The original God of War trilogy is getting a full-blown remake. Sony announced this at the end of its State of Play presentation last week, and if you’ve played these games back on the PS2 and PS3, you might have thought of several scenes from Kratos’ violent crusade tearing through the Greek pantheon that would likely raise eyebrows 20 years later. Modern-day God of War is violent, but much less overtly sexual than Kratos’ original run. Which raises the question: if we’re going back to Kratos’ roots, just how much of God of War history is going to make it through the remake process? That’s what fans and culture war tourists are wondering as we wait for the remade trilogy to show up on PS5.
I do find the question interesting. God of War has spent the better part of a decade rebranding itself as being ashamed and regretful of the violent edginess that was a defining trait of the original, early 2000s games. The 2018 game is especially obsessed with wanting to bury Kratos’ sadistic past, with the god of war trying to hide any hint or reference to it from his son Atreus.
At the time, this shift read like Santa Monica Studio reinventing a video game icon for a modern age, allowing Kratos to be more than a barbaric living weapon and care about something other than vengeance, much to the chagrin of the character’s original creator, David Jaffe. That violent past is just as important to God of War’s present day as anything else we’ve seen in the Norse games, and to change it would likely undermine the arc Kratos has gone through since 2018. But is Sony likely to do it? The violence may stay, as it’s core to the story, but what about the sex?
If you look at the top comments on PlayStation’s announcement trailer, you’ll find several players begging for Santa Monica Studio to not “censor” the games or cut anything from the original trilogy. What they’re mostly referring to are a series of sex mini-games in which players would engage in group sex with multiple women while mashing buttons as QTE prompts appear over shaking furniture or excited onlookers. They’re some of the most blatant depictions of sex as a power fantasy in video games, and these women were merely another achievement in Kratos’ conquest. They’re gratuitous, sure, but they’re also cartoonish in just how over-the-top they are, such that no game in 2026 would be able to replicate them without being criticized as juvenile.
That said, if you squint hard enough and look past the clear attempts at titillation, you’ll find something that does, against all odds, factor into the story at large. As some fans point out, when we meet him in the original God of War, Kratos is descending into a monstrous, violent state, overindulging in sex and violence as a way to try and cope with the pain of being tricked into murdering his wife and daughter. As IGN’s Tim Brinkhof says in his own write-up, what is first presented as a righteous revenge tour reveals itself to be just part of a nihilistic descent.
“Both God of War 2 and the trilogy’s final entry make clear what the first game only insinuated: that Kratos’ vengeance is not a crusade for justice, but an excuse to kill and destroy for the sake of killing and destroying,” Brinkhof writes. “In both games, the [sex] minigames help convey his downward spiral into sadism and nihilism.”
The original God of War games are some of the most “of their era” games Sony has ever put on a PlayStation. Remaking them when player sensibilities have changed isn’t an easy task, especially when Santa Monica Studio spent the last two games trying to rehabilitate Kratos’ image and casting retroactive judgement on the younger versions of itself that made him the violent bastard he was in the first place. In the era of the online culture war, cutting the infamous sex minigames out of the remake would inevitably be deemed “giving into woke ideology” by those who make money riling people up on YouTube over pronoun options in games, but I think removing them would actually remove one of the load-bearing beams of the whole series’ ethos.
We still know almost nothing about these remakes. They may just be a graphical update, they could retool the original game’s hack-and-slash mechanics for the weightier action we played in 2018, or they could just be holistically remaking the games from scratch. But whatever the approach, the more I think about it, I think I’m in favor of those moments making a return because they’re true to the wanton destruction Kratos left behind in Greece, and thus, they bolster the themes of the Norse games as well by giving Kratos more to look back on with regret. Attempting to hide the ugly truth of what God of War was would be falling into the same fear Kratos felt in the 2018 game when he closed himself off from his son to keep his respect.
There are a lot of stories from years ago that get retouched and edited for modern tastes or at the very least get some kind of disclaimer about the time and place in which they were first introduced. God of War could omit these scenes, but if the series posits that hiding who we are to maintain an air of respectability isn’t the way, it can’t try and cover up even the most regrettable parts. The sex mini-games would be easy cuts, likely saving Sony the headache of trying to explain the violent misogyny of the early 2000s and how Kratos embodied it for over a decade. But this is the bed it’s making for itself by bringing games that aren’t exactly timeless to the PS5. Kratos leaves a pile of bodies, bloody and otherwise, in his tracks on the way to redemption, and if God of War ever wanted to engage with what it once was, it shouldn’t look away now when it’s no longer convenient.
