When he goes to use his air lightning arrow attack, dodge backwards and use your bow and arrow on him. When hes down, quickly switch to your bear arms and use the heavy attack (triangle) to corner him and hammer him down a few times. Try to save your magic for the second stage. When the first QTE is done, he will go for more close combat attacks. Again, just jump and air dodge, then switch to bear arms. Attack him until your health is low, then use your magic bar until hes knocked down then hit the second QTE...

where the damn duplicates get spawned over and over and you have to hit gaia's heart to get life.

You 100% need to use the claws. They have the fastest repeat L1 + Square spin attack for gaias heart. You have to dodge like a motherfucker, constantly, you aint killing 5 dudes with 10+ hit health bars with zeus shooting light at you. The idea is to dodge and spam L1+O until gaias heart pulses, then spam L1 SQ to regain. This bitch takes about 20 minutes of solid repetitive play, so if you fuck up your gonna be raging, so just take it slow, repeat what works and dodge those clones.

He was whining about Pandora dying, yet it seems like he destroyed the world. Gods are dead, the world is in ruins, and he does not care, wonder if he had any long terms goals other than defeating the gods .
Also those fucking flying sequences were annoying. In some places if you hit one of the things, you will have no time to dodge the others and you just gonna hit every obstacle.

It looked like he was alive at the end, but who else is there to kill? He killed every major character of Greek mythology, would they bring in some other mythology, with Athena in charge?

zeus tells gaia that maybe she should have chose the other one to help her

going crazy over the power that Kratos had, and demanding it back. Could be that she was the "real" bad guy. Using Kratos to kill all the gods, and then extracting the power back and become the new ruler of Olympus. But of course saying she has done it by accident and she needs it back to restore the world.

yeah she definitely has her own agenda. Athena just uses Kratos to defeat the gods and take over the world for herself. I assume that the 'ascended' form that athena has now after her death will somehow figure into future games where you'll be killing a new kind of god

the clones? At some point he starts summoning loads of clones, and they all start shooting these lightnings. I always manage to replenish my health so that he can't, but I still die within seconds when 4 or 5 clones appear...

they die really fast, like..one hit takes them down, so some aoe magic would probably be best to get rid of them quickly once you got too many on your ass. can't really think of anything more specific I'm afraid. I don't remember them causing me too much trouble on hard

You basically just have to get through it one clone at a time and it's a bitch. He will keep on spawning them until more or less the end of the fight. I spent about an hour on this fight and sometimes it was upwards of 15 minutes per try. Anyway, I finally defeated him in 9 minutes using the nemesis whip because it seems to have great range and the magic attack can hit all of the clones at the same time which is very handy when you get swarmed with them. That combined with using the rage of sparta which I was able to recharge a couple of times through the course of the fight got me through it.

Also, it seems that the nemesis whip is the best weapon for getting health from the heart of Gaia. I could fill my health meter every time using it so just make sure that Zeus doesn't get to the health first and you'll be fine.

grapple the clones and dodge their attacks. they go down quick and then grapple zeus. he falls on every 2nd to 3rd hit when you grapple him so you can get in an extra lick or two. when he shits out a whole bunch of clones use the nemesis magic and while they are doing the neutron dance just concentrate on dodging any attacks and try to grapple the original zeus if you can make him out. that magic took care of most if not all of the clones when i used it. if there are any left afterwards, grapple the hell out of them. when the heart pulses, attack it and replenish health. this will also block zeus from going to it and he'll throw lighting in what seems like a temper tantrum for blocking him and you start over with the same pattern.

i spammed the hell out of zeus with the grapple attack yesterday and it worked really well. he actually quit spawning clones. i had to continue dodging the occasional lightning and punch thing he did from time to time though.