Swearing to avenge them, Kratos broke the blood oath that bound him to Ares, but oaths to Olympus are not so easily broken… Six months have passed since Kratos stood over the bodies of his wife and child, his hands stained with their blood – tricked by Ares into murdering the only people he ever loved. Now, as to why Kratos named his son after a guy who fed his twin brother’s own sons to him … that, you’ll have to take up with him.Plot: Vengeance is born in the fires of betrayal. You’d be surprised how accurate some of it is. In fact, it’s fun to keep your phone on hand and Google some names as they come up. These aren’t the only mythological nods in the game. So, yeah, the fact that here he’s a dime-store Conor McGregor on a meth bender, five days after his last shower and covered in tattoos? It’s so much of a spoiler to the rest of the game that when he first turns up, they just call him “The Stranger.” He’s one of the few nice guys in Norse mythology, well, relative to the rest of the pantheon.
He’s so chill there’s even an ongoing academic dispute over how much possible influence the myth of Baldur had on the story of Christ. In Norse mythology, and in folklore in general, Baldr is the god of light, purity, joy and summer. And it turns out her failures as a parent are the hinge the game’s emotional arc swings on, thanks to her son, Baldr. There’s even one of the nerdiest in-jokes ever featured in a video game over her name, since she’s also referred to as “Frigg,” and the game brings up the discussion over which name is correct in a very funny way. Freyja has had an ugly divorce from Odin, so ugly in fact that she’s stuck in Midgard for good.
If you know your Norse mythology, you’ll spot Freyja right away, but the game holds her identity close to the chest for a fair chunk of the plot. In fact, even leaving aside the events of the game itself, it’s hard to blame the Jötunn for just taking their tower and going home. Despite how we use the term “giant,” the game takes pains to point out that the Jötunn weren’t necessarily huge, and throughout the game, you’ll learn quite a bit more about various giants and how they’re pretty much repeatedly screwed over by the Aesir, which is more or less true to Norse myth. One of the central mysteries of the game is what happens to the Jötunn, the race of giants. Their depiction takes one or two liberties, but if you finish a specific side quest, they’ll pull off something of the same trick for Kratos, so stick with those quests. They’re fairly central to Norse mythology, in fact: They forge Thor’s hammer, the golden boar Gullinbursti, and Draupnir, a ring of Odin’s that makes eight new rings of the same size and weight every ninth night. Throughout the game, you’ll keep running into the hilariously rude Brok and his delicate germophobic brother Sindri, who knock together Kratos’ gear.
So, if you want to go in completely cold, stop reading here and enjoy Kratos smacking around a troll. What’s most interesting, in fact, is both the level of detail they get into, referring to minor dwarves and other figures that only Norse mythology nerds would know, and that if you know your Norse mythology, fairly early on you get some hints that something has gone very, very wrong, even by the standards of the Aesir, who are not great people in their own heroic myths. Needless to say, there’s a few spoilers for the game’s plot below, although we’ll avoid the really big ones (and there’s one we’re not mentioning at all, to keep the surprise in place). Here’s a tour of the major players Kratos meets and generally pummels as the game unfolds. But while the game takes a few liberties here and there, what’s most surprising is how detailed it gets into Norse mythology and how it riffs on its ideas. After six games where Kratos killed most of Greek mythology, wrapping up with the deicide of God Of War III, an older, wiser, and slightly less jerk-ass Kratos has returned today to do the same, however reluctantly, to the Norse pantheon with today’s God Of War.
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