Supergiant Games fumbles the Hades 2 narrative when it really matters.
I’m a big fan of the original Hades – we’re talking “has a Zagreus tattoo on my leg” levels of fan. It’s a game that I could replay endlessly, a desert island title. So to say that I was excited for Hades 2 would be an understatement – I have thirty hours in the early access period of the game alone. But after putting an additional forty hours into the final release of the game, beating the story, and completing the absolutely absurd requirements to unlock the epilogue, I’m left feeling cold. Nothing here lives up to the narrative quality that I’m used to from developer Supergiant Games, and the ending feels like it spits in the face of the themes that they were setting up before that point.
Hades 2 is, from the very beginning, a revenge story. Chronos, father of the gods, has beaten down the underworld and forced several of the Unseen (a hidden cabal of Cthonic beings) into hiding, with Hecate taking Hades and Persephone’s daughter, Melinoe, into her care and training her in the ways of combat so that she can eventually take down Chronos and avenge her family’s defeat. Meanwhile, high above in Mount Olympus, the other Olympians are being distracted by Typhon, the father of all monsters, so that Chronos doesn’t have to deal with the rest of his children – Melinoe will have to beat both of them multiple times to save her family. But despite having to defeat Chronos and Typhon multiple times, despite having to run through hell gauntlets, something weird happens.
Melinoe just lets Chronos stay around.
Every time Chronos is defeated by Melinoe, Melinoe sleeps in Zagreus’s bed, which rests just beyond the throne room. She then talks to Zagreus in a dream state, instructing him to complete various tasks so that he can hopefully defeat Chronos in the past in his prison, rather than allow him to terrorize the underworld. It’s already a weird decision on its face – it takes agency away from Melinoe, refocuses the story on Zagreus even though he already had his story in Hades, and it flies in the face of what the Unseen has been set up as – they’re a Matriarchal society, one where everything goes through Hecate. But now you’re outsourcing your own revenge, your own goal, to Zagreus.
What this results in is a peculiarly disjointed story – in Hades, you were fighting to get to the surface, to get past your dad. The twist was that what was waiting for you on the surface was your mother, and that gave you a reason to keep going. But here, there is no twist, there is no rug pull. The story here is exactly as it appears to be – Chronos has taken over, and the solution you’re presented with is exactly what it seems to be. One could argue that Chronos’s survival is the twist, but because it’s the same twist as Hades, it doesn’t feel like one.
What stings the most about this is that since Zagreus is ultimately successful in his goal, since he manages to convince Chronos not to take out his anger and fury on the gods, he essentially causes another timeline to exist. Chronos sees a timeline where he was happy with the entire family, where he was an actual grandfather rather than a total menace, and he chooses to reform. But it feels cheap – Melinoe doesn’t get any catharsis, she doesn’t get any of this closure; she gets to watch as somebody else completes her task. Somehow, this is compounded by a revelation in the post-game: you remember Hecate? Well, it turns out that she’s actually a version of Melinoe from another timeline; they’re the same person (which is something that is noted in Greek myth several times, so it’s not like this came out of left field). Suddenly, you realize that all of this was more or less a way for a completely different version of Melinoe to get revenge, which makes your actual quest feel pointless.
All of this circles right back to the decision to spare Chronos – it would have felt way better for both Hecate and Melinoe’s stories overall if Melinoe had actually been the one to defeat Chronos. After all she’s been through, she deserves to get a win, and Chronos isn’t exactly a hard character to hate – he’s a monster that has proven time and time again that he’s willing to betray his own family to further his own goals.
Supergiant has announced that it plans to patch the ending and change how events play out – but it feels like any attempt to fix these problems is merely putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The issues are far bigger than just the final few hours of the game; they permeate throughout once you look at the story as a whole, and changing story beats feels like it’ll basically only serve to make the other narrative weaknesses of the game more evident.
I understand why Supergiant decided to spare Chronos in their original ending – they needed a reason for the gameplay loop to persist in the post-game. Part of the appeal of any roguelike is the almost endless replayability, which is why a large number of them don’t really have massive stories akin to modern AAA titles. But there are better ways to do it – make it so that killing Chronos causes an isolated time-loop that Melinoe has access to, or something along those lines, rather than taking an exit that Hades already did. You can get away with the redeemed villain trope once, and it would benefit Melinoe’s story if she were the one to bring an end to all of this – if she were the one to defeat Chronos once and for all, rather than being rendered a bystander in her own game. It’d also give Supergiant more chances to develop her character, to make her stand out compared to the cast from the first game. This character already feels undercooked in comparison to Zagreus, and it’d complement the themes of the original game. Sometimes, you can’t redeem a bad person. Sometimes, there’s nothing to do for them. Sometimes, you have to take them down.
