I have stalled enough. I need to talk about the ending of Hades II (Supergiant Games). Early warning, there will be spoilers from here on out. As always, I will always try to keep the spoilers as vague as possible, but I will have to get prettyt specific in this post.
*SPOILERS*
When I say the ending, I mean the true ending. The one true ending. Sure, you can beat Chronos in one run and be happy with that. However, there is so much more to the game than that. I expected the true ending to be huge because there was so much more game this time around. I was nervous, though, because the whole theme of the game was Death to Chronos. Chronos is time. You can’t stop time, so what was the solution?
As I killed Chronos again and again, I was able to go travel a mystical road to visit my brother, Zagreus, in his bedroom. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s enough to get the gist across.
I had to convince him that I was his sister from the future. I said we needed to find a way to kill our grandfather, Chronos. I could not do it permanently in my time, so he had to do it in his.
Was this weird? Yes. Was it cool? Also yes. Was it fan-service-y? Yes as well. I was fine with all that, to be clear. I didn’t know where it was going because when you think about it, if you kill Time, well, then what do you have left? Zag even asked if that meant Mel wouldn’t be born, and Mel kind of brushed it off.
I did wonder how they were going to sq0uare that circle, but I shrugged it off. I mean, if they were going to go down that road, they had to have a resolution? Right? I will admit, there was doubt in the back of my mind, though. Chronos is Time. If you kill him off permanently, then how can life continue?
Mel and Zag realize that they need Hades’ spear, Gigaros, to kill Chronos and *double spoiler* Typhon, the final boss of the upward path. I’m not going to get too into who Typhon is except that he’s the Father of all Monsters, and his boss fight is ridiculous–UTTERLY ridiculous. I will save that for my post on gameplay. For the purpose of this, I will say that I can understand why–no, wait.
I can’t. Because my stance on this is that the game should have been one or the other path, but not both. It was too much, and as a result, I feel that the story and characters suffered.
Look. It’s admirable that Supergiant Games tried to make this a Greek mythological epic. I understand that they wanted to blow their first game out of the water at the same time.
But, and it pains me to say it, the true ending is bad. Like SO BAD. Shockingly bad, I would say. Remember when I said I was wondering how Supergiant Games were going to reconcile the fact that permanently killing Chronos would mean the essential end of all life? The short answer is: they didn’t. The longer is as follows.
After going through the painfulness to get the true ending (killing Typhon and Chronos several times each to get the ingredients needed for the two incantations to permanently get rid of them–and having to do part of it in a certain order to get the proper ingredients), on the last kill, I go to visit Zag for the last time so he can kill Chronos once and for all. I can’t do it in my timeline, so he has to do it in his.
We switch to Zag talking to Chronos. Instead of spearing him, Zag lays out two options. One is that Chronos gets speared and is killed forever. The second is that he voluntarily gives up what he’s doing and becomes reformed. There is a cut-scene that shows him visiting the family as when Melinoë was very young, and they are playing hide-and-seek. Hide and fucking seek! It’s so over-the-top and cringeworthy. Chronos chooses the latter (which is difficult to believe in and of itself), and that’s how the game continues on.
Zag informs Melinoë of what he’s done, and she’s outraged. So am I. I played this whole game for that? Really? Look. I’m not against a good redemption story, but that was so unearned! Chronos has aeons for his rage and hatred to build up and burn. And one heartfelt speech from Zag makes him change his mind?
Also. Can we say how fucked up it is that it’s Zagreus who changes Chronos’s mind? Not Melinoë, the fucking protag of THIS game, but Zagreus, the protag of the LAST game. So nothing I did mattered in this game. Oh, sure, I had to get the situation to the point where the action could be made, but when the actual important action was made, it was completely out of my hands. That’s bad enough, but then my fucking brother makes the exact opposite decision of what I would.
I trained my whole life for this. Seriously. Melinoë was raised by Hecate with one goal in mind–Death to Chronos. And this is the one true ending? My brother decided to take mercy on our grandfather and let him live?
I was shocked by the ending and really let down. This was such a bad ending. I understand it from the gameplay viewpoint because they needed to give a reason to keep playing the game (which I’ll get to in a minute), but from the storyline point of view, I cannot think of a worse ending. I was really let down by it on several levels, and I wondered what was the point. Honestly, I would rather they said said something like, “We realized he can’t be killed, so we just have to keep him locked up eternally.” Would it have been a cop-out? Yes. Would it have been better than whatever this was? Also yes.
I have to say, the surprise epilogue was almost as bad. There was a mission on the Fated List of Minor Prophecies that I got fairly early on, and ID was not able to do it until after I got the true ending. Or near the end of it. I don’t remember, but it was very late in the game. Chronos had kidnapped the Fates and banished them to somewhere in the Abyss/Void.
Moros, their brother, didn’t seem to worried about it. Mildly concerned, yes, but not too distressed. Also, even though I maxed out our relationship, I was a bit dissatisfied that the game did not address the fact that he was promised to another goddess (Eos), but was content to hanging around The Crossroads and banging Melinoë.
This was the mission I mentioned earlier in which I had to take Moros’s Keepsake and die in different rooms of the second biome in specific ways and then clear the room to get revived by Moros’s Keepsake. There’s a bunch of steps prior that are exacting and annoying –this is the last step (the consecutive dyings, I mean), and I was unsure I would be able to do it right. It took me several tries, but I finally did it.
I love that the Fate who talkes the most sounds like a Real Housewife of New Jersey. What I don’t love is that they decided that they preferred not to weave any longer. Oh, that part was ok, but it was the speech that went with it–which was the epilogue. That gods had too much power and that mortals should be allowed more agency. (Which is what Chronos claimed his time of rule was about, the Golden Age.)
So. If you’re following my multi-rants, three of the biggest stories/missions in the game including the main storyline all tell you that what you did during the whole game did not matter a whit. Killing Chronos? Didn’t matter. Waking Hypnos? The effort didn’t matter. Rescuing the Fates? Didn’t matter. None of it matter. At all!
Let’s talk about killing Chronos, by the way. Since Zag decided to spare him, how did the devs rationalize keeping the runs going? They had Chronos say with a straight face that there were traces of him and Tyhpon still existing. So, I had to keep doing the runs to make sure neither of them return.
By the way, I have to give one shout-out in this sea of negativity. It’s to Logan Cunningham, the voice of several characters in this game. He does an excellent job with each, but this is a special shout-out because when I looked up the voice acor for Chronos, it was him. The reason I was surprised is because I love Logan’s voice. It’s deep, rich, and just so lush. He’s Hades; the narrator, Homer; Poseidon; Polyphemus; and Charon. The last is especially hilarious because Charon doesn’t actually speak; he merely grunts, hisses, and moans.
In the first game, he was Hades; Poseidon; the narrator (storyteller); Charon; Asterius; and Achilles.
Chronos’s voice is thin, reedy, arrogant, snooty, and so fucking twee. I hate it so much, which is why I was surprised when I found out it was Logan’s. The good Chronos’s voice is warmer, chipper, still twee and reedy, but not as annoying. My shout-out is to how they are so distinctly different from each other, and how I was so shocked that Chronos was voiced byy Logan Cunningham in the first place.
That’s the shout-out for today. I will continue ranting tomorrow.