Neither, never go against Kratos…

A recurring theme with Kratos is that you don't "win" against him with violence, to counter Kratos you simply have to be a fairly decent person and treat him with respect and kindness.. usually this will be sufficient (of course younger Kratos is less caring however even at his worst Kratos has some humanity and simply wishes to be either left alone or treated as a person and not a monster).

TLDR: you don't "beat" Kratos, you either leave him alone or treat him respectfully, then he should largely leave you be (if you are a decent person Kratos may even help you.. though you probably don't want to get his aid unless you want your enemy to end up with a snapped neck or worse).

I think the reason why he didn't die was because Kratos only faced one god at a time. Imagine if all of them faced Kratos togheter.

I think the reason he didn’t die was because he was a Mary-Sue, seriously, if the goddesses of Fate wanted him gone, he’d have never been born. If the lord of Death wanted him dead, he’d be dead, heart attack - bam, gone. But hey that’s not the point, the issue is who got to him the most?

The guy who set off his personal tragedy with his family’s death?

The goddess who gave him back his loved ones just to keep him distracted and he had to reject in order to save their existence?

The guy who launched a full scale divine war against him?

The guy with way more legitimate grievances than he ever had, forcing him to abandon his own not so righteous rage?

The goddess playing him the entire time?

Or the goddesses who knew to pose him no threat whatsoever and instead deconstruct his very ego by letting him know what a basic b*tch he is?

Kratos in Greek cycle was his own worst enemy and the sole enemy he could not defeat.

Kratos in Norse cycle thankfully became much more kind and understanding, obviously a combination of age and his giant-wife finally got through his rather infamously thick skull that not everything is black and white: Kratos of old saw everything as either his fault or the gods fault, it took an entire mythology shift for him to understand that it was a combination of both.

And yet people still don’t understand Kratos as a character even after Ragnorak.

@Yoshikage1234

Amazingly a lot of people still reply to any Kratos conversation with:

"Kratos is so boring, he's a doomsday monster / one-dimensional rage beast who just shouts and screams"

Or the opposite:

"new Kratos sucks, they neutered him - he's too submissive and weak".

Kratos has always had a softer side to him, he continues to have his "rage best" moments too.

I think people are unfair on him and it took us to this point for people to even begin to acknowledge that GoW games have always had quite a complex story-system and the supposed "exploitation" portions are actually tamer than what you'd find in many mythologies.

Also Kratos could be considered in his "early adulthood" (by god standards) during Greek cycle and mid-to-late adulthood by Norse era, so combine that with his incredibly traumatic life and the fact he's a Spartan (a society infamous for its brutal methods of raising its citizenry) and you can easily see why he develops the way he does.

I genuinely think the games sort of mishandled his character development - it the Image Comics problem, wanting to make someone more complex with trauma and rage and at a certain-point if you are afraid to acknowledge, say, how badly your plot points are messing someone up or that they have basic psychological needs like positive re-enforcement or self-awareness, you make your character more one-dimensional. By God of War II's second act we are well into the "A-are we the baddies?" phase and he never backs down, because the plot demands he not back down to get to the next set-piece which seems macho but in truth means he needs to be drunk on his rage and becoming a giant man-child. The developers certainly realize what Kratos has become by God Of War III, but by that point the Flanderization has already come full circle. Quite frankly corrupted or not, Zeus is right, Kratos needs to be stopped, Hades, corrupted or not is still legitimately more wronged than Kratos and fully justified by the same logic Kratos is using to butcher him. Ragnorok manages to give us character development, finally, with Kratos coming down off his rage-high and being able to think clearly and with regret at the sort of big murdering bass-turd he's been and how his heat of the moment justification can never last; But he's still a god-killer, no matter how he justifies it. And the Norns point-blank telling him, 'Oh no, free-will totally exists, you're all just too stupid to use it because you all do what's in your nature' is that first moment when Kratos doesn't simply feel bad about his actions but has to start accounting for them. That is when he starts to escape the character Flanderization.

Every person deals with trauma differently, some recover with a few years of therapy or care, some will continue to suffer the same negative patterns forever, no matter how much is done to try and help them.

Kratos being dysfunctional and incapable of evolving past his trauma is not mishandling his character, it is his character - he eventually breaks this pattern in the Norse era.

Again for the Greek era Kratos is a young man (by god standards), he does all the stupid things a broken young man does, refusing to evolve is absolutely how some people with mental illness or trauma react and again just because many do evolve past it doesn't mean Kratos is one of those types.

Kratos is dealing with his traumas in an extremely poor fashion but that's not unrealistic, sadly this is how quite a few do react.

For a non-fantasy setting it can take upwards of 10 years plus for adults to "improve" from repeated traumas or personality disorders even with whole teams of psychologists to help them.. Kratos is born in a world of vengeful gods and supernatural forces that continue to cut his mental wounds, he can't heal when he's being continually re-traumatized.

No one says Kratos is a good role-model but he's far from being waved away as a character that is mishandled - perhaps in his early days, yes, however those days are long gone and every early work has problems (look at the horrors that was original Toy Story Woody, who thankfully never saw light of day).