Kratos may be a god of war, but he’s by no means a god of fashion. If you’ve been playing God of War Ragnarök, you may have seen one or two cool-looking armor sets. The rest, however, are downright hideous — and also, go figure, happen to have the best stats and perks. So it’s good news that God of War Ragnarök indeed has a transmog feature, which allows you to retain the stats of one armor set while rocking the look of another.
The catch is that you can’t access God of War Ragnarök’s transmog feature until you’re in the final stretch of the game. First, you’ll need to continuously enhance a piece of gear until it’s at rank 9 (the highest level a piece of armor can be in Ragnarök). Even if you grind, you simply won’t find the materials to upgrade any gear to rank 9 until way later in the game.
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Once a piece of armor is at rank 9, open up your inventory, go to the armor tab, select the piece of armor you’d like to change the look of, and press square to “edit appearance.” You’ll see a full list of all the armor pieces in your inventory. (Some sets of armor have multiple appearances, depending on how far you’ve ranked them up.) Hold square over the look you like to apply it — no need to burn resources or spend in-game currency.
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Note that you can only apply the visual effect of armor that’s currently in your inventory. Let’s say you love the health-boosting perk of Nidavellier’s Finest Plackart but don’t like that it (somehow) covers Kratos’ considerable deltoids. You far prefer the rough look of Mani’s Pauldron of Wisdom, but don’t really care about your runic stat and sold it off. If you want the Plackart to look like the Pauldron, you’d need to buy the latter back.
Also, it does not appear that you can apply a transmog effect to weapons or, sadly, shields. (As someone who leans hard on the effective but silly-looking Stone Wall Shield, this news devastated me.)
One last tip: If you’re at all sartorially minded, it’s worth getting at leveling at least one set of chest armor to rank 9 before you begin the game’s final mission. No spoilers, but you’ll get the most stylish armor set in the game right after you start it.
Its stats? Useless.