| dsister44 said: And please for the love of God! Can we please stop with all the spoilers?!? It's annoying |
www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/10/
To those arguing that Kratos could grapple Link when he hits with his magic cape on because it's illogical if he cannot seems illogical in itself. It is a MAGIC cape, in other words an item that breaks the laws of physics and common sense. It is like saying that Link could cut off Kratos' blade of Chaos/Athena/Exile because it is obvious given the way they extend and retract that they are logically connected to his arms by a rubber band and thus easily cut off. It's logical but it's false as his blades are magical and thus obey different rules, just like the magic cape does.
I do not know enough about GOW lore to debate item by item like Khuutra did (nor the will to do so) but from a pure logical point of view the only ways there can be a fight between both of them would be either a fighting game crossover where both would be balanced for gameplay reasons which moots the question as it can be answered either way depending on which character you choose at the screen select (or which player is better if playing against a human) or a storyline crossover where one of them is a boss to the other. As the second one is the only interesting one that is the one I will discuss.
First, though, I must make a detour as to why Link and Kratos are badasses; but I will not do it from a item/powers/... perspective but from a storytelling perspective.
Kratos doesn't overcome the gods because he his Kratos and more uber ultra extreme badassest; he overcomes them because of the power of narrativium (read some Pratchett if you don't get it) and him not doing so would go against the story and thus is technically possible but self defeating.
After all, would you have bought GOW if Kratos didn't overcome the odds and killed Ares at the end? Well, maybe if you had managed to keep the game spoiler free and thus didn't know that you were gonna lose, but you certainly wouldn't have bought the second one as nobody would see him as a badass like they do now.
So the only way that story can work is by having Kratos defeat his seemingly unstoppable opponents no matter what the odds against him are.
Some will point out that the same applies to Link and that that small kid/young adult only defeats his seemingly unstoppable opponents because nobody would have bought Zelda games for more than twenty years if Link didn't defeat them. They wouldn't buy them because such a story doesn't work.
They are definitely right and both Kratos and Link are on the same level here.
Note: Even when the hero dies or sacrifices him/herself at the end to save the world they still do so to beat the last boss or allow the last boss to be beaten by sidekicks. This is obviously not the case in either series (well, maybe at the end of GOWIII as Kratos impales himself but then again, maybe not as his body disappears) but I wanted to point it out as even them they have to overcome the odds, even in or through death, otherwise their demise is meaningless.
The conclusion of this detour is that neither accomplish their feats because they are badasses. They do them because the story wouldn't work any other way. And while the cause of these feats is the power of story the consequence is the badassness of their protagonist.
That is people have it all wrong when they argue that their favourite character should win because he is more badass than some other character and thus can overcome that other character that they see as less badass, for the badassery is not the cause of the feats they perform, it is the consequence of it; with the cause being the story itself.
So to know who would win between Link and Kratos in a story we have to look at what makes them different from each other and how it would play on the story they would share.
The biggest difference between them is of course their attitude, with Link being universally described as kind, humble and brave, the perfect embodiment of a hero whereas Kratos is only (to my knowledge) kind to his family, arrogant, but, like link, brave and thus more a antihero than a hero.
A story in which Link acts like a total tool and used and betrayed Kratos would not make sense as for were Link to do any of these things that go against his core being he would be someone else, so then we would have a Kratos vs Someone Else fight, not a Kratos vs Link fight.
So Link could not be the boss to Kratos's antihero as the story would not work that way. With no reason to have a beef with Link and to want revenge on him you have no drive for him to do similar feats to what he did in the 5 current games.
**ARRGH THERE BE SPOILERS**
On the other hand Kratos destroys or sets chains of events leading to the destruction of the antique world bits by bits, so it is not too far-fetched to have a Link being embroiled in it as we already know that some of them can travel across dimensions to parallel universes both from canon (Dark world in LTTP and Termina in Majora's Mask) and from outside of canon (Soul Calibur, where he visits a world similar to our own and thus similar to the GOW one; which raises the probability of him being able to travel to Krato's version of antiquity).
In such a scenario Kratos would be the villainous final boss that the heroic Link has to kill to save the world and restore it. And one thing that holds true in both the GOW universe and the Zelda universe is that no matter what the odds against the hero, whether they are battling against gigantic monsters, reality warping sorcerers or gods; the hero overcomes against all odds, no matter how improbable it seems.
Thus, no matter how improbable it would seem to you to have Kratos defeated by Link, he still would win for he cannot help but be the heroic ideal that is a foil putting in relief Kratos' villainous aspects.
tldr version:
Zelda story: Good (Link) vs Evil (Ganon) => Good always wins
GOW story: slightly less Evil (Kratos) vs slightly more Evil (Zeus) => slightly less Evil always wins
=> Good (Link) vs Evil (Kratos) (as there is no slightly more evil to lessen Kratos' immorality) => Good always wins.
Oh, and even if getting killed by Link for his evil deeds gave Kratos the drive to escape Hades (which it wouldn't otherwise it would work for the gods Kratos killed), it still wouldn't help him anymore than Ganon's constant coming back from the dead helps him. He would just come back to get served another can of whoopass.
"I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it"
