The remastered audio doesn’t help. In the original PSP versions, the screams were compressed, tinny—easy to ignore. Here, they’re crisp. Surround sound. You hear the blood hit the floor from the left speaker. You hear the gurgle from the right.
It’s just a black screen. No music. No logo.
“My son. You were named after the god of war, but you were never his. You were mine. And I am so sorry for what the world made you.”
Then you finish the disk. The trophy pops: Brother’s Keeper . god of war collection - volume ii
You play through it. The volcano. The death of his mother, Callisto, who turns into a monster mid-embrace. The game wants you to feel sorry for him. And for a while, on that first playthrough, you do. You trick yourself into thinking Volume II is a tragedy.
You know how the main menu for each game is a static image? For Ghost of Sparta , it’s Kratos on the throne. For Chains , it’s him chained to a pillar.
After you platinum both, the menu changes. The remastered audio doesn’t help
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.
Just the humming.
And yet —there’s a moment, near the end of Ghost of Sparta , when Kratos finds his mother’s letter. On the PSP, it was a text scroll. You read it, you moved on. In Volume II , they added a voiceover. Linda Hunt, the narrator, reading Callisto’s last words: Surround sound
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 .
Not Origins . Not the prequel tag they tried to slap on it later. Just… Volume II.
And the lie dies.
The game doesn’t let you skip it. You just… stand there. Kratos stands there. The camera doesn’t move.