this one is my favorite of the series, good story, good gameplay, amzing graphics for the PSP, and this whole experience being portable, it's just an amazing game all around, nice review and honest critcism
It's an incredible game I mean, it doesn't feel like a portable entry at all it could legitimately be a main console entry is how it feels to play. I had a blast revisiting Ghost of Sparta and whilst I believe it has some issues it's still no less great.
I think I know why demios had weapons because ares and thanatos actually teamed up to use the marked warrior to destroy olympus so they trained him but when they found out he was a disappointment they left him there
Back then, this game truly felt like a 'GOW2 on the go'. Bigger, more story oriented, shinier. I mean you didn't really mention how nice this game looks: the blues of the ocean and the Eye of Atlantis, the reds of the volcanoes and Thera's bane, the greens, the greys, etc. It's still stunning. Looking at it now, yes, it has its problems and plotholes but it did better than it had any right to be (and was far better than GWO:CoO imho). The locations and the backstory to Kratos is the real deal in this game: seeing his relationships with relatives/Spartans. One truly memorable part is when Kratos's younger self [having emerged from the mirror] berates him for leaving Deimos behind. It's haunting and will always stay with me. And although having some plot problems, it does fit in well with the timeline between GOW1 and GOW2. Since you'll play Ascension hopefully, here's a fun fact for you: in the beginning parts of Ascension, you'll find a letter that, even tho it won't reveal its author, is written by Kratos's mother, Callisto. Just from the context and emotions in the letter, you can guess that it was her. Well done video, mate!:) It was as great as always. Hope you had fun with it. Cuz next up is Ascention and ohhh boy... better be ready for its hijinks:D
Oh don't get me wrong the game looks gorgeous for a PSP game but I don't judge the visuals in these retrospectives because unlike the story or gameplay, I'm not expecting the visuals to hold up to todays standard. But I agree Ghost of Sparta is a big improvement over Chains of Olympus in every way and fits in well between GOW & GOW 2. Thank you as always mate for watching, glad you enjoyed the video because it's clear you love the game and I had a blast revisiting Ghost of Sparta. I'm currently scripting the Ascension Retrospective now and all I'll say for now is... I went into Ascension believing the game to be underrated and now I no longer feel that way 😂
@@MayorHairBearI love these handheld GOW titles because I never had a Playstation, so back in my younger years, this is what I had, what I played. Somehow the visuals always stick out for me in GOW: GoS. Nah mate, thank you for making these videos! Ascension is a meme, not gonna lie :'D. It's in a weird, sort-a-like, limbo state. You can't really wrap your mind around it. Nonetheless, by the way you described your experiences with it so far, I'll bet it will be a doozy, thats for sure. Btw, you have any plans to do a halloween/spooky game, either in the form of a 'Retrospective' or a 'So I finally played...' as we are in October? Just a curious question?:)
I enjoyed this one much more than Chains due to the story. I feel like "side story" games like this are in a tough position because they have to be interesting enough to tell a compelling story, but they also don't have the freedom to mess around with the cannon as much as mainline stories do. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe any of the story elements in Ghost or Chains were brought up in the main console games. So doing these spin-off games is often a thankless job where they could have easily phoned it in, but instead they did a great job of trying to flesh out Kratos' backstory.
The side stories are in a tough spot you're right and I don't believe the main entries bring these stories up (could be wrong and maybe they're in the notes) except for a track in the GOW 3 soundtrack that has the choir singing "Kratos, Deimos..." But I'm with you, I enjoy having Kratos' backstory fleshed out more and Ready at Dawn did a great job here!
@@MayorHairBear helios brings up chains of olympus when kratos goes to kill him, hades references kratos killing persephony, and then deimos’ voice can be heard in the dark “fear” vision kratos has at the end of the game. Thats about it from what i remember and most of those are all from 3
@@breakplayz3598 Did you think that greeks didn't swear? Be for real. Brok (who is pretty much the only one that swears) is meant to be that way. Y'all really need to take that stick out your ass.
I always loved how kratos uses the blades of Athena in this one, they were always my favorite looking version of the blades, and the first game never let you use them for actual gameplay, as there was no new game plus.
One thing that always annoys me is that everyone assumes Arms Of Sparta is Kratos' weapons during his captain days. This factually incorrect. He carries a sword and you can see it during flashbacks in GOW1 and a recreation of his promotion in Ascension. Arms Of Sparta presumably is Kratos' weapons when he was still working up through the ranks before being captain.
This is my favorite god of war gsme from the Greek saga.. I love how you can tackle monsters and beat them down.. this game amazing the atmosphere the bosses every single detail the way how the world looks
Your Commentary is so pleasent, I'm surprised you don't have more viewers. I played the God of War trilogy again over the last couple weeks and your videos are a very nice round off upon copleting a part. I have never played the portable Games but I have them setup in Emulator now, so I'm looking forward to them.
Thank you so much mate, glad you're enjoying the videos! The portable entries are very much worth a play, not the best games in the series but still great great fun.
I cannot stress enough how enraged i was at the final battle, i spent the whole game looking for my brother only for discount grim reaper jesus knock off hair cut that looks he got rejected from the twilight cast to take him away from, and the game makes you the one to press the button that calls for him to rescue you!
I loved Chains of Olympus and it was something I replayed multiple times but I missed out on Ghost of Sparta when it released, only getting to play it years later thanks to emulators. I think it's a good game but I get the feeling that this game was the start of people becoming tired of the old God of War formula along with Ascension that eventually led to the gameplay being revamped completely for God of War 2018. Still a very solid game and this is probably the game that squeezed the most juice out of the PSP's hardware and it looks simply incredible to this day as a PSP game, but it does feel like the series started to become stale at this point for many people.
People didnt grow tired of anything. Sony failed at marketing and conceptualizing Ascension. Releasing yet another prequel to a finished story and failing to market it properly was its downfall. Had the game been just a bit delayed and titled GoW 4 it would not have flopped
@@MayorHairBear I always thought he was designed like that. Not that he was just paying tribute to his brothers birthmark. They definitely made that up for this story here.
@@trippyskullz6669even in the extra videos on gow1 the one describing his childhood he didnt have the tattoos as a child so that means he eventually had them later in his adult life
Well my head canon for why Deimos changed his tune is less he forgives his brother and more Kratos is the lesser evil in this situation and that after Thanatos defeat/death all bets are off.
It can be a bit like that, when a series is 7 games long you're bound to forget an entry or two. For me it was GOW 2 but I didn't replay that one as much back in the day and it had been a long ass time between playthroughs.
The fact that Zeus did not want to kill Deimos could well be because he preferred to torture him in a place that very few know about, he would not know what thanatos would do to him, and it seems to me that he did not want to know either, he simply preferred to torture him instead of killing him, in instead of giving him a quick and painless death even though that person is theoretically the one who would cause the destruction of the kingdom they worked so hard to build. I wouldn't be surprised, Zeus is a son of a bitch after all, and at least here they don't make Zeus look like a bipolar like it was the case in gow 3 with pandora. I interpreted the "only one, remains" as literally that, that deep down Zeus had some appreciation for that particular family, maybe not Deimos, but Kratos and Callisto, not for nothing did he make a grave for them at 3, something that in theory is because you have a certain appreciation for them as kratos says in ragnarok to faye. I also understood that the realm of death was on another plane of existence or something like that, not exactly close to Hades, which is underground or at the bottom, and I also don't think I could have gone to rescue him or get him out of there, precisely because kratos himself cannot do it on his own, much less he will do it with someone, people think that kratos can get out of hell as many times as he wants because he feels like it but it is not really like that, in the first game he did Zeus had to help, in the second game Gaia helps him, and in the third game Hades "helps" him with his soul. There is no doubt that Deimos has a 180 change of mind, I totally agree with you, even if there are reasons for him to think so, Kratos never told him, something like "our mother hid you from me because of our father "Or something like that, but no. And in the end, if Thanatos didn't kill him when he left him on the cliff, it could be because he wanted to see Kratos suffer as a consequence of killing his daughter, followed by the fact that by then he already knew that Deimos was not the marked warrior, " The oracle lied" also, I don't know if many people know this but Deimos can really fall and "die" if you delay even 1 second and in fact, the one who won in that final fight was Thatanos because he achieved his goal, do suffer Kratos with the death of another of his relatives that he loved. Maybe they are far-fetched answers and the whole thing but I don't know, as far as that goes, they make a certain sense to my taste.
All of your "problems" with the story are either explained by the game itself, or by the series as a whole. Why wasn't Deimos killed? Because trying to alter prophecy without the consent of the Sisters of Fate is a horrible idea that always goes wrong. This applies to both the games and Greek mythology. Cronos trying to save his regime by eating his children, only for Zeus to avoid that fate and taking revenge on his father, is the biggest example pre-Kratos. Zeus takes the best possible route he has without the Furies: he sends TWO war Gods to take Deimos, he orders Thanatos, one of his most loyal followers, to imprision him in his Domain, which even the Gods are afraid to go to. Killing Deimos, or trying to, would speed up the result of the prophecy, which it does. Why isn't Death's Domain close to, or adjacent to, the Underworld? Because it's not. That's it. That's how GoW's world is set up. Why would to powerful Gods, loyal to Zeus and with similar power, share a single domain? Thanatos oversees death, while Hades oversees the dead. They're to aspects of the same process, but incredibly distinct. Why does Thanatos save Kratos from Deimos? He doesn't. Thanatos is presented as a sadistic loyalist of Zeus. His task is to imprison and torture Deimos, and he wants revenge for the death of his daughter, Erinies. By taking Deimos, his hurting both brothers and obeying orders. Why doesn't Thanatos kill Deimos? Once again, that's not what he has ordered to do. His job is to imprison and torture Deimos, making him weak. By leaving him dangling off the cliff, he's doing both. He can clearly catch him if he falls, in order to continue torturing him. Why does Deimos have weapons? He doesn't. He uses fragments of his manacles to fight Kratos. They even brake at the end of the fight. Why does he join Kratos after fighting him? Because Kratos was willing to die for him, both when they fought and when he saved Deimos from falling. Despite the fact that he's fighting the God of death, he sees that Kratos still wants to save him. Deep down, he still wants to be with his brother.
I have no idea why ares didn't just kill Deimos or kratos. Him and Athena already raided Sparta and killed god who knows how many But nah. Don't kill Deimos. Let's send him to the chamber of death and keep him alive
well, Zeus was an mf, surely he preferred to torture the child who was "destined" to kill him as punishment for being something that in theory was going to be, and more precisely with thanatos, someone who existed long before the Olympians or the Titans, I mean, the bastard preferred to send him with him thinking that it was a worse punishment than killing him and letting his brother Hades torture him in hell. Even more knowing that very few knew that kingdom well, come on, the worst of the worst.
this one is my favorite of the series, good story, good gameplay, amzing graphics for the PSP, and this whole experience being portable, it's just an amazing game all around, nice review and honest critcism
It's an incredible game I mean, it doesn't feel like a portable entry at all it could legitimately be a main console entry is how it feels to play. I had a blast revisiting Ghost of Sparta and whilst I believe it has some issues it's still no less great.
@@Lord_Kratos69 IMO it is lol
I think I know why demios had weapons because ares and thanatos actually teamed up to use the marked warrior to destroy olympus so they trained him but when they found out he was a disappointment they left him there
Back then, this game truly felt like a 'GOW2 on the go'. Bigger, more story oriented, shinier. I mean you didn't really mention how nice this game looks: the blues of the ocean and the Eye of Atlantis, the reds of the volcanoes and Thera's bane, the greens, the greys, etc. It's still stunning. Looking at it now, yes, it has its problems and plotholes but it did better than it had any right to be (and was far better than GWO:CoO imho). The locations and the backstory to Kratos is the real deal in this game: seeing his relationships with relatives/Spartans. One truly memorable part is when Kratos's younger self [having emerged from the mirror] berates him for leaving Deimos behind. It's haunting and will always stay with me. And although having some plot problems, it does fit in well with the timeline between GOW1 and GOW2.
Since you'll play Ascension hopefully, here's a fun fact for you: in the beginning parts of Ascension, you'll find a letter that, even tho it won't reveal its author, is written by Kratos's mother, Callisto. Just from the context and emotions in the letter, you can guess that it was her.
Well done video, mate!:) It was as great as always. Hope you had fun with it. Cuz next up is Ascention and ohhh boy... better be ready for its hijinks:D
Oh don't get me wrong the game looks gorgeous for a PSP game but I don't judge the visuals in these retrospectives because unlike the story or gameplay, I'm not expecting the visuals to hold up to todays standard. But I agree Ghost of Sparta is a big improvement over Chains of Olympus in every way and fits in well between GOW & GOW 2. Thank you as always mate for watching, glad you enjoyed the video because it's clear you love the game and I had a blast revisiting Ghost of Sparta. I'm currently scripting the Ascension Retrospective now and all I'll say for now is... I went into Ascension believing the game to be underrated and now I no longer feel that way 😂
@@MayorHairBearI love these handheld GOW titles because I never had a Playstation, so back in my younger years, this is what I had, what I played. Somehow the visuals always stick out for me in GOW: GoS. Nah mate, thank you for making these videos!
Ascension is a meme, not gonna lie :'D. It's in a weird, sort-a-like, limbo state. You can't really wrap your mind around it. Nonetheless, by the way you described your experiences with it so far, I'll bet it will be a doozy, thats for sure.
Btw, you have any plans to do a halloween/spooky game, either in the form of a 'Retrospective' or a 'So I finally played...' as we are in October? Just a curious question?:)
@@laszlopados3350 I don't have any Halloween related plans right now but that doesn't mean there won't be some Spookiness this month!
I enjoyed this one much more than Chains due to the story. I feel like "side story" games like this are in a tough position because they have to be interesting enough to tell a compelling story, but they also don't have the freedom to mess around with the cannon as much as mainline stories do. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe any of the story elements in Ghost or Chains were brought up in the main console games. So doing these spin-off games is often a thankless job where they could have easily phoned it in, but instead they did a great job of trying to flesh out Kratos' backstory.
The side stories are in a tough spot you're right and I don't believe the main entries bring these stories up (could be wrong and maybe they're in the notes) except for a track in the GOW 3 soundtrack that has the choir singing "Kratos, Deimos..." But I'm with you, I enjoy having Kratos' backstory fleshed out more and Ready at Dawn did a great job here!
@@MayorHairBear helios brings up chains of olympus when kratos goes to kill him, hades references kratos killing persephony, and then deimos’ voice can be heard in the dark “fear” vision kratos has at the end of the game. Thats about it from what i remember and most of those are all from 3
@@cstrife420 also the letters in Hades in gow 3 from kratos's daughter and mother. I think these nods are satisfactory.
The reason the story for this one is better than Chains of Olympus is because it was written by Cory Barlog.
That makes a lot of sense, it's much more coherent!
Cory Ballot is meant to write GoW stories. Eric Williams let us down with GoW Ragnarok.
@@TheSantach No he didn't lmao. GoW Ragnarok is perfect continuation and epilogue of the Norse Saga
@@jacobjake7623The writing in Ragnarok is awful. Everyone uses modern day slang
@@breakplayz3598 Did you think that greeks didn't swear? Be for real. Brok (who is pretty much the only one that swears) is meant to be that way. Y'all really need to take that stick out your ass.
I always loved how kratos uses the blades of Athena in this one, they were always my favorite looking version of the blades, and the first game never let you use them for actual gameplay, as there was no new game plus.
This game singlehandedly made me want a PSP so bad, never have played it unfortunately looks just on par with the big boys though!
Ready at Dawn achieved something truly special with these portable entries, they feel so much like the console experiences!
Bro use ppsspp on your phone!! I played it the same way when I got a good phone❤
This is the game that got me into god of war
One thing that always annoys me is that everyone assumes Arms Of Sparta is Kratos' weapons during his captain days.
This factually incorrect.
He carries a sword and you can see it during flashbacks in GOW1 and a recreation of his promotion in Ascension.
Arms Of Sparta presumably is Kratos' weapons when he was still working up through the ranks before being captain.
Your videos are very great quality man, don’t stop making them
You keep watching and I'll keep making my friend! 🙏
This is my favorite god of war gsme from the Greek saga.. I love how you can tackle monsters and beat them down.. this game amazing the atmosphere the bosses every single detail the way how the world looks
This is my first entry to the series : )
Your Commentary is so pleasent, I'm surprised you don't have more viewers.
I played the God of War trilogy again over the last couple weeks and your videos are a very nice round off upon copleting a part.
I have never played the portable Games but I have them setup in Emulator now, so I'm looking forward to them.
Thank you so much mate, glad you're enjoying the videos! The portable entries are very much worth a play, not the best games in the series but still great great fun.
Incredibly underrated channel. Great work
Thank you so much mate, glad you're enjoying the videos!
I cannot stress enough how enraged i was at the final battle, i spent the whole game looking for my brother only for discount grim reaper jesus knock off hair cut that looks he got rejected from the twilight cast to take him away from, and the game makes you the one to press the button that calls for him to rescue you!
This game was awesome on the PSP.
One of the PSP's best!
I've been looking forward to this
I hope it delivered mate!
@@MayorHairBear it did, I love your PSP reviews
Edit: I recommend Resistance Retribution&Killzone Liberation to continue those franchises
MayorHairBear never disappoints
You're far too kind mate but thank you!
Deserve more subscribers for sure!
Thank you mate, I appreciate that!
I feel like Kratos and Deimos could be GOW 2 player a possibility
Absolutely they could
@@MayorHairBear imagine a co op GOW where u play as both at the same time with even more or more challenging enemies. Would be great
I loved Chains of Olympus and it was something I replayed multiple times but I missed out on Ghost of Sparta when it released, only getting to play it years later thanks to emulators. I think it's a good game but I get the feeling that this game was the start of people becoming tired of the old God of War formula along with Ascension that eventually led to the gameplay being revamped completely for God of War 2018. Still a very solid game and this is probably the game that squeezed the most juice out of the PSP's hardware and it looks simply incredible to this day as a PSP game, but it does feel like the series started to become stale at this point for many people.
People didnt grow tired of anything. Sony failed at marketing and conceptualizing Ascension. Releasing yet another prequel to a finished story and failing to market it properly was its downfall. Had the game been just a bit delayed and titled GoW 4 it would not have flopped
hang on...The Marked Warrior was kratos' brother and kratos gets a tattoo in memory of his chosen dead brother?!
Apparently so mate, crazy isn't it 😂
@@MayorHairBear I always thought he was designed like that. Not that he was just paying tribute to his brothers birthmark. They definitely made that up for this story here.
He is also marked with the ashes of his wife and child
@@trippyskullz6669even in the extra videos on gow1 the one describing his childhood he didnt have the tattoos as a child so that means he eventually had them later in his adult life
i think the spin offs were pretty good
I agree mate
One of The Best psp games
Easily!
There is a theory that ares made a secret deal with thanatos and trained deimos to become the marked warrior and destroy olympus
Well my head canon for why Deimos changed his tune is less he forgives his brother and more Kratos is the lesser evil in this situation and that after Thanatos defeat/death all bets are off.
Wait when does this game take place? Post GOW1? I feel like we didn’t get enough timeline context lol
It takes place in between GOW 1 and 2
So pretty much before god of war 2 and after god of war 1
@@empgkrazer_5124 thanks 😒
@@chancylvania is it something i said that offended you
@@empgkrazer_5124 when I replied it said “god of war and god of war 1” and I assumed you meant god of war 2018 and god of war 1 lol
This is definitely one of the god of war games I remember the least from my binging of all the games back in 2018.
It can be a bit like that, when a series is 7 games long you're bound to forget an entry or two. For me it was GOW 2 but I didn't replay that one as much back in the day and it had been a long ass time between playthroughs.
The fact that Zeus did not want to kill Deimos could well be because he preferred to torture him in a place that very few know about, he would not know what thanatos would do to him, and it seems to me that he did not want to know either, he simply preferred to torture him instead of killing him, in instead of giving him a quick and painless death even though that person is theoretically the one who would cause the destruction of the kingdom they worked so hard to build. I wouldn't be surprised, Zeus is a son of a bitch after all, and at least here they don't make Zeus look like a bipolar like it was the case in gow 3 with pandora.
I interpreted the "only one, remains" as literally that, that deep down Zeus had some appreciation for that particular family, maybe not Deimos, but Kratos and Callisto, not for nothing did he make a grave for them at 3, something that in theory is because you have a certain appreciation for them as kratos says in ragnarok to faye.
I also understood that the realm of death was on another plane of existence or something like that, not exactly close to Hades, which is underground or at the bottom, and I also don't think I could have gone to rescue him or get him out of there, precisely because kratos himself cannot do it on his own, much less he will do it with someone, people think that kratos can get out of hell as many times as he wants because he feels like it but it is not really like that, in the first game he did Zeus had to help, in the second game Gaia helps him, and in the third game Hades "helps" him with his soul. There is no doubt that Deimos has a 180 change of mind, I totally agree with you, even if there are reasons for him to think so, Kratos never told him, something like "our mother hid you from me because of our father "Or something like that, but no. And in the end, if Thanatos didn't kill him when he left him on the cliff, it could be because he wanted to see Kratos suffer as a consequence of killing his daughter, followed by the fact that by then he already knew that Deimos was not the marked warrior, " The oracle lied" also, I don't know if many people know this but Deimos can really fall and "die" if you delay even 1 second and in fact, the one who won in that final fight was Thatanos because he achieved his goal, do suffer Kratos with the death of another of his relatives that he loved. Maybe they are far-fetched answers and the whole thing but I don't know, as far as that goes, they make a certain sense to my taste.
What would have happened if Kratos killed Ares and saved Deimos. And killed athena to.
That would have been impossible since he was just a kid at the time
All of your "problems" with the story are either explained by the game itself, or by the series as a whole.
Why wasn't Deimos killed?
Because trying to alter prophecy without the consent of the Sisters of Fate is a horrible idea that always goes wrong. This applies to both the games and Greek mythology. Cronos trying to save his regime by eating his children, only for Zeus to avoid that fate and taking revenge on his father, is the biggest example pre-Kratos. Zeus takes the best possible route he has without the Furies: he sends TWO war Gods to take Deimos, he orders Thanatos, one of his most loyal followers, to imprision him in his Domain, which even the Gods are afraid to go to. Killing Deimos, or trying to, would speed up the result of the prophecy, which it does.
Why isn't Death's Domain close to, or adjacent to, the Underworld?
Because it's not. That's it. That's how GoW's world is set up. Why would to powerful Gods, loyal to Zeus and with similar power, share a single domain? Thanatos oversees death, while Hades oversees the dead. They're to aspects of the same process, but incredibly distinct.
Why does Thanatos save Kratos from Deimos?
He doesn't. Thanatos is presented as a sadistic loyalist of Zeus. His task is to imprison and torture Deimos, and he wants revenge for the death of his daughter, Erinies. By taking Deimos, his hurting both brothers and obeying orders.
Why doesn't Thanatos kill Deimos?
Once again, that's not what he has ordered to do. His job is to imprison and torture Deimos, making him weak. By leaving him dangling off the cliff, he's doing both. He can clearly catch him if he falls, in order to continue torturing him.
Why does Deimos have weapons?
He doesn't. He uses fragments of his manacles to fight Kratos. They even brake at the end of the fight.
Why does he join Kratos after fighting him?
Because Kratos was willing to die for him, both when they fought and when he saved Deimos from falling. Despite the fact that he's fighting the God of death, he sees that Kratos still wants to save him. Deep down, he still wants to be with his brother.
This is a great account of the game
I loved this game and found Chains of Olympus to be kind of boring and forgettable in comparison
I have no idea why ares didn't just kill Deimos or kratos. Him and Athena already raided Sparta and killed god who knows how many But nah. Don't kill Deimos. Let's send him to the chamber of death and keep him alive
well, Zeus was an mf, surely he preferred to torture the child who was "destined" to kill him as punishment for being something that in theory was going to be, and more precisely with thanatos, someone who existed long before the Olympians or the Titans, I mean, the bastard preferred to send him with him thinking that it was a worse punishment than killing him and letting his brother Hades torture him in hell. Even more knowing that very few knew that kingdom well, come on, the worst of the worst.
I played and beat this game on the plane ride home from Iraq, was absolutely engulfed.