Portal 2/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Villain: The post-credits scene where Wheatley, floating in space at the end, regrets his betrayal of Chell. It's particularly touching that even though he's lost in space with the Space Core ranting in his ear forever, this guilt is what is really bothering him.
• Alternate Character Interpretation
  • GLaDOS: Did she really delete part or all of Caroline? If she did, was it just a matter of deleting Caroline's memories, or did she murder an actual consciousness? Or was it not a murder but a Mercy Kill?
    • Does she see Chell as her lover, daughter, friend, enemy, or some combination of the above?
    • How much of her crazy do we attribute to the mainframe, the personality cores, the trauma of Caroline's uploading, and/or Caroline's original personality (after all, she didn't seem to mind Cave's Comedic Sociopathy...)?
    • How separate are GLaDOS and Caroline, anyway? When she speaks of Caroline as a separate person, is she just trying to distance herself from emotions she'd rather not have, or is there more to it? Is it even a meaningful question now that we know her personality cores are fully sentient on their own? If they're truly separate, is that something that developed over time as GLaDOS lost her memories and had personality cores added on, or were they always two people? Did GLaDOS have a fully sentient mind of her own even before Caroline was shoved into it? If Caroline's always been a separate person, was she dormant all this time, or conscious but unable to communicate?
    • Oh, and is PotatOS really unable to lie? If it was true when she said it, is she still unable to lie after the extra jolt from the portal gun?
    • When, at the end, GLaDOS says "And killing you? Is hard.", is that because she's grown emotionally attached to Chell, or is just admitting that Chell is impossible to kill?
  • Wheatley: As with GLaDOS, how much of his Face Heel Turn do we attribute to the mainframe's influence? Did he really expect Chell to be killed in his escape all along, as he says in the final boss fight?
• And the Fandom Rejoiced:
  • Portal 2.
  • And again when they announced the version for PS3.
  • I'm sorry, Valve, but did you just say that J.K. Simmons will be the voice of Cave Johnson?!
  • And again when they changed their mind on Chell's outfit for Portal 2. She'll be wearing this as opposed to what they were originally planning her new look to be.
  • And yet again when Valve finally released a trailer where we actually see Chell.
  • They haven't finished yet - Valve announced free DLC for Portal 2, due sometime this summer. Which, in Valve Time, is the end of September. Maybe.
    • First they said "summer", then they said "mid-September"... and now they say October 4th. Okay, so it's a bit late through Valve Time, but at least we have a date now!
  • And now they've publicly released a full Portal 2 SDK for PC players. And The Modders Rejoiced.
    • Aaaactually, it's just the mapping tools and model viewer. Sorry! Oh, and Face Poser.
    • For those who don't have the leet skeelz required to use Hammer, a heavily simplified level editor is being released with the next update, complete with a more streamlined upload system so you don't have to keep downloading maps off the internet, plugging them into your maps folder, and hoping everything works. Amateur map makers rejoice!
      • We have a date now. May 8th, the Perpetual Testing Initiative begins.
  • Portal 2 soundtrack volume 1 released on May 25, 2011.. And if that weren't enough, there's going to be 3 full soundtrack volumes, and with 22 tracks already on Volume 1 alone, we can be sure to have plenty of music to test by.
  • Even more rejoicing involved when Valve stated they're going to release more Portal 2 comics and videos.
  • Rejoicing continued when Valve announced and released soundtrack volume 2 on July 1st, 2011. (There are also 8 sound effects as ringtones.)
  • After a Schedule Slip, Volume 3 was released on Sept. 30, 2011, PLUS a definite release date on the FREE DLC, PLUS a new comic.
    • Hang on Valve, did you seriously put extended versions of "Reconstructing Science" and "Cara Mia" in that Volume?!
• Base Breaker: Hasn't exactly sparked too big of a Flame War over it (yet), but there is definitely a Broken Base regarding Wheatley's voice. Was Valve wrong to replace Richard Lord, or did they make a good choice hiring Stephen Merchant?
  • It is worth noting that Richard Lord was never supposed to be Wheatley's voice actor. Richard Lord is a programmer for Valve, and did the voice as a stand-in for the E3 demonstration. When Wheatley turned out to be so popular during the demo, Valve went out to get big-name Stephen Merchant.
  • The Robot Enrichment DLC. Essentially a bunch of completely non-essential skins, animations and Team Fortress 2 hats, just like Team Fortress 2. (The similarity was even noted by the TF2 team, who said they snuck in and blatantly copy pasted hats into the game against the Portal team's wishes.) And just like Team Fortress 2, people raged. The Robot Enrichment customisation is largely responsible for the user ratings on Metacritic being (out of 10), 6.5 on on Xbox, 5.2 on Playstation, and 5.8 on PC, compared to critic ratings of (out of 100) of 94, 96 and 96 respectively. (It should probably be noted that, just like the Mann Co. Store, the items are completely optional — you can unlock one flag and one hat through achievements, and none of the DLC has any effect on gameplay besides looking pretty.)
  • The Sixense DLC for the Razer Hydra. It's 10 extra maps with additional abilities for the portal gun that you need to buy a $140 motion sensing controller for. The extra forty is for a copy of Portal 2, and the controller thus far only comes as a bundle that can only be bought online. So if you already own a copy, you have to buy it again for some added motion controls. To say the fandom has gone ballistic would be an understatement. This isn't helped by the fact that there was miscommunication that led to people thinking this was the promised summer DLC, when it wasn't produced by Valve.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment: The turret orchestra that plays during Chell's ascent to the surface at the end of Portal 2. There is some minor foreshadowing, but it's out of the way. In Chamber 16, prior to Wheatley helping you escape, there's a vent guarded by a turret which leads to four turrets practicing. You can come up with some justifications - the lyrics seem to suggest it's GLaDOS and/or the turrets and/or Aperture as a whole bidding a fond farewell to Chell, who grew up there - but that doesn't make it much less bizarre.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Cara Mia Addio as the song is called is Italian for "farewell my dear"
• Bittersweet Ending: Chell finally escapes from the facility, but there's no one in sight and she only has the clothes on her back. If you think about it with that in mind, returning the Companion Cube at the end seems like a very cruel parting shot from GLaDOS, essentially saying "this is all the company you'll get from now on." It seems clear that the Combine were defeated, but as to the state of the world beyond that, who knows?
  • Wheatley is lost, alone and stranded in space. All he wants now is to take it all back and apologize. He was such a lovable character, too.
• Broken Base: There are two real camps of Portal 2 fans, those who find it to be an excellent game and often say it's one of the best games ever, and those who think it's far too short and the focus on Co-op and relative ease of puzzles makes it simplistic. The former are decried as newbies to the Portal franchise who don't understand what made the first game great and the latter are decried as "Stop Having Fun!" Guys who can't enjoy the story.
• Cargo Ship:
  • Chell/Wheatley is growing increasingly popular. Most of the fics based off of it either involve Wheatley sometime After the End, desperate to apologize to Chell for what he did and suddenly finding a means to do so, or Human!Wheatley, typically based off of Stephen Merchant.
  • The GLaDOS/Chell 'ship (which was already popular after the first game) is still going strong here.
  • The cores are often shipped with each other. Space Core/Curiosity Core ("Spaciosity") or its rival Fact Core/Curiosity Core ("Factiosity") have become quite popular, as has Fact Core/Adventure Core ("Factventure").
• Crazy Awesome: Wheatley performing a manual override on the wall? GLaDOS being turned into a potato? Portaling to the MOON to beat the final boss? The entire game qualifies.
  • Cave Johnson, we're done here.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Merits its own separate page.
• Disappointing Last Level: Played straight with Aperture Science of the Past section (chapters 6 & 7), then later averted HARD with the excellently designed final two chapters (i.e., Wheatley Science). After five chapters of solid plot/gameplay progression in Aperture Science, the Disc One Final Boss twist comes about and suddenly throws you into the Aperture Science of the Past section. The testing chambers are still well made, but transitioning from test to test in wide open, insipidly designed industrial environments is frustrating compared to Aperture's simplistic elevators. Like zooming into the tiny corners of each level to find tiny, easy-to-miss portal tiles, just to reach another test chamber? You'll love this part. Cave Johnson's hilarious audio recordings make these portions somewhat bearable, but hardly excuses the poorly implemented exploration. Getting back to Aperture after the last doozy of a section is a very welcome relief, and the last two chapters are arguably the game's best. Subjective though, since there are players who enjoyed the Aperture Science of the Past chapters.
  • Indeed, some of the hardest-to-figure-out puzzles are the ones between tests.
    • Which, in true YMMV form, made some players yearn to go back to old aperture after returning to new. That's where the challenge is!
• Discredited Meme: Valve said that they don't include cake in Portal 2 since they got tired of The Cake Is a Lie jokes.
  • There's still one reference to it though: GLaDOS tricks you with a door marked as her central control and cake factory.
  • One of Doug Rattmann's murals at the beginning of the game also shows GLaDOS holding cake out to you.
• Draco in Leather Pants: If this Let's Play is worth noting, Wheatley from Portal 2 is on his way to becoming this.
  • The player was probably unspoiled for the game and thus unaware that Wheatley was going to become the bad guy before she got attached to him.
• Dude, Not Funny: Apparently a parent finds the adoption jokes deeply insulting to his adopted daughter.
  • MSTed here.
• Ear Worm:
  • "Want You Gone" is every bit as bad as Still Alive.
    • The only way it could be worse is if the Sniper suddenly decided to do a duet while playing banjo or something. Oh, wait...
  • "Cara Mia" (Turret Opera)
  • Exile Vilify is haunting, beautiful, impossible to get out of your head, and apparently hand made by The National just for Portal 2.
  • It is not advised to be in Chamber 20 to hear the Variable Mix of thermal discouragement beams activating buttons for too long or else an ambient music is in one's head.
  • Rick's "theme song" that he comes up with.
  • Robots FTW, the Coop credits song
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The Space Personality Core seems to be turning into this. Imageboards and Youtube comments seem to be inundated with screams of SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
• Even Better Sequel: In the first game, the most emotional sequence besides the boss battle is dropping a box down a hole. In Portal 2? We've got so many characters introduced and developed, that it's practically a different world entirely.
  • On the other hand, They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Portal 1 was fundamentally a puzzle game with a very good premise and plot. Portal 2 is a story game with puzzle elements.
• Fan Dumb: Immediately after the game's release, its Metacritic score was bombed by people complaining about its length and the completely aesthetic in-game store.
  • It's possible that some of this was Hype Backlash due to the relatively minor impact of the Potato Sack & the ARG.
• Fan Haters: Portal 2 being the memetic game it is, it's no surprise that people have begun posting quotes from each character on videos featuring the actors in the game (i.e. Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons), much to the annoyance of people who haven't played the game.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Oracle Turret for the "different" turret you can save from the Redemption Line, since everything it says is Foreshadowing, though this comes from the developers.
  • GLaDOS is known as PotatOS when in her potato form, a name that also shows up in the developer commentary.
  • Similar to how the Adventure Core claims to be named "Rick," some the fandom has begun to call the Fact Sphere "Craig," based on the portion of his monologue where he claims that Craig is the best name, according to the world's most advanced algorithms.
• Fountain of Memes: Cave Johnson is becoming one.
  • SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
• Game Breaker: There's a minor example for those with the Razer Hydra motion controller. The extra features added for Sixense's map pack work in the main campaign, though not in co-op. While the tests are designed in such a way that you usually can't reach the buttons unless you can walk to them in the first place, and the gel sections generally don't need precision, the ability to place cubes at a distance does make your job somewhat easier. It also makes placing the cores on Wheatley a breeze, since your don't have to jump on the Repulsion Gel. Conversely, Thermal Discouragement Beams can be a lot harder to aim.
  • With the addition of the Challenge maps in the DLC, the Hydra has become a true gamebreaker. With the ability to move portals and boxes, it's possible to beat courses with less portals than should be possible (without outright cheating).
• Genius Bonus: The "lemons" rant is funnier when you realize citrus fruit oils are, in fact, highly flammable.
• Good Bad Bug: A design oversight in the first half of co-op chamber 5-5 allows you remove the cube from there and take it with you to the second half, completely bypassing that portion of the test.
• He Really Can Act: Stephen Merchant has been getting some of the biggest kudos of his acting career for his performance as Wheatley; everyone expected his character to be a one-trick pony but, in typical Valve grand fashion, he shattered everyone's expectations. Merchant himself has described playing Wheatley as some of the most challenging and exhausting work he's ever done, and initially had no interest in doing it again, but has admitted that all the acclaim the game has received has softened his stance on that.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Stephen Merchant plays a character who happens to be a round-headed buffoon. One does wonder if the creators of Portal 2 got him on board for this reason...
  • Karl Pilkington is the round-headed buffoon, not Stephen Merchant.
  • One of the taunt Wheatley gives for making you jump down the pit is the supposed pony farm he has down there. If only Valve knew of a certain Periphery Demographic of a certain cartoon show that suddenly was popular about the time of the game's release...
• It's Short, So It Sucks: Portal 2 was said in prerelease materials to have a 10 hour single player and 10 hour co-op mode. In the game proper, each mode can be beat in somewhat less than that.
• Jerkass Woobie
  • Cave Johnson. We get to listen to him descend into bitterness and despair shortly before his death.
  • Wheatley, that lovable idiot, floating in space potentially forever. He says he's sorry, and how much of it was ever really his fault?
  • GLaDOS. Apparently spent the time between games reliving her own destruction over and over and over again, if you believe her own report. Has her head painfully ripped off her body while she screams in horror. Attached to a potato battery purely as humiliation. Has to listen to someone she knows to be a complete moron gloat about his victory over her and watch him ruin her beloved facility. Oh, and we find out how maddening the influence of the personality cores and the mainframe must have been all this time. And that's without even getting into the whole Caroline backstory, which is pretty sad and traumatic no matter how you interpret the details.
• Karma Houdini: At the end of the game, not only is GLaDOS still "alive" and as unhindered as when the first Portal started, but, as of the co-op ending, she has MORE human tor-er, test subjects. Then again, as previously mentioned she might also have spent the time between games reliving her own death, repeatedly. So even if she managed to kill 100,000 people, she's also more than paid for that crime with the number of deaths she was made to suffer herself. Also, she was a potato at Chell's mercy which is probably her idea of Hell.
• Les Yay: The Foe Yay is obvious and lampshaded; see Yandere, below. Chell is female, and GLaDOS at least sounds that way.
• Memetic Badass: The Adventure Core. Also something of a Memetic Sex God, due to his claims of having a black belt in everything, including Bedroom. In fandom, he's typically portrayed as being an Anything That Moves guy, being too confident in his own masculinity to really give a shit about the gender of the other.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Just about everything the Space Sphere says, especially "SPAAAAAAAAACE".
  • Cave Johnson's When Life Gives You Lemons rant.
  • "He says what we're all thinking!"
  • "They told me that if I made up any more of these memes, I WOULD DIE!"
  • "Gla-tato," "Potat-OS" and its variants seem to be worming their way into this category as well.
• Misaimed Marketing: The advertising, tie ins, and just about everything heavily tout Co-op, yet what is this huge page about? Not to mention according to only about half of PC Portal 2 players even start co-op, and only a fourth finish.
• Needs More Love: Not this game, but the group of indie games being promoted as part of Valve's marketing campaign to get Portal 2 released early. Didn't result in a significantly early release (about ten hours for Steam download), but it definitely succeeded in getting those games some love.
• Newer Than They Think: The "Cara Mia" Turret Opera, though you might think it was some old aria the developers borrowed for the sake of a big finish, was actually written for the game by composer Mike Morasky. Ellen McLain (a trained opera singer) used her knowledge of Italian to come up with the lyrics herself.
• Robo Ship: The two cooperative mode robots were being shipped together by fan-artists before we ever saw videos of them. Images like this helped.
• Scrubs/"Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Admittedly, it's fun to mess around with cheats every once in a while, but then you have a staggering amount of Jerkasses who will only play co-op with cheats enabled and deride anyone who doesn't want to use them.
• Spoiler: Valve and Steam Forums took great measures to remove spoilers of Portal 2 when it got leaked, removing comments and persons. Shame said spoilers can't be untroped from this site...
• The Tetris Effect: This (NSFW) article at Cracked sums it up rather nicely.
• That One Achievement: "Professor Portal", which requires you to play through the co-op Calibration Course with a friend (as in an invited one) who has never played before, is the bane of everyone looking for 100% completion. There are threads on every dedicated forum searching for people who qualify so others can unlock the achievement. It has the third lowest completion percentage of all achievements, trailing behind "Friends List With Benefits" (hug three friends) and "Still Alive" (complete Course 4 without either player dying).
  • Speaking of which, "Still Alive" is rather difficult to pull off, even with two players that communicate well. Most of the chambers punish screw-ups with death, forcing you to go back to the first chamber and start again. The final chamber is all that and more, since it's filled with turrets, spikes, and pits.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: They did an incredible job of giving Wheatley so many facial expressions--and he's just a robotic eyeball!
  • Hardly surprising it's such a good job, though- the character animator for Wheatley when he's a core is none other than Karen Prell, a Muppeteer and the performer and voice behind Red Fraggle.
  • The destruction of your "hotel room" in the opening. Check out the commentary bubble after the scene and see just how much work was put into the one sequence; nearly nine months' worth of effort.
• Ugly Cute: On the one hand, it's an old potato. On the other hand, DAWWWW GLaDOS IS SO SMALL LOOK AT HER
• The Woobie:
  • It's hard not to feel bad for those Frankenturrets. Especially when they look at you with big eyes, shivering after you picked them up.
  • The defective turrets. They're blind, bulletless, casing-less, and fully aware they're defective. You also have to feel kind of sorry for the functional turrets that get rejected, shouting, "I did everything you asssskeddd" as they get incinerated.
  • The "Space" Core. All it wants is to go to space. And it gets its wish!
    • But if you listen to some of the deleted audio files...

Space Core: Space. Space. Too big. Wanna go home.

• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Wheatley.
  • GLaDOS too, actually.
• Yandere: Wheatley continues this trend in the final boss fight. He pretty much accuses Chell of dumping him and running off with GLaDOS.