Rez said:
re: why I like it more
The level design 'gimmicks' in God 2 just worked better for me. Simple things like a sudden change of colour palette, a totally new area to explore, a sudden-death trap area, the falling bridge sequence, the flying sections, the fall down the canyon with Icarus, time-travel mirror bits, the boss-fights and on and on and on. Each part of God 2 just worked for me in a way that felt totally unforced and well-thought out, whereas God 3, probably as a result of my exposure to everything that's come out between God 2 and 3, feels much more by the numbers. Uninspired, if you'd like. I wish post history search is on, because I'm sure I've articulated myself better on this discussion in the past, but ah well.
Well I disagree on a lot of what you said, except that GOW2 has more natural progression and pacing, although on that note personally GOW1 is still the best
Boss fights for example. I thought overall that they were really weak in GOW2(I even prefer the three in the first game to the 10 or whatever there are in the sequel), and GOW3 blows it the fuck away.
Or the flying sections, which for me are not that great and much prefer the Icarus Lift sections of GOW3.
Or the Icarus "fight", awesome then, but easily bested now by a lot of the craziness displayed in GOW3, like the Poseidon kill-cam.
And the time travel mirrors crap I hated in GOW2, actually I kind of disliked the plot in that game, GOW2 is responsible for turning Kratos into a mindless REVENGE! REVEEEEENGE! retard. In GOW1 he somewhat had depth and character development...GOW3 had to do the best it could with the idiocy left by GOW2, even going as far as retconning stuff(which I'm glad it did, always hated the retarded use of Pandora's Box in GOW1) to give back Kratos some of the depth that was sucked out.
In terms of level design and stuff I'm of the belief that the ideas they had for GOW3 were just too much for the team at the time and had to scale back a lot/leave a bunch of stuff n the table. Just looking at the first trailer there are things that are gone or greatly altered in the final game, Gaia seems a lot smaller(it seemed like she had a fully-fledged forest on her, or at least that a decent chunk of the game took place on her), the idea of the titans being chained is gone(and Kratos having to break those chains), Kratos wrestling with a cyclops while a titan is moving all over the place was only used once in the game and not quite as awesome as it looked then, in any case they streamlined that greatly. I think the development of the technology took too much time.
I can understand why people prefer the stages in GOW2, but for me none of that is enough to offset the now extremely simplistic and dated combat. Not only is it simplistic, but like I said on anything beyond normal difficulty the game forces you to not mix shit up. Square-Square-Triangle
is actually the best way to get through the game. You try different shit and you're punished with death. And that shit let me tell ya gets tired.

As someone who has played GOW2 a couple of times through, it's just not really fun to play anymore.