The Steeds of Time cast an intimidating and awe-inspiring shadow when first encountered within God of War 2. These enormous horses are chained to an island inhabited by the Sisters of Fate, a gift from the great Titan Cronos used to pull the island away and discourage visitors.

My first glimpse of them came as Kratos ran across the heavy chain that linked them to the island, and the sequence that takes me from the initial sight of those presumably inanimate tributes through to awakening their power to pull the island closer and thereby grant Kratos access, embodies the greater share of my attachment to the series.

The game walks a fine line between being the loud, brutal, chest-banging experience that sells the majority of copies, and being littered with sequences of sparse isolation, where Kratos is set against the larger than life nature of the ancient world, tearing it apart while also traveling through eerily emotionally charged environments.

My excuse for revisiting the series came with Sony’s decision to put both PS2 games on a single PS3 disc and back on the shelves for the holidays. And having never mentioned the series before, I’m not about to pass on the opportunity.

The packaging doesn’t receive the same type of love that Nintendo gave to the Metroid Prime series earlier this year. In fact, whoever designed the packaging was either entirely uninspired or incredibly concerned that shoppers might get confused if they got too creative. But graphic design gripes aside, both titles now run silky smooth on the PS3 and include all the video extras that accompanied God of War 2 the first time around. To keep it straight, these are not HD remakes. Cleaned ports would probably do them justice short of comparing screenshots with a magnifying glass. This package also includes access to the E3 demo for God of War 3.

As it happens, I didn’t make time for that game at E3, largely because there were so many titles to see, and I assumed myself capable of knowing what to expect from the title. I mention this because it’s been the same case with every entry in the series. I never play them right away because I know what to expect, and then when I finally invest the time, those expectations are continually exceeded and I question why I ever waited. This isn’t because these are the bloodiest and most ultra-violent games to date, which they may be, or even because my expectations were wrong, but rather that the series offers such an expertly balanced rhythm, somehow made greater for the mix of action and melodrama, that I find it earnestly hard to put the controller down.

It’s an odd relationship to find myself in, given that I don’t consider the series possessed of the intricate and tight controls I favor, or even the typical subject matter I savor, and yet it’s so entirely easy to fall into both games and see them through to their completion. Both offer controls and a series of attacks that empower the player with ease, but are offset by enemies that will knock players flat on their asses if they try to charge through like a freight train. This quickly teaches the importance of evasion and creates some prolonged battles and combination attack strategies - focusing on taking down one monster at a time for instance.

The series also does something that would normally cause me to quit a game altogether. There are consistently times when defeating one overpowered beast will cause the game to simply spit two more of the same creature at you, and I absolutely loathe the unimagined nature of that arrangement in so many other titles. And yet I continually come back for more, because somewhere between evading and stabbing, and then finally tearing the eyes out of some cyclops or ripping the heads off of Cerberus, nothing matters except doing this again and again in exceedingly larger ways.

My adrenaline legitimately rises while trying to survive the onslaught in situations where there are no hiding places, and where the greatest monsters mythology has to offer are never willing to surrender. At times the series presses for my survival horror buttons, and not merely after dropping me into the pits of Hades.

When the battles are over, Kratos moves forward through a world of ancient architecture and fantastic spectacles, defying the Gods and turning everything, and everyone, inside out. And the landscapes that he moves through speak to another side of me that appreciates the skill used to adapt these imaginary places into tangible spaces, even if players are never truly able to interact with them.

So I’m left with a set of games I wouldn’t expect to enjoy, led by a character that I would never expect to find any attachment with, finding myself unable to hate this overly dramatic badass template Kratos is cut from by the end of it all. I’ve come to consider that this owes a great deal to the fact that no one despises Kratos more than he does.

Suffering through his story, and a brilliant sequence requiring the player to defend his family, makes the series far more than the action hype-machine many still tell me it is. At the very least, hype and preconceived expectations can’t take away the level of depth the action is built upon, as well as the fuller character developed within Kratos, even if only one-side of him is ever needed for the focused action of the game.

Perhaps it’s just undeniably fun to disrespect the Gods. Somewhere along the way I willingly put my mind on auto-pilot and sink into a narrative that takes mythology with an active hand, bending and warping the fabric of it as necessary to suit its goals in a rare way that raises the appeal of the material.

As far as the revisit versus your time, there are certainly shinier titles lining the shelves this season. And yet this collection isn’t entirely out of place alongside those newest offerings. More than enough words have been spent on the fact that the games looked incredibly good on the PS2.

A lot of the tricks that made that visual accomplishment possible also provide reasons why other choices might be better – such as a very linear path and a long series of battles that occur in closed off arenas. And yet there really aren’t as many choices that offer something so assuredly fulfilling in the way the God of War series balances action and narrative without either one severely outweighing the other, making the tight focus of both games a valid reason to revisit both.