God of War is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we examine how Kratos’ character arc has shifted over time to become a timely reflection on masculinity and change.
As much as people remember the brutality and the grandiosity of God of War, as a singular game and as a series, it’s easy to forget that the first God of War in 2005 doesn’t actually begin with Kratos fighting a hydra and ripping soldiers apart with his bare hands.
It begins with a suicide attempt. Starting a new game, the very first thing we hear from Kratos is him gravely intoning that “the gods have abandoned me” before walking straight off a cliff into the Aegean Sea. This is a warlord who accidentally murdered his own wife and child, and is then cursed by an oracle to have his family’s ashes permanently grafted to his skin, ensuring there is nowhere in Greece he can go where his crimes are unrecognized. The only help he receives is being conscripted by the gods to murder Ares, who set him up to begin with, which isn’t really helpful at all. The reward is the gods’ forgiveness, which does nothing to alleviate his consistent nightmares about the deed. When blood doesn’t grant him peace, the gods give him power, letting him take Ares’ place as the Greek God of War, beginning a reign so destructive that almighty Zeus himself has to intervene to take him down. That’s before finding out Zeus himself is Kratos’ father, and Kratos having his revenge means laying waste to his entire domain. Which Kratos does.
For a series that built so much of its early reputation on violent catharsis, it always felt ike Sony having their cake and eating it too that Kratos’ quests never really get him any real solutions to his pain. Even when he sacrifices himself for a more noble cause in God of War III, spilling blood doesn’t fix problems in this series–though it sure feels great in the moment. It all still leads to the desolation of Kratos’ homeland, the complete massacre of its pantheon, and he himself doomed to wander the Earth with nothing but his thoughts. If I had a nickel for every prestige PlayStation franchise that ended up there.
All of this is a product of the time in which Kratos was born, really. Not as a character, but as a game from 2005, and one that felt like a grim-and-gritty nu-metal take on Greek myth–and two years before Zack Snyder would get there on film, to boot. Kratos’ angst is the style of the time, a man who has made horrible, cruel, vicious mistakes, and his rage about that becomes everyone’s problem. Everything about Kratos’ design is of its place and time, and if there is any enduring lesson from that place and time, it’s that hatred and violence can be useful and have their place, but they, in and of themselves, are not solutions. There is no happy ending with just nihilism as a driving force. By definition, it ends with nothing. God of War III just shows us the endpoint. Or, at least, what we thought was the end, before 2018, and Kratos’ arc became one of the most beautiful things ever committed to pixels.
What tends to go forgotten after all these years is that the shift for this character didn’t begin in 2018. It began in 2010, when we find out exactly why Zeus felt Kratos needed to die, the first acknowledgement that he himself had started a cycle of violence, creating the precise circumstances where his child, Kratos, would do to him what Zeus did to Kronos. But, again, Zeus still dies in God of War III. One of the unkillable plagues of AAA gaming is the inability for its stories to speak a language that isn’t a language of blood, and there was no way to reconcile Kratos with the forces that resulted in his existence except by ensuring Zeus could not inflict more pain on others–not that there was anyone left on Olympus when Kratos was done. The cycle could only have a chance to be broken by taking Greece’s #1 abuser out of the equation.
The thing we never see much of–in real life or in video games–is what awaits on the other side. Revenge is easy to obtain, retribution is easy to imagine, but the thing we don’t consider enough in our art is what rehabilitation looks like. What does it mean for someone having done the things Kratos has done to continue to exist, if we are to allow him to exist?
There’s no roadmap for processing the things Kratos has done, the only certainty being that he must carry the unrelenting weight of it. And he does carry it. The Kratos of 2018 is, too, a product of his time. He is heavy, taciturn, all too aware of what his power and anger can bring, trapped alive in a tomb of scars and regrets. It’s where the manhood he was created to embody leads. But the singular issue with men knowing their acts have consequences, the innate wrongness of it all, is there is so little that tells them where to go next. That’s especially true for Kratos since the one woman who could have guided him a little further down a righteous path has passed away when the new games begin.
The only light that shines out in that darkness is the fact that Kratos has a son. And in his son, even as he lacks the literal and metaphorical vocabulary to do it, he has but one true north, a realignment of priorities for this kind of narrative: “Don’t be sorry. Be better.”
How does Kratos atone? Are the centuries Kratos spends in silent exile enough? Is it enough that he once again loses a wife? The hard answer is that there may never be enough. But the asterisk is that it is good and worthwhile to try.
Thus begins a story unlike any in all of gaming and at bare minimum rare in all of fiction; the slayer of gods, monsters and men putting something back into the world instead of burning it all down, a father seeing his future reflected in the prism of his child’s life, while ever pursued by the distorted Norse funhouse mirror of his past. And even though Kratos takes up the blades again, it is endlessly fascinating that Kratos does not regress. There is brutality still, a wellspring to draw upon when faced with a threat. But the timbre of the violence is different. It is violence attempting to operate without malice. And that’s a hard tightrope to walk, one that God of War 2018 and Ragnarok don’t always traverse without slipping. But the intent is clear, on the part of the developers, and this character, this man. We must try to be better, even when better is inconvenient.
Kratos watching himself and his son struggle with power and privilege is wonderful on its own, their journey towards empathy and sympathy for each other, for all they have endured is equally so. But the moment that fully raised Kratos into the rarified air of characters in gaming came later, when the Valhalla DLC for God of War Ragnarok dropped, and Kratos faced his true enemy. Himself.
Kratos faces his younger self, the bastard who slaughtered by the thousands, bathed in blood and fury, the one who would rather have killed himself than confront his grief and crimes, and the one who came to power he did not deserve or understand. That Kratos. It could have been a final boss. Instead, it is a monologue. Kratos has the vocabulary to face himself.
High-profile games don’t reckon with the ramifications of their existence much. It’s not fun, or entertaining, or empowering in the traditional sense. And a power trip like 2005’s God of War is those three things above all else. But no matter what the medium is, there’s a crucial honesty in the idea that the stories we tell each other grow with us, that a tale can mean one thing when you’re 20, and something else entirely when you’re 40. Where God of War differs is in being one of the few video game characters that has legitimately grown and changed in 20 years. Not after a reboot or redesign, but because the character has had experiences that recontextualize everything he’s done. And so, Kratos faces himself.
“What can I say to you? I remember how it felt to take the throne. All that it meant, and all that it did not. A god of war. A god of pain. Of suffering. Of destruction. The Norns said I chase a redemption that I know I can never deserve. What does that make me? God of fools. A god of…hope. ‘When all else is lost.’ You lost everything. And everyone. And you became. There is no forgiving you. You chose. I chose! What now? Should I, this same man…should I sit? Take? Proclaim? Lead? Place myself in service? In service. Should I lose everything and everyone? Will there still be enough left inside so that I do not become you? I do not know. But I have hope. You are cruel, and arrogant, and selfish. But you are more than that. You have always been more than what others saw. You are more than that.”
That monologue represents one of the greatest feats of storytelling in this medium, putting itself in direct dialogue with the game that many of us followed into adulthood, with many of them really. It is a thorough understanding of the power of escapism, the appeal of it, but also its limits, its failures, and ultimately, that it is not enough for any soul that wishes to evolve. For men in particular, the ones for whom Kratos represented a place of violent force unquestioned, for those words to come from a better man is miraculous. And it uses one of gaming’s most violent monsters to tell it, without redeeming him, simply showing the path forward, the way to wield power and privilege. There is no arc like this in the wider landscape of gaming. And that, more than any blessing from the gods, will make Kratos truly immortal.