by Amr (@siegarettes)
- God of War (2018)
- Developer- Sony Santa Monica
- Publisher- Sony
- PS4
[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
God of War makes a big deal of the fact that the entire game is framed in one continuous take. Comprised of an extended shot, uninterrupted by cuts, the long take–or oner–has gained a certain reputation in film due to the technical difficulty required in capturing it. In an episode of the video essay series, Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou described the long take as something “critics and film students get raging hard-ons for”, and yeah, there’s definitely a masturbatory quality to it. So I can see why a game in the AAA space, which often deeply values technical achievement, would pitch God of War’s long take as yet another technical feat it’s mastered. I mean, sure, you did a 2 hour film in one take, but how about a 30 hour game?
But while there’s an element of forethought needed to achieve this, it’s just not as impressive in an all digital environment. Long takes in film require actors, cameras, and special effects to all achieve the right timing and movement to capture certain compositions and keep a scene on pace. With digital animation, all of this can be edited after the fact. Performances can be redone, movements adjusted, and every part of the environment is controlled. It can be cool, but the same awe isn’t there. And with any shot, when the question of “how?” goes away there’s the more important question of “why?"
God of War really doesn’t have an answer for this, aside from "because we can.” Long takes can be used to hold a moment–to provide exposition, linger on a certain emotion, or bring tension to a scene. God of War has moments where it dips into this, but often it shows a lack of consideration to the purpose of the long take. The run time is dominated by the gameplay’s over the shoulder camera. This prevents more structured compositions and lends a visual monotony that imbues it with a sense of fatigue. Weirdly, it also undoes a lot of the work the series did to the opposite effect.
Previous games had a strong emphasis on unique, fixed compositions, and used them to emphasize the scale of encounters. God of War tries to have encounters of the same scale while having a more grounded, viewpoint but it only serves to undercut both elements. You can make the argument that the long take is supposed to reflect the exhaustion Kratos feels through at the constant impediments to his journey, but that’s kind of undone by how Atreus keeps shouting reminders of all the side activities you can do. Also telling are the people who’ve said that they wouldn’t have noticed the long take unless it was pointed out. That’s partly the implementation, partly lack of thought for the language of games.
The upgrade screen turns towards Kratos to keep him in the shot, but the map, character menus, death or even ending a session–all break continuity with the shot. And if you leave consideration for those criteria as being outside the canonical one shot, then it begins to feel a lot less unique.Games already center the player’s view in their pursuit of “immersion”. If you disregard death and menus then games like Skyrim or Half-Life can be considered to be made of a series of long takes. Games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted place a similar emphasis on seamless movement between player control and cutscenes, with plenty of their own long, uninterrupted scenes. We’re already used to a lot the visual language God of War employs. And arguably, seen it done with other games with a better sense of rhythm and pacing.
It that context, it’s achievement is more in disguising loading screens and its stubborn refusal to show us another viewpoint. That singular viewpoint reveals God of War’s lack of attention to the narrative implications of the long take. Long takes can be surprisingly flexible, forfeiting control of a scene to different actors, moving to different vantage points, including or excluding information.God of War almost always keeps Kratos’ viewpoint center. Even when it diverges from it, it does it in relation to Kratos. This gives Kratos control, giving him the only legit point of view, and justifying his methods and worldview above others.
For a game ostensibly about interrogating Kratos through the eyes of others, the camera shows an almost singular interest in Kratos alone.