Slowly coming to the conclusion that I do not like Hades 2.
It's like a good game is in there, but it's been blocked by all sorts of gatekeeping crap that was added to make it more "rogue-light." You can't unlock all the weapons, or even a fucking fishing rod, without going to the surface to get materials. But the surface is blocked by a ward. When you dissolve that ward, you still can't really go to the surface without dying. But there's another spell you can cast to make that go away.
There are arcana cards, but you can only use some of them, and many of them also have conditions that mean you can rarely even fill out your card limit. Also you need to cast a spell to "fully unlock" the cards.
Some things take time to finish casting. So they added a way to waste time in game by taking a bath. You can only take a bath with a friend, and when you have something baking, no one wants to take a bath.
The final boss has a one-hit kill attack that he can use as many times as he likes. You can't defend against it, so you have to kill him fast enough that he can't use it, or something, idk, I haven't beaten him.
This game was in beta for like seven thousand years. Did they only get pandering feedback about how cool it was? Or is it exactly this gate-keep-y because they built it while live, so they had to keep adding things to unlock that they could roll out during that beta to keep people interested?
Also, are there fewer gods compared to the first one? This one has Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hermes, Apollo, Aphrodite, and sometimes Artemis. The original had Ares, Dionysus, who are now replaced with Hephaestus and Hestia. Athena was in the first one as well. Is this something else that's locked behind something?
One more run, I guess, and if this new weapon isn't actually good, I think I'm done. I'm not enjoying the game as much as the first one, where at least I had decorative elements to unlock that made it feel like I was accomplishing something. All I'm doing now is increasingly my god mode defense counter (which, obviously, doesn't increment when you die on the surface. Of course they had to change the rules for that).
