Hades

Woo, loddaposts.  I'm not going to go through and multiquote them all, I'm just going to talk about my experiences with the game since I last posted and hopefully answer any questions people have posed in the interim.


I am... a little frustrated at this point.  Three times I've fought the midboss of area three, and three times I've lost to it.  The third was particularly galling because I was near the end, lost concentration for an instant, and took 41 damage in the blink of an eye.  (Its running attack is rubbish as well.  Occasionally I can make it run into a wall.  Otherwise I just hurt my fingers hammering dash.)  The time after that, I circumvented said midboss entirely... only to get to the final boss of the area and, well, if you've played it you know what happens.  I didn't win.

Of course you can't practise the boss over and over again until you git gud, or go back and redo the encounter without the loss of concentration, without a slog back through the rest of the game, because roguelike!  (I know technically it's a 'roguelite', but I think we have to accept that 'roguelike' is no longer as strict a term as it might have been once.)  And even if you do, you may not get boons that suit you (me) so well.  The next couple of times, I got a combination of unlucky and sloppy, and died in Asphodel.  Frustration building.  I couldn't even appreciate the way they change up the Tartarus and Asphodel boss fights, because at that point they're just more obstacles between me and Boss Three.  

I've had one story beat over quite a few runs, so I don't feel like trying to convince myself that that's the main source of progression is going to work.  Also, I notice above that Smurf said he beat the game in 12 runs, and I think I'm already past that (and I don't think Boss Three is the game's final boss).  So maybe I'm just really bad at this and should switch to God Mode?  

TL;DR: This is not the game to make me like roguelites.


'Find a way to enjoy what it is': well, the spear's great, and I've found a couple of builds that I really like (except I can't keep them...).  Does anybody like the fists?  Anyone at all?  And it's still really pretty and I like the fighting in general, and coming across somebody new like Euridyce is always a plus.  I hope I get to tell her that her beau's around now.  I hope she absolutely canes him for it.  (Dusa is the best character and I'll hear nothing to the contrary.)

And heck, I'm still playing the damn thing!  Still not on God Mode, out of stubbornness.  I do now have three continues (including Skelly's keepsake), which will hopefully help me poke my way to somewhere near freedom.

EDIT - Third area Miniboss:

The boss you are on is a wall for everyone & tbh it sounds like you are doing pretty well so just keep at it.  

Balla wrote:

I've had one story beat over quite a few runs, so I don't feel like trying to convince myself that that's the main source of progression is going to work.  Also, I notice above that Smurf said he beat the game in 12 runs, and I think I'm already past that (and I don't think Boss Three is the game's final boss).  So maybe I'm just really bad at this and should switch to God Mode?  

Smurf beating the game like that definitely isn't the norm, I was like double that amount of runs if not way way more, it just took me a while to properly understand the boon system and actually how to make a decent build from them.

Balla wrote:

'Find a way to enjoy what it is': well, the spear's great, and I've found a couple of builds that I really like (except I can't keep them...).  Does anybody like the fists?  Anyone at all?

The spear is my favourite with the fists a close second.  

I can't remember how I'd rank the weapons but I enjoyed the fists a lot. Sword was probably my favourite and spear towards the bottom.

I think I used the pierced butterfly trinket the most, but skelly has a good one too. It definitely took me over 12 runs before my first clear but I'm not sure by how much.

The third area is quite hard and a wall for many.

I quite liked athenas boons when I was newer to the game but I like all of them now. I struggle with love lady and hunt lass a bit more than the other gods but there's generally good stuff in every run. Getting a good dash boon is most helpful alongside whatever augments your best attack imo. I'll tend to go for chaos boons if I'm feeling healthy and it's early as they can be very powerful.

The third area was an absolute wall for me too. I think the enemy difficulty jumps up massively and the boss is probably the toughest in the game in my opinion too. You're doing well!

Yeah that was the hardest boss for me to break through too, but once you get it you'll get it.

Spear was my favourite weapon at first, and fists my least favourite, but fists are 100% the best! You just have to use them a few times to realise.

Agreed on the fists being lots of fun, but I think I just prefer the up close and personal fights! I'm not a massive fan of the bow.

The bow with the adjustment on it where pressing X after tagging an enemy results in your flurry shot becoming a homing attack is amazing.

That's true! And if you get the right Artemis boons where you just become an arrow machine with any weapon that's also very fun.

Jay also beat it in a crazy low number of runs, as I recall, whereas I was well into double digits.

Rum wrote:

Agreed on the fists being lots of fun, but I think I just prefer the up close and personal fights! I'm not a massive fan of the bow.

But the bow is best as a close range weapon! Special attack at point blank and all those arrows go into the one target, quick and devastating.

Looks like I got that one badly wrong!  I don't see it at all myself, I find the fists and the shield both really tricky to use.  I'm clearly more of a long-range kind of person.

I'll have no slagging off of the bow though: the bow's what finally won me the game! Or, well, got me out into the world above.  Only to find that I'm very far from finished.  So far from finished I don't even get a credits sequence.  And now...

Muss wrote:

masofdas wrote:

I bet he ends up dropping it and putting in last game didn't finish thread.

Nah, I reckon he'll finish it just like he did Monster Hunter Rise.

...this is looking like a real possibility.  I've looked it up, and...

Post-surface spoilers:

It doesn't help that, especially as I got an extra continue after that final run from the mirror, I assumed that I'd be able to breeze through most of the game again.  Nope.  Killed by the boss of area three twice in succession.  (Granted this was me trying with the bobbins fists and the bobbins shield.)  It doesn't help that boss three gloats when they win either.  Or that I rolled the pink mini-boss in the area both times. I've learned to handle the other mini-boss, and that one's worse.

I'm not done with the game, but all this has dented my will to continue.  This is somewhat counterbalanced by...

Character interaction spoilers:

Stop fighting it, you bloody love it as much as you love Dusa.

The number of clears needed felt a little much and I did take a break before trying the post-story stuff. But equally it makes thematic sense when the game concludes. I still think that there are enough story beats and depth to the combat to justify it.

A big part of the appeal is that you could sink hours into multiple runs, or just have a relatively quick go, both of which feel congruous with it taking multiple clears to me.

The average clear time is like 20 hours for the credits as well which is pretty normal for a lot single payer games these days.

From I'm reading from Balla's post length isn't the issue but doing stuff over and over, it's also why I'm not a fan of the genre.

Nah, they're inextricably bound together in this game. The repetition of Hades, and pretty much every rogue like, is the game's length.

Yep why, me and guess Balla not keen on the genre, we just go play a JRPG instead.

Why?

So they can repeat the same random encounters over and over

I knew some clever-dick was going to pipe up with that! Every game is going to have some degree of repetition in, and every player is going to have different degrees to which they can cope with that repetition. Myself, I don't mind micro-scale repetition if I'm getting something out of it, be that exp or whatever, so long as it doesn't get too repetitive. I do heartily object to macro-scale repetition, where the game structure repeats large swathes that are essentially the same thing, and those swathes take half an hour or more. It's not just roguelik/tes that do that: Bravely Default had an awful example in its second half. It is however the premise that roguelik/tes are built around.

Sadly I think I'm probably done with this particular rogue-thingy. Got to the final boss with no problems this time, then absolutely fell apart, making it exactly 0 runs I've won at since the once I made it out. Trying to do that nine more times is just going to lead to frustration. It's a shame, because I have enjoyed my time with Hades! Just not enough to finish it, or to live up to the praise showered on it from other quarters.

As a result I did of course look up the character interaction I mentioned above, and...

Spoiler:

Hey, given the practicalities involved, that is definitely the best outcome of the Dusa romancing!

I loved Dusa as a character but I ended up liking Zag with Meg. They had great chemistry, whereas 'Dusa came across as a Zag fangirl and Zag was just being friendly.

I just want to see if there is any chat about Patroclus and Achilles. Having met them both there's been very little reference to them knowing each other... in my playthroughs at least. Maybe those references do exist!

I think Achilles wrote the Codex entries, didn't he? So maybe in there?