YMMV / God of War II

• Demonic Spiders: The puppy Cerberi are very maneuverable and hard to hit. Take too long to kill them, and they evolve into fully-grown Cerberi mini-bosses, who will start spitting out more pups. Spamming Atlas' Quake is the most effective way to deal with them - not to mention the only way, at higher difficulties.
• Even Better Sequel: God of War II was received even better than the already much loved first game, using the PlayStation 2 to even greater effect, having more elaborate boss fights and more detailed environments.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • There is a level where the player must climb a long chain to get to the top of the level. Along the way there is an endless supply of Bats that you can not attack from the rope and can throw you from the rope.
  • There is also a level where Kratos must pull a lever in circles on a platform to move the platform. If he stops for even a second it begins moving back. All the while mooks appear to attack Kratos, forcing the player to stop what they are doing to finish them off quickly. They are very weak and die in two or three hits, but they're annoying and will consume your precious time.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Last Spartan is set up as a Morality Pet whose death devastates Kratos. Too bad in the following console game, Kratos causes the death of the rest of Sparta after he kills Poseidon, and decides his revenge is more important.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The game's story has been heavily criticized for rehashing the original by being another plot with Kratos seeking out something to aid getting revenge on one of the gods.
• Memetic Mutation: "ZEEEUUUUSSS!!! IS THIS HOW YOU FACE ME, COWARD!? I AM THROUGH DOING THE BIDDING OF THE GODS!" ^ExplanationYelled by Kratos after he learns about what happened to Sparta. It's since become a popular meme to use the audio of the clip to express frustration over minor inconveniences.
• Moral Event Horizon: Zeus crosses this when he destroys Sparta. Whereas before he was simply concentrating on Kratos, he decides to rope an entire city into his wrath.
• Narm: There's a scene where Kratos screams "ZEUUUUUUUUUUUS!" in a manner that's reminiscent of Boris Badenov cursing out Bullwinkle.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: This game is relatively less difficult than the first one, the puzzle sections are less frustrating unlike the platforming/climbing sections with rotating blades which the developers admitted wasn't play tested. Leveling up is less of a hassle and your "Rage of the Titans" power can be turned on and off at any time, while the "Rage of the Gods" could only be used after fully charged and quickly used up after activation, meaning it had to be used sparingly.
• Squick: Sacrifices to the Fates can be difficult to sit through for some. Not only both of those moments are among Kratos' worst, but they are also accompanied by graphic cutscenes in which copious amounts of blood are flowing out of the translators' dead bodies.
• That One Attack: In his third form, Barbarian King's attacks are completely unblockable. That's not a major issue, but this otherwise easy phase is completely ruined by Alrik's triple attack – its first swing hits much further than it should, making it near impossible to dodge.
• That One Boss:
  • The second rock minotaur is a resilient boss with no blockable attacks and only a few openings. It's an annoying opponent on its own, but to add salt to wound the minotaur is also accompanied by infinite respawning harpies that can 3 shot KO you on Titan-mode with their explosive attacks. Fortunately, the minotaur has a blind spot that can be abused by bursting it down with either Barbarian Hammer or Spirit of Hercules, but that won't stop Harpies from pestering you, stretching the fight out.
  • Theseus on Titan, who serves as a huge difficulty spike, even compared to the Nintendo Hard opening act. He can combo Kratos to Hades and back in his first form, proving to be more of an unpredictable opponent than the Mooks you've been facing so far. And then comes his second form, where he starts spamming projectiles at you from safety, starts summoning two Minotaurs at once to fight you at the same time, and causing large crystal spikes to pop up from the floor which, on Titan, one-shot you. Add all of this on top of the fact that the only way to hurt him in his second form is to shoot him with your incredibly weak bow. And your magic is limited, so the only way to restock it is to run around dodging attacks and killing the Minotaur for blue magic orbs. It'll take at minimum four cycles of this before you even get the chance to finish him off. If you die, you go back to the first form. He also gets a cheap shot that wipes half your health if you're not blocking when you choose Restart. Have fun.
• That One Level:
  • There's the part where you have to protect the first translator. It basically involves carrying around the ultimate Squishy Wizard on your back and trying to protect him from the game's most frustrating Demonic Spiders, the Satyrs and the Minotaur Priests, enemies you would be lucky enough to survive against yourself! It's only moderately difficult on some of the more human difficulty levels, but on Titan it can be seemingly impossible. If you haven't upgraded just right up until this point (usually by exploiting infinite respawn and / or magic areas for experience orbs), you could be stuck in an Unwinnable situation. To add insult to injury, you can totally see the final boss lair from the balcony!!! At least when / if you ever get past this part, you immediately get to smash the fragile little bastard's face into a book to vent your frustrations.
  • On Titan Mode, every part of the game that's merely tedious turns into That One Level/Boss, but one notable example is at the end of the first Pegasus segment, right after the prologue. During the Dark Rider portion, he traps you in a draft and shoots bursts of dark magic at you that you have to dodge, the last of which is unavoidable and ends up railroading Kratos into the next section of the game. The problem is that now each hit takes off over half of your life bar, so you have to avoid everything up to this point or you're dead. The only problem is figuring out how to dodge THAT DAMN PENULTIMATE DARK BURST! Even when you go on the opposite side of the draft from where it'd logically hit you, you still get damaged by it!
  • By itself, one of the late-game sections is tedious. You're basically grabbing the chains in a pillar and pulling them to make the elevator move down, but a ways down, the ceilings sprouts spikes and starts coming down, so it turns into a race to get to the bottom and open the door before you're impaled and crushed. Problem is, the skeletons you saw just lying on the ground since you entered start coming to life and attacking you. Not only do you have to keep them off of you while you move the elevator, but the skeletons will occasionally get stuck in the gears moving the elevator and stop them entirely, so you have to go after them anyway. The whole thing is more tense than anything, though spamming Cronos' Rage or Atlas Quake or shattering the skeletons after petrifying them with Euryale's Gaze makes it much more manageable.
  • On your way back to the Phoenix Chamber, you encounter a room full of spikes that disappear for only a few seconds when a lever is pulled. You have to turn a crank in the middle of the spikes to open a gate and escape. While you can use the Amulet of the Fates to slow down the spikes, touching the crank stops the time freeze.
  • The room right before the urn containing the Phoenix ashes will bring flashbacks to the previous game’s That One Level involving dragging a caged soldier up a hill while fighting off enemies. Here, the ashes are located behind a door sitting above a Phoenix statue that constantly spits a giant wall of flame across the room. The only way to progress is to slowly push a statue ahead of you as protection against the flames. Naturally there are endlessly respawning enemies (who are immune to the flames) to slow you down, and of course the flames push the statue back if you’re not holding it. To make matters worse, the room’s floor is a mini maze that you need to navigate the statue around, and you need to flip a slow lever switch midway to open a pathway for the statue. The final task is to set the statue on one of two floor switches to open the door to the ashes while Kratos stands on the other switch to make a grab point appear for him to reach the door. But as a final middle finger to the player, reaching the switches immediately spawns a larger group of enemies for you to deal with, forcing you to take them on while the flames continue to push the statue back.
  • The gauntlet of enemies preceding Clotho's Chamber in the end game. Little-to-no health/magic recovery from beginning to end, and you have to face several rounds of almost every enemy you've ever seen in the game, from Satyrs to Cyclopes. With no checkpoints.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Typhon could have made for an epic boss fight, and instead he's just a lame giant that barely attacks you.
  • The game spends far more time setting up for the encounter with the Sisters of Fate than it does building up to Kratos fighting Zeus. And yet, the game itself largely treats them as stepping stones when they could have easily worked as the main villains considering they are effectively responsible for everything that's happened to him in his life.