YMMV / God of War: Ghost of Sparta

• Demonic Spiders: The Keres Wraiths are perhaps the worst of them all. Like the wraiths in II and III, they sink into the ground when they land after a knockback. But when they leap out of the ground, and should they catch Kratos, instead of merely hitting you, it forces you into an action sequence where you take continual damage until you manage to get it off. This wouldn't be too annoying on its own, except the lunge is ridiculously fast, tracks you, and ignores blocks and invincibility frames.
• Good Bad Bugs: Arms of Sparta comes with a pleasant exploit: after you throw a spear in the air, raise the block, and then quickly jump right after the shield starts glowing red. Then throw the spear again, and repeat the process ad infinitum. If you do everything correctly, you'll be able to make much more than two jumps at once, raising Kratos higher and higher. This has many obvious speedrunning applications, but the real reason the bug is so notable is because it can be used to skip some of the hardest fights in the entire game, all without requiring too much effort from the player.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Antony Del Rio would voice another character in a Greek-inspired handheld game about Gods. One who also wields dual blades, even.
• I Knew It!: Many fans guessed that the grave digger from the original game was Zeus. The revelation in Ghost of Sparta is quite anticlimatic: you just have to select the grave digger in arena mode, and his true self is revealed instantly.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In Spartan and God difficulties, if you die more than 4 times in the same point, the amount of heatlh you'll have when you respawn will be just 100 (the health you have at the beginning). Not a problem during the first half, but is definitely problematic in the second half when you can lose half of your health if you picked up all of the Gorgon eyes, making some battles like against the Geryons harder than it should. Players sometimes debate if this is an actual punishment mechanic or just a glitch.
• That One Level:
  • The Atlantis fight against Geryons and Harpies is infamous because of its wave structure that punishes reckless players. Right at the start of the battle, you are put against four of the latter. Sounds like an easy sweep, but the catch is that the 2nd and 4th Harpies each spawn a Geryon once you kill them. So if you rush to clear them all at once, you will have to deal with two massive tanks who do exclusively non-blockable attacks, one of which is landed after teleporting. And then once you kill one of the Geryons, it will spawn another one just to continue punishing you. The intended trick for the battle is to keep the 4th Harpy alive, and weave between her attacks while trying to burst 2 out of 3 Geryons one-by-one. But even that can prove to be futile, as there's a good chance you will accidentally kill the pest, or get caught into her QTE-enabling attack which kills the Harpy once it's finished, meaning you will have to fight two Geryons at once anyway.
  • The last normal battle in the Temple of Thanatos takes place in a small arena, and puts you against Keres Wraiths and Armored Cyclopes. The battle would probably not be that difficult had it not for the brass juggernaut. Since Armored Cyclops has multiple attacks that ignore blocks, you have to try to dodge them in the little space you are given, while also taking Keres Wraiths' movement tracking ranged attacks into account. And then there's the fact that you have to use Thera's Bane to break the Cyclops' armor: since TB's explosions knock down Wraiths, there's a good chance you will have to constantly deal with their lunges. Your best bet is to first take all Wraiths out with the spear throw of Arms of Sparta, but even that is not as easy to do as it sounds.

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