‘What the f*** are they thinking?’ God of War creator says 2D spin-off Sons of Sparta doesn’t ‘respect the license’

The creator of the original God of War game has criticised the newly released 2D spin-off God of War: Sons of Sparta.

Announced as a surprise ‘shadow drop’ release during a State of Play presentation last week, Sons of Sparta is a retro-style 2D action game developed by Mega Cat Studios in partnership with Santa Monica Studio.

According to Santa Monica Studio, the game has “a canon story set in Kratos’ youth during his harsh training at the Agoge alongside his brother Deimos”.

However, David Jaffe – the original creator of God of War and director of the first game in the series – says he bought the game and doesn’t recommend it, partly because of its story and partly because it doesn’t live up to other retro-style 2D games released in recent years.

In a nine-minute YouTube monologue about the game, Jaffe opens with: “I bought this game. It’s a $30 game. I don’t like it. I don’t recommend it. But I wanted to make a video more about ‘what were they thinking’? Like, ‘what the fuck are they thinking’?”

Claiming he was told by a former Santa Monica Studio member that the developer is more driven by story than gameplay these days, Jaffe claimed Sons of Sparta suffers from focusing too much on the plot.

“What I played – which was only about an hour of it, and I’ll never go back to it – it’s just like ‘get over yourselves, man’,” he said. “It’s like they just kept stopping over and over and having the characters just talk and talk and talk. And the voice acting is not very good.”

He added: ” I want you to think about the choice this team had and Sony Santa Monica had. The idea of saying: ‘Hey, we want a 2.5D Metroidvania God of War game.’ Most gamers, core gamers would say, ‘oh my God, yes please’.

“The idea that it’s like: ‘And we don’t want it to be the Kratos that you know and love from either 2018’s God of War or the Greek trilogy God of War. Fuck it, that characters is boring. Nobody likes that Kratos that we’ve built billions of dollar franchises on. Let’s make him just some generic fucking kid like we’re watching a fucking WB Kids TV show or something.’ It makes no fucking sense.”

Arguing that fans would have rather played a game more like 2019 Metroivania title Blasphemous – something extremely violent and bloody with the tone of the early God of War games – Jaffe also argued that putting the story to the side, the overall game is less impressive than other 2D action games from recent years.

“The production quality is not very good compared to what we got just this last year,” he said. “If you look at the gameplay variety and just the joy of playing a game like Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, if you look at the art and level of detail and just genuine interesting scenarios at a moment-to-moment gameplay level of Neon Inferno – which also came out towards the end of last year, which is just an excellent shooter by the way, I highly recommend it.

If you of course look at the production value of Shinobi [Art of Vengeance], the 2D Shinobi, I mean look at that thing. People want this production value, and they want this vibe, and they want it to be classic Kratos.”

Later he noted: “The gameplay itself is serviceable. It’s fine. I didn’t really particularly enjoy it too much. Maybe it gets better. I’m sure it does. There’s nothing offensive about it. The only thing offensive about it is its genericism, if that’s a word.

“The only thing offensive about it is its inability to respect the license, the brand. It’s like you get the John Wick license and you make a movie just about him sitting in a coffee shop and talking.”

He added: “By the way, I don’t need the big budgets. I would have loved bigger production value, smoother animations, this, that, and the other, but I don’t need that, right? If the gameplay was interesting, if it was violent, if it had personality, if you opened immediately and the players were like ‘oh my God, I’ve never thought of that kind of mechanic in a game like this’, or ‘this is so fun to do’, you could make it super inexpensive like this seems to be. I can’t imagine this cost that much money to make.

“But why would you even put this out? All it does is leave a bad ta in taste in God of War fans’ mouths, in my assumption.”