God of War
Now that God of War’s Norse saga has ended with Ragnarok, speculation turns to which realm Kratos may dive into next. There are a lot of obvious choices for a new pantheon of gods to explore, the most common of which is ancient Egypt, though some bring up the idea of a Mayan game or exploring ancient Chinese deities.
Forget that. I want something brave and bold. I want Kratos and God of War to dive into Christianity.
Once it became clear that Kratos had murdered every Greek god and was on the way to Norse mythology to do the same, it became a meme that someday we would have Kratos fighting Jesus Christ himself as he worked his way through every possible deity.
But even if that’s what a meme, what I’m proposing here is not a joke, and I don’t think it’s entirely impossible, based on how the series has transformed. I do think it would be a much, much more interesting concept for a game to explore Christianity as the next “pantheon,” which is not as wild an idea as you think.
Christ appears to Mary Magdalene’, 1834, (1965). New Testament scene: Mary Magdalene kneels before … [+] the risen Christ who tells her ‘Don’t touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father’. Painting, also known as ‘Christ’s Appearance to St Mary Magdalene after the Ressurection’, in the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. From “Russian Painting of the 18th and 19th Centuries” by Vladimir Fiala. [Artia, Czechoslovakia, 1965]. Artist Aleksandr Ivanov. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
Christianity only has three gods, which are really one God, The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit which all exist as parts of the Trinity. And yet the Bible is full of countless other entities, Lucifer/Satan of course, but archangels and demons, saints and monstrous kings, apocalyptic horsemen and sea dragons, that you could see being integrated into a story about Kratos fighting his way through heaven and hell.
What’s become clear throughout this Norse saga is that Kratos is no longer necessarily the god-killer he was once. (Spoilers follow for the end of Ragnarok), he reluctantly kills Heimdall because he absolutely has to, and while he fights Thor and Odin, he doesn’t kill them (Odin kills Thor, Sindri kills Odin), and he’s learned to make peace with past godly enemies (Freya) rather than killing them to prevent them from killing him first. As such, a game that involves the Christian god would not necessarily need a slugfest with Jesus H. Christ himself. It could be a lot more nuanced than that.
Part of the fresco series at the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.
Christian “mythology” has already been the focus of many games. The Diablo series has been using angels and demons for ages, even if God and Jesus aren’t anywhere to be found. Dante’s Inferno was essentially a God of War clone using the seven circles of hell as inspiration for enemy encounters. So yeah, there probably would be a way that Kratos could exist in the Christian sphere without dealing directly with the Holy Trinity, but it’s such a complex scenario, I kind of hope they wouldn’t shy away from that.
Would they ever do this? It does seem very, very unlikely that they would dive into a religion with a billion or two practitioners around the world, even if they’re not doing anything specifically blasphemous. But I think it would be a far more interesting challenge to take on a modern religion that still exists rather than all these ancient ones, even if it seems extremely likely that we’re going to get some Kratos versus Osiris showdown five years from now, or whatever it will be.
I think there is a way to do this without it being an actual attack on Christianity, but rather exploring its themes (hell, Kratos trying to find forgiveness for his past is a major theme of the entire series). There are enough wild angels and demons in the Bible and adjacent texts to create fantastical scenarios for Kratos to fight through, while dealing with larger questions of the series and the character at his core. It’s not impossible to imagine something like this working, even if it’s impossible to imagine it being greenlit in the first place.
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