YMMV / La-Mulana 2

• Anti-Climax Boss: Mother/The 9th Child is ridiculousy easy compared to her boss fight in the first game. Her attacks are weak, her HP is surprisingly low and her boss fight can end in a few minutes. Not even her other phases are challenging, and all of them can be beaten very quickly. Version 1.1.1.2 fixed this.
• Awesome Music: Just like the first game, La Mulana 2 has an amazing soundtrack. In particular, the various themes played when fighting the Guardians are amazing.
• Better as a Let's Play: While the game and its predecessor are relatively fair games, with signposted deathtraps and challenging-but-not-impossible bosses, many of their puzzles are deeply obtuse and founded in unfamiliar mythology. Since these puzzles are not optional and make up the majority of the game's story, a playthrough with someone talking you through the mental gymnastics can end up a better experience.
  • Let's face it, the traps in Eg-Lana are more plentiful and devious, and it's much funnier to watch players fall in them than to fall in them yourself.
• Breather Boss:
  • Aten-Ra is nowhere near as bad as the guardians that precede him. While his attacks are numerous, they're fairly weak in comparison to the likes of Jormungand and Anu. He does have an instant kill, but once you see what it is, it's very hard to get hit by it. He got buffed in the 1.2.2.2 patch, but he's still much less of a hassle compared to the other guardians at that stage of the game.
    • Further patches buffed him even more, however. He has more health and his attacks do much more damage, making him a genuine threat.
  • Hel, considering her status as the last of the 9 guardians and boss of the incredibly difficult Eternal Prison area, is a fairly simple fight. In her first phase, she literally does nothing. In her second phase, she doesn't even move, using only simple, predictable projectile attacks. Her third phase isn't much better: She's capable of moving, and gains an attack that's somewhat harder to dodge, but is entirely predictable. While the moving platforms can make getting hits on her somewhat annoying, and can squash you against the ceiling if you're not careful, a patient player can easily whittle her health down without taking much damage. She does, however, have a final phase, where she moves more erratically and her scythe spins around the arena in addition to the projectiles from the first phase... but at that point, she's literally three hits away from death.
    • Averted if you're trying for the achievement to defeat all the main bosses without using subweapons. The platforms that rise off the ground cause you to slide off them if you're standing in the wrong spot, and as alluded to before you die if you get pressed against the ceiling, so the only weapon that can really hit her effectively is the whip. Colliding with her body does a far bit of damage, and her erratic movements make it difficult to judge the correct spacing to hit her without getting slammed into. In addition, the occasional laser pillars that are a nuisance when using subweapons are far harder to dodge when you're trying to get in hits at melee so you end up taking a lot of damage. This makes it hard to get to the final phase without a lot of life... which means that while she may only be three hits from death, you probably are too.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Skeletons. No, really. The skeletons in Eg-Lana are far more aggressive than their La-Mulana counterparts, constantly throwing bones at you unless you are able to knock them down, and are always put near things like pits of lava or spikes to start Cycle of Hurting. What puts them into Demonic Spider territory is that the blue skeletons found in the late-game areas can't be destroyed until you find a certain item.
• Disappointing Last Level: Many consider the last area of the game (Spiral Hell) to be a complete letdown (past the initial PTSD caused from the opening screen/opening riff of the music) compared to the rest of the game due to a lack of challenge, though version 1.2.2.2 fixed the issue with the final boss's health. Additionally, the Escape Sequence at the end doesn't bring much tension compared to the first game since the sequence itself doesn't have a time limit.
  • Possible bit of Fridge Brilliance with the Escape Sequence and why it has no timer: as the act of using the Beherit on the 9th Child was essentially unleashing Loki upon it to exact his revenge, he's allowing you to leave before bringing the house down.
• Fridge Horror: For console players, Burgerpants has brought Flowey with him. Flowey is in Eg-Lana, where mists of concentrated evil, soul-like energy tend to swirl around.
• Funny Moments:
  • The Crystal Skull Epitaphs are a mixture of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.... with Sir Swears-a-Lot and Totally Radical mixed in. Ye puny dumbasses.
  • After breaking the child statue, Lumisa turns around to Fobos and shrugs.
    • More funny body language from Lumisa when she reacts to the Gyonin King's death with a dismissive hand wave that just oozes "good riddance!"
  • One of the regular enemies found in the Valhalla area is a giant bipedal ear of corn.
  • Walking past a spot where Lemeza and Shawn had set up camp with the Alert app activated gives the warning message "curry stank."
  • The entirety of the Tower of Oannes DLC is a riot from start to end and beyond the end, and it is meant to be this game's Temple of Hell! You will likely spend more time laughing or amusing yourself with all the absurdities and references, rather than being frustrated. Nevermind the statues' codpieces.
• Game-Breaker: The hot spring in Ancient Chaos temporarily provides infinite subweapon ammo, allowing almost any boss to be trivialized with a few shots of the normally Too Awesome to Use handgun (or by spamming hundreds of flares in the case of bosses whose hitboxes are above you most of the time, such as Anu and Echidna). Of course, this is meaningless if you are going for "All I Need Is One Arm/Finger".
• Genius Bonus: Ra absorbs Aten and Amen into himself. In Egyptian mythology Aten was considered an aspect of Ra, while the gods Amen and Ra were combined into the deity Amen-Ra during middle Egyptian dynasties.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Lokapala soldiers found in the Immortal Battlefield. In a game where you primarily fight with whips and thrown projectiles, these guys come at you with fully automatic rifles. They time their burst fires to hit you right after you lose Mercy Invincibility, making it possible for them to stunlock you, and makes any shield short of the Angel Shield useless against them. Right as one sees you, it will whistle, calling more comrades to appear from the Tree Of Life doors. What's worse is that as you progress through the game, they'll begin appearing in other areas as well.
  • The Valkyries in the Divine Fortress as well as the Ginnungagap enemies in Spiral Hell. Whenever they get close to you, they back up five or ten blocks, ignoring all the walls, and shoot three "Einherjar" ghosts at you. It's basically impossible to kill them without sub-weapons, and hard mode ensures that there's at least one Valkyrie on every screen in the Divine Fortress. Fortunately, they do get easier as the Crucifix makes you immune to the Einherjars but not to the enemies the Ginnungagaps spawn.
• Goddamned Boss: Surtr, the Guardian of Icefire Treetop is possibly the most frustrating and unfair boss fight in the entire game, surpassing even Jormungand himself. First off, the room itself: There are rocks falling from the ceiling whenever Surtr moves, meaning you can take damage unless you destroy said blocks. Not only that, but you can die if you fall into the bottomless pit, which can happen since the floor itself is collapsing. Remember what we said about destroying blocks? You can accidentally destroy the block you are standing on! Then there's Surtr himself: he has a truckload of HP, he can destroy parts of the floor with his hand, he can rear his head and drop magma from his mouth that leaves a trail of fire if touches the floor and he can walk to the side and attack you and destroy a major chunk of the floor with his fist. It's not completely hopeless, however. He can be manipulated into using his magma attack, his least dangerous attack and the one that enables you to hit him, by standing directly underneath his face. Additionally, you can cling to the edges of the screen if you run out of room, though there's nothing to suggest you can do so.
  • Version 1.4.4.2 reduced the difficulty by replacing the bottomless pit with a pool of lava. However, he gets a significant health boost in return. He's still hard, but not as unfair as before.
• Heartwarming Moments
  • Given their somewhat antagonistic nature in the first game, it's nice to see Lemeza and Shawn working together.
  • Fulfilling Sakit's final wish, allowing him to finally rest. Doubles as a Tear Jerker, since by this point you've learned the sad truth about him.
  • The ending sequence shows the Kosugi family seemingly reconciled as they explore archaeological sites around the world, with Mulbruk along.
• Nintendo Hard: This is a sequel to La-Mulana. You will die.
• Nightmare Fuel
  • The Beherit. Anyone at all familiar with Berserk would be very nervous about carrying this item around. When used to absorb dissonance, it screams as a bright orange flash erupts from it. Absorb all of the dissonance, and its face looks much angrier and its entire description is replaced with a single word in all caps: "DIE".
    • It's implied that you sucked the Trickster/Loki in with the first Dissonance absorption after defeating Vritra, and each subsequent absorption adds to his Rage Against the Heavens.
  • The Dissonance itself when it first appears. You've just defeated Vritra and you're probably feeling good about it, but when the game shifts from the boss area back to the ruins, the room is filled with this weird mist and this utterly creepy music starts playing. It's very disturbing, especially on the first playthrough.
  • Related to the above, the Corridor of Blood. The moment you look at it you get a message from Fobos and Xelpud talking about how ominous it is. If you walk into it when the Beherit has absorbed that section's dissonance, upon entering the entire corridor will suddenly be splattered with blood. But it's in the endgame, when you seal the Corridor of Blood, that all hell breaks loose. When you've acquired all of the dissonance and set the Corridor of Blood gates in the proper sequence, the entirety of Yggdrasil, from the Roots to the Icefire Treetop, has a malicious red mist resembling dissonance in the background, and some parts of the ruins look cracked.
  • Ra in general. Not only is he completely insane, but when you first see him, he's fused with Amen and states his intention to fuse with someone else. What makes this worse is that you can see Amen's face in Ra's abdomen. When you go to check on Horus, you instead find Ra giving you a very disturbing look as he's busy absorbing Horus.
    • Some players however found this Deer in the Headlights moment quite hilarious.
  • Hel. While she starts out as a Cute Monster Girl, just looking at her as she sits on her throne you can tell there's something unnatural about her from her idle movements. Then you fight her. She does nothing until you hit her a few times, at which point her legs are suddenly replaced by a mass of tentacles. Damage her further and she breaks free from the tentacle mass and starts floating around to strike you with her halberd. When you defeat her, you get the typical red flash you get from beating a Guardian... and then she suddenly screams as tentacles burst from her eye sockets and her mouth, and she goes in for one last attack as her now severed arms attack you.
  • The 2019 update and onwards turned Spiral Hell into one of these, by turning all the previously fought mini-bosses into undead abominations. Just to give you an example, Vidolfnir, the mini-boss of Icefire Treetop, has been reduced into a headless bird that shoots fireballs from its blood-covered neck. In fact, almost every mini-boss from the area lost their heads after being resurrected. The only exception is Ratatoskr, whose body is decomposing after his true form was killed.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The last game was hard enough! Rather than the fairly linear opening few areas, the ruins of Eg-Lana are far more open from the get go, which means exploration can be both more difficult and confusing. Despite the many anti-frustration features, the challenge in the platforming and puzzles is ramped up from the get-go - this game expects you to be a veteran of the previous game, and God help you if you're not. Justified in-game where you're told the traps in La-Mulana were designed to test you, but the traps in Eg-Lana are designed to kill you.
• That One Achievement: "All I Need Is One Arm" and "All I Need Is One Finger" are back. Good luck.
  • "Encyclopedia Completionist", which requires the player to complete the glossary, which can be done by talking to other characters and killing enemies. Sounds easy, right? Well, guess what: sub-bosses and Guardians do not get entries on the glossary by killing them. You have to find their entries that are hidden in the area that contain said bosses. While some of them are in plain sight, others are very well hidden and sometimes require you to use the Hand Scanner to check some spots in the area. But wait, there's more! Some characters also have additional entries in the glossary. How do you get them? By doing the same thing, except they're scattered all around Eg-Lana instead of placed in a particular area. Not only that, but a few can be accidentally rendered unobtainable (though fortunately, collecting them on any playthrough or via any save counts towards the achievement.) To top it off three of the entries can only be gotten during the Escape Sequence!
• That One Attack: The Mother/9th Child's tentacle attack during the final phase. Once she copies Surtr's attack, she will slowly raise one of her arms as a giant tentacle comes from the side of the screen and hits you, which can deal a massive amount of damage. If you're on the platforms, make sure you drop as fast as possible before the tentacle comes out. If you're on the ground, equip the Gale Fibula and run to the other side of the screen.
• That One Boss: This being La-Mulana, there are a few that qualify.
  • Jormungand, the fourth boss, is not the world serpent that eats its own tail, but a Lokapalan soldier riding on a bike that resembles the world serpent. This fight is the unholy union of Ellmac and Palenque. Just to even fight him you have to use the Pochette Key or you get crushed and killed in one hit. Once you do that, you'll have to contend with his attacks. While his gun attacks do decent damage, the biggest danger is just getting run over, as he has a huge hit box and often moves from one side of the screen to the other without warning. Worst of all, he spends a lot of time behind you, and Lumisa can't attack behind her during the fight although you can get underneath Jormungand and use earth spears or the flare gun. While he does follow a very strict pattern and all of his attacks are avoidable once you know them, it may take you many attempts to figure him out.
  • Anu, fought in the Ancient Chaos, is another fight that's visually impressive but quite difficult. The biggest challenge with Anu is that he spends much of his time in the air and is only vulnerable to melee attacks for a brief moment when he dive bombs you. Flare guns work, but his own ship works as a shield to protect him from the blast, meaning you have to hit him when he tilts to one side so the explosion will tag him. While he's doing all of this he's littering the arena with rolling spiked balls and projectiles. Good luck!
• That One Level: The Eternal Prison takes the cake in this game. When you first access this area through the Corridor of Blood, your holy grail is disabled, meaning you can't warp out, and you immediately have to descend in a way that keeps you from leaving the way you came in. It only gets worse from there. Screens are filled with difficult enemies, spikes (which the lighting can render practically invisible), lava, and crushers. Its main gimmicks are the underworld gates, which need to be traversed in the correct order to reach the boss, and each one you cross will make another item unusable until you leave the area. In addition, the scythe gate will murder you when you attempt to go through it if you haven't lost access to all the other items you're supposed to. To make matters even worse, some gates will spit you back out of the area, requiring you to go through it all over again. This is all on top of the area containing some of the most difficult and annoying puzzles in the game.
  • Icefire Treetop, one of the earlier areas of the game which can be accessed after defeating Nidhoggr in Roots of Yggdrasil, especially if the player didn't acquire the Scalesphere and the Ice Cloak. Filled with annoying ceiling enemies that can lunge at you and knock you off platforms, ice physics, the most obnoxious platform segments with breakable platforms and two new hazards: Icy water and poisonous lava. Icy water can drain your health slighty faster than regular water without the Scalesphere while poisonous lava can drain your health in a second. Even the Ice Cloak and the Scalesphere combined only reduce the damage to "manageable" rather than eliminating it. Did we also mention that the Guardian of this place is Surtr?
  • The Ancient Chaos is a lot like the previous game's Tower of the Goddess, with incredibly tall towers you have to scale, and lots of enemies that love to knock you all the way to the bottom, either into Spikes of Doom, more enemies, or pits of poison lava. Not to mention that many of the floors will either crumble under your feet or are pitfalls that will drop you right onto a bunch of spikes, and the area is filled with Anunnaki statues that will blast you with divine retribution if you accidentally hit them.
  • The Hall of Malice, Eg-Lana's version of the Dimensional Corridor. It doesn't seem that hard at first, but once the area is activated with the Cog of Antiquity, things go downhill at this point: just like last time, you're unable to warp out of the area until you beat all the sub-bosses in the area. Said sub-bosses are very challenging and require a lot of ammo to be taken down, since most of them can't be defeated with just the primary weapons. Oh, and just like last time, the area will lock you on a route until all the sub-bosses from that route are dead. You can make things easier on yourself if you get the Golden Tablet first since the path from Heaven's Labyrinth will be open. If you didn't, go down the route first that has the Giant Enemy Crab at the end since you can leave via the Corridor of Blood once it's dead. Thankfully you can return to the village at any moment between routes and once all of the sub-bosses are dead, the area will allow you to use the Grail again once Echidna's Ankh is revealed.
  • Tower of Oannes, the DLC released in January of 2022, is basically this game's Hell Temple. But the setup to even unlock it, alongside its traps, bosses and puzzles in it, are far more ruthless. For starters, you are required to die in a specific place in a specific way to be allowed into a certain area, and if you didn't bring a certain item with you then you can't leave the area without dying, and dying in there prevents the quest from going on. But you are very likely to be crying in laughter over how absurd the Tower of Oannes and its content is... Even after you die the most shameful deaths to the traps in there. And once you finish the tower, a time trial mode exclusive for the tower is unlocked, where you must complete the tower again in under an hour.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The Golden Rock puzzle at the Roots of Yggdrasil is something that players have stumbled upon for years after the game's release. When the game was released, the puzzle had a very simple solution, in which the player must use the Lamp of Time as quickly as possible after breaking the pillar, jump to the platform after chanting a Mantra in front of the Bust of Mimir, break the wall and the Life Sigil to obtain the Pyramid Crystal. Later updates changed the puzzle completely by rendering the Golden Rock immune to the Lamp of Time. Because of this, no one knows exactly the new intended way to solve this puzzle. Some suggested to break the pillar, jump and break the wall as fast as possible before the rock crushes the player or use Mjolnir to break the wall, but these solutions are more impractical than helpful.
  • How to actually get the Cog of Antiquity once you unlock the chest containing it. One tablet gives you a selection of mantras to chant "at the neck of the colossal dragon", while another says "the infernal fiend bites the neck of the colossal dragon". From the Crystal Skull puzzle in Heaven's Labyrinth you figure out that the Blob Monster depicted around Heaven's Labyrinth is the infernal fiend, but what about the dragon? Well, you have to figure out that the drawing in the bottom left corner of every stone tablet in an area corresponds to the map of the area (which is what completing Brahma's Trial is supposed to show you). The drawing on all of the tablets in Heaven's Labyrinth is the infernal fiend, and the chest containing the Cog is where its mouth would be. Takamagahara Shrine has a dragon on all of its tablets, so you go to where the neck would be and chant the mantras there. Most people end up "solving" this puzzle just by noticing the purple line on the map indicating an area transition and simply chanting every combination of mantras until something happens.
  • Tower of Oannes introduces many puzzles that will baffle any player, veteran or otherwise, and that's before even getting in the tower proper. For an example, part of the puzzle involves finding a trap that literally does nothing. And no one would think of that one switch in the Ancient Chaos.
• The Woobie: This game reveals Sakit, a mechanical effigy of whom was one of the bosses of the first game, to be this. It's revealed that it was Abuto, not Sakit, who orchestrated the war of the giants. In truth, Sakit questioned the need for the giants to fight one another. In response, Abuto manipulated Sakit into murdering his wife Ledo to kick off the war. Sakit alone was made a scapegoat for the war and was imprisoned in the Underworld to have his intestines eaten for all eternity. The worst part is that no one knew the truth for thousands of years, since it was Abuto who chronicled the history of his people.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Burgerpants, just like the games where he came from, looks just as weird as ever in the console versions, especially with a more realistic art style. See for yourself.