For all the implications of the title, Ragnarök’s story puts the emphasis on rebuilding. As in Mass Effect, you’ll spend a lot of time in sidequests salvaging regions trashed by your Asgardian antagonists at the world-tree’s summit. In Svartalfheim, realm of the dwarves, you can take time out to shut down huge Aesir smelters at the behest of Mimir, Odin’s old fixer, nowadays reduced to a head bobbing around on your belt. In Alfheim, you’ll free huge jellyfish creatures trapped in dark elf nests, and probe the origins of the latter’s enmity with the light elves. In Vanaheim, you’ll help Freya dispel Odin’s curses and come to terms with her memories of their marriage, while cleansing toxic gardens and exorcising corrupted spirits.
This theme of gradual repair and reparation carries over to the main story, albeit with the usual caveats about self-aware action games that can’t quite forswear their violence. Antagonists are just as often befriended as felled, and the theme of parental responsibility towards the younger generation is ceaselessly drummed into your ears. “We must be better,” Kratos intones, again and again, even as the game settles into a familiar rhythm of killing and looting that extends past Ragnarök itself to a postgame defined by valkyrie hunts, rare crafting resources, and regional clear-out operations.
At their most compelling, this and the previous God Of War do a fair job of advocating for change without pretending that there are any easy solutions to an intrinsically violent world. This is change earned not through clean, crushing victories but incremental negotiations that may still involve yesteryear’s destructive methods, but tempered by self-mastery and empathy even for your abusers.
All of which may sound perilously like a political manifesto. Ragnarök doesn’t push its topicality, but there are obvious parallels between, say, its portrayal of preapocalyptic fimbulwinter and the climate crisis (just as in the real world, it’s about intensifying climate extremes rather than simply warming or cooling). The enormous wall separating Asgard from mortal refugees speaks to Trump-era border politics, while the subjugation of the dwarves as Asgard’s manufacturing base points to the western outsourcing of manual labour to people in former colonies with fewer workplace rights. Ragnarök makes the case that such systemic abuses need to be carefully undone using any methods available, even as it struggles to square this takeaway with its own age-old imperial campaign formula of clearing regions of rewards and enemies.