tl;dr / The Point: 1) GoW is not universe level. At all.
2) GoWs WoG is tainted by a lack of standards and uninvested creators. It should have little to no weight on the verse going foward.
-----------Word of God Credibility-----------------------
God of War's lore has never been particularly coherent. This isn't shocking, the first game was not made with the intent of it becoming a series. The creators thought it would flop.
Over the years, as creators became more active on social media, VS nerds tried to remedy this by reaching out for clarification.
@BenTennyson did a
massive info dump a few years back, just before GoW4 released. He, and a few other posters at the time, were sure that WoG had confirmed Kratos as universe level and lightspeed.
More recently, active debaters have been referencing tweets and Facebook posts about the nature of Yggdrasil, the Nine Realms, and the stars found in the Realm Between Realms
[1][2]. Again asserting clear evidence of true cosmic-level godhood for Kratos and co.
The problem is that these inquiries into canon seem to be aimed at literally anybody who brought the dev team coffee. Most do tend to work in a department that at least makes sense for the question ie; "how big is x map?" being asked of an environment artist. But regardless of what your title should imply, individual artists
do not dictate canon.
Beyond asking the right person, we also have to take into account the possibility that even those people aren't bothering to track the canon of the material on a level that is suitable to this hobby.
Recent comments by actual top creatives about the nature of the 9 Realms have been in direct contradiction to what we see in the games. And it is clear that their comments aren't genuine answers they had to give about the world they created. They were just interpreting the same information we have to work with.
The comment was along the lines of:
"character X said ___, therefore I guess the answer to your question is ____". This is literally the point of Death of the Author. Their opinion on what certain in-game comments mean for the lore has no more weight than ours.
It doesn't help that character's comment they cited -- a line from the 2018 game, is directly contradicted in Ragnarok.
---------------Power Level--------------------
As for the actual claims being supported by this dubious WoG, the one I take the most issues with is universe level Primordials and, by extension, universe level Kratos (and everyone else who matters). The sole piece of evidence for this is
Ouranos getting celestial bodies punched off his face. This punch was "confirmed" by "WoG" in Ben's info dump to be the creation of the Greek universe. A universe that somehow also ends a few hundred miles from Athens, when you reach Egypt. I guess this is one of those "only infinite in one or two dimensions" type of infinities, despite the Greek infinite cosmos being a sphere.
maybe
The key redflags are:
1. Without scaling, not even the God Tiers of the verse come anywhere near this power level. As such, everyone struggles against and falls to much lesser powers.
2. The creation of the universe, especially the stars, should include the sun. And we know Greece's sun to be smaller than the Greek landmass. This makes it untold orders of magnitude smaller than any real star. And removes any in-game credibility the other celestial bodies had.
3. None of the other Primordials, not even the one that punched Ouranos, generate these kinds of phenomena. When they take damage, or even fall dead, their bodies turn to mountains or oceans. None of them generate cosmic aftershocks.
The Yggdrasil claims are also just as dubious. The idea that any of its dimensions are infinite seems absurd to me when
A) creatures exist specifically to trim its roots
B) you can walk across the width of its trunk to go from Muspelheim to Niflheim.
I also don't see any reason to think you are hopping universes when you go between realms. It is specifically stated that the primordial realms existed in the infinite void before Odin slew Ymir and created the other 7 realms. Ymir's corpse did not end up in 7 different universes. It is in the same place as the two primordial realms, hence why they are
all in the same fucking tree. The single piece of WoG I have seen cited for this is the one I mentioned earlier; creators quote Freya claiming that the realms all exist in the same space. Something that is directly contradicted by you being able stand in the space between the primordial realms.
