Fire and Ice: How God of War Thematizes its Doubled Combat

Precise. Accurate. Exacting.

These are not words usually associated with the combat in God of War.

Sony Santa Monica’s series, which began in 2005 on the original PlayStation, experienced a bit of a tonal shift with its most recent installment. Gone (well, sort of) was the wanton destruction and carnage that characterized its earlier games, replaced with a story about father and son bonding over, now, fairly specific destruction and carnage.

And somehow it actually works—Kratos and Atreus’s relationship feels real, and heavily conflicted, and filled with sometimes painful tension. It implies Atreus’s fear and distrust of his father in ways that feel naturalistic and nuanced, and the growth it depicts felt, to me, well-paced and believable. The game revolves around the conflicts that characterize that central relationship, and its writing and voice acting shoulder that responsibility well.

[Warning: the following contains heavy spoilers for God of War]

But there’s another element of the game’s design that wordlessly serves its themes, and that adds a certain connotation to Kratos’s development over the course of the game. In some ways, it boils down to the very specific moment, when, about halfway through the game, the once and future Ghost of Sparta wraps old chains back around his wrists and retakes his signature weapons. Or, put more simply, when Kratos unburies the Blade of Chaos and places them alongside the Leviathan Axe, and immediately thematizes the game’s two core styles of combat.

The rest of the God of War series, through its main trilogy, prequels, and interquels, tells the story of Kratos becoming a monstrosity. Initially fueled by a quest for vengeance, he morphs into an killer, murdering things both incredibly large and mundanely small with his swinging blades. Those Blades of Chaos, expanding and retracting, engulfed in flame, mete out destruction indiscriminately. Kratos rarely ever cares who he kills on his way to tearing apart the entire Greek pantheon, and neither do they. They are his enablers, and, in the barest of symbolisms, his chains.

But for the first half of his new adventure, now with his son alongside, those very blades are mysteriously absent. Instead, Kratos wields a new weapon—an axe that can perform close-range melee combat or be flung at distant enemies. Like Thor’s hammer, he recalls it with a satisfying thunk (by far the most enjoyable mechanic in an extremely enjoyable game), and can upgrade it to perform more and more complex attacks and combos. Yet, at least at higher difficulties, combat with the Leviathan Axe is always strangely precise considering the series’ history. Button mashing can only get Kratos so far—enemies will overwhelm him with block-breaking swings, and ranged attackers take precise (and sometimes repeated) throws to eliminate. Moreover, some enemies—the icy denizens of Helheim in particular—seem oddly immune to the axe’s frost magic. Instead, Kratos must awkwardly fight groups of them in bare knuckle brawls, in which his range is miniscule and his dodging and blocking must be near-perfect.

Yet for around half of God of War’s main story quests, that’s how Kratos fights. Precisely, exacting, a descendant of melee combat in the era of Dark Souls. On the surface, he is no longer the same character that murdered and destroyed most of Greece over the course of seven brutal games. But then, when Atreus falls ill and he learns that the only cure rests in Helheim, a land of ice where his frost axe will be all but useless, he returns to his home, retakes the Blades of Chaos, and reveals something integral—and seemingly overlooked—about God of War’s central narrative.

Namely, God of War is not about Kratos becoming any less of a monster.

It’s about him recognizing and admitting that he is one in order to save his son.

As Kratos rewraps the blades’ chains around his wrists, bandaged to hide his old scars, a mirage of Athena appears in the doorway of his cabin. “Pretend to be everything you are not,” she says. “Teacher, husband, father. But there is one unavoidable truth you will never escape. You cannot change. You will always be a monster.”

“I know,” Kratos replies. “But I am your monster no longer.”

In that moment, he sounds sincere. Perhaps in moving to Midgard, marrying Faye, and trying to build a family, he was trying to escape that past of monstrous violence. But in that moment, he recognizes that he’s too far gone. And moreover, that to save his son both from sickness and from becoming like him, he must admit that history.

Then, as he emerges from his cabin, a circle of Hel-Walkers, those very enemies immune to the Leviathan Axe’s frost magic, begins to close in. What follows is a literal baptism-by-fire—a whirling inferno of swinging chains and flaming blades that suddenly re-inserts the series’ signature weapon and combat style into its new setting. Once again, Kratos’s rage is indiscriminate, wild, and brutal. While the axe necessitated quick-turning and precise throws to pivot between enemies, the blades swing in arcs wide enough to set every single frost warrior ablaze. It’s invigorating and cathartic and enrapturing, and as the last enemy turned to ash, I could feel myself coursing with adrenaline. After hours of exacting, measured, careful combat enouncters, God of War said “let loose.” And I had, watching and feeling those blades cut through icy zombie bodies like, well, fire through ice, and it felt so, so good. 

But in the aftermath of that feeling, I realized something else—that the euphoria I’d felt in the wake of that fight came alongside the dropping of the game’s initial facade. Kratos is not redeemable. He is a monster, and those blades represent that. Only a monster can wield them as he does. Only a monster can descend into Helheim and fight his way back out. Only a monster can harness that fiery maelstrom to survive those hordes of ice.

Only as a monster can he save his son, and thus prevent Atreus from becoming a monster himself.

As the rest of God of War plays out, those two combat styles exist alongside each other, ultimately becoming more synergistic than conflicting. Kratos can switch from blades to axe and back on a dime, unleashing powerful runic attacks in quick succession, throwing and slashing then recalling and smashing the ground for plumes of lava and frost. But while that interplay does elevate the game’s combat on a purely mechanical level, giving its players the opportunity to play through embodiments of both order and chaos, it also mechanizes the game’s themes, or thematizes its mechanics. By ignoring the atrocities of his past, Kratos endangers his son—both because of how it limits him in combat and how Atreus’s sickness ultimately emerges from his belief that he is mortal. Conversely, by admitting to that past—by retaking the blades, and ultimately by revealing his scars—Kratos can better prevent his son from repeating his mistakes.

Whether he succeeds, of course, will have to wait for the sequel.

Header image by Jose Daniel Cabrera Peña: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1BGaq