sea.
Big surprise, he doesn’t get dashed to bits on the rocks below. Instead, he’s rescued by Athena and installed as – you guessed it – the new God of War. Kratos gets all his nifty powers back, plus the Blades of Athena as a level up from the Blades of Chaos. Bonus.
Next: Good God, we're nearly at the end/beginning...
