It’s a strange thing, holding a ghost.
The Fields of Elysium are wrong. They’re supposed to be paradise. But Bluepoint’s remastering has made the light too yellow, the shadows too long. The shades that drift past you don’t just moan—they whisper . Your own language. Your own failures.
The first Collection— Volume I —was easy. That was the blockbuster double-feature: God of War and God of War II . Pure rage, pure spectacle. You could turn your brain off and mash square. It felt good.
But Volume II ? Volume II is the hangover. It’s the PSP games, stripped of their portability, their “just one more level” pick-up-and-play nature. On a console, with no bus ride to end, you have to sit with the violence. You have to watch Kratos drown Atlantis again , murder his mother again , abandon his daughter’s memory again .
The opening is the same: Atlantis, before it drowns. The water physics catch the light in ways the PSP’s tiny LCD never could. You can see the salt crusting on Kratos’s boots. But it’s the quiet moments between the QTEs that get you. The flashbacks to Deimos, his brother. The way Kratos’s voice cracks—just once—when he says his name.
You finish both games. You watch the credits scroll. There’s no post-credits scene. No sequel tease.
Because that’s the real horror of Volume II . Ghost of Sparta gave you hope that Kratos might be saved. Chains of Olympus proves he doesn’t want to be.
