My M7 "colleague" played it at the EG expo and yes, he said it's eerie how similar they play. It IS essentially GOW except it's.. you know.. not. You even hold a trigger down and attack and he does a spin attack. :D

I agree that Kratos has subtlety on his side. I think if you rub people the wrong way for long enough you invent a fetish though, and that's what Dead Space did with me. I thought Isaac looked dull and stupid in his waffle iron armor, but at the end of Dead Space I really dug it. For me, Dante's journey has been the same way. When they first showed the trailer with him in it I was like what the fuck.. but then it has grown on me more and more.

I disagree that Dante is overdesigned though, for me the off putting thing was the contrary. He looks like a dude with a knight's helmet on. Hoo-fucking-ray, you know. But yeah, after a while it kinda makes sense.


Bayonetta's superfluous insanity is half the point I reckon. Scratch away her surface and you'll just find more surface, just as with Devil May Cry's Dante. Darksiders though, right there with you. Superbly icky more is more thinking.

Good for you. Seeing as the Xbox only really has had one of those series on it and Ryu starred in that, that's fortunate.

I always liked that DMC didn't take itself seriously, and they really amped that up to perfection with 3. I guess if you've a hard time rocking with the cheese factor then Dante must be poison.

I think NG is the best game out of all of them but the stoic, stuffy nature of everyone involved in that game is unflattering. There's just not much personality there at all to me.

Well, Kratos has some pretty poetic stuff going for him, and the anger like you say is very much part of that.. kinda poetic thing.

I mean he's a dude who did everything in the name of Ares, and Ares in order to ensure Kratos' complete loyalty severed his ties to.. his humanity essentially, by slaughtering his family. Kratos white skin is the ashes of his family that has marked him forever, as a reminder.

I mean eventually throughout the series you realise that he's just a perpetual force of agony and anger, and with each step that he hopes takes him closer to eternal rest, he just grows even more powerful and eternal.

If you look at the greek mythology (that GOW happily butchers, heh :D) and you look at the type of stories told there, they are told with broad strokes like that. They are ironic yet heartfelt, moving in a simple and sometimes blunt way. Kratos does embody that, it gives him simple context, a point of origin from where he can be taken on these epic journeys that ultimately are all about spectacle. He has his captured princess and moustache at the ready, in surprisingly classic videogame style.


And speaking of irony, Dante of Devil May Cry fame is very much an ironic creation. The only entries in the series that miss the point of having him be an extravagant, over the top, cheesy rockstar are 2 and 4, and they're incredibly boring because of it. DMC when its at its best doesn't just balance rediculousness and awesomeness, it puts them both in a room and lets them get it the eff on. I mean when he axe kicks the pool table into the air, pulls out his gun and SHOOTS one of the balls which then breaks the airborne-but-still-intact triangle and sends balls knocking demons out.. you just can't do that with a straight face. Have the face going "WOOOOHH!" to butt rock though and it becomes the acest thing ever.

So yeah, ideally the character fuels the tone of the game you're creating. They don't have to be stories in and of themselves. Most of all perhaps, it's pretty much impossible to percieve from a distance whether a character does fill its purpose without experiencing the games in question. Sam Fisher doesn't do backflips over missiles like Snake does, but he makes a better Splinter Cell protagonist than someone larger than life would.

EEEET cetera. Man I go on.