Kratos Is A Shit Character

So recently I've been playing the God of War HD Collection for the PS3.  God of War was a game I played a long long time ago during my high school days and while I enjoyed the first two entries in the series I never played Chains of Olympus on PSP (despite now owning 2 copies) or God Of War 3.  I'm actually surprised about how little I remember about these games.  As far as the first game in concerned I remembered everything pretty vividly up to the point where you go and get Pandora's Box and then it almost feels like I'm playing it for the first time once again.

Kratos, the lead character of these games, while not as universally recognizable as something like Mario or Sonic is a stand out face in the world of gaming.  God of War is a big popular IP for Sony and people who are at least a little into games have probably seen Kratos at some point.  Hell, even at the last E3 people were losing their shit for fat dad Kratos since there was a new God of War game on the horizon.

However what my current play through of the first game has led me to feel is that Kratos is just a bit of a shit character.  Now the shitness of his character doesn't reflect on the quality of the games, they are good games, but Kratos is a completely unlikable prick. 

His story seems to be that he was a general in the army who was pretty good at killing things but in some battle against barbarians he got his shit kicked in.  So just as he's about to get his head smashed with a hammer he calls upon Ares, the God of war and Ares comes down, saves the day and makes Kratos his bitch.  So Kratos does his bidding for a bit but one day wanders into a village and "accidentally" kills his own family.  Pissed that Ares made him do that, Kratos vows to kill him and so begins the first game in the series.

Granted that I've not finished my re-play of the first game yet so maybe the ending will make me rethink this entire post but it feels like they were going for some kind of redemption plot line.  Kratos wants to kill Ares, get his life back so he can stop being a prick.  But it's impossible to feel sorry for Kratos since being a prick was all he was made to do, with or without Ares and my bet that if that whole silly family killing thing hadn't have happened then he still would have carried on in his hobby of draining things of their blood.

Playing as a hilarious asshole can be fun, there's nothing wrong with that, but trying to throw in certain story aspects to try and make us feel sorry for a character who is just a prick and nothing more feels silly.  Like I said though, my memory of the first two games is fuzzy at best and my lack of experience with the third means that there may be things that they have done with the guy to make him a bit more likable but the first games attempt is quite frankly, laughable.