Game ten, story one: where it sits

✚ Checked 2026-11-15 · PS5 1.005.000 / PS4 launch build · 2 sources

The one-line answer

God of War Sons of Sparta is the tenth game in the series and the first in the timeline. It sits before God of War: Ascension (2013) and before the flashback sequences in God of War: Ghost of Sparta (2010).

That combination — last released, first chronologically — is the whole reason it exists as a prequel rather than a sequel.

Story order

Note that story order and release order diverge sharply: Chains of Olympus (2008) comes before God of War (2005) in the story, and Ghost of Sparta (2010) comes before God of War II (2007).

The two time periods inside the game

Sons of Sparta runs on two clocks at once:

The frame story — adult Kratos, a captain in the Spartan Army, telling his daughter Calliope a story from his youth. This sits before the tragedy shown in flashbacks in the original God of War (2005).

The main story — young Kratos, thirteen years old, training at the Agoge with his younger brother Deimos, eleven. A comrade named Vasilis goes missing, and the brothers leave Sparta to search Laconia for him.

That structure lets the game be simultaneously a prequel to everything and a story about a father — which is the same thematic territory the Norse games covered from the opposite direction.

Why the Agoge setting is the point

The Agoge was the Spartan military training regime, and the game uses it as the source of the character rather than as a backdrop. The stated theme is duty, honour and brotherhood — the values the training is designed to instil.

That is also what makes the story coherent with what the series already established. Deimos' fate is the wound at the centre of Ghost of Sparta; Sons of Sparta is the game where he is still just a younger brother who wants to find his friend.

Where it sits in the series timeline in practice

If you want to play the series in story order, Sons of Sparta comes first — before everything. That is unusual for a prequel released 21 years into a franchise, and it has a practical consequence: nothing in it requires knowledge of any other game, but almost everything in it is enriched by knowing what happens to Deimos later.

If you want to play in release order, it comes last, which is how it was designed to be received.

The Laconia map

The setting is Laconia, the region around Sparta, which serves as the game's Metroidvania map. Sparta itself is the central hub, and the story ranges out from it. The 21 collectible regions map onto that world:

Knowing that geography is worth more than knowing the story order, because the collectible clean-up is organised by region and the regions are grouped by how you reach them.

What this page is not

It is not a plot summary. The story beats belong to the game, and a beat-by-beat retelling on a guide site spoils the one thing this entry is most praised for. The timeline here is temporal and mechanical: which game is when, what the two time periods are, and why the setting matters to how the game plays.