Hades 2 (2025) is Supergiant’s first ever direct sequel to one of their titles and nearly flawlessly takes what made Hades (2020) a smash hit and improves on it from gameplay to relationships and regions.
The word “nearly” was used intentionally however, while the story of Hades 2 makes sense and for the most part is a logical evolution of the original set up and story of Hades, the ending created a thorough ripple among the Hades community. I believe this to be for a few core reasons:
1. Building off the emotions from the original Hades in Zagreus coming to terms (but specifically not forgiving his father for his past transgressions) Hades and mending the relationship between his parents.
2. Giving some Fans around a full year of Pre-release builds before the full game was released creating a significant amount of room for fans to be able to theory craft on potential endings, thus (reasonably) raising expectations. I am personally in this camp as I was playing when the Surface was first added to the game.
3. (VERY SUBJECTIVE) The ending itself almost feels rushed and particularly the post game feels a bit like a slap to the face narratively and it ended up hurting the perceptions of Melinoë and Zagreus.
So lets step back and actually go through the general motions of the story and how everything generally makes sense until the true ending.
In Hades 2, the player controls Melinoë, the daughter of Hades and Persephone, who has been orphaned at the hands of the Titan Chronos (The father of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) and is on a quest to travel from Erebus (the darkness surrounding the underworld) into Tartarus to face the Titan. As the player progresses they become more acquainted with the personality of Melinoë- the persistent goddess of nightmares as someone who will not give up until she saves her family (who have been sealed away from time… other than Hades who is imprisoned in his old house) and slays the regenerating Chronos for good.
It is from here that Mel (what many of the characters in the game call her and what I will be using for the duration of this blog) learns that Chronos had actually been waging war with the other gods on the surface of the Earth by summoning the Creator of all Monsters: Typhon. So Mel takes it upon her self to both find a way to kill Chronos and keep Typhon at bay so he doesn’t destroy Mount Olympus.
Mel’s dedication to absolute success in these tasks she has been training her entire life to achieve show her personality as someone who does not compromise even slightly in her quest for vengeance (And POSTGAME SPOILER!!: Once you learn the true identity of Mel’s headmaster in witchcraft Hecate actually being Mel from a different timeline where she ended up ruining her timeline by erasing Chronos, Mel’s absolutism becomes even more apparent.)
Eventually in the story, after defeating Chronos for one of the first times, Mel is able to communicate from Zagreus through his Mirror of Darkness and she tells him to find Chronos in the past and to kill him so they can live as a family in the same timeline. Zagreus agrees and sets off to find the cult of Chronos and to kill the Titan with the Gigaros Spear.
But then, in one of the strangest moments of characterization, Zagreus, a character who had spent the entire first game trying to improve his relationship with his family and become a dependable person chooses to spare Chronos under the conditions that he not be a dick. This creates a parallel universe for Mel and Chronos where they both have the memories of having been Enemies and Family and Chronos decides to become a good guy and apologizes for being a dick to Mel.
For some reason Mel is not mad at Zagreus for completely disregarding his word that he would kill the most evil titan ever and just decides to roll with it.
To rub even more dirt into the wound of this already strangely written ending, Mel only hangs out with her family for like a week and spends the rest of her life in the cross roads where her and her now cool grandpa jump from timeline to timeline to kill other versions of her Grandpa and Typhon (I guess those versions don’t deserve any redemption???). Finally, Mel gets to meet the fates who gave her this quest to begin with and they just decide that they don’t care about being the fates anymore and stop weaving forever leading to the Age of Humanity in the most anti-climactic way possible.
This ending flat out ignores the motivations of a majority of the gods (and in particular Zeus, Prometheus, Mel, Zagreus, and Hades who were potentially affected most by the Chronos’ actions) and ends the story by essentially stating that nothing that mel does from this point even matters and that there will never be another sequel to try and fix these issues because the Epoch of Gods has ended. How Devestating.
