FieryTrainwreck said:
Two things:
1. I can't fathom how anyone believes this isn't a God of War clone. That term certainly gets thrown around, but it fits this game like a fucking glove. Mythological monsters? Check. QTE finishers? Check. Chained whip weaponry? Fucking check. You'd have to be blind or stupid not to see it. If anything, this is the first time it has genuinely applied.
Presumably you have not heard of Dante's Inferno... the game, not the epic poem, of course. But to show how pointless your line of reasoning is, let's try a little reductio ad absurdum.
I can't fathom how anyone believes [Half-Life] isn't a [Duke Nukem 3D] clone. That term certainly gets thrown around, but it fits this game like a fucking glove. [Aliens]? Check. [Great big bosses]? Check. [Firearm] weaponry? Fucking check. You'd have to be blind or stupid not to see it. If anything, this is the first time it has genuinely applied.
So with very minor edits, your argument "proves" that the original Half-life is a massive rip-off of Duke Nukem 3D, which is, of course, patently absurd.
If all you do is scratch the surface with your analysis and point out a few trivial, superficial similarities, sure, Lords of Shadow looks like God of War. But that's utterly meaningless. The gameplay is extremely different.
In God of War, you slowly acquire moves that more or less replace your previous moves in usefulness until you eventually have a massive repertoire that you boil down to a couple of combos... somehow this doesn't feel repetitive, because the game is just so damn well presented. But the gameplay isn't terribly deep, unfortunately.
In Castlevania, you slowly acquire moves that enhance different playing styles, all of which are necessary to get through the game at a reasonable pace on a reasonable difficulty. Some are good against hordes of enemies, some are good for focusing on slow enemies, others are good for focusing on faster, dodging enemies, others are good for gaining life in light magic mode, others are good for heavy damage in shadow mode, others are good for building fast focus in order to regain magic. I had, at the end of the game, a few moves I wasn't using often, but there were probably 6 or 7 combos or techniques I used regularly and that's not even counting the subweapons, which also have no perfect analogy in God of War.
And that's just gameplay. You called out the "mythological monsters" as a similarity, but it's actually a vast difference. Gothic monsters like vampires and lycanthropes are inspired by a western horror tradition, while Minotaurs and Gorgons come from a more heroic mythological tradition. The literary histories of these monsters could not be more different. And besides, what *should* Gabriel Belmont fight in a Castlevania game? Aliens?
And as a protagonist, Gabriel is nothing like Kratos. He isn't out for revenge, ultimately wants to do the right thing, wrestling with what that is, and genuinely cares about the consequences of his actions.
2. To the people who think he's overusing the "Like God of War, But" stamp: is it possible to miss the point any harder? It's meant to be an indictment of "me too" game design. The more he uses it, the funnier/sadder it gets. If you don't understand this, I'm not sure you're responding to the actual content of his criticism. You're maybe just infatuated with clever imagery or his accent.
No, they think it's lazy. It was only ever really accurate with respect to Dante's Inferno, yet it was applied to a host of games (including Bayonetta of all things). It was only used in the first place as a comedy trope he could come back to repeatedly for humorous effect. For the most part, it has never been an indictment you should take seriously for any given game. It was supposed to be taken in aggregate as a number of developers saturated the action game market.... well, that's all over with now. Castlevania is not arriving in a saturated action game market that has to compete directly with God of War. So it's no longer relevant... and since it's far from fresh, it seems lazy.
Not that the comparison isn't worth making.... it is. But more so you can take the opportunity to contrast the two. They look obviously similar on the surface, so if you're going to call them similar, you're not saying anything interesting. But luckily, you can say something interesting... because under the surface, they're completely different. Even the QTEs.... they seemed more like they were inspired by Lost Odyssey than God of War.
Ironic. And I hope I get to see a Sequel to this game 
