Mafia II/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Aside from the licensed tracks, the actual score is excellent: sometimes pulse-pounding, and sometimes incredibly sad and haunting. Try the main theme, or the pause theme, which sounds like it was composed by Thomas Newman. The pause theme, in particular, sounded like as if it came off the Series of Unfortunate Events soundtrack, as it was reminiscent of "The Baudelaire Orphans".
    • The licensed tracks are pretty good though, particularly the scripted ones (see Suspiciously Appropo Music)
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Jimmy, the DLC's protagonist, is quite popular.
  • Excuse Plot: Jimmy's Vendetta's plot is exactly what it says on the tin.
  • He's Just Hiding: At the end of the game, it's heavily implied that Joe is killed. Of course, since we don't actually see the deed itself, a lot of people are convinced that Joe survives the events of the game, even though it was pretty clear that those guys weren't exactly taking him out for a nice night on the town.
    • However, Joe has proven himself both durable and able to win a fight, and considering that there were only two guys with him in the other car (one was the driver and one sat next to Joe), one could imagine that he could incapitate both fairly easy. At least he was armed when he entered the car...
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: An early mission where you have to stack crates in the back of a truck for a lousy 10 bucks. The mission ends with you saying screw it and informing your boss that you come for a better job. The kicker? Now you're sent out the office to collect cash from all of the employees in the warehouse, collecting 10 dollars from each. In other words: would you've completed the job you got offered first, you would've spent a lot of time earning only 10 bucks, only to lose it immediately.
  • Hype Backlash: While the game has received generally positive reviews, many have criticized it for its relatively short length (around 10 hours) and lack of things to do outside of missions, as compared to other sandbox games (the fact that a lot of features were Dummied Out didn't really help). So a lot of people, who were expecting something along the lines of Grand Theft Auto Rocks The 1950s, were let down.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks
  • Narm: Settle down Vito, we know your hyped up on adrenaline, but shut up about the barber already.
    • Nearly everything Jimmy says in the DLC.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Henry being brutally murdered by the Chinese... who are using meat cleavers. The worst part is hearing Henry, who has spent the game up to this point cool and in control, screaming and crying in agony.
    • The slaughterhouse in the mission "Ball and Beans" is quite disturbing, too - especially since you can hear pigs squealing as they are slaughtered.
  • Nintendo Hard: The Bomb Under the Seat mission in Joe's Adventures, to be specific. Expect a mother lode of irate players who bashed 2K for putting up an unbearable mission that involves driving a car to a specific location, all while under time pressure, traffic, winding roads and with the threat of a bomb exploding if you go too slow.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: Many fans of the original Mafia dislike the game particularly because very few of the original staff were on its devteam, and most of them left during production.
  • Porting Disaster: Take 2 has apologized for making the PlayStation 3 version of Mafia II the least feature rich version, compared to the PC (which is the fullest experience) and Xbox 360 versions.
  • Tear Jerker: When Vito finds out that his mother has died - while he's in prison, no less, and Marty's death - especially Joe's reaction.
    • Killing Tommy Angelo from the first game, Henry dying horribly at the hands of the Chinese (because he was feeding info to the Feds - putting him in a Tommy Angelo situation), and Joe likely getting killed at the end.
    • The pause screen music.
  • That One Level: The dockworker strike level. Enjoy the insanely bad checkpoints.
    • "Enemy of the State". You start off doing a stealth mission, which ends badly regardless of what you do. The entrance is swarming with cops and you have to escape the way you came in from, out of a bathroom window, likely with cops shooting at you the whole while. Wanted, you have to evade more police and get back to Henry. Oh, but what's this?! The tickets you stole expire at midnight! Hurry and deposit them at gas stations before the time limit ends. Said time limit continues even as your character has an unskippable conversation with the attendants. They won't talk to you if you are wanted, which you probably will be because you have to speed if you want to make it. Finally, as icing on the cake, you can't kill anyone or you forfeit a bonus.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Despite the game being more of a cautionary tale and deconstruction of the mobster lifestyle with Vito's life going to a low point around the end of the game, Sonia Alfano, an European Parliament member and antimafia activist, took umbrage at the game as it reminded her too much about her father's death in the hands of Sicilian mobsters in 1993, and called for the game to be banned, stating "We can't allow this to happen, our wounds are still too fresh" and accusing the publishers of trivialising the Cosa Nostra, "a reality of death and destruction, into a thrilling and hands-on virtual pastime." Similar concerns were expressed by the Italian-American service organisation Unico National who accused the game of anti-Italian racism. (This is similar to how actual mafia groups protested against the release of The Godfather, only for them to yield when the producers compromised with said groups.) Take-Two responded quickly to said issues, maintaining that they were no different from other mafia fiction such as Goodfellas.
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