I have a few more awards to give out for the games I have played this year. In the last post, I wrote about an indie game that had a lot of heart and was made by what I presume to be is a small team. I quick-Googled, and, yup. They have 29 employees, and they are an indie Australian team. I mentioned in that post how I wanted indies to take a leap and throw everything into their game that they want to have there rather than have them play it safe.
In this post, I’m going to talk frankly about an indie team that also went big to varying success. Well, it’s more complicated than that, so I want to preface this award by saying the following is a great game. I believe I gave it a 7.5 when it was all said and done–nope. I gave it an 8 when it was all said and done, but it was quite the journey to get there. I have written endlessly about this game, but I will touch upon the issues briefly after I give the award. Which is now.
The sequel that was a great game, but more than anything, made me want to go back and play the original–which I enjoyed more in almost every respect
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
This was my mostanticipated game of the year. I watched the announcement trailer, and then I stridently ignored the game as it went through Early Access because I did not want to be spoiled going into the game. I did not play the first game until it was officially released, and I did the same for this game.
When it finally released, I was initially very impressed with the game. I didn’t love the protagonist because I found her a bit earnest, but she was fine. The combat was snappy, though I was not immediately drawn to any one weapon. There were tweaks that smoothed out the combat, but it wasn’t that much different than in the first game.
Let me put it this way. If you had played the first game, you would be right at home in the second game. There was a new cast of characters with several of the old favorites nerfed for this game. Two of the best Olympians from the first game were limited to the end game in this game, which I did not appreciate. Look. Yes, Athena was OP in the first game, but who the fuck cares? Let people get OP if they want. You did not have to take her most powerful boons if you didn’t want to, and you could always get rid of her boons later if you so wished.
I really don’t like the idea that if anything is OP, it should immediately be nerfed. FromSoft has fallen into this trap as well, and it creates a weird tension that I don’t appreciate. A weapon becomes OP, and then in a week or two, it gets massively nerfed. That means if you want to experience it in all its OP glory, you have to A) know the meta and B) hurry to get the weapon. Even then, you get to enjoy it for a week or two until it gets nerfed. Not just weapons, by the way, but spells (sorcieries and incantations), too.
If someone doesn’t want to be OP, they can avoid the meta. Yes, it’s not quite as easy in Hades II because you have to take boons (I think?), but for the most part, you can choose which door you go through. That means you can avoid Athena as much as possible if you find her too powerful, but those of us who relied on her boons in the first game would still get to use them in the second.
I found that a curse of the sequel, by the way. The desire to make things so much harder. I get it. The structure is very similar to the first game, so the way to stand out is to make things harder*. Harder isn’t necessarily better, and I found something lacking in this game. It’s ephemeral/ethereal, and I could not quite pin it down. The more I played the game, though, the less satisfied I felt.
This is where I acknowledge that I turned on God Mode after beating the downward path for the first time. I did not use it in th efirst game, but there was no way I would have beaten the upward path without it. I tried so many times and could just barely scrape by the third boss. The upward path is so much harder than the downward one, and I have no idea why it was done that way.
It’s not just harder–it’s significantly harder. And the final boss of that path is just visual noise. This is something I’ve noticed with the game in general–way too much visual bullshit. Yes, it was a mild problem in the first game, but it’s triple the issue in this one.
I want to emphasize once aga;in that this is a great game–it’s just missing something I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m not even talking about the hot mess of an ending, which ruined my enjoyment of the game. I’ll get to that in another post, but for now, I want to say that this is yet another game that produced very split feelings in me.
That’s the theme of this year in gaming, and I’m not crazy about it. I don’t like having deep misgivings about things that I like, but I can’t control that. I have more to say about the game and the deeply divided feelings I have over it, but I’m tired. It’s late, and I need to get up at a relatively human time tomorrow. I’ll leave this here, though it’s rather short, and I’ll pick it up again tomorrow.
*Well, one way. Another is by emphasizing the relationships because the NPCs are different, which Supergiant did. Unfortunately, I did not find the relationships as compelling in this game as they were in the first.