The throughline between God of War (2018), Persona 5, and even smaller titles like Loop Hero, may not be immediately apparent, but each of these games have a vital component in common: defying and ultimately killing gods/divine beings. Despite being fairly different experiences, each of these games includes this violent Promethean rebellion because the notion of challenging divinity is deeply human.
Gods are a key part of human cultures stacross the globe. From ways to explain natural phenomena and disasters, to figures of hope, faith, or even vengeance in crisis, gods have been a cornerstone of how we navigate the world and our communities for centuries. They are also a means to organize life’s power structures, and to understand our relative smallness in the universe. But the thing about humans is, we don’t like to be small.
Pyramids, skyscrapers, obelisks, we love to make ourselves larger than life through our monuments and cityscapes. For better or worse, there is a tendency amongst humans to challenge our smallness and make an impact on the world around us, often in a very physical way. It makes sense then, that in the face of gods that wish to reinforce human smallness, human weakness, that the protagonists of these games would also want to challenge that ideologically and physically.
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