I just don't like grabbing all of these small moments in to judge how powerful a character is, I can sometimes excuse/forgive this happening on Battle boarding but for a character like Kratos it feels wrong.

For every moment of Kratos not being able to cut a tree, there's 20 more examples of stuff like him knocking out giant monsters or flipping a temple. A big appeal of the series is playing as an insanely powerful dude, a lot of cutscenes focusing to show his huge power.

It's ironic, because usually when someone complains about a character being wanked I've seen them say "no one who just plays the games would think he is at this level", and here that same thing is happening, no one would play God Of War and think he is on the same level as fucking Batman.