The official Twitter for the upcoming mobile game Kingdom Hearts Dark Road revealed four characters early Tuesday morning that make up Young Xehanort’s crew along with Young Eraqus in Scala ad Caelum.
The characters were revealed via a challenge posed to Twitter users where they reply to this tweet using the hashtag #KHDRNewCharacters, and each character was revealed to every user who replied with said hashtag.
Their names are Urd, Hermod, Bragi, and Vor.
You might read these names as the weirdest aliases Tetsuya Nomura has ever conjured up for the Kingdom Hearts universe, but the names of Xehanort’s friends are derived from the Nordic language as well as Norse mythology.
Although no further information about the new characters has been given, the meanings of their names might give a clue as to the kind of personalities they may possess.
Urd is derived from the Old Norse variant of Urðr, who was one of the three women in Norse mythology called Norns who determined the lives of fates of men. Skuld in Union χ shares her name with another one of the Norns.
Hermod is the younger form of Hermoder, who was the son of the Norse god Odin, while Bragi is named after the Norse god of poetry whose name means “the best, foremost.”
Vor might have been read like the NSFW term, but it’s actually the feminine Old Norse form of Vár, who was the goddess of contracts between men and women. The name carries four meanings: spring, woman, truth and oath.
The meaning behind the names of the new characters establishes that Nomura-san did not whip them out of thin air like Elon Musk did with his newborn son, but rather it sets a linguistic pattern for the character groups of each Kingdom Hearts game.
The Destiny Island trio, Sora, Kairi, and Riku, have Japanese names, while the Wayfinder trio from Birth by Sleep, Ventus, Terra, and Aqua, have Latin names, and the friends Young Xehanort made in Dark Road have Nordic names.
Kingdom Hearts Dark Road was planned to be released in spring for iOS and Android devices, but the release date has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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