An Informal Critique of Hades 2, and Why it is Definitively Not Game of the Year
No preamble, we’re just jumping right into this (Spoilers for the entirety of the game follow)
General Issues
The dialogue and conversation structure. I had this same issue with the first Hades game, and that is the way in which nearly every single piece of dialogue is delivered to the player, through the form of single, static paragraphs that go back and forth between the main character (Melinoe, in this game) and whichever NPC is currently being spoken to. Human beings do not have turn-based conversations. They are messy. They talk over each other, interrupt one another, interject, so on and so forth. Without any of this, each conversation just feels so heavily scripted and unnatural. Obviously this applies on a case by case basis, but overall it is still one of my biggest problems with both Hades games and Supergiant’s writing style. It is just not the way you wish to convey dialogue, especially in a game that puts so much emphasis on story and character interactions. Those are the crutches of Hades 2. The game absolutely wants you to care about the story, get invested in the trials and tribulations of the characters and especially the player character of Melinoe.
Additionally, the dialogue takes an utter nosedive in quality post credits. Every single character just starts mindlessly repeating the same shit to the point it became a horror game where all the NPCs I grew to love and become attached to (mostly) were replaced with robots scripted to infinitely repeat procedurally generated dialogue (you beat Kronos?? You beat Typhon? You actually did it? You found the fates?? This is incredible, how did you - blah blah please sacrifice me at the alter immediately)
Characters and Relationships
I am still entirely unsure as to how the romantic relationships in this game function, on both an inner story level and game level. What in the world is going on in the crossroads? How did we go from Hades 1, which had great and unique explicit polyamory representation to whatever the hell is happening in Hades 2? The only thing I remember that comments on this is a brief exchange between Nemesis and Moros during early access where it basically just boiled down to them saying “we both have feelings for you Melinoe and we’re upset” to which Melinoe responds “okay.” It seems like this, amongst other things, were just plot points that were brought up and dropped as the game inevitably rushed to the 1.0 release (which, ultimately, is why the game feels as messy as it does. Why does it feel so horribly rushed? Somehow this is Hollow Knight’s fault. Do not ask for the specifics, but it is, I just know it.)
I actually quite love Icarus and Eris and the relationships that you can develop with them. They are far and away the most fleshed out and interesting options, especially Icarus, who actually has a deeper connection with Melinoe that develops over the course of the game. Their romance was by far the highlight for me when it came to this aspect of the game.
But, that is quite literally it when it comes to the disaster that was the romance system in this game, and this bleeds into another problem being the underwritten nature of some characters, especially Nemesis. She starts out really gruff, hating you, holding this heated rivalry and jealousy over your position! A classic setup, ripe with potential for juicy character moments and development! So how does it end? Um…well, it just does. Nemesis remains exactly the same throughout the entire course of the game, and you just randomly sleep together at the beginning of a random run and that’s it. Wow. Bravo Supergiant for this wonderful ”””””writing”””””” I am truly floored by your ability to interweave character relationships and dynamics to such a complex degree. It totally didn’t leave me wanting more, shrugging at my screen and belting out “that’s it?” multiple times per minute towards the end. Obviously no one wants an entire personality change. I quite liked Nemesis at the beginning! To have a character entirely switch personalities on a dime would be foolish, and extremely poor writing. Obviously Supergiant knew this and did not want to go overboard with Nemesis, playing it safe. As a writer, I understand. That would be quite audacious, to entirely flip-flop on a character in a moment, would it not? Haha…oh.
Kronos and the Ending
Here’s the big one, and ultimately the catalyst for me typing this in the first place. Recently Supergiant dropped a patch that I saw people on twitter lauding for “fixing the ending” and I took that with perhaps the most minuscule grain of salt there ever was and will be. Upon closer inspection of the actual patch notes and seeing what was actually changed, I discovered that it was a juicy, well-seasoned nothingburger as expected, the last dregs of a fandom huffing absurd amounts of copium. Guys, I get it. I too was in that position for a time, when I heard about the ending before reaching it. But it is time to wake up, I’m sorry. They fucked it, and no attempt by them to sweep it under the rug will help. I would make a comparison to trying to patch the hole in the Titanic while it’s sinking, but this is more akin to dumping buckets of lukewarm water on the iceberg to melt it despite the fact the ship hit and passed it several hours ago.
Kronos is both one of the worst characters and “villains” I’ve ever had the displeasure to experience in a video game period. I am a huge fan of the sniveling, irredeemable and unsympathetic main villain, who gets me to love them based on their charisma and performance rather than their tragic backstory or sympathetic motivations. They often times end up being the most fun type of villain, whom you know is wrong in every way but you kinda want to root for regardless just because of how thrilling they are. Is Kronos Hades 2 anything like this? Fuck no. He is one-note, boring, and often times annoying with zero charm. He quite literally has nothing going for him asides from the extremely basic, overdone modern Greek Myth retelling cliche of “being mad at the gods,” and this factors into the lost potential which I will dive into in the next section, but for now, sticking to Kronos. There is no development, or change, or really anything of note happening with him until the…very end.
The ending of Hades 2 is flat out embarrassing, and I am still reeling wondering why it even got cleared to release in that state to begin with, let alone make it past the first draft. I could not have come up with a worse conclusion in my wildest dreams. If you purposely tasked me to write a concept of the worst ending I could think of I still would not envisioned with this. In a cutscene that lasts about five minutes, Kronos has an epiphany that he is…gasp. Not the greatest guy, and under the guise that he “lived a whole other life that changed his ways” he returns and literally sets everything back to normal just like that. Boom. Done. Game over. He’s a nice guy now! Isn’t he so wholesome chungus grandpa? Aww, look at him! You can talk to him and even get a special keepsake! He is just so cutieful and so uwu! Oh blow my fucking lid off, Melinoe should have slaughtered him. Her and Zagreus should have killed him in both the past and present in the most glorious two-phase boss fight to grace a roguelite. You can’t just have me viscerally going after this man the whole game with the sole intention of stopping and killing him to get my family back only to pull the rug from under my flaming feet to make me trip and eat shit so badly it breaks all my teeth and gives me permanent amnesia. Hell, I wish I had gotten amnesia actually to forget this piece of crap. If you are going to do something so drastic with a character, let alone the main villain, then by god, you have to write it well. You have to lay the pieces for redemption much sooner, and not only that but you must write the interactions and shift in a compelling way that both makes sense and is thematically appropriate…
On that note, what…are, the themes of Hades 2? I thought I had a good grasp during early access, but after this ending I haven’t the slightest fucking clue. Forgive the violent maniacs who kidnapped your family? “Strength and determination in humanity” or some bullshit? I don’t care. This ending nearly single-handedly killed my drive to interact with this game on a thematic level outside this critique.
But back to the ending(s). I was actually ready to call it quits after Kronos was lobotomized into silly old man, but soon remembered that, oh yeah, the whole Fates thing that was brought up maybe twice. Better keep playing to find out what that’s all about.
Yeah. One interaction, where they tell you they’re fine actually, and that is that.
This, again, leads me to believe that the writers set things up and when it came time to actually pay them off, they just didn’t give a single shit. I don’t even care if it’s thematically appropriate with whatever bullshit they setup with Kronos and the first ending, it is lazy, plain and simple. I sank a hundred hours into this game over the course of both early access and the full release. Dozens and dozens of runs, over and over, runs that I admittedly quite enjoyed because the core gameplay of this game is still extremely enjoyable! To claim otherwise would be hilarious, and exactly the reason why I don’t bring it up here because despite the faults of the story and writing, Supergiant still made a solid core experience and gameplay loop (a loop that they prioritized so much, in fact, it came at the detriment of the story.) But now that it’s all over, I felt like I did nothing but waste my time. I dedicated so much effort and determination to just have Zagreus decide for me that, actually, maybe he’s just misunderstood and deserves a second chance (allegedly, this is one of the things the “new” ending adjusts, giving more agency to Melinoe. Even if this is true, I don’t care, and it is far too little too late and still makes zero sense whatsoever.) I have absolutely no desire to replay or even continue my current save file, and it is truly a marvel how it all came crashing down because of the ending.
But that’s not all folks! The final cherry on top of this shit sundae is the grand revelation with Hecate. To save my words and my sanity, it’s revealed she was…Melinoe from an alternate future, traveled back in time to save herself and raise her to fight Kronos to prevent what happened from occurring again. What. The everliving fuck. Am I playing a game based on Greek Mythology or reading a fucking X-Men comic book?? Why, just why is this even in the game to begin with? Genuinely, what the fuck does it add aside from a cheap twist to make players shake in their boots and point at their screen and drool? Why did you fuck with one of the few things I actually enjoyed about this game narrative wise, being the complex relationship Melinoe and Hecate had? I absolutely loved the whole reluctant-to-admit-im-like-a-mother-to-you storyline. It was rich, complex, and something I don’t often see in any media. It actually made me feel emotions! It made me invested in their relationship and how it developed! Yet, that was thrown all away for time time-travel retcon bullshit that cheapens the entire thing. Merely thinking about this is making me upset again, and I’m remembering my live reaction when I got to that point and just sitting slack-jawed in silence for probably five minutes straight. There was not even anger. Just confusion. Just astonishment. Just…disappointment.
Lost Potential
Ultimately, my biggest issue with this game is its utter lack of risk taking (until the end apparently! But we won’t talk about that anymore.) This was one of the things that I feared during early access regarding the story. I was wondering if this was truly as easy as, oh, Kronos is attacking and we need you to destroy him! Fight the big scary monsters and be the hero! It felt awfully simplistic, like the plot of a late-career Rick Riordan book. Is that truly it? Thankfully, my worries were slightly alleviated with (in retrospect, the peak of the game’s lifecycle) the Prometheus update. Woah! This guy is awesome! And he’s not just another one-note boss? He has valid motivations for teaming up with Kronos? Is it really a good idea for us to just mindlessly receive help from the gods who have done so much harm to humanity? After this, the seeds were planted, the beacons lit. Surely the game will take a drastic shift after this which will have us questioning our role deeply! What will Melinoe do? Is there actually potential for her to, gasp, maybe switch sides, help Kronos or Prometheus? How insane would that have been. How awesome and special that would have felt. Much like Kronos in the ending, I long for that timeline I never got to experience, to the point it permanently warps my personality and turns me into a shell of my former self.
But no, at the end of the day, the game does not even try to play with your exceptions. Aside from an ending so shitty that literally no one could have seen it coming, the status quo of the world remains stagnant. The gods are still good and in charge. Kronos is a good guy! Prometheus is just uh…hanging around, I guess. Is he cool with things? Probably not. Do I even care? Not at all.
Zagreus
This ties in to the above lost potential section, but I felt like the specialist boy in the world deserved his own section, so congrats! Sorry Zagreus. I utterly loved you in the first Hades. I loved how you were a little shit with horrible daddy issues. I loved you and your awful situationships that you miraculously worked out. I also loved your clear arc in the first Hades game, a game I still hold fondly in my heart despite the crimes its follow-up committed. What a satisfying ending, that game had.
I utterly despise you in this game. Hell, you aren’t even in it until the last chunk. You have such a small footprint until all of a sudden you determine the entire course of the game out of the player and Melinoe’s control. What the fuck is wrong with you? Since when did you become this Batman, “anyone is deserving of redemption” type character? How many monsters and gods did you murder again in that first game, could you please remind me? Sure, they came back afterward, but Kronos? You didn’t even bother listening to your sister and jumped straight to the misunderstanding angle. Utterly ridiculous! Thankfully the game punishes you with this rash action by later revealing that Kronos was merely faking his redemption and actually unassumingly using his powers and influence to-oh wait. Never mind. That didn’t happen, despite me being absolutely convinced it would because of just how odd the characters and Kronos were acting. How idiotic that was in retrospect, to actually believe the game was pulling my leg when it was instead delivering a message of utmost sincerity. I’ll go and hit myself with a mallet now.
I long for the days of theorizing what exactly happened to Zagreus. If you were to ask me a couple months ago what I thought, I would have excitedly explained how he might come back as a secret boss in that last room in the underworld, corrupted by Kronos somehow, culminating in the most emotional final confrontation possible as he uses all the tools from Hades 1, the same tools the player used years ago, against Melinoe in the perfect combo of gameplay and thematic satisfaction. God, how fucking cool that would have been. That would have made me cry. But fantasizing about something the developers most likely (and wrongfully) never considered is not exactly a good-faith critique, so I shall merely mark this paragraph as my personal thoughts on how Zagreus’ presence could have been more impactful in this game, because as it stands, I’d rather he just not be in it. (And his ‘actual’ boss fight postgame is probably one of the biggest slaps in the face possible. This felt cobbled together in perhaps a week, if I’m being generous. Please, god, just let it end.)
Conclusion
Oh Hades 2. How I really, really wished you had been my game of the year. You were probably one of my most anticipated games period. I absolutely loved your predecessor, its unique take on Greek Myth, its utterly incredible character designs and addicting gameplay, its grounded and emotional story with engaging character dynamics, and everything else. I had so much fun playing you in early access, experiencing each update as it came out, and being so incredibly hyped when the full release date was announced. Now, I think I will merely take those positive memories and run, because truly, the ending has soured this game entirely for me. When it is so disappointing and poorly written that it retroactively makes all that came before it pointless, in the same vein as a Game of Thrones season 8, that’s when you know you’ve fucked up.
If you made it this far, I applaud you, and also apologize that this became more unhinged at it went along. Just let it be known that those were my emotions rising to the surface in real time.
If you disagree with me at all, that’s perfectly fine. If, somehow, that patch changed more than what I have been lead to believe, whatever honestly. The damage has been done. You can pump the bullet hole with blood but the floor is already stained red.
Signing off.