Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: disappointment

Hades II (Supergiant Games): let’s talk about story and characters, part three

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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.


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I truly think I’m done with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (part ten)

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I am so tired. I think I’m done with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive). For the first day since it came out, I did not play it as soon as I could in the morning (afternoon, really). I did dip in a bit before writing this, but I just felt empty as I did it. Here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk about my growing dissatisfaction with the game, especially the story.

*SPOILERS*

I’m going to be talking about the story a bit and other things that might be considered spoilers. After I finished the second act, I flew around the map (we unlocked the ability to fly on Esquie during the last boss fight of the second act) quite a bit. I love Esquie, but he says exactly three things as you fly (when you hit RT to accelerate): “flashing through the sky”; here we go”; and “hang on tight”. Along with some sounds. Because I am pumping RT all the time, that means he says these phrases every three seconds or so. Which, as you might guess, is annoying AF.

Here’s the thing. Getting the ability to fly was super-cool. But 90% of the things are for later. MUCH later. I am in the high fifties, level-wise, and I can get one-shot by some of these enemies. And doing chip damage.

Beating the last boss of the second act unlocked the dagame cap (it was 9,999 for the first two acts). I was so excited for it, but I’m not doing the millions of damage I’ve seen other people do (and that I need to do in order to kill many of the world bosses I can reach now). I just had a look-see, and the things I need to have these incredible builds are farther down the road. Except for a skill that I did not unlock, even though I could have quite some time ago. I may go ahead and respec Maelle to optimize her build.

Because, you see, if Im’ going to continue playing ,I want to be able to finish the combat as quickly as possible. I hate it so much. SO much. I know the third act is much shorter than the first two, but man. Something inside me rebels at doing it.

I also deepened the relationships between different characters. I’m of two minds with this mechanic (it gives you perks like unlocking gradient attacks–the deadliest of attacks). On the one hand, the chatting between the different party members is one of my favorite things about the game. Partly because the acting is so good even if the writing is shaky at times and partly because it means I don’t have to do the combat.

By the way, I am about to give up and min-max the hell out of my characters jsut to get through the combat more quickly. I have enough respec items to redo every character, and I just might do it. That’s how much I hate the combat. I don’t want to struggle, doing thirty-thousand damage when I could be doing millions. I want to one-shot bosses so I don’t have to grind out a win.

I did one of the chromatic bosses today, and it was really difficult with my puny damage. I managed to eke it out, but I died three or four times (which is way more than I’ve died to most other bosses). People in the Discord were saying it was disappointing to be too overleveled for the final boss, but I don’t care. I want to be that overleveled. Though I’m confused as to how one person got to level 100 before taking on the final boss. I’m almost level 60 with each member of my party, and I’ve done a hell of a lot of grinding.


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More to say about the state of FromSoft

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I’m getting pretty sick of people saying you can’t criticize The Duskbloods if you’re a “real” fan of FromSoft. First of all, don’t tell me what I can and can’t criticize. Anything is fair game. Nothing is sacred and nothing is perfect.

I’m not mad about the fact that the game is multiplayer. Well, I am, but that’s because I don’t play multiplayer games and the fact that they are also doing Nightreign–which is also an MMO. I will play that, but I have a hunch that I’m not going to love it. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post (or maybe the post before), people have said that there’s an emphasis on quick responses. This is not within my wheelhouse.

I’m listening to Krupa and Gav talk about it in their weekly podcast, and I find myself saying repeatedly, “It’s a Nintendo exclusive” as to why “some people” (me) are not happy about it. If it was not a Nintendo exclusive, I would have zero qualms about it*. They didn’t even mention that at all or the fact that the The Switch 2 is pretty fucking pricy. The American price right now is $450, but will probably go up. The game will be at least $70 if not more, and the online you have to get is, surprisingly (in a good way), $20 a year for an individual.

I have included a video by TopicArlo below in which he muses about his conflicted feelings about The Duskbloods. They mirror my own thoughts, and I appreciate I am not the only one with mixed feelings. He’s late to the FromSoft games, but he has become very enamored with them. He’s always been a Nintendo fan, by the way, so he was going to buy this console/handheld, regardless. He describes how he went from elated to bewildered to ‘huh, what?’ and everything in between. He’s very much not a competitive player (or an online player), so he felt very deflated when he found out this was PvPvE. He was displomatic about it, but I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

Everyone is harping on how very Bloodborne-y this trailer looks, but it’s not Bloodborne. I feel like I’m the crazy one because I have never though there would be a seqouel to Bloodborne (at least not one done by FromSoft). One of my weirdest points of pride is that when everyone was so sure there would be a BB2 trailer at E3 and/or GeoffCon (2018 I think?), and I was as sure as I could ever be that there would not be–nor would there ever be a sequel to that game.

There was a From Soft trailer that year, and people convinced themselves it was BB2. It was not. It was Sekiro. And people were deflated (while also being elated that a new From game was announced).


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