God of War (2018)

After a fairly decent length hiatus from playing anything for any particular length of time, I finally jumped back into God of War and completed it. That includes the main story, Muspelheim and Niflheim (although I haven't farmed them enough to pick up all of the gear and upgrades), and defeated the eight Valkyrie. What have I not completed? Sigrid. Do I want to? Maybe. Sigrid feels out of place in this game. Although God of War encourages you to fight thoughtfully, it never really requires the type of planned thinking of games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne (I make this comparison lightly, because I do not think of God of War as a Soulsborne style game, but the comparison has been made elsewhere). The Soulsbourne games encourage you to think about every fight as a puzzle, and it is by thinking your way through a fight that you win. God of War, despite encouraging some combat planning, lets you brute your way through fights with Runic attacks. Now a good fight between Kratos, Atreus and 10-20 enemies requires some quick thinking and adept use of of both combat tactics and runic attacks. It is certainly fun. But the boss fights are few and far between, and most can be won with some light dodging and spamming Runic attacks. While I did dance around a bit during some of the Valkyrie fights, they required very little pattern memorization. In steps Sigrid and everything changes. Here we have a fight that requires careful observation, copious amounts of dodging and patience. All of these feelings are familiar if you have played Soulsborne games. But there they differ from God of War is that you spend the majority of time in the appropriate mindset. God of War wants you to switch to that mindset for the Sigrid fight, and having spent the rest of the game in a completely different mode of combat, I was not ready. And frankly it was exhausting. She has a massive health pool and even if you manage to dodge well she wears you down. If I had spent hours doing the same over the course of the game I would have been ready, but I had not so I was not. And it affects my desire to try. I am not averse to tough fights, but I just don't have this one in me. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the abrupt switch in play style and expectations, but I might just leave this game where it is now, without defeating Sigrid. Maybe one day.

I'm done. I still need to fight the Queen of the Valkyries, but to do so would require me grinding the two realms of the game that are a PitA to grind in. I don't care anymore. I've gotten my money's worth for this, and every second more that I get raped by the Queen Valkyrie (tried for 3 hours today alone to beat her) and then have to do extremely difficult or monotonous side quests is every second I get more pissed off. Fuck it, I'm done with this. I don't care about a fucking trophy. I deleted the game so I can move on to others.