Chapter One
A child ran off from their village, filled with rage. A petty kind of anger; one that the child would have all but forgotten about the next time you saw them. This next time would never come, though. The child disappeared and in their place stood a Destroyer.

Chapter Two
The village seemed different. Strange new people kept showing up, with pig shaped masks covering their eyes. On the surface, they went about their business and chatted like any other villager but the more mind you paid them, the more their words rang hollow. Their thoughts and jokes seemed inorganic; mass produced even. As these Pigmasks gathered in the village, the original people there felt alienated. An old man, once known for his insights and his sharp wit would get angrier and angrier, lashing out at those around him and eventually leaving. More villagers would follow suit, some of them against their will, as this community they saw as a safe haven to share things they couldn’t share anywhere else slowly but surely became part of that “anywhere else.”
Were these Pigmasks to blame for everything? Or was it merely a case of things that always infested the community finally bubbling up to the surface? And what of the Destroyer, a one-time villager, now hailed as the champion of the Pigmasks?

Chapter Three
A monkey walked through a forest with boxes on their back; head and torso fighting a fierce battle to not fall and hit the ground. This grueling process eventually became routine and the monkey’s body eventually went on autopilot. They had all this time to think about if they’ll ever move past this task and if they’ll ever have a purpose.
Did the Destroyer have the same thoughts in this same forest?

Chapter Four
Another village child was not unlike the one who would become the Destroyer. In fact, you could say that these two village children were a single entity; two sides of the same coin. The Destroyer was the head of this coin, facing up and always the topic of conversation from those who saw this “face.” The tail, stuck to the ground, reveled in the attention the head received. They took glee in seeing friends talk about the Destroyer without any clue of its relation to the one standing near them. They searched for other villagers’ words on this mysterious Destroyer and snuck into houses to see them: the praise, the insults, the natural discussions surrounding this new “symbol” of the village.
This was not healthy for the village child. But still, could you blame them? This sensation of feeling important, even if that importance was just a niche micro-celeb in a small village, was much more comforting than the cold reality of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter Five
A Pigmask working in a tower was a big fan of a rock band. They were utterly awestruck at the sight of that band’s merchandise on the man that entered the tower earlier that day and could not talk about anything other than that band: expressing their love of the band’s work, idolizing the ones behind it as supposedly great people, and elevating the band to some moral paragon because of milquetoast political opinions in its songs.
The Destroyer was in the tower too, watching this Pigmask’s conversation with mere apathy if not active contempt.

Chapter Six
Sometimes, ghosts of the past appear as reminders of what will never come back.

Chapter Seven
The Destroyer pulled a needle out of the ground and felt nothing. They pulled quite a bit of these needles before but something was different this time. The act was now done only out of some perceived obligation; to the Pigmasks and villagers cheering on or to the fake images of hearts that result from the act. It was time for the last needle to be pulled.

Chapter Eight
The Destroyer laid on the ground motionless as its tail pulled the final needle on its behalf. Its supposed stardom was crushed into not even half a star.
It’s over.

Soul Hackers 2 is like the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of Megaten. I don't think I've fully processed that it exists, even like a year and a half after finishing it. I think of this game often. It just confuses me - it's like the ultimate monkey's paw. They made a sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game that offers basically nothing to someone who loved the original, aside from some terminology carried over.

This game is fine - and I think that's what makes me so bitter towards it. They specifically selected one of the most unique, rough around the edges Megami Tensei games and sanded all of the interesting features down into something more digestable for general audiences. Things like demon loyalty and zoma fusions had so much more potential, but instead of exploring that they were just stripped and replaced with a combat system reminiscent of modern Persona. Dungeon design is repetitive, as is the music. They added in a pointless mascot character, there's nostalgia baiting content locked behind a paywall, and even the game's special Jack Frost variant was only obtainable by pre-ordering.

So many things about this game just reek of marketability and someone in a suit making the decisions, which is pretty funny considering it spends time critiquing capitalism and exploiting nostalgia.

Ringo is a very cool character. There are some standout tracks in the OST too. It's just not enough to justify the rest of the game for me. Some people see that this game is functional and has characters and argue its reception was unfair. I also knew people who saw Crystal Skull as their first Indiana Jones movie who said the same thing.

The dev for this game, potemki11, just woke up one day and decided to make one of the best Shin Megami Tensei clones and make it even better by adding Touhou characters to it.

Difficulty is perfectly balanced, there is nothing in here that's as frustrating as most other SMT games or even Touhou RPGs, except maybe the Secret Boss? Which is debatable as it's really easy to cheese if you've been paying attention to your stats altering moves.

The developer isn't even done with this game btw, he's still adding new content to it to this day, including a customizeable level/map editor, so I will probably go back to this in the near future.

A waste.

I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.

It's worse.

I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.

While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.

I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.

The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.

Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.

Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.

There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.

Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.

The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.

Great photo mode, though.

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!