Trivia / God of War Ragnarök

• Acting for Two: Apart from Bitter, which Troy Baker reprises from the previous game, SungWon Cho voices Ratatoskr and all of his various spectral counterparts, each with a different voice.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A main criticism of the previous entry of the franchise gameplay-wise was the perceived lack of enemy variety and sub-bosses, with the trolls in particular being criticized for having mostly similar designs and fighting patterns. As the behind-the-scenes documentary series says, the development team heard those complaints among the community and leaned into having more variety and larger enemies in Ragnarök, creating more opponents with unique abilities specific to each one of the nine realms. There's a cheeky nod to this complaint: Kratos and Atreus are attacked by a troll, only for Kratos to swiftly decapitate it in a cutscene and move on to the newer enemies.
  • At the start of the game, Kratos wears a heavy black-bear-skin cloak to help stave off the cold winds of Fimbulwinter, but during the lengthy QTE sequence of defending against Freya's attacks, he loses the cloak and it never appears again. Due to being a really cool piece of apparel plus being prominently featured on the cover art for the game, fans clamored to have the cloak return as an optional piece of equipment. With the update that also brought New Game Plus, Santa Monica exceeded everyone's hopes by not only bringing back the cloak but making it part of a similar-themed Gear set.
  • In a sense, there's been criticism by some that Kratos hasn't reckoned enough with his past and the atrocities he committed in Greece. The plot of the Valhalla DLC shows Kratos coming to terms fully with his past and what he did in Greece through the use of memories and mental projections.
• Content Leak: A store released the game a few weeks early causing spoilers to flood various sites.
• Character Aged with the Actor: Atreus is noticeably older in this game, being a teenager with a deeper voice. It's likely so that the developers wouldn't have to recast Sunny Suljic from the previous game, despite getting four years older in the meantime. It helps that the Time Skip between games is the duration of Fimbulwinter, explicitly three years.
• Dueling Games: With Bayonetta 3. Both are the latest installments in two hack and slash series inspired by Devil May Cry, come out within weeks of each other (Bayonetta 3 on 10/28/22, Ragnarok on 11/9/22), are on mutually exclusive consoles (Bayonetta 3 being a Nintendo Switch exclusive, while Ragnarok is exclusive to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5), and having YouTuber Anna Brisbin voicing on both titles (In the case of Ragnarok, she's one of the three voices of the Einherjar).
• In Memoriam: The Eternal Campfire and the "Across the Realms" favor were created specifically as a monument to the relationship of two Santa Monica Studio staff members, the full story of which can be read here. Bring tissues.
• Meaningful Release Date: The game was originally intended to release three years after the first game, matching the in-universe prophecy that Ragnarök starts three years after Fimbulwinter arrives (as explained in Schedule Slip, that didn't happen). However, it still managed to get one: the day before the November 9th release date, a blood moon occurred due to an eclipse, one of the heralds of Ragnarök! (the only difference is that it's an Earthly eclipse, not a lunar eclipse)
• The Other Darrin:
  • Sigurn is voiced by Misty Lee as opposed to Lani Minella.
  • Latin American Spanish dub:
    • As a result of being now a teenager, Atreus went from being voiced by Susana Moreno to Carlos Siller.
    • Ratatöskr went from being voiced by Ernesto Lezama to Roberto Molina, as the former retired from voice acting at 2020.
  • Japanese dub: Just like in Latin America, Atreus goes from Yumiko Kobayashi to Tomo Muranaka, through Kobayashi stills voice him in the flashbacks.
• Role Reprise: In the Valhalla DLC, Crispin Freeman reprises his role as Helios from God of War III, which he originally played twelve years prior to the release of Ragnarök.
• Schedule Slip: Was originally announced for a 2021 release, but the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Christopher Judge experiencing health problems that required intensive surgery and rehabilitation, forced Sony to delay the game from 2021 to 2022.
• Throw It In!: According to game director Eric Williams, the scene where Kratos required two tries to take Gjallarhorn off of Heimdall's corpse was actually the result of an unintentional mistake during mocap sessions. The intention was for it to be one smooth motion, but Christopher Judge's hand slipped and had to take a second swipe. Judge personally was upset at the messed up take, but the team insisted on keeping it as is. It felt unintentionally appropriate that Kratos would flub the action as he was mentally reeling from having briefly slipped back into his destructive rage and strangling Heimdall to death after the god threatened to kill Atreus to spite Kratos' intent to spare him.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Word of God reveals in an interview that for a long time during production, Kratos and Atreus were saving the real Tyr from prison, and the idea that he would be Odin-in-disguise instead only randomly popped into the director's head one day and they worked it into the story from there.
  • Ratatoskr's actor SungWon Cho told in an interview there was supposed to be a "rap battle" in the style of flyting — a poetic contest, present in Norse literature between the 5th and 16th centuries like in the Eddas, in which two parties throw insults at each other in verse — between Ratatoskr and Brok, but it was cut for time.
  • Uncovered game files reveal Sinmara, Surtr's consort, was originally going to have a much larger role in the story, with full dialogues and a character model.
  • Co-writer Anthony Burch revealed on his Twitter during production that he semi-jokingly tried to add more lines "to make Kratos talk about kissing guys" (alluding to how homosexual relationships in fact existed in ancient Greece). Burch described said lines as existing in "the same purgatory with the line where Kratos mentions PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale as being a canon part of his backstory" (a line he was quite happy to discover when the game was released had made the final cut).
  • During production of Valhalla, Christopher Judge was asked to provide some lines for the younger version of Kratos but he refused out of respect for Terrence C. Carson. As a result, Young!Kratos remains silent throughout.
• Word of God: God of War Ragnarök Director Eric Williams compares Sindri to The Giving Tree, as Sindri would constantly help in providing new and useful items for Kratos and Atreus similarly to the generosity of the tree in the book, but Sindri's final state as a grief and anger-filled person following Brok's death was compared to the tree's final state, a stump who could do nothing but be sat on.

---