God of War 2 general discussion

I really like this one, the opening is epic, really good multi phase boss fight, Kratos yelling "I AM THE GOD OF WAR" when you use Poseidon's rage. This series in particular has always nailed large set piece bosses, especially compared to how Team Ninja handles it in Nioh.

I got all the way past the Theseus boss, good starter boss. Simple, well telegraphed attacks not too much going on and pretty predicable. Killed me once during his ranged phase with the minotaurs.

God of War 2 really is this shining example of a game that for some how, just got blessed with insane creative luck and was a miracle. It just tends to hit all the right notes for me, great bosses, great enemies, fun engagements, nice puzzles - just overall a great time.

Barbarian boss was cool, really neat how many phases he had. Lots of bosses in this and their all really good so far.

Perseus was neat, not often you fight an invisible boss, but you can see his footsteps and faint outline in the water. The window of opportunity the prompt gives you if really strict, you need to grab him immediately otherwise the prompt goes.

Also this ones kicking my arse, even regular enemy encounters are tough. I'm playing this on hard and will do the same for the rest, i played 1 on normal to acclimate to the gameplay.

Enemy variety is very high, and it has various mixes for encounters. I liked the fight with 2 sirens and 2 large Minotaurs. I like how many types of jobber mobs there are, like undead legionnaires of all kinds, goat men and weird midget goat guys at one point.

It's paced well too, you don't spend too much time in one area and backtracking is minimal. One level i really like is the one inside Atlas, really detailed innards sell me on being inside a titan.

I dig that purple spear weapon, it even has a stinger like move thats a follow up to a launcher for its s,s,t combo.

Got all the way past the Kraken then stopped. Gotta say all the block pushing and lever pulling ha gotten a bit dull. They do have a bunch of different variations of those puzzles which is nice. Some of the gimmick rooms gave me trouble, namely a room with lava waves that periodically come at you, you need to push a block to avoid the lava. All the spawning elite legionares plus the harpies gave me trouble. I used atlas ground quake or whatever to knock then back so I could finish the puzzle.

Gotta give the last spartan some cred, nice surprise boss who for being a human put up a hella of fight. How did they manage to get to where Kratos was BEFORE Kratos? With no devine weapons or magic to aid him?! Big up last spartan #remembergameplay.

Beat it. Pretty good.

I had a lot of trouble during the section before Clotho boss, a bunch of hallways with green magic walls that appear and disappear with wave after wave of goons of all types. It seems kinda cheap throwing so many enemies in such a small space I could barely dodge most of the bigger enemies moves. The wave with 2 satrys and large minotaurs was a pain and so was the last wave with 2 Cyclopes. My tactic was to trap most enemies behind the barriers when they opened and closed again, I clipped the others through the barrier with plumes.

The dual fate sisters boss was cool, lots of different phases kept it interesting but not too challenging.

Zeus gave me some trouble during his human phase, until I realised that sometimes he does a long range unblockable palm thrust at the start of his combo if you counter throw his lighting back at him.

I got tired of pulling levers and pushing boxes, those animations I'd like to be shorter but I suppose that would break some of the puzzles.

Also why didn't Kratos go back in time to save his family? I suppose he's in denial and wants an excuse to kill all the gods, like he kills the last spartan by accident and immediately screams at the heavens calling Zeus's name.

I've started this game on hard difficulty and just got Icarus' wings. This game seems a big improvement in many areas. I'd like faster puzzles but it's my only complaint so far.

The game really is an example of "fix what was broke and just improve the rest". I still to some extent prefer GoW1 (mostly the story) but GoWII just...it is really a master piece. Glad to hear you're enjoying it!

The puzzles are a funny thing, but they get a lot easier on repeat playthroughs. I remember I got stuck really quickly at times and even not looking forward to some parts on repeat-runs because "oh yeah that puzzle was really bad" while on a repeat run it was over in seconds.

For me, the first third of this game is the SHIT! So many great fights, beautiful environments, good secrets to find. The middle was good but to me had far too many puzzles and platforming, not enough fighting. By the end I was praying for it to be over. I do like the final bosses though, a good challenge and much better than 1. My least favorite of the trilogy, but still a fantastic title, and one of the greats in the action genre. To be fair, it is hard for anything to top 1, what a masterpiece.

One thing that I can't stand about this game is you can no longer cancel the plume into a guard. In 1 you could guard at any point before the plume hits the ground. In 2 once it starts, you are stuck in the animation. It just felt like it made the move so un safe I never wanted to use it. Seemed like a weird un needed change to me.

Yeah, the first one is less polished but still an unforgettable experience. I don't know if I'll like GoW2 more but both of them are very good and they haven't aged a bit!

God/hard mode completed. It was harder than GoW1, some rooms are difficult. I got a rank after I finished the game but I don't know what determines it. Overall, it's a great game so I'll play it more

GoWII has a ranking system? I don't remember seeing that.

Yeah, they are named like the difficulty modes (Mortal, Spartan, God and Titan).

EDIT

Just done an easy run with two urns of power and I got Titan rank. I was only fast, I skipped chests and a lot of things. I died only two or three times falling into the void.

I've got Titan Rank on the seven challenges. They are not too difficult but I had to retry the translator one a few times.

Titan mode is much harder than GoW1's God mode but it's so satisfying when you beat a boss or a difficult section. Now I have to fight some Hades Legionnaires and Fire Harpies on a platform.

Booted this up after not playing it for about a decade. Started on hard, I don’t really know what I’m doing but I went in with the mindset of “don’t use plume” and I feel like I’ve learned a lot just in a few hours. Been using grabs as much as possible and some fights that I remember being long are going by quickly. Fun stuff, will try to beat it and move to very hard soon.

Started Very Hard. That Star Fox part towards the beginning of the game is killing me haha. Gotta say, I’ve got a ton of respect for this series now. Messing around with grabs and magic and reading up a bit on some more advanced tech has been really cool. It’s also nice to play a game in the genre that’s just kind of the complete package: combat, level design, platforming, music, it has it all imo.

Fantastic to read, and I can understand what you mean with that latter part. Most action titles tend to really focus on one or two elements, it is rare to see one really nail the whole package. God of War II has good stories, cutscenes and all that jazz as well, not to mention great presentation for a PS2 game that really makes you feel that they did all they could with the system.

Currently playing Lords of Shadow, and I really miss God of War's platforming and how open it was. You could always derp around with double jumps, take risks etc or experiment with shorter paths. LoS feels way more on-rails.

Really still want to dive deeper into its magic system. While its combat and grabs are 'the same' as GoWI with some buffs, the magic really got a nice boost again. Really love just how it isn't all about dealing damage, but lots of great utility.

Always love this video:

The more I see and read from you guys, the more I want to play. STOOOOOOOP!

Wow, that guy made that part look easy. Didn’t realize how powerful the hammer could be, good stuff.

Yeah I got that video slung my way one time by SBK when I noted that the Hammer didn't feel too useful. I soon changed my tone.

Well, I beat VH and am a little bit into a NUR. This has quickly become one of my favorite games and I can’t believe I didn’t dig into it sooner. This game almost seems like it was made specifically for me.

Fantastic to hear man, glad to see God of War II get more love by the day. Haven't done a NUR myself in that one (only GoW1), but it is high on my list. Apparently General Kratos NUR is the most fun one around from what the veteran players tell me.

Enjoy man! Already have some strategies for the Translator?

>gow1
Should’ve done that one first, I’ll probably get into it soon though. Which is your favorite Roy?

>general kratos NUR
SBK gave me a quick breakdown of it and it sounds like a blast, can’t wait to try it.

>strategies for translator
Not too sure yet, really didn’t use magic last time, just kicked the dogs around since their hit box seemed safer for collisions. I think my plan will be to group the enemies over to the side where the summoner spawns.

> Favourite
I think GoW1 is my favourite, while I consider GoW2 to be the best and GoWIII has the best combat thanks to its hilariously overpowered battering ram. But GoW1 just has it all for me, great setting, interesting story, great combat. 2 is better by a mile, but I just like 1 that much more.

> SBK
Good to hear you're in touch with the guy, he's the saner one of the duo.

> Translator
Good luck man! You recording your run?

>battering ram
I love that attack. Can’t wait to get back into that soon too.

>gow1 favorite
It was always my favorite too but now that I’m replaying them all that might change. The whole trilogy is absolutely phenomenal though.

>saner of the duo
I think I know who the other is haha.

>recording run
Sadly no. I’ve been meaning to get a new pc and recording equipment but haven’t yet. It’ll be my priority after the wedding next month, though.

Run update: just beat Perseus, not having too much trouble yet, but I know that’s about to change with the translator and cerberus fights. I also haven’t been getting any health of magic upgrades and didn’t realize that wasn’t part of a normal NUR(at least, I don’t think it is).

That's NUR+ as I recall it, which is fine. That's the way you're supposed to run it I feel, with the upgrades to that a lot of things can still be trivialized through tanking or magic abuse too much I feel.

Started using the spear, great for launching and knockback. Piercing shards works really well against Satyrs I feel.

I never dove into the Spear myself, I've read notes from SBK a long time ago and watched a Spear Only run, fantastic weapon as I recall. They really upped the secondary weapons in this title. While Artemis was great and had a lot of utility, it did feel a tad more 'by the book' somehow and more a fun addition than a dedicated weapon. Hard to describe.

Artemis is great for ring outs yeah? The weapons in GoW2 are indeed fantastic, great utility and synergies with magic(always use them for shatters).

Side note: I didn’t realize you could use a false grab to cancel out a hades Minotaur unblockable attack. Great stuff.

Artemis was great for a few things, it had the knockback which was gold for ring-outs. Aside from that it was the only weapon that had a full moveset even at rank-1, which was pretty fun for challenge runs as it meant you still had a lot of moves.

What's very interesting is that 'equipping' it grants i.frames.

https://youtu.be/EGMv25b47T0?t=2826

You can see me do it here to dodge his unblockable and be able to stay in his face. It's pretty crazy, not a lot of games have a literal "on demand i.frame" generator that can be canceled out of. Pretty fantastic!

What do you mean with False Grab, I'm not really clear on the foe or situation you're describing atm.

That is neat, will come in handy when I get around to GoW1.

>false grab
Grabbing an enemy that can’t actually be grabbed, like a bigger foe. The hades Minotaur are the big ones with the flaming weapon, while they’re winding up the unblockable attack you can go for a grab and they’ll switch to an attack that can be blocked. Super helpful.

Ah that! Gotcha! Yeah you can also do that for Medusa and Gorgons, it will always trigger her throwing that freeze-projectile that you can parry with the fleese. Fantastic little details. Cool to see in the Gamefaqs topic that this game made your top5 list.

Get that GoW love going strong!

In an unrelated note, somehow my old and massively out of date God of War article is being discovered. 200 views just today. Shouldn't have waited with updating that one haha, wasn't my best. Oh well!

Yeah the gorgon trick is great, really gives you control over the battles. This series is really special and I’m trying to spread the love as best I can.

>article
Interesting, I’ll have to give it another look.

Royta/Raeng wrote:In an unrelated note, somehow my old and massively out of date God of War article is being discovered. 200 views just today. Shouldn't have waited with updating that one haha, wasn't my best. Oh well!

Because I posted it on a thread on Era

Sadly, it turns out that a lot of them just read the headline and jump to conclusions just as much as GameFAQs, Reddit, Youtube, and NeoGAF. I was hoping that over there would be better than the ones I just talked about, but nope, it's not really much different over there. Also, stay the fuck out of political threads. Because just like all the other places, it'll either become a circlejerk, or a clusterfuck.

And a lot of them seem to have a misguided idea of what it means to be "Good" at God of War. It's more than just completing the game by blocking and attacking.

Trust me, I would fucking love it if you leapt in there, and proceeded to shoot them down. Or you could do that here, and I could just post it over there on behalf of you, because Era is extremely restrictive about who comes over to post. No personal emails or anything, no, you gotta submit, say, a school email (I used the email that my elementary school gave us) or workplace email.

The main advantage that Era has over the other ones listed is that games discussion is both really central (Reddit is mostly just for news, and truegaming isn't amazingly big), really active (I honestly underestimated how quickly you would get responses), and the answers to questions generally tend to be 0.0005% less dumb.

Reddit is best when it comes to game news, and Era is best (A very, very, very low bar to clear, by the way) for centralized discussion and questions.

And wow, this post got really out of hand.

Ah, that makes sense! No worries man, ERA being ERA. I've never really went into that place because to me it felt like a lot of walls not open for discussion. You have any threads that are of quality? Like game discussion etc. I'd love to read them, might push me over the edge to actually make an account there.

I'm very interested in this comment however "I tried to read the article but the header keeps hovering over the article so nope". Not sure what's going on there.

In other news, I'm really surprised by just how huge the reaction is, two pages worth of replies, not in my wildest dreams would I get that on Reddit (at least not without setting the site on fire with hate).

If you can, perhaps link the NG1 anniversary docu I made, or the NG2 article series (NGII, NGIIMM, NGS2). I think those are pretty high quality and maybe a bit more something they'd be open to. And cheers for trying to spread the love, appreciate it :)

ERA man. I only lurk on the site. In almost every thread you will see a few people who know what the hell they are talking about, most of it is garbage. I only use it for news, as there will be a thread up asap for anything big, and I don't need to visit actual trash gaming sites.

I like this post from a supposed verified artist at EA star wars:

"I played it when it came out, got halfway through ... didnt really like it. Played it from the beginning last year ... and beat it, along with 2 and 3 in preparation for the "reboot" and I can say I thoroughly disliked it. Comparisons to its contemporaries like DMC or Ninja Gaiden dont do it any favors either."

1. People like this are the reason that star wars game will be boring trash, I'm calling it now haha.

2. Like how?! wtf my mind. This is such a horribly bad take it blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf game they were even playing. I can only assume his skill level at action games was sooo low that any difficulty at gets immediately filed to the "bad game design" part of his egotistical brain.

It's not that they just read the headlines and jumped to conclusions, the issue is much deeper rooted. Society today has mostly lost the ability to critically think. Art is either bad or good. If they don't understand how to properly play a game, instead of taking the time to learn it, or own up to the fact that it isn't for you, but still high quality, it is just dismissed as bad.
I see this a lot with discussion of movies, which died with Ebert IMO.

I think the one that bugged me the most was "i'm not talking about the default setting. i'm talking about the hardest difficulty, and i'm saying that it was too simple to "solve" to make almost every encounter nearly trivial -- and i'm not talking about a specific weapon, or a specific combo, i'm referring to the utmost basic defensive option that is always available, is a core function of the battle system, and is a single button press away. it's not about forcing to get good or not, it's that it's too easy, and too basic to get good at it."

They're talking about how easy it supposedly is to beat God of War on Very Hard by just constantly blocking, and how you don't need to get good.

Ugh.

For what it's worth though, your Dante's Inferno article didn't go over terribly, although no one really had much to add.

The one from the artist is a tad scary, but he is just an artist, not like he's the director or gameplay main designer. I'm still very worried about the upcoming jedi game though, Stig is behind the wheel which makes me slightly confident it will be of good quality, but it just looks and feels like such a step back mechanically to The Force Unleashed.

For gaming news I follow Nibbel on Twitter, guy just posts unbiased info.

But yeah a lot of the talk there really comes from people wanting the game to play in a certain way. Same in regards to the blocking. I really liked the way SBK noted it in the article: "play smarter, not harder".

Art discussion really is starting to become difficult to do, especially with all the attached narratives. We had a class in art-critique at the academy and it was very insightful for me, how to preceive art and look beyond the "I don't like it" or "I like it". Analyse the why, separate objective from subjective. Think in solutions etc. What was their original vision behind it, why did they do this?

I hated God of War initially and probably would've joined the group had times been different, and I'd probably have some good arguments in my favour knowing what an ass I can be in those regards haha. But having an open mind really helped. As well as some good players to edge me in the right direction.

@TheFirmament1

Honestly man, I really appreciate it, seriously. The site tends to just get regular viewings of about a 100 people a day (a number which I'm very proud of, considering it is so niche). Now just look at this here, these are the views the site got this month. Guess which day you linked the articles? Again, appreciate it a lot, spreading the love like this!

@Royta/Raeng

No worries. I really like your site, and I'm almost certainly gonna keep posting them around, regardless of the expected feedback.

@Royta

As for good discussion threads? Hmm... Off the top of my head, my God of War critique started off with a pretty messy discussion, but then some people actually decided to try and make a case for why certain decisions were the way they were. I completely disagreed with most of them, but you know, it was at least discussion of some kind, regardless of how informed it was.

This thread about your top 25 games of all time, but also with a quick analysis of your list (Like what types of games, whether they're western-made or not, etc) was pretty interesting. Not amazingly in-depth, but it did give some perspective.

This thread about Tomb Raider, and how it kinda went off track, and what's needed was pretty good too, although I'm not a big fan of Tomb Raider.

That's what I can think of immediately. But other than that, it was mostly just standard gaming forum fare. Answering questions, flaming, insults, political arguments, circlejerks... Stuff that you're pretty familiar with on GameFAQs.

Cheers for the links, I gave a few of them a look and decided to make an account. I wanted to send you a message but you made your profile private haha! Enfin, I'll see how I'll like my time there. Gamefaqs is to dear to my heart haha!

Jesus Christ. Don't let them know it's you though, I mean you follow ReERAtakes on Twitter. That alone might make you a " problematic" target.
And May God be with you.

Eh, if they do, who cares!

Well these great folks are known for doxing people. So be careful at least.

I will! Thanks for the concern :)

I'm gonna keep track of how long you last over there. Mods are always glaring over everyone's shoulder.

Also, here's a suggestion: Stay away from political threads. When I say political thread, I mean stuff like... Video game politics that are inevitably going to be partisan. E.G loli or representation related stuff.

I'm genuinely saying this for your own good. It always descends into a clusterfuck, and ends up with people getting banned.

And not to defend Witchhunting Zeal, but... ResetEra didn't dox the CDPR employee. They just threw a link to his twitter, which would still be witchhunting, and pretty bad at that.

I don’t know what’s going on in this thread but...I beat the translator on my NUR. Pretty confident I can do the rest of the game now.

TheFirmament1 wrote:
And not to defend Witchhunting Zeal, but... ResetEra didn't dox the CDPR employee. They just threw a link to his twitter, which would still be witchhunting, and pretty bad at that.

I see. I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the info, but it's better to be safe than sorry imo.

Damn @Infinity_Divide! Great job! What was your tactic?

@TheFirmament1, no worries, I knokw to stay clear of those. If I want to troll I'll stick to Gamefaqs or Twitter.