YMMV / Hades II

• Awesome Art: Par for the course for a Supergiant Games work, but not only is the art gorgeous, the animations are far more fluid than the first game. Special mention goes to the Infernal Beast (Cerberus), whose attacks and area telegraphs - fiery circles with veins slowly expanding from their center - have an almost hand-drawn look to them.
• Awesome Bosses: Scylla and the Sirens quickly became one of the most talked about elements from Hades II upon the release of the game in Early Access, due to them being a rock band who treat the fight as if it were a concert, along with an accompanying rock song.
• Breather Boss: The "Infernal Beast" (aka Cerberus), who caps off the Fields of Mourning and is therefore the final obstacle the player must face before returning to Tartarus, comes after the chaotic and heart-pumping fight against Scylla and the Sirens and before the Final Boss fight against Chronos himself. While certainly capable of dealing high amounts of damage in a wide area, the Beast's attacks are much slower and more heavily telegraphed than any of the game's other bosses (save maybe for Hecate). If the player can make it through the Fields of Mourning in one piece, the Infernal Beast likely won't pose too much of a challenge.
• Breather Level: The Fields of Mourning are generally much easier than the levels before and after due to having a wide-open structure that gives you plenty of room to retreat coupled with a system focused on unsealing, allowing you to catch your breath and regain your bearings after every wave. Additionally, most of the enemies there are straightforward, and there are few serious hazards aside from the thorns, which are easily avoided and do only Scratch Damage. In comparison, the levels both before and after it have a much more cramped structure, more complex enemies who attack in steady waves, and hazards that can do severe damage to the player if they make a mistake.
• Crazy Is Cool: Eris has received a loving response from fans for her sheer kinetic chaos and love of bringing mischief and insanity, particularly in her boss fight on the Surface where she shows both Mel and the player exactly what the Adamant Rail can do in its original wielder's hands as she fires waves of bullets and carpet-bombs entire parts of the beach front, all the while giggling like a wicked schoolgirl.
• Evil Is Cool: Chronos is an abusive, cruel, cold monster and one of the first truly evil characters in sharp contrast to the Punch-Clock Villain and Affably Evil characters that populate the series. Yet he has met overwhelmingly positive reception thanks to his awesome aesthetic themed around gold and clocks, his Time Master powers, and the fact he proves himself to be far from a Non-Action Big Bad when confronted by picking up a scythe and showing off everything the Titan of Time can do with his abilities.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of Hades II have been drawn into a rather heated rivalry with Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, mainly over the differing appearances of the Greek pantheon between the two series, with both sides accusing the other's character designs of being unrealistic and not attractive enough. The Hestias of both series especially get a lot of negative comparisons, with Hades II fans saying the other Hestia looks too generic and child-like and DanMachi fans saying that Hestia in Hades II looks too fat and old.
• Fanon: Despite them yet to be seen interacting, Zagreus has been uniformly portrayed as a loving and doting older brother to Melinoë. Given that Melinoë was born after the events of the first game, it created the fanon that Zagreus helped raise baby Melinoë, even taking her around the Underworld to introduce her to others, and perhaps sparring on occasion. This was helped along with footage from the Technical Test, which showed a family portrait of Hades, Persephone, Zagreus, and a baby Melinoë; it depicts the four of them and is accompanied by Melinoë saying to herself, "Remember what they took from you".
• Friendly Fandoms: One quickly formed with Delicious in Dungeon after Hephaestus's reveal, due to the similarities between him and Senshi, both being bearded Big Beautiful Men with horn ornaments on their head and long black hair.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • A lot of Chronos' attacks invoke the shape of rings, such as his thrown scythe, his scythe vacuum, his Orbiting Particle Shield, and a number of his second phase's attacks are basically giant rings. The planet named after his Roman counterpart Saturn is famous for its rings.
  • Chronos isn't just time-themed, but also very money-themed, even reforging the gold coins to have his hourglass symbol. One of Chronos' forces occupying the House of Hades is even a sentient money bag. As the saying goes, "time is money".
• Game-Breaker: The Total Eclipse Hex summons a meteor that deals massive damage in an area, but is balanced by a long wind-up time of 4 seconds before it drops. However, one of its Path of Stars upgrades makes you Impervious until the meteor falls. This not only removes its main weakness, it turns it into an excellent offensive and defensive tool at the same time, effectively going from a delayed attack to 4 seconds of invincibility that just happens to include a powerful explosion.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Chronos has a distinctly Egyptian aesthetic compared to the rest of the characters, as a nod to the fact that just as he long predated the Olympian gods, so did Ancient Egypt long predate and to some degree inspire Classical Mythology and ancient Greek culture.
  • The Fields of Mourning, or Fields of Sorrow, are a real underworld location in mythology, coming from Virgil's Aeneid. Just like in the game, they're close to the River Styx, and are known for their myrtle and golden boughs.
• LGBT Fanbase: The moment the first trailer was released, the game already had a massive amount of queer fans much like its predecessor, with people quickly falling in love with the attractive character designs.
• Love to Hate:
  • Even when the game's only in Early Access, Chronos is so despicably smug and responsible for turning Cerberus into a monster that many of the fans have taken up the game's rallying cry of "Death to Chronos".
  • Narcissus is every bit the self-absorbed Jerkass you'd expect, and he's voiced like the Greek myth equivalent of a Fratbro. This, naturally, makes him fun to encounter.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Fields of Mourning are an especially unsettling area by the series' standards, as it it usually shies away from the more visceral aspects of death. The rooms are huge and very easy to get lost in, pools of what looks like blood and veins dot the landscape, making it feel less like a plain and more like a Womb Level. And the enemies aren't just Demonic Spiders, they're also disturbing, especially the Holehearts, which attack by throwing their own hearts, which become land-mines of blood. The region's boss being a Body Horror-infected Cerberus doesn't help.
  • The first few appearances of Chronos are incredibly unsettling. He initially appears as a black silhouette who is not entirely visible to Melinoë or the player, and compared to the other characters, his stature and design look somewhat off compared to everyone else's. There's also his echoing voice and his ominous messages to Melinoë, and to top it all off, his name isn't even given until after the few first meetings, with the UI instead identifying him as "???".
• Player Punch: Especially for people that played the first game, Chronos corrupting the lovable Cerberus into a monster you have to fight hit players hard.
• Preemptive Shipping: Melinoë and Nemesis got immediately shipped for what is implied to be a long and complicated story of resentment between them and just how good-looking they both are. Other fans ship Melinoë and Moros for the same reason, or ship all three of them together (akin to the Zagreus-Thanatos-Megaera polycule you can potentially start in the first game).
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Zagreus' Cast from the first game was often a superficial part of his moveset unless you built around it (with specific weapons or Boons, the latter not being guaranteed to appear in a run). Melinoë's Cast is a far more integral part of her playstyle and its default properties (a circle that slows enemies and causes damage when charged) ensure it's useful even when not empowered by a Boon.
  • Stubborn Defiance in the first game rarely saw use over the regular Death Defiance, outside of emergency healing via self-KOs in very high Heat runs. Here, a similar effect to Stubborn Defiance is attached to Moros' Keepsake, allowing it to be used alongside regular Death Defiance.
  • One of the cauldron upgrades will create a silvery trail and dialogue to let players know of collectibles in the room, remedying a common issue that many players would miss potential fishing spots in the first game due to the only notification being an easy-to-miss chime noise that might not play until they had already left the room.
  • Poseidon's knock-away Boons in the first game were sometimes undesirable for melee builds as they could knock enemies out of range of follow-up attacks. Here, the effect has been changed so the initial enemy hit is not knocked away, only those surrounding it.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Eris's curses. Like Chaos boons, you incur a penalty during your run. Unlike Chaos, the curse lasts the entire run and even worsens instead of changing to an upside. And while you eventually no longer have to deal with this mechanic after you make enough meta progress it can still ruin a lot of early runs, especially since a player can get the same curse twice in a run.
• Scrappy Weapon: Ygnium, the Umbral Flames, are the least popular weapon of the initial early access release. They're a pair of magical torches that automatically launch fireballs as long as you hold down the attack button, with enough consecutive attacks triggering more powerful Omega shots at the cost of some Magick for each attack. You can move while firing, but your movement speed is greatly reduced, and since you're expected to be firing for several consecutive seconds (as opposed to other weapons, where you can just do a single attack, then quickly start moving at full speed again), this cripples your mobility, especially since the damage output is very poor. The special move, an Orbiting Particle Shield, can be good, but is risky due to requiring you to stay at very close range to an enemy while waiting for the orbiting projectile to hit them, and this move generally misses the point of choosing a ranged weapon in the first place. Additionally, because the attack isn't charged and the special move isn't aimed, it interacts poorly with the very first Arcana you get, The Sorceress, which slows down time while charging in order to make it easier to aim.
• That One Boss: The guardian of the Rift of Thessaly is Eris, who can prove to be as much of a threat to the player (if not more so) than Chronos himself. She's a Lightning Bruiser who zooms around the battlefield and proves to be a real sharpshooter, with her attacks dealing massive damage to Melinoë should they hit - which they almost certainly will, given the sparse amount of cover available during the fight. To make matters worse, as the fight goes on, she takes advantage of her weapon's special feature by shooting herself with her own grenades to up her damage by 100%. She can do this multiple times, making her already high damage shoot through the roof. Eris makes a fitting roadblock to cap off the initial phase of the game's Early Access, as the region beyond the Rift of Thessaly is currently unavailable.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Chaos' redesign is somewhat divisive. While some fans like it for being a case of Progressively Prettier and as a sign of character development regarding Chaos' repaired relationship with Nyx, others are less keen since it loses some of the Eldritch Abomination, Creepy Good and deliberate Uncanny Valley aspects in the process.
  • Likewise a lot of the redesigned portraits for the returning Olympians are considered downgrades compared to the last game's, due to the more static poses and reduced shading being seen as making the art look more dull.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Melinoë herself is this; fans theorized that a Hades sequel would follow up on Zagreus, but they chose to instead use Melinoë, another obscure deity linked to Hades.
  • Moros is likewise obscure, having rarely been featured in mythology or its adaptations, while Hecate, Nemesis, and Chronos have.
  • Skelly, or rather "Schelemeus", returns as the player's training dummy. While still a jokester, he has toned it down for the sake of being a more serious trainer for Melinoë and is now more recognized and revered in Erebus.
  • Selene, a Titan and the moon incarnate, is revealed to be an ally to Melinoë.
  • Eris, the incarnation of strife and discord is another obstacle in your way who will tamper with your current run if she thinks it's "going too well". She also has a secret boss level where she wields her aspect of Exagryph.
  • Icarus, a well-known but very minor figure from Greek myth whose primary claim to fame was dying in a spectacular fashion, appears as a go-getting inventor and another boon-granting ally to Melinoë.

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