Side Campaign
When I finished the main story of God of War (2018), my overall game completion was closing in on a third — meaning the game gave more than twice as much in adventure, character growth, and unexpected stories that had nothing to do with the fight against Baldur, its central antagonist. Beyond dealing with one of Odin's sons and setting Ragnarök in motion — the winter that precedes the apocalypse… …a world was waiting for me: every color flared at the full capacity of the graphics card, every sound, every step led to a new adventure: freeing dragons chained by a staff among locks and relics to the Nordic gods — that staff driven into the bleeding wounds of their armor… granting the last wishes of fallen warriors who could never reach Valhalla, helping valkyries — only when their reborn, cursed souls drew their last breath after battling me, only then were they freed from Odin's magic…
Somewhere in the middle of it I thought: sure, Baldur's story is the main one, the fundamental one, but beyond that necessary chapter there's a whole whirlwind of feeling and potential riches in this escapism...
When it's already the fifth year of waking up every day in Kyiv (what luck, that you wake up at all) and drinking your coffee against the morning stench of fires after the shelling (somewhere in there, someone's life burned down, a business, some hopes), your life starts to feel like the life of an NPC (a non-player character) — someone who just bought a car that Hulk, without so much as a strained expression, hurls into another film character. It feels like you're being played, used as extras for someone else's triumphs. Those triumphs are only triumphs from a very specific angle; history will forget you, grind you to dust.
Standing in line for a prosthetic, you understand that heroic memories won't grow a limb back. What's lost doesn't reincarnate into anything that can heal a soul. I would die for the woman I love, I would die for principles and values — never for geography, this lore never interested me, I can't feel pride over the coordinates I happened to be born at, and I'm not about to start despising Bulgakov either. And though all of this sounds like trivial whining to some of the cardboard cutouts, I declare inner optimism and detachment the central heroism of my own person. Not that I don't believe in a happy ending — I'm just selfish, and I have my own dreams.
I won't be anyone's playable character (a character controlled by someone else), and I don't want to be an NPC either. I feel no attachment to this story, to this map; I'm not interested, and no propaganda can make me sacrifice myself for a phantom kingdom. I want this reality to not be everything I get in this life, the way it isn't in the game, and more than twice as much adventure, growth, and unexpected story is waiting for me — none of it bound up in the fight against false prophets.
In any universe...
If this is the main campaign, the primary storyline (or one very unfortunate large expansion) — I believe more than twice as much thrilling time is still waiting for me on this planet.
If these are side quests, secondary missions — I'll gain the experience I need, give myself over to thoughts that were bottled up but have finally ripened, and to the pull of the new.
In any ending, I'll be able to draw on the tempering of my own character to lean back in the driver's seat of an old Jeep Cherokee and drive off into the sunset down Route 66, with the woman I love and the cat I love.