#Grievings of the mountain || discussing DD2

[coffee-in-veins]

i was reminded that DD2 exists and i will make it everyone's problem

can't stop thinking that this was exactly what development process looked like

[coffee-in-veins]

considering the staggering ammount of effort and details in other parts of the game (i hope you can hear sarcasm dripping off my teeth), did anyone seriously think they would bother with different heights...?

yeah, okay, i did, back when i still had hope.

but now i know better

Okay, Reynauld and Dismas height comparison discourse seems to start up again and it pisses me off. People keep using ingame screenshots to try and guestimate their size difference.

Guys... guys... you know Dismas slouches and has his knees bent, right? And you know Rey basically stands like a fucking flag pole.

Also why are you so obsessed with proving who is taller and who is smaller? Make your own damn headcanons. Make Dismas five feet and Reynauld 8 for all I care, or the other way around, there is no one stopping you if you are into that stuff.

And to put an end to the discussion right now on 'who is taller' in game, I'll attach a screenshot of their in game models under the cut, the result will shock you!

Yea they are basically the same fucking height

And yes I used the backstory model because the helmet adds like 2 inches and I didn't want to leave room for speculation

[coffee-in-veins]

i realized todat i have a very odd worry about DD after DD2 came out and we got Rey back and his story is just... i'm not sure how to describe it politely. let's use "not what is implied in DD1"

and... that's it. that's the worry

a lot of people come to DD fandom from DD2 now. and they're thrilled and excited. and they will know those characters only as they are shown in DD2. and they'll create things with them based on that display

this might be a 'me' fear since i am a writer who prides myself on research and trying my damnest to keep charcters close to canon or at the very least not contadicting canon. i look up how belts work. how you would care for and fire a flintlock. how to put on a fullplate. how to ride horses. what is the tensile strength of human arm being attached to human torso and how much raw strength some eldritch fuckupery would need to separate one from the other. you get the picture

but i describe characters as they were in DD1. and i pride myself on pouring dozens upon dozens of hours into research and characterization and whatnot, on having compilation tables and huge ass files of notes and research and pinned facts. but if someone comes from DD2 to see my work... for them, I'll be wrong. just plain wrong. whatever i have would be just odd headcanons and 'portraying characters wrong'. 'not getting it'. 'making them far worse people than they are'. maybe even 'victim blaming', who knows

this makes me anxious and i dunno what to do about it. is there even something i can do about it? i dunno...

[coffee-in-veins]

Hey, I'm that new player anon from the other blog who asked about Tardif enjoying baking. Thanks for your detailed answer.

I'd like to ask, why do you feel the DD2 interpretations of the characters feel squeaky clean? I have heard from others that DD2's backstories comes off as trying to make them similar to Dismas' (feeling remorseful for their past and trying to find redemption), is that true? Characters like Sarmenti don't feel like they're particularly different, but I can see where they're coming from with Paracelsus or something

Hello hello! o/ welcome to the fandom and thank you for the ask :}

Sorry for the late reply, i was promptly reminded why i shouldn't type big answers in a browser and had to re-do this answer a few times ^^'

i'm happy that my bits of historical anecdotes were of any interest to you, if you have anything else you'd like to know, ask away, i'll do my best to answer. i researched DD's possible cuisine for my writing, so i'm more than happy to share and have an unhealthy amount of interest in Crimson Curse

Now, regarding your ask…

Oh, the characterization... well, i am working on a huge and detailed answer for another ask regarding Dismas in particular, and it's taking me a while because i have feelings and i need to dig out DD2 barks for factual comparison, but in general, for me this is because of three things:

removal of the character's agency;

removal of moral ambiguity;

re-writing of established facts that contradict 'heroism';

You see, before DD2's shrines, all the fandom had to work with were hero's comics, their barks (lines they say during specific afflictions and/or actions) and descriptions on some of their personal trinkets (namely, Crimson Curse sets). All of those were vague and open to interpretation, but painted quite a dark picture for any given hero. The only more or less 'cinnamon rolls' (aka victims of circumstance but arguably good-aligned) were Baldwin (leper), Misendei (arbalest), William (Houndmaster) and Bigby (Abomination), who were wronged but tried to keep their goodness intact. And even those supposed cinnabuns had some quite questionable lines when stressed enough, revealing that sure, they did their best, but even they weren't spotless.

However, everyone else was either a selfish ass, or a coward, or mass murderer, or someone else equally shitty and their 'key backstory moment' was painting them in a dubious light.

Fresh examples that pop up in my head and have mirrors in DD2 are Paracelsus (Plague Doctor), who was rather obsessed with her work on the human body, and her barks show how she is absolutely determined to keep her notes and research private but in a rather "this is my achievement, only mine!" way. She's arrogant and shoves her way around others whenever she's stressed, feeling them all beneath her.

For example:

(sigh) My time is too valuable for these trivialities!

You halfwits are interrupting my concentration!

Uneducated brutes! The ignorance! The idiocy!

Hmmm... deformed at birth or merely hideous?

So many useful organs... all wasted on you.

Why bother? You are all little more than meat.

Medicine marks a new age, ignorant barbarians!

Sure, her comic shows her hard working, not denying that, but also having the bloodied handkerchief of her professor with her (from the 4th panel onward, it's always with her); which can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, not excluding her poisoning him just to be able to work on his body and further the study. We can't see her shunned and debated as it was shown in DD2, and she isn't portrayed as a singular woman character in the university setting. We can't see her professor dying of natural causes – we just see him dead and her coming to witness that, already with books and clutter at hand. It can be seen as if it was her own scheme. For all we know - yes, she is the mad scientist (tm.) and it wasn't her trauma or making a zombie which pushed her out of university and into Hamlet, but her arrogance, very Victor Frankenstein style.

However, in DD2 a lot, and I mean a LOT was made to make her softer, mellower, less over the top and more sympathetic: how the professor disregards her theories; how she's the sole woman in the class; how she is mocked, debated and considered 'scandalous' (based on Shrine quotes); how she lost her will to pursue medicine; how she was a poor little meow meow after shrine 5 who cannot focus and get the screams out of her head (which contradicts heavily all of her characterization in DD1...); you get the idea. Even her negative barks aren’t as vicious:

You bicker as a child does!

You! Reckless! You threaten us all!

I've had better company in the morgue!

If I bleed out, who will staunch your wounds?

By my calculations, you misjudged that.

Sure, it can be because DD2 is still in the making, but… they have a different attitude, don’t you think?

A lot of work went into making this character as beaten up and sympathetic as possible instead of an over the top, cocky, somewhat mad scientist with absolutely unhinged love and fascination for bodies and bodily fluids (she’s asking her teammates for their piss during camping for god’s sake, that woman has no understanding of social norms, or no use for them) - but in doing so, Para lost what... well, made her Para, in my opinion. Para in DD1 goes through bodies, piss and blood to further her goal of medical enlightenment; Para in DD2 is a tormented soul who went in over her head and got broken, and now atones for... well, making a zombie out of an already dead man and genuinely i fail to see how is that use any worse than a regular autopsy. It's not like her professor felt it, or was trapped in that body or was turned into a zombie by a bite or something. He was already dead. So... dunno, maybe it's just me, but the sudden complete breakdown was... odd. Para I knew would’ve been motivated to push even further, to make that mistake count. Para from DD2 broke and gave up – which, in turn, makes no sense, since the timeline is DD2 backstory -> DD1 -> DD2, so she had to go to Hamlet and continue her experiments there and… alright, the timeline is another beast altogether, and I am not poking it here.

Another example is Audrey, the Grave Robber. In DD1 she was flamboyant and cocky, teasing and taunting enemies and allies alike, concerned about her clothes even in the heat of battle and undeniably selfish, in there for a thrill and money. She still referred to herself as a Lady, and was quite cheeky with everyone. We saw her backstory comic, and all it showed was the poverty of a high class lady, a presumably dead husband (?) and how she turned to grave robbing due to him being buried with his jewellery. Her barks referred to tea, ambergris and other high-end luxuries, so it was an easy timeline to map: a noblewoman (the title of Lady was only reserved for a wife of the currently ruling Lord, and I’d better stop here before I start poking heraldry and title inheritance) who got into debt for some reason (maybe even her own spending) and was facing eviction and social humiliation, and who decided to change her fate. That was it. No domestic abuse (although, I cannot argue that it wouldn’t be setting- and time-appropriate), nothing about her husband sexually assaulting her, nothing. Only her love for baubles and luxuries. For all we knew, she had spent the family fortune on those. I don’t think there’s any indication in DD1 which points to her killing her husband, really. Hell, we weren’t even sure it was her husband, some people headcannoned the guy from the portrait as her father.

But in DD2 she is shown as exclusively a victim – at home, she’s a victim of abuse, then she’s a victim of circumstance, she’s a cornered woman, desperate to get out and get better. It’s not her fault she poisoned her husband – he abused her! It’s not her fault she became a grave digger – she was forced into it! She isn’t a bad person. She was forced into those circumstances! She’s a good person, a hero! She was just in a very bad spot, really, please sympathise with her.

You mentioned Sarmenti, and I want to poke that one a bit, too. He, too, is very different to what was portrayed in DD1 and DD2. In DD1 his backstory was one of revenge for the humiliation he was faced with during his work in the court of the tyrant. However, it was never shown how or why would he come there. Again, for all we know, he worked there, and his barks about serving at children’s birthday parties supported that. We knew he was a jester and he worked as a jester. He was humiliated and took revenge by killing the court. How he summoned spears of dubious origin was never explained or addressed. With all the constant laughing he had in his barks, it sounded almost like he had PBA (pseudobulbar affect). If he actually had it, becoming a jester was really one of the few available options for him.

But in DD2 he is shown to be specifically a musician who became famous enough to become a curio, was tricked into coming to court, caught and kept there, humiliated in ways even Narrator refuses to specify and supposedly driven absolutely insane by the combination of that and some eldritch music magic he got. He wasn't even employed there. He was tricked, lied to, then abused. Again, an absolutely normal, arguably good person, driven up a wall due to horrendous inhumane circumstances to do evil— sounds familiar by the third time, isn’t it?

And this is why I call them squeaky clean. Heroes in DD1 were the agents of their downfall. They were arrogant, they made decisions which ended up in disasters, they were led by their greed, obsession or vices. But they had agency. Sure, they weren’t good people – but they were active forces in their lives, and what they did or didn’t do was just that – their action, their decision, their agency. It was never exclusively circumstances offering only one solution which happened to be a bad one. It’s not that they chose bad action because it was easy or they didn’t care or something else caused by heroes – they were put in circumstances where this was the only course of action they could do, and thus, they cannot be considered morally bankrupt for doing the only available thing. All of the backstories are now there to evoke sympathy and say “wouldn’t you do the same if you were put in the same awful circumstances?”. And this, to me, cheapens and flattens the heroes by a huge margin. Frankly, I’m even a little bit surprised the ‘redemption’ bit is intact, considering how much they distanced the heroes from the actual horrible things they did. Arguably, Alhazred is the only one who still does his backstory completely selfishly, but they don’t really show him as remorseful, too, and because of that it’s not as jarring.

But then again, heroes in DD1 didn't always seek redemption in Hamlet. For some, it was just... money, fame or a job. The high moral horse was a factor only to a selected few (looking at you, Dismas). It wasn't ubiquitous. And frankly, it made the motley lot more believable. People are different. People react to bad things differently. Hell, people cannot even agree on what "bad" is. Damian's favourite pastime for all intents and purposes can be Bigby's nightmare. Having different heroes having different reasons in their backstories helped them stand out against each other more, in my opinion. The way all of the backstories became only focused on redemption, and only pushing hard for sympathy after DD1's diversity is frankly a bit odd for me.

Again, RH are the canon makers and if this is what they wish to do with their property, more power to them. But to me as a writer it is disappointing.

I hope this explains it ^^ but feel free to ask more if you want to

[coffee-in-veins]

Have you heard of how reynauld goes back to being a farmer after it all in dd2? Apparently if you fully upgrade his altar, a narration says that "he will retire his battered helmet atop a scarecrow, and labour the land beneath its baneful gaze" Any thoughts on that?

hello hello o/

thank you for the ask! ^^ i hope i won't dissapoint you with my answer, but after the last stunt RH pulled, on top of my already sour reception of the butchering changes the game made to characters...

let's just say, don't expect a pure, not salty, unbiased opinion, alright?

short version:

i'd say - i'm getting progressively more and more glad DD2 got cancelled in the making the more info i hear about it :}

long version:

the word choice in that particular snipet is so baffling i don't know where even to begin.

let's start with the simple things. upgrading the altar means nothing to land restoration. you either channel your JRPG and kill a god, or you don't. there's no in-between. you're restoring memories of what once was by grinding the candles and pouring the wax into the altar instead of feedingit to Tardif or something. if it implies living in the memory and denying reality as the only thing worth doing in a ravaged world, well, that is a shitty message to bring along as the only hope your fictional world has.

then again, looking at the real world now, i somewhat get the appeal... but i digress.

secondly, the guy is naively optimistic if he thinks he'll be able to return to farming without some community or an armed force to defend that land and whatever results of his labour bring - especially after such a massive shitshow as the full-world calamity DD2 implies. after DD1, localized and contained in just one county at worst? oh, sure, no issue with that. grab that Dismas' arse and go fulfil your redemption husband dreams in a neighbour country that have never even heard of walking fish. but after the fuckupery of DD2 where the whole world is corpses, burned cities, undead and tentacle fun? ehhhh... not as many places to go to, ain't it? starting community from the scratch? again, see point 1 aka "good luck putting that helmet away instead of sleeping in it if you found some untainted land".

thirdly, "baneful gaze" addition is just... what do you even imply here? that it's his past sins and he's the only one who can't leave the past behind? that there's some higher ups (probably the church who canonically have military here) who will be watching him and controlling his land and its harvests? is it just a throwavay line to make it sound more poetic? is it vague for the purpose of being vague...?

"baneful" is a very strong word. it implies hate, poison, promise of harm. is this a hint that DD3 Electric Boogaloo will be about the crusaders DD2 tried so furiously to scrub out of itself and then just slapped a DLC about them on top of itself without care and thought about the timeline and how none of it makes even a lick of sense if you stop for a moment...?

let's say, i can see Rey wanting a retirement and starting a farm somewhere on the outskirts of some village. but i doubt it will keep him, unless there will be some trauma which would prevent him from asking to work anywhere better - or someone who'd keep him there. Rey is knighted. he's a soldier in a medieval world, with a gear and maybe even a horse. he's worth a small fortune and i doubt he doesn't know that. hell, if we look at his barks:

Eyes down, you cowering sheep!

The faithless have no right to harm anyone...

Fool! Stop getting in the way of the soldiers!

No. And if thou breaks rank again, I will smite thee.

It profanes the Light to visit blessings upon you unworthy dogs!

You are not worthy of aiding me.

does he sound to you like someone who'd settle for a peasant position unless he has some outer reason to...? he doesn't to me. more like a guy who has a pride of a knight - and the life expectations of one. i can see him becoming a borderline knight, with a castle tower of two rooms and a village or two in his grasp, tho. that would fit, imo. a tiny lord with a lot of secrets in his past, battling PTSD and trying to get back into the civil life. that would be interesting to see.

then again, maybe he's a poor little meow meow like the rest of DD2 crew, i honestly have no idea. i tried to play the DLC, but the story was giving me seisures, so i dropped it pretty fast. i got him and Dismas together to the tavern, fed them chocolates, quit the game and never opened it since because that scene with the warlord was making me unreasonably angry.

sorry if you were expecting a better opinion.

[coffee-in-veins]

Plan accord-- oh stfu, Academic

after i booted DD1 today, i think i started to glimpse what is so wrong for me and why i cannot enjoy myself in DD2. and while i in no way can tailor your way of having fun, i cannot comprehend how someone new to the game, who doesn't have everything unlocked previously, can genuinely enjoy DD2 in the state it is now - even if we forget the sudden absolution of characters from their guilt and dubious past deeds in favour of making them as spit-shiny as they could be, for a moment. i mean DD2 solely as a game - especially a game for someone who started it after this godforsaken Altar of Hope change.

a lot of rambling regarding the games, obviously. i have very strong opinions and i wanna share them

the part which got me thinking was, surprisingly enough, the joy of getting some minor trinket in DD1, i believe it was this little fella:

a Blight Amulet. relatively cheap (only 1500 gold), unassuming trinket, which granted +20% blight skill chance and +20% blight resist at the cost of -20% bleed resist. nothing to write home about, really. but my thoughts were "Oh, how nice! I can use it on my PD, now!". and i was happy i got it. it felt like i progressed. let's pin this as important for a moment and move on to a few clarifications:

first and furthermost - i didn't have a PD that run; it was an expedition into Warrens with Dis, Rey, a flagellant and a vestal. sure anyone could equip it, but none of my characters would benefit from it. objectively, this trinket was useless in that particular run. but now i had it and i felt joy and i felt better equipped for the future planned march to the cove.

why?

because i knew i had it if i needed it.

it was a viable option for later, in case i chose to use it, regardless of its importance now. it didn't matter whether i would sell it or use it as a cornerstone of my future expeditions. the most important thing was that i got it, and if i chose to see it as necessary enough to make room in my bags to bring it back, it would serve me in any way i saw fit: as a usable item, as a pile of emergency cash, or as a bragging right of having every trinket in the game - it didn't matter; i got my reward and i was free to use it in any way that suited my playstyle. it was there and it felt like an achievement; a victory, however small.

that was when the revelation of why i struggle so much to find any joy in DD2 finally hit me: in that game, i never felt like what i acquired, lost or did before, mattered at all.

let me explain.

the thing with the Blight Amulet contrasted nicely with my attempt to find joy in DD2 again on the previous day. on my first Desperate Few talk or after the first battle in the Valley (i don't remember and it doesn't matter), i got this charming thing:

and this looks amazing, right? a great thing to make Dismas into the dps monster he's supposed to be! well, you see, there was a tiny little problem:

it was completely and utterly useless in this run. and since DD2 operates on "each run is its own separate universe", it was useless period.

for those unaware: you choose hero's path before you start the run; and the moment i broke and told myself "well, maybe i will give this path thing a try, maybe it will make things better" i am "rewarded" with a thing that should make me feel good (it's even in the name, an Incredible trinket for crying out loud), but instead i feel like the game is mocking me and spitting in my face. because i would have never, being able to read and relatively sane, given this item to myself on that run, had i the ability to choose like i have in DD1.

it doesn't matter that i got a supposedly strong item at the start of the run. i'm not stronger; and since the run is a universe in itself, i will not be stronger next time for getting it this round; next time when i'll go all melee on Dis, i might never see the whiff of it. it doesn't matter now, so it will not matter at all, period.

it will not be there if i ever needed it.

so let's unpin that previous pin now, shall we?

DD2 presents itself as a management game while not being one, unlike its predecessor

it tries to be such, and presents itself as such with candles, and the Altar of Hope with a similar to DD1 rebuilding of the city, and the constant yelling in your ears about it, but it is not designed as one. unless you consider choosing Heroes' skills management, that is.

"The next Inn is leagues away!" the narrator needles me. "Plan accordingly!"

and i flip the bird to the screen as i gloomily look at the provided assortment of Chalk Dust (removes invisibility), Noisemaker (adds aggro to a hero) and a single sorry Ablative Powder (increases fire resist) with a side serving of Slime Mold (the food you do not want to give to your heroes period) while having to go to the shores where none of those matter at all. what am i supposed to plan, if i have negative options? for a game that constantly pokes you about how you suck at planning and managing your resources and squander your opportunities, it provides aggravatingly little of either. sure there is managing stagecoach inventory, and... managing stagecoach inventory, considering you don't have anything else, and all goes in it.

in DD1 i knew that if my character died from blight, it was on me: i failed to spare coin to buy antivenom from the Caretaker and bring it with me, or threw it away to make room for loot, or grew greedy and hoped they'd survive one tick without using it.

in DD2 when my guys die of blight, i throw my hands up with a yell "What in the everloving fuck was i supposed to do if all healing has round CDs and none of the three shops i visited (including a bloody field hospital) didn't have no antivenom? Conjure it outa thin air?!"

now, this can be refuted by: "oh this is roguelike" or "you're supposed to open antivenom in this barb wire sarded new gatcha minigame called The Working Fields"

well, two things regarding that:

first: i had antivenom unlocked; it didn't mean that the game felt entitled enough to roll it in any store for me (while showering me in burning salves AND failing to offer to go to the burning city simultaneously), and that's my gripe with it; let's expand on this a little bit before poking the "roguelike" aspect, shall we?

i cannot understand who in their right mind came up with "The Working Fields" idea for DD2 and i don't usually wish harm on people, and you might react very negatively to my following statement, but i genuinely wish to smack them over the head with a mobile-shaped club until they become a normal functioning person again since they can't have concussion while not having a brain.

the idea of a player having to roll for the privilege of even having a chance of the item at their disposal is utterly and absolutely abhorrent. you got unlucky and rolled the only fucking healing item in the game which works in all circumstances at your 35th attempt out of the 35 slots in this glorified gamble machine? well sucks to be you! look at this dung beetle, observe how it eats shit and contemplate what you can learn from its example.

yes, i still don't have healing salve or anything better than slime mold food; yes, it aggravates me to no end; imagine playing DD1 where you need to play slot machine to have the privilege of having a non-100% chance to have food offered in store at the start of your expedition; or the game randomly deciding you don't deserve having torches in the store; sounds like a moronic thing, isn't it? well, welcome to the DD2 experience, hope you like losing.

and it's not even a hard fix; just skew the chances of "newb friendly" items higher at the start of this bloody gatcha if you're so dead set on keeping it, before offering something highly specific and ultra-specialized, which is used in precisely 1,5 builds when you have everything else opened to support it. hell, the experience system everyone criticized so heavily was less prone to fuckups than this. and with it, you could clearly see how long you needed to suffer before it became better; even throwing items away boosted your experience - now you cannot sell them and don't get anything for throwing them away. you just get to see what the game tries to sell you as "cool" or "useful" and spitefully yeet it out of the window because you cannot do anything with it.

okay, while i was typing this i came up with another fix that might solve some of this frustration - there's a hoarder at the start of the valley, right? let the player buy back the trinkets they had at the end of the previous run if they wanna; boom, problem solved! you got unlucky and looted this incredible thing for the path you don't use this time? you're now inclined to keep it for as long as possible so you can buy it back at the start of the next run instead of yeeting it out and forgetting it existed; now there's a reason to spare that precious inventory slot for an item which is useless *now* to have a better chance *later*. why can't something like this be implemented? sure, puritans would spit at it - that's what they do after all - but it's not like they have to buy it back; don't want don't take, easy solution - all while those who struggle will have a little more of a wiggling room so they don't feel like they're permanently chewing cacti. i'm not asking for easy difficulty for those who want a challenge, i'm asking to offer options for those who struggle.

because honestly, for now, it feels like DD2 doesn't want to be played by the new people.

now, secondly, regarding the roguelike pin from earlier. i've played some roguelikes before, the most notable was Hades, and i want to show what Hades does well and DD2 handles poorly, in my opinion, and that is the same sin as almost every MMORPG in existence does:

making only endgame matter.

all is locked behind candles: your characters, their trinkets, all trinkets at all, all items (both combat and inn), cosmetics, and worse of all, hero stats. deathblow resist, stun resist, hp, damage, you name it - just push enough candles in the slot, and you can have anything. Dismas you start with and Dismas you could grind into are two very, very different Dismases even if both won't have paths and trinkets. sure you can argue it is similar to hero lvls in DD1, but - no, they're not. you got lvls if heroes survived expeditions; regardless of whether you had money or not to up their gear, they still lvled up and gained stats. you could improve them further to have better chances in the expeditions of the corresponding lvl, but you weren't paying for the lvl up itself with, say, Heirlooms. imagine dishing out busts or coins to lvl up your Dismas from lvl 0 to lvl 1 instead of spending it on the city. suddenly it becomes a lot more wtf, doesn't it?

and this is candle-bound lvl up troublesome, because combined with the lack of drops (oh yes, i forgot to mention - those, TOO, are locked behind candles!), lack of "privilege" to even have a chance to loot items, trinkets and food, it becomes painfully obvious the game wants to pad its time and make you grind. you can't experiment, you're locked out of 95% of the characters, and you WON'T have enough candles to unlock after your first death, or even after your fifths. you can't just go on a short run without healer and burn mobs before they burn you - DD2 won't allow it. at least, i'm yet to see any successful "no healer" run in it, while even i, being the unbearable ruminator who overprepares for any expedition, ran plenty of no heal expeditions in DD1 and those were mad fun.

DD2 dangles a carrot of "oohhh imagine how good it will feel to use it???" in front of you, and you go and farm the same first location over and over again for your 14 bloody candles, because attempting to finish cultists after second location each time ended up in a 32-37 round battle for me, and with all honesty fuck that shit, those are hours of my nervous system breaking apart that i'm not going to get back.

if we circle back to Hades for a moment, sure it has some grind too: the mirror, the prophesies, the unlockable weapons. but you not having bow unlocked doesn't mean you cannot make a full run with another weapon; and you don't have to lvl up your Mirror of the Night to have a chance of Daedalus hammer or Charon's well even be considered as a thing which can spawn. and for the love of everything that's holy, you don't need 100+ runs to open all the weapons' upgrades; and even if you do, if you suck immensely and cannot get any titan's blood needed by killing bosses, you can grind your way up and buy it from Infernal Brocker. i know because i've done it as a self-imposed challenge.

you can argue "but it's the same as farming candles in DD2" - no, it's not; in Hades, you had different currencies and spent it on different things; secondary ones accumulated by just playing the game. you could ignore some and concentrate on others; you could get enough to have a power boost by just playing. in DD2, regardless of whether i want my heroes suck less, have options in combat or make my vagon look better, i need the same thing. and, well, good luck getting more than 13 candles for the first region before you unlocked (with candles!) their spawn on the map at all, when your heroes want to do some obscure shit like killing a boss (haha gl with that!) or using an item you don't have yet opened from the gatcha and in-game don't know it even exists (how the hell did that pass QA?).

in DD1 the expeditions were the gameplay; you could not poke into the Darkest and enjoy the game as it was, and not bother at all - and the game didn't punish you for this anyhow, unless you opted into a special mode with limited time. harder things in expeditions were layered on top of existing ones, instead of being locked away from you with demand to come back after you paid for the privilege of trying to have fun. in DD2, if we continue the analogy, only Darkest is "the real game" and all before that is a meaningless grind you're supposed to do "to start having fun".

and frankly... if this is what my options are, i'd rather spend my limited free time on a game which offers me all it has on the second week, instead of promising that "it gets good after [insert whatever amount you think is appropriate] hours". i have enough grinding in my life as it is. i don't want a second job in those precious moments i'm supposed to have my fun - that is, if the game decides i deserve it and allows me to have a chance of rolling an item i need.

if you find DD2 grinding and gatcha mechanics fun... first of all, i am envious of your ability to have fun in this. and secondly... please tell me how. i genuinely fail to understand that.

[coffee-in-veins]

I was thinking again about how Dismas's Face Your Failure sucks, but tbh they kinda fucked up with the concept? To have Dismas kill a random guard doesnt really represent what went on and how it affected him, on the other hand, for him to face his failure by shooting that poor woman again would have been horrible and stupid.

There are very different types of backstory they tried to pigeonhole into the "failure" theme and to represent it by a single NPC gets even more awkward. You have Para killing the result of her horrid experiment, good, ok, makes sense. But Audrey kills her husband which she has no reason to regret killing in the first place, only that she didn't get away with it, Bonnie is faced with the adult that tortured her as a kid (is her failure running away from a fucking cult???)... then Barristan has to kill the ghosts of people led to their deaths and genuinely regrets doing so. Damian has to beat himself like he doesn't do that shit every day.

I'm sure if this was an anime it would all make sense, with dialogue and the evil shades taunting the heroes by distorting what went on, but as is stands, it's just forced. It's no Come Unto Your Maker in terms of impact, that's for sure

thank you for the ask!

sorry i'm slow with those lately ^^' too much irl shite falling on my lap... i am genuinely happy to receive asks, but i barely have much strength to do more than reblog some nice art lately. my bad.

i hope the length of it will make up for how late it is.

frankly, i refuse to engage with DD2 on principle and do my best to forget it exists, so where i feel comfortable discussing DD1 and my knowledge of it, in DD2 I can mostly speak based on youtube walkthroughs and my spite.

please, bear in mind that i'm biased. i'm still salty at DD2, and what i let slide in DD1, i meticulously dissect in DD2. so if this bothers you, i'm genuinely sorry. i can't help it. this was why i tried my best to distance from DD2 entirely.

that includes the little arsonist. i still can't help but resent her for taking space away from someone from the old cast. so i can't say anything about Bonnie, sorry.

Dismas is just a whole mess in his own league, as I mentioned before. and it's too depressing for me to dig into it fully, but the way the game is now (to my knowledge) it seems that his biggest 'failure' is getting out of a 'hellish' prison which had left such a lasting impact on his psyche that he has nightmares about it instead of some eldritch horrors. which imo speaks volumes about his time there.

frankly, for me Para is firmly in a 'this is not as traumatizing as they make it out to be' category. the guy was already dead, and based on narration, he was dead before she found him (where in DD1 comic this fact was up to debate). morally, at least in my eyes, it is no worse than autopsy. is autopsy immoral? no, not really. it doesn't hurt anyone. the corpses don't really care what happens to them. she basically created a Gaunt and we see no proof that Gaunts are sentient or can comprehend what is happening to them. for all intents and purposes, Para made a zombie, and then killed a zombie. the only change was that she used to know the basis of said zombie. was that traumatic for her? most likely, in a way every failed experiment of such magnitude is. was it immoral since the guy was dead and wasn't technically there anymore…? ehhhh… no? not in my head, at least. it definitely didn't warrant the place of her biggest failure - after all, she continued her trade, in DD1 at least, and there she was quite self-assured and willing to do what it takes to battle illnesses of Hamlet.

Audrey actually got away with killing her husband. the problem was that she got his debts too, as the new Lord of her household. so to not lose the lifestyle she had, she resorted to grave robbing. later, she either didn't get away with that, or got way too into it for the thrills. if anything, my bet would be on her regretting not killing him sooner, before the debts. i can't see any point where he would be her failure. marrying him? well, considering the age and her noble lineage, being a woman and narrator's phrase about her "Born into money, and married into more", marrying her husband was hardly her own decision, so not a failure in that regard, too. unless RH are implying very, very dubious things, i fail to see any scenario where he is her fault, worthy of 'Face your Failure' yelled at her face.

Barristan we get to see in both DD1 and DD2 seemed to be post-redemption arc, personally. well, save for few barks in DD1 afflictions (man, i miss how jaded and pointed they were unlike what i've seen in DD2...), but in DD1 everyone was much more at each other's throats and less sanded off to be mellow when they were afflicted, imo. but i digress. so, guardian grandpa felt like he had had his redemption arc already, before the game even started. he fucked up, he made amends, he learned his lesson. making him re-kill the ghosts is just a dick move from writers, imo.

i'm lowkey afraid to ask who Junia and Sarmenti get. because i dunno. i have my guesses, but if they are true, then i'm... i'm not even disappointed, i'm just tired.

Damian is... well, he simply is. i can get a separate rant about him, but boy, i have a lot of punches for the way the narrative worked with him. granted, he appeared when the levels of my blood salt regarding DD2 were reaching organ-failure levels (guess like Damian himself), but boy, did the RH did him dirty! not only in handling him, but also with going the most stupid, the most cheap option of self-fight.

however, and that's one huge however.

however, there's one character who, to me, outshines all this crap.

the most baffling example for me personally has to be Baldwin. the game made a very pointed, on the nose, blatant effort of showing him like the only actually undeniably good guy from the whole roster. he is kind, humble, loving, and is a 2-meter tall disney princess in disguise considering how each of his official artwork features small birds loving him and sitting on his hands. i don't even know what he gets as a Failure. his advisers? he dealt with them in more ways than one. the beggars he selflessly helped got leprosy from? if yes, this is undoubtedly not-as-good of a character anymore. does he just get to slap the boss for 200 HP because he's a gigachad or something? i'm genuinely confused.

as i said before, given the game's narrative, Face Your Failure makes no goddamn sense, and i stand by those words.

not only it feels cheaper than Come Unto Thy Maker (you can't straight out DIE from it afaik) it's not a hindrance - it's outright your way to win. unless you play with a vestal who has 0 attack skills, this is not a thing which makes the fight harder (like Come Unto Thy Maker does, progressively reducing your damage output and safety options), it does the exact opposite! why? why would the big bad make this fight easier for you to win? ugh! are we going for the 'i know you are in there somewhere' fights? is the guy called Hateful God for fuck's sake playing along with you, pulls his punches and secretly wishes you well? WHY would he??

excuse me, i need to read some soft reymas else thinking about this will put me into salt-induced frenzy.

[coffee-in-veins]

Face Your Failure and how to uproot all of character’s backstory and development in one model or less - a practical guide by RedHook

can anyone tell from that title that i’m salty yet?

so major spoilers ahead about which i couldn’t care less, but people love this game and i want to be polite, and as objective as i can be, so: please be warned, DD2 ending and boss moveset is discussed under Keep reading. if you want to experience the ending for yourself, spoiler free, do not read

Edit: you know, after contemplating about it, i realized - it’s not a bug, it’s a feature (tm.). this is distilled quintessence of everything wrong with this game. it shows you everything, places all cards down and punishes you one almost-last time if you cared or paid attention - the last time will be in the very last cutscene, if you pay attention to the lower part of it. if this, too, doesn’t bother you, you won’t have any issues with this game. if you did, this will be the last nail you needed to lean back and take time to contemplate your choices.

i think they shouldn’t fix this. because this is what Darkest Dungeon had become, and they should be honest about it and their attitude.

so. the big bad boss on the throne has a move called Face Your Failure - which, as the title suggests, summons what the chatacter you select (Come unto thy maker-style) thinks is his biggest failure in life. Para gets her zombie mentor, Barristan gets the spectre of his fallen comrades, Audrey... gets a zombie of the husband who tortured... and... abused her...? Including sexually...? Do you want to tell something by showing this, RH...? Something very, very dubious...?

But I digress. I’m here to show you that writing in DD2 makes no goddamn sense (tm.) by pointing to our beloved rateating highwayman:

Namely, pay close attention to the mob it summons for Dismas

it isn’t too obvious, and the arena is spun wide to see all of the tentacles and the iron crown, so here is a closeup:

notice anything interesting about its weapons? let me give you a hint.

this is the guard from the clown car the stagecoach that Dismas robbed in his backstory, in which the woman and child were. the ones he killed by his reflexes misfiring after the fight was over accidentally “in erratic gunfire”. the ones which spiked his guilt. the ones which pushed him into character development and coming to Hamlet and trying to find redemption. you know? that tiny miny plotpoint thing which was the culmination of his backstory and made him the character who we knew? that passing thing?

and this is the prison guard from his very first shrine:

do you notice the weapon choice? the stagecoach guards have swords while prison guards have batons. and the big bad boss summons a spectre of Dismas biggest failure. with a baton in hand. a prison guard.

I... genuinely dunno what to say, because the implication, unless I’ve lost my mind, is that Dismas’ biggest failure in life was getting out of prison. and this scene in the credits:

makes no goddamn sense (tm.) because this is not his biggest failure - prison is. the locket isn’t tormenting. it’s not shameful. it’s just there. it means nothing. because a cosmic deity which supposedly knows all of existence showed Dismas his biggest fear - and it had nothing to do with killing innocents.

i could’ve chalked it to cuts on model prices. but Audrey received a new model of her deceased husband. if Dis got a spectre of the woman he killed, the ghost of the child staring at him, anything - Reynauld’s corpse half-eaten by the Heart of Darkness for fuck’s sake! - it would’ve been better. but no. he has a prison guard. because who cares. it looks cool and that’s enough.

on a more personal note... i’m happy i didn’t have the money to buy early access. i genuinely am. i’m tired. i know i would never buy it, now. not after their eradication of Reynauld, not after how they butchered Dismas. if you can enjoy the game - more power to you. i’m not here to police your fun. but for me... DD2 got cancelled during development stage, and only thanks to Shibs’ vigilence we got to see the models and animations. but nothing else exists because accepting it is a far too tall of an ask.

now i crawl back into my cozy reymas saltmines.

[coffee-in-veins]

it's funny

the new DLC for DD should be what i wanted, it should've filled me with hopes and dreams for RH finally seeing straight and fixing their storytelling

instead i'm eyeing it warily, feeling like it's them breaking before fans' demands more than anything. like "here is your fucking crusader, but you'll have to fork more money to have him, we won't even put The Usual Suspects together in promo snapshots, shoving Boudica instead of Dismas and keeping Dis separate with the new lady, we may or may not make the class suck, and there still will be his chopped off head in the epilogue because who the fuck fixes ending videos for a DLC. are you happy now and can you stop yammering about him finally?"

the final nail in the coffin would be if it's not Reynauld but some Reynot. then i'll know RH is pissing on people who like DD1 and won't even have the curtesy to call it raining

ugh. i was finally having my peace with DD2 and now it's back to square one...

[coffee-in-veins]

You mentioning the DD 2 steam sale reminds me that despite the fact I bought the game early access, they expect people to buy it AGAIN if they want it on Steam. I can't put to words why it makes me so upset, I just want the fucking Steam icons!! And to not spend another $40 for them!!

hullo hullo!

thank you for the ask and sharing in my pain. and sorry for such a late reply, my inbox is a mess and I feel like i don't do it justice when people are trying to reach to me... i'm very sorry, I'll do my best to do better

to be honest, i'm kinda on the fence with all this 'exclusive early access'. especially with the DLC announced. they made people buy the game, and now will try to sell characters separately. don't get me wrong - this is an amazing monetary model... if you're the seller. have you noticed their wording in their answer to the questions about future DLCs?

translated from polite talk: If this crusader DLC is lucrative, we will make more DLCs with heroes you actually want, so if you wanna see the one you are actually interested, prepare to pay up! this feels almost like holding other heroes hostage so to speak - get enough cash to get previous ones or the one you actually want won't see the light of the day.

and i mean... this just reminds me so, so much of EA or Total War, you know? it sure is lucrative for them, people are dying to see their favs in gorgeous 3D (if they don't treat them like poor Damian over there but i digress...), and play with them in new maps against new bosses... i just dunno if i can be bothered to cough up 10$ or however much they'd want for each pair of them, you know? if we count all of the missing heroes and if they'll continue Crus' model (aka 1 oldie and 1 newcomer per DLC), DD2 becomes almost scarily expencive. especially where i am now.

honestly, with the amount of shit around me, i almost stopped monitoring the situation, but i am curious about the price they'll put on Rey fans to have him back (the achievements for Rey and Dis are just grinding the boot at this point imo), and how this all will be received. we'll have to wait an see, i guess.

but i'm scared that people will be happy and they will cough up that money, and RH will follow this monetization path, follow? not meaningful DLCs with mechanics like Farmstead or Crimson Court, but hero packs. and i am genuinely not sure what to feel about it. sure i'm happy Rey gets to be in DD2 but... shouldn't he be there by default? especially if they add achievements for him, Dis and the Usual Suspects. dunno. i don't want to be too negative or sound like a tin foil conspirator, but it almost feels like a planned idea? see if people want their old characters back, and then put a price tag on nostalgia and attachments and see if it will work.

[coffee-in-veins]

what do you mean about your last dd2 post? genuinely curious

hullo hullo! thank you for the ask

i mean that with what i've seen so far with DD2, from how they handle characters to how they show the story beats, i was already struggling. and how they handled Rey was the last nail in the coffin of my patience and goodwill.

i am not here to tell other people what to like and how to have fun, and i love the resurgence of art and writing it brought to the fandom. but for me, personally, DD2 was prematurely cancelled and never saw the light of the day. which is sad, because i desperately wanted to love this game and saved money to buy it and cherish it for hundreds of hours like i did with DD1.

but i guess we can't always get what we crave for.

[coffee-in-veins]

after the snippets i've seen so far, all i can say is:

too bad DD2 was cancelled out in early development guys, it looked very promising. shame all we got were a couple of snapshots and character models.

i hope they will continue the series someday, since it's beloved by many, including myself

[coffee-in-veins]

Dismas for the bingo? Also I keep seeing the 'fandom is wrong about them' the filled with no further explanation, if you fill it could you elaborate? Thanks!

ding-ding-ding we have double bingo!

who is surprised? certainly not me

as for the "everyone else is wrong about them" elaboration...

my problem mostly lies with how fandom loves to absolve characters of their shittiness - and now canon does too.

like if we look at DD1, canonically, Dismas is not a good man. maybe kind in his own right, maybe loyal, maybe friendly in his own way, i'm not denying any of it. but he did shit. he killed people. he robbed, mugged, most likely caused road accidents (considering how highway robberies were made). very few people write/draw/talk about him as a man who has serious problems, is probably an alcoholic, a tobacco addict, and considering times, proooooobaby on some dubious opioid/alcohol/only Light and Para knows (probably more Para than Light) what else mix which was considered medicine at the time - that is, if he can be bothered or can afford it. he has to be at least somewhat shady.

in my opinion, he has to scheme, lie his ass off, double cross people - it's what kept him alive for so long, after all. sure he can tell noble lies, but it doesn't mean he's any more honest. sure he knows his way around people, but look at his barks, he surely is a braggart. he sees his skills as superior (as anyone in Hamlet does, really, but that's beside the point). he is a conman, a shitbag, a cheater - and yet in most cases, I see him portrayed much like a cat: a bit bumbling, a bit of a jerk, sometimes moody but in the end, harmless. and this isn't what he is, imo. he's a thug. a thug who writes poetry in his free time, sure, but a thug nonetheless.

it's honestly my problem with DD2 mostly. characters there are washed-out toothless poor little meow meows. and it saddens me, since i see them as horrible people who try to make the most out of their current situation - it doesn't make them any less of the shitbags for it. like, i have no doubt that Dismas would suicide-rush a boss to save a friend (much like that Darius highwayman who met his end in encounter with Shambler) - but it doesn't mean he won't sacrifice a seeker he doesn't care for to assure his or his friend's survival or won't mug some sorry bloke in the town if he wouldn't have enough for a bottle. fandom, unfortunately, is usually pretty bad at seeing the moral greyness of characters and sticking to it. they either become the bastards or the infallible "precious babies". and since Dismas is widely popular, he bears the brunt of it.

we know he was in prison but it is barely explored (we don't talk about DD2's portrayal of him there in this blog, i need to be much more inebriated to talk about Buffmas). he is writing poems, but it's rarely referenced. he used to be a candlemaker, used to have a lover, maybe was in Vvulf's brigand, and knows marine terminology, so maybe he was on a ship or was sold as a galley slave from prison - there's so much going on in his backstory that seeing RH dumbing it down to "desperate meow meow who had literally no other viable options was tricked by a bad gang to assault a clown car" and even the "moral sin" which is pushed heavily as the reason he came to Hamlet in the first place was washed off him; in DD1, he shot the carriage deliberately: he heard a noise, and fresh out of a fight, his reflexes snapped into pulling the trigger. but the big emphasis of the scene in the comic was that it was after the fight was completely and utterly over. that was the tragedy - the same quick reflexes that let him live to his age, that he always, always starts the run with, screwed him over into murdering a defenceless woman and a child. however, in DD2, he's robbed even out of that, as they died, as Narrator puts it, "in erratic gunfire", cleansing him of deliberately pulling the trigger and having full responsibility of it when there was no need for it.

i can go on and on but... those are the biggest gripes.

[coffee-in-veins]

The Character Bingo for Damian👀? Also, thoughts on the redesign?

thank you for the ask!

i really should save drafts of those, when will i learn...

here's Damian's dd1 bingo:

frankly, i didn't think much about flagellants since i rarely used them in dd1 the game. i thought about Damian since my dear friend liked him, and he even got a supportive character role in RRR since i can easily see him hunting Bloodsuckers with single-minded religious zeal. he makes a nice foil for a decent amount of folk - Rey, Junia and Baldwin for their religiousness, Tardif for their inability to comprehend their own feeling, Sarmenti for singlemindedness. there's a lot one can play with, genuinely. i like the concept.

in-game, my biggest issue was that my flagellants always failed their very first death door checks despite their supposed high rez (hell, they had martyr's seal and it didn't flipping help in the slightest!), so i just sighed and resolved to a bunch of hwms and jesters for all my bleeding needs.

anyway, here's the same bingo for dd2:

hope it explains a lot, including my attitude towards the redesign. please bear in mind, i don't own the game (and now i doubt that i will unless it gets a nifty sale.. but i'm derailing here), so my attitude is based on text descriptions and three screenshots i've seen.

but if we want to be technical:

as i mentioned above, my flagellants died more than any other class (save for maybe vestals because i didn't play with occ as healers), so seeing literal Death chasing him is frankly hilarious;

i hate zombie characters when they are played as straightforward zombies. if they are more or less creative (fungal artillery my beloved - the yell i let out when i realized what exactly was going on with this thing was and still is priceless), then they get a pass, but you can't get any more zombie-y than a mummified guy who "refuses to die because of his will";

also the snobbery of that statement. i get that it was a magazine interview but just... others are pussies, i suppose, if they fail death check and die? wonder what does it make a non-candlefed flagellant when he inevitably bites an L and dies...

also WE ARE KILLING DEATH; no, for reals. it's Death. not a monster. not some eldritch being. not corporeal demon. DEATH. the literal aspect of it. how? why? since when it's a thing?? we are the motley crew of fuckups and social rejects; yes, they (supposedly) stopped The Heart of Darkness in DD1, but there it was more of the benefit of the estate and the looping nature of the land surrounding the titular Darkest Dungeon than anything, with a dash of Sleeper's time fuckupery and the Heir heavily implied to be cursed to keep the loop going and the Heart sleeping. and then again - you are supposed to lose a minimum of two heroes in that fight. are we supposed to perma-lose someone "Come Unto Thy Maker" style each time we fight Death? I highly doubt it, because Damian will become a liability quicker than he'd appear on a character select screen; here we are supplexing literal "i'm in my horsegirl phase" Thanatos AS A ROAD MINIBOSS; let's see what road minibosses are: a canon, a greedy woman with PTSD from her former expeditions, a pack of bandits and LITERAL DEATH; am I the only one who sees a "what the fuck are stakes" problem, here...?

also also seeing a fanatically zealous character having a move to desecrate corpses/graves is very odd, imo. yes, Baldwin/Leper has one too in dd2 - but in dd2 he is canonically no longer religious;

this is more of my quirk of trying to biologically explain eldritch fuckupery - but if Damian has coherent lines in DD2, this is a fuckup on RH part. he has no lips. he physically cannot speak as a human would, since lips and cheeks are a big part of how we form sounds to make words. if he groans, moans and wheezes only - my bad, you can ignore this point completely;

he no longer has his tooth gap. why? why, RH, why? his CC set trinket is literally Chipped Tooth. his background comic highlights him losing it. and yet his "rotting body" somehow got dental work and got it back...?

I dunno man. much like DD2 in general, i want to love it, i genuinely do, but it feels like... how do i put it. imagine amazon "hollywoodifying" DD1 with absurd stakes and literal "we're the only one who can stop the end of the world with our street magic" and making a sequel based on that and... i just dunno. i want to give it the benefit of the doubt, but the more i see, the less hope i have. huh. much like the game itself does, i suppose. it was a dd2 joke. an attempt to make one, at least.

sorry to end on such a downer note ^^' i hope you can enjoy dd2. i genuinely hope you can, i'll envy you in the best of ways. the game looks amazing and sounds decent, and i wish i didn't detest the rest of it. looking at you, gatcha.

and we end up on another rant of mine about dd2... sorry ^^' i'll try to control myself next time.

[coffee-in-veins]

I find the belt thing like... very interesting. It kinda vaguely reminds me of the story of how the Bounty Hunter got his iconic bounty scroll. Although it is like. Weird, I imagine that whoever does the majority of character design (which, as far as I'm aware is Bourassa) doesn't really have the time to check details like that. It's silly, admittedly (speaking as someone who's pursuing costume design), but also like. As an artist, I know the feeling of not realizing a thing is wrong with my drawing until after it's done. Idk, this is mostly like. Rambling hfdshkjs

thank you for the ask!

well, to be fair, this isn't exactly me you should be asking ^^' i wasn't the one to notice this, i don't wear belts enough to notice that it's wrong. all i noticed was that the knot with the tail's end was looking weird but hey, i was drawing from a reference of an official art director, so what did i know? i shrugged it off and drew this mistake, too

now i know better and i won't repeat it. i guess it proves, once again, an old saying of never using another drawing as a reference and only using real life references, because you'll be copying someone else's mistakes, huh...?

but if you want my opinion, it is lowkey a sign of lack of polish. if someone noticed it (and someone clearly did, since some of DD2 models don't have this issue) they never bothered to check other models for this and fix them

[coffee-in-veins]

New player anon again, thank you for your fantastic reply!! I'll admit there were a couple od things that I disagree with but I'm sure that stems more from my lack of enough research to these character's backstories

Someone in your replies had also said that it's better to consider the DD1 and DD2 characters as seperate entities and I can't help but agree. After all, the jump in premise from "exploring the cursed dungeon and driving back nasty monsters" to "literally saving the world from a bigger eldritch horror than last time" is a bit much in terms of upping the stakes. After all, while in DD1 it seemed believeable that warriors would come to the hamlet to be hired and were there for their own selfish reasons...what sort of reason is there for the DD cast to want to take on the apocalypse itself? The way I see it, most of the cast saw the dungeon crawling as a job, but I cannot see them tackling the DD2 big bad from the virtue of their hearts. Perhaps the Protege hired them but ehh...less believable than the Heir hiring them idk

Also DD1's main color palette being red is cooler than DD2's main color palette being blue lol

sorry for the late reply, irl just keeps getting to me and i have just enough energy for silly reports but nothing too serious

i'd love to hear things you disagree with, personally, because discussing characters is my passion, and even if i disagree with someone's take, it's always interesting to see how they justify it - if they justify it, and it's not, well, just a preference

starting with something easy - i would disagree that DD2 is "blue". Sure, the Ingress is blueish-black, but I guess it's more of a continuation of the "cosmic" theme. Blue/cyan/green are usually the colours of the "celestial" in the DD as far as I can see - take The Colour of Madness, for example - it's cyan, blue and grey, mostly, and those are the colours we somewhat see in Tangle and Shroud, locations "infected" by something cosmic/celestial. Meanwhile, red/black/purple are the colours of the Darkest Dungeon, The Heart, Crimson Curse (mixed with white), Cultists and whatever comes "from below", and they can be seen in Foetor and its assumed connection to Flesh and Sluice/Warrens to a lesser degree. besides, new location of Sprawl is definitely not blue, so i'm not sure what are you about here... the infodumps before each run? i'd call them grey. the Altar of Hope? it's always purple it's also grey. could you point what you mean by "being blue" here?

and regarding the other point you bring up... that's the issue i have! those are NOT different characters, this is NOT a different world, and we have quotes, items and characters to prove that. Baldwin says that he used to be religious when he interacts with Holy Beads in an inn. we meet Caretaker as Hoarder and at least some of the characters note that he is familiar to them. the one who teaches your heroes upped skills is none other than Guild Lady. we get Ethereal Dust and Otherwordly Fragment from The Sleeper. we get The Blood and The Wine from Crimson Court. hell, we see fully grown Willbur and Wilbur's Flag, much like we get those in DD1.

Damian is the most obvious and the latest living (?) proof of DD2 being a direct sequel of DD1, if Protege's story wasn't screaming it loud enough, since he and his Professor narrowly escaped (or Professor didn't quite manage to) being turned into the Necromancer from DD1.

frankly, if those were separate bubbles, separate branches of reality, i'd have a lot less gripe with DD2 lore- and character-wise, but (unfortunately?) RH go out of their way to prove how it IS a continuation of DD1, story-wise. that this is the same Dismas, that this Para is the same Para, and that Baldwin still somehow can get double leprosy.

also: the reason why they want to take a fight to an apocalypse can be, quite literally, a desire to survive or die trying; if they don't fight the apocalypse they'll die 100%. if they do fight the apocalypse... well, realistically, they still die 100% but they feel better about themselves. but this is not what happens in the game.

speaking of which.

my biggest gripe with DD2 is that it feels... "hollywood-y", for lack of a better term. a pack of socially undesirable underdogs, stopping the end of the world they have literally no way/no means/not enough understanding to stop by the power of drugs and friendship and maybe a gun they found along the way. let me explain.

in DD1 it was a war of attrition, either you mismanage your town (and yes, you have a whole town bending to your will and serving you, providing for you and implementing whatever you want and can afford), or whittle down cultists and horrors and breach in to... not win, no and this is an extremely important distinction, here! - but to return things to the status quo. the Heir(ess) cannot win against the Heart. they simply cannot. it's not a thing a human, cursed or not, can do. they can only perpetuate the cycle and return things to the start by stockpiling corpses of their mercs high as the sky in an attempt to do so. again, you have a whole town at your disposal and you can't win, you can only win more time which, in the end, is futile since it's a continuation of the cycle. notice you can't do anything about The Heart just as you can't do much about the Sleeper but return them to the start of the sleeping cycle, unlike more "corporeal" beings like Countess, Flesh, etc.

now, in DD2, you canonically have: a guy who nearly became the Necromancer's right shinbone, two horses, a wooden box with wheels and four traumatized people who had already seen some shite. no planning, no whittling, no attrition, no army, self-made as it was in DD1. and you do the biggest sin of the cosmic horror genre - you WIN. not survive. not escape with a few scars, a forever shattered sanity and a grey head. not return things to the feeble status quo by a MacGuffin and a connection to some cosmic entity (or being a larva of one). win. if you count the inn stops, the game is four days long. think about it. you WIN against an apocalyptic calamity which fucks up the entire WORLD (not some province, not even a country or a continent, not some lost backwater estate, the WHOLE WORLD) in four days. twenty if you want to be pedantic and include all five chapters. twenty five in we're being generous and adding sluice. twenty five days to win the unwinnable. i think the quickest i've seen DD1 finished was 16 weeks...? and again, that wasn't a win, narrative-wise even if the player won against the final boss. it was a draw, a reboot because you shouldn't be able to win against the cosmic horror. it's not how cosmic horror works...

please note, i'm not trying to diminish your love for DD2. go for it, enjoy what i have issues with, i'll be happy to see the fandom having new people and new takes. if you can explain or maybe just not care about it all, i genuinely envy you and wish i could, too. alas, here i am, overthinking the rule of cool and why RH does what they do.