Subversion of expectations is a bane to modern storytelling. It was one of the key reasons Star Wars was ruined. And it is very present in Gof of War Ragnarök.
Surprise me if you want to - I like good surprises. But that is the rub. A surprise birthday party is awesome. Because I like birthday partys. But if I don't expect a shit and you hand me one, sure I am going to be surprised, but not in a good way. Not giving people what they want is fine. But you have to replace that with something they did not know they would want even more. The whole 2018 game was like that because it was so new and different from before. But so, so good in its own right.
And here is a fine line to straddle. If you are too much in love with your own expectations, you will not find anything else good. At that point you cannot be surprised in a good way, just disappointed. That is not what happened with my reception of Ragnarök. I really wanted to love the game and tried to see stuff in a positive light. Anyways, here are some additional thoughts about expectations vs what we got.
I expected Kratos to go full monster mode in Ragnarök. And the game even teased as much with the first Thor fight ending with Kratos losing his shit at Thor just mentioning Atreus. This was honestly one of the best moments in the game. And later in Jotunheim Angreboda asks Atreus if/why he constantly needs to be in control. No wonder with a father who lost control and killed his first family because of it. So everything was in place for Kratos accepting his full character and trusting that he will direct all the uncontrolled rage towards something good. Could have been a cool moment of redemption. Nice arc from the very first game to now. "I will forever be a monster, but yours no longer." Kratos said that in the 2018 game. Could have done it in Ragnarök.
But at Ragnarök Kratos never lost it. He overpowered Thor only to talk to him. And even against Odin he was reserved. What sort of shallow massage is that: killing is bad. What? This is how far you are willing to go with the character? Kratos knew that, even saved people in Ascention. And than in gow1, after so much shit happened, he could not give a fuck about people. In gow3 he was a monster killing monsters. And in 2018 he found peace with himself, only defended himself against Baldur after getting attacked repeatedly, and in the end only killing him, because Baldur could not stop harming others. He was already there. Ragnarök did exactly that again, only Thor listened and was not as lost as Baldur. But Kratos had no arc. It is as if the devs said: he is already in a good place in the 2018 game, no need for him to grow in any direction or have any meaningfuly character moments. What should be his big moment? -Not killing Thor, even though he could have. ... ... Just like he did (at first) not kill Baldur, just like he did not want to kill Magni and just like he repeatedly let Modi go. All of them ended up dead anyways. But I honestly think it is the thought that counts, what is inside, how Kratos thinks. And that is a problem.
That is a problem, because in 2018, Kratos was not a destroyer (how Thor thought of Kratos and himself). Gods died, but it was very much not his fault. And the innocent lived. In Ragnarök Kratos claims to be no "destroyer" because (wow wow wow) he decided not to kill Thor (*gasp, so very different from 2018, what a moment, not at all like in "he is beaten, no threat, not worth killing"(2018)). Yet even though Kratos claims that he is no longer a destroyer, he is still chiefly, perhaps solely responsable for the destruction of all of Asgard and I do not know how many deaths that would entail. In Ragnarök Kratos is presented as a grown man, different, better, no longer a destroyer. But they have it backwards. In 2018 he was that. In Ragnarök he was exactly the destroyer the game claims he finaly isn't anymore.
Something different. I expected Tyr to be cool. But he was lame. Now if Odin used his position as Tyr to great effect, that subversion of expectations could have worked for me. But he seemingly did not use it at all for his own sake. To the contrary: the only time Odin tried to use his position as Tyr, he made everything for himself a million times worse and gave our heros a reason to fight. Lame and boring, and done already a million times. Remember the first Avengers movie? When agent whats his face died? Same shit.
I expected a cool fight between Thor and the snake. And we got something so far away, that it did not look epic, but lame and boring again. It felt like a rushed, unfinished compromise of a fight.
I expected Freya to hunt Kratos down almost to the end of the game. But what we got was one interactive cutscene and one short, pretty standard Valkyrie fight, even though she is supposed to be their true queen. Kratos helps her and than they are just buddies. Felt less like a character- or story choice and more like: Atreus will be gone for long sections of the game and we have to replace him with somebody.
I expected Ragnarök to be more than half an hour. I expected it to be crazy all out chaos. True battlefields and an all out war. But what we got was a few elfs buzzing around, some Einherjar in trenches, one glimps at the Ragnarök monster from a distance and its sword up close, Kratos never letting go of his stoic control over himself (even though they teased as much in the same game); I expected better action on a grander scale than the 2018 game had, but was sorely mistaken in all of this.
It was a lay-up. And instead of just putting it in, they decided to give people not what they expected, but to surprise them by handing them a shit.
