While I can certainly appreciate the gameplay > all sentiment, and I've been saying as much of myself at multiple occasions, I think the appeal of God of War is difficult to even measure the same way as a more technical action game.

I mean you're welcome to not enjoy it, obviously, but making GoW more complex wouldn't benefit anyone, it's simply not that kind of game.

God of War in terms of core combat is very arcadey game and has more in common with a horizontal/vertical shoot em up than something like Ninja Gaiden. God of War is all about patterns, and whether the moves you throw out are complex or difficult to time or not, it has more to do with positioning and "keep firing". Bosses especially make it even more obvious how you need to constantly change position into the safe zones while the boss does its crazy death beams of death equivalent, and winning or losing to the game's various challenges is almost always about context. Even its QTE's, converted enough times into vague principle speak is about context.

Then you have this platformer and puzzle game wrapped around it to the point where, if that was emphasised more, you'd almost have a Zelda type situation. Zelda has even simpler, even MORE positioning based combat, but as a game it has substantial enough elements around it that it overall just benefits that balance.

The perfect game isn't Halo shooting + Virtua Fighter melee + Forza driving sections + Ace Combat flight sections + a Shenmue environment, and I think we all know that much. If you're like "hell yeah!" then you prolly just aren't thinking very far. That's like expecting Schindler's List drama in Terminator 2. Elements that are too extreme are like oil and water, and in order to bridge them they need to meet half-way.

This is a reply to Lebato's post, and I'm using that as jump off point, but it's not that I disagree so wildly with his post that I went of on this rant. I simply think that comparisons to what are effectively combat focused games are unfair, when GoW is really in a different school of game alltogether.

And that's not just to say that GoW puts more emphasis on its cutscenes, I mean fundamentally as a game. 3D and 3rd person cameras have unified the look of games, making it a harder call to make than simply looking at Gradius and Ace Combat, but you can still identify how hopelessly different games are at the core, and when you realise that it seems forfeit to make the comparison.