Tips

O, Mashing?

There are numerous times in the game where you’re going to have to mash away (tap rapidly) on the O button. A simple example of this is when you open a large door; you have to press O fairly quickly to simulate Kratos flexing his muscles and lifting the door.

When you have to deal with O-mashing, it helps to use your index finger.

Well, O-mashing can be complicated if you actually use your thumb to do it; it’s difficult to move the thumb up and down rapidly enough to complete some of the more strenuous mashing challenges. So, if you’re having a hard time with any of the O-mashing sequences, it usually helps to remove your thumb from the button and use your index finger instead. The movement required to move the index finger up and down is much smaller than it is for the thumb, so doing this can help you get more button presses in more quickly.

Also note that for actions that require you to grab something with the R1 button, then mash O (like the aforementioned doors), you can usually let go of the R1 button after you’ve grabbed your target and solely concentrate on tapping O.

Button Selection Minigames

There are plenty (plenty!) of button-pressing minigames in God of War II. You know what we’re talking about - those minigames where you have to hit a certain face button after it pops up on the screen. If you hit the button correctly, you’ll move on to the next part of the animation; if you miss, you’ll usually wind up having to start the whole thing over, if not take a lot of damage from the opponent that you’re dealing with.

The button games are easy in the beginning, but will get progressively harder as time goes on.

If you’re not good at these minigames, then you’re going to have a hell of a time getting through God of War II. One thing we found that helped us during the more difficult minigames was to plant our thumb in the small flat area in the middle of the buttons in between individual button presses, so that it’s actually touching the controller instead of floating over the buttons. There can be a tendency to attempt to cut down on the time it takes to hit the next button by letting your finger hover over one, generally the one you guess will come up next. If you plant the thumb in the center of the buttons, though, you’ll be close enough to reach all of the buttons when the prompt comes up, and you’ll also hopefully avoid hitting the wrong button by accident. Your mileage may vary, but this technique helped us a fair amount, especially late in the game.

Evasive Maneuvers

Reprinted from Doug Radcliffe’s guide to God of War:

"You could rather easily argue that Kratos' roll maneuver is as important as any of his combo attacks. When an enemy is about to attack or if you're suddenly surrounded by foes, just flip the right-analog stick in a direction to roll and evade the enemy's attack.

Although it'll be primarily used to evade attack, it's important to use the roll to put some distance between you and any enemies nearby. The advantage of Kratos' Blade of Chaos is its long-range usefulness. As you near closer range, roll away using the right-analog stick and restart your combination attacks. If you're close, an enemy can strike and interrupt combo strings. A solid pattern would be to perform a combo that knocks down enemies, perform a multi-hit strike to damage the prone foe, and then roll away and repeat the sequence."

Abuse Your Throws

One of the best ways to increase your survivability in God of War is to attempt to use your throw mechanics as often as possible. Pressing O while near an enemy will cause you to grab them and perform a variety of throw effects on them, depending on the next button you press. The square button will typically throw them around bodily, while pressing O again will start mauling them at close range, and so on. (Note that a good number of enemies, especially later in the game, can't be thrown until you deal a certain amount of damage to them.)

Throwing and grappling your enemies makes good offensive and defensive sense.

This is important for one major reason: while you're throwing or grappling an opponent, you can't be hit by weapons or enemy attacks. (This is true of most throws, but throws that require you to button-mash the O button to grab hold of your foe, like summoners and some demonoids, will still be interruptable by damage.) In large groups of foes, you can often concentrate on throwing a single small opponent around until he dies, then repeat the process on the next small enemy until everyone's dead. This works especially well when large, unthrowable enemies, like cyclopes, are surrounded by low-level annoyances, like soldiers or imps. Concentrate on throwing the lower-level enemies around, since you'll be invulnerable while you do so, then deal with the bigger foes when you've cleared out the area. (Note that some fights will simply respawn in smaller enemies forever, though.)

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