I remember watching a GDC talk about the design of Darkest Dungeon (this one),1 which was a pretty thorough and candid view from inside about what worked about the game and what they wanted to express. One particular line stuck out to me (around minute 54 if you care), "don't arbitrarily kick the player in the nuts. Kick them in the nuts with specific and carefully crafted purpose"
I believe Red Hook relaxed on this rule for Darkest Dungeon II.
DDII kept superficial related elements from the first game. The heroes are the same types of guy, things look the same (albeit less hyperdeformed and more realistically proportioned), Wayne June is still narrating your journey, the 1D combat is broadly similar, there's corpse management, there's stress and related bits to that. It is not the same game, however, which I think is a good central choice for the sequel. Darkest Dungeon has a core tension to the entire campaign (at least on the difficulty setting that enforces this): you have a limited number of weeks to build up enough resources in terms of your town and heroes to be able to take down the final boss, and if you don't meet that deadline you just lose. This means just accomplishing the mission and bugging out will keep one particular group of heroes safe, but deprive you of possible resources that you need for the overall campaign. In the video, Tyler splits the four central systems between estate, exploration, combat, and camping. Even if you don't spend the most time in the estate, it is centrally what the game is all about. It's a personnel management simulator with some other things attached. Not that I think those could be just removed and leave the experience unchanged, but that at some point, you come to think of your roster in terms of turnover rate. It isn't all that difficult to know what the best thing to do in combat is at any point. Once you know how your characters and the monsters work, this becomes nearly automatic. There's a learning curve, sure, but it has a low ceiling. Knowing what the right thing to do between exploration and the estate, on the other hand, is actively impossible, and a gamble you are forced into making over and over again. It is meaningfully stress-inducing. So if you think your party is still put together enough to shove a torch in the Shambler's altar for the sake of more loot, the altar is sitting right there waiting for you. But be prepared to lose all the resources you put in to training up one or more of the people who have to face the thing.
DDII lacks that central tension. You have the road, you go down the road, the run ends when it ends, you can just try again. There is no campaign-long resource pressure looming over you, so there's no real push to take risks to gather more resources in a long-term sense.
In a run-overall-term sense, there's at least some pressure. For confessions 2-5, it is impossible to drive to the mountain unless you mount a trophy on the wagon. It is narratively unclear what sort of mechanism enforces this, as if the inkeeper before the mountain flatly refuses to change out your horses for fresh ones unless you are at least this amount of brave or crazy. To get a trophy, you must complete a lair, which is a three-stage battle with a boss as the third stage, each boss unique to their region. I rank the bullshit level of the bosses from least to most as the harvest child (foetor), the librarian (sprawl), the leviathan (shroud), and the general (tangle). Most parties can reliably defeat the baby no matter what, since the baby is width 2 and moves about, and is the only target that needs to be damaged, and since the baby takes dots just fine, and since the main tool to mitigate the gimmick is party reordering, which is a universal mechanic (although Hellion struggles the most with this, being limited in movement to forward 1 only for some reason). The librarian needs you to be able to deal damage to ranks 3 and 4 with most of your characters, and also needs the majority of your damage to not come from burn. The leviathan needs some combination of strong attacks, move resist, stealth or enemy blinding to mitigate the various things he does, and sometimes he just wins out anyway. The general needs you to be able to hit rank 4 to even play, and the game is one of hitting the root enough to stop the tendrils from above, but not so much as to trigger the roots below, and this game is rigged.
So the tension is present for going after a lair. You are permitted to bug out after the first battle or the second, and in that one moment the original tension exists, but most of the time, if you are familiar enough with all the bosses anyway, the right thing to do is straightforward. Not always, it can be tough, and the outcome uncertain, but it is a toss of the dice you choose to make, and so getting screwed over feels justified in the "give em just enough rope to hang themselves" design sense, which I approve of, to be clear.
Contrast this with Inn quirks. When visiting an inn between areas, which is your chance to purchase goods and de-stress, heal, improve relationships, and buff your team, arriving at the inn itself will almost always assign one or more quirks to each member of the team. The EV on quirks is negative, as about 50% of them are blue and outright bad, and even some of the gold or "good ones" can still have drawbacks, or bump off a different, better quirk you already have if you had three good ones already. This is a mandatory negative EV dice roll. You cannot avoid the inn. You cannot select which inn you are going to (which can also have variable effects, one called The Vestal's Secret in particular assigns two quirks and so is particularly egregious). It is both arbitrary and mandatory. Certain quirks can be especially debilitating. This is a total violation of the principle. You did not choose to toss the dice. You have been kicked in the nuts arbitrarily.
And much of the rest of the game carries that same idea along with it, even if I think inn quirking is the most stark example. Because the choices you do have access to are relatively low stakes overall (road route choices for example), and the worst things that happen to you have nothing to do with your choices at all, success really feels like a crapshoot in a way that the presentation elides.
Which makes the choice to do a run-repeating-metaprogression form kinda baffling to me. In something like Dead Cells or Hades, you can build up your stock of permanent resources and make solid choices mid run to more-or-less guarantee your success. Maybe you need one particular thing that your build is missing that you never get, but runs are short enough overall that just rolling again doesn't feel like you're missing out on anything.
In DDII, the road is long. Any single confession can take hours (about one hour if you are absolutely speedrunning it, and if you're going at that pace you are way better than I am), and always ends with a boss that can wreck you. Your plan from the outset needs to involve a way to defeat the confession boss, which can sometimes involve items you get along the way to them, which maybe you didn't get. The buy-in for a reroll has a lot more weight to it than in other games with similar form. Press and hold R in Balatro to quickly restart your run if the first two tags are not to your liking, for example. With so much of player agency bundled at the very beginning of a run, where you choose your party and skill loadout and maybe unlock or purchase some items, there's no real reason to restart right away. The variance outside of your control is obscured and distant. You have to play for an hour to know if you were screwed from the beginning or not, and that doesn't feel great, and doesn't feel in keeping with DD.
There's also a lot of items with drawbacks. Combat items tend to perform a task, but then they are gone, the drawback being limited number of uses, which is understandable and acceptable. Combat items are overall pretty good, I like where they're at. Trinkets, on the other hand, almost universally have drawbacks attached to them, often in totally baffling arrays. There's a little traction to managing a drawback on an item that, say, lowers your speed, which could allow you to manage your party turn order favorably, but for the most part, trinket drawbacks are all bad. Sometimes in ways that can't even be mitigated by something else. Most egregious, though, are indelible rank trinkets that have drawbacks. For normal trinkets, there's a kind of colored rarity system in place, where the common version of the trinket has a lower effect and a drawback, the uncommon has a larger effect and some drawback, and the rare version has the largest effect and loses the drawback. The managing factor is how expensive each is to purchase or obtain. You really have to shell out for the good shit. For that money to be spent on something that either only works a fraction of the time or can outright screw you over is a wild choice, and one I really resent. Especially when it comes to trinkets you get as random drops instead of direct purchases. As in, yet again, you didn't toss the dice but you did get a bad roll anyway. I really think they went overboard with the upside/downside or kiss/curse designs. Come to think, I also don't really like the inn items that have 80/20 relationship effects, but at least with those, I'm the one choosing to use them.
Then there's a big hole in DDII also that you might feel nebulously if you don't play a lot of run-repeating-metaprogression games, or you might feel acutely if you do. That hole is the size and shape of the reroll. The hoarder is not interested in anything you're carrying. Inventory management has one step and it's throwing things out the wagon window to free up space. You can't sell back anything, and there's no way to reroll the shop except for visiting more of them. If you really need something specific, there's nothing you can do to try to get it. Imagine if there were, though. Suppose you know of a rare trinket that will bring your build together, and suppose there were a way to get it, or anything else, but at a price? Wouldn't that be perfect for a Darkest Dungeon? Imagine the kinds of faustian covenant you could make the player sign up for if it meant they got their chosen treat. Imagine if the player had a Leper as their mainliner and really wanted the grinning gargoyle to enable those big chops, so they go to the devil's deal location and ask for the trinket for an unspecified price, and the price ends up being the Leper is exchanged for a different character. There's a thousand ways you could come up with ironic punishments for specified greed, but you don't even have to get specific, you could just come up with a handful and assign one at random. At least the player is the one who asked for it. They're the ones who made the bargain.
But that's fanfiction at present. Since the most recent patch, I have no real hope that DDII will change in the substantial ways I think it needs to in order to become actually good. Don't get me wrong, I've appreciated my time with it and it is the sort of thing I find fascinating because of how close it is to being good. There's something about an imperfect thing that inspires fixation in ways that things that are merely pretty good can't do to you, hence a post of this length.
And I'm not done, because I may as well load on my problems with the story while I'm here. Which, curiously, I think is an actual cursed problem in the Dr. Alex Jaffe sense2, but this requires some buildup.
I think the story beats of DD and DDII are broadly incompatible. Sure, the same people show up, there's a sense that at the end of DD, everything went all to hell and now we're here, but the actual told story does not fit with that beginning and so needs to be scrapped. I think a better overall baseline is to pretend the events of DD are not directly canonical with DDII, since at the end of DD, the ancestor, that's the voice of Wayne June that has been narrating everything and who says "a decisive pummeling" when you get a critical hit and so on, that guy appears at the end and explains that investigating and awakening the being at the bottom of the darkest dungeon was his fault. There's a kind of resigned melancholy to that final revelation, where the nature of the being is such that the ancestor believes it would have happened anyway and tries to cop out of any responsibility over either uncovering it or driving the estate to ruin in the process, let alone any of the horrible bedfellows he took on along the way to that.
That ancestor simply cannot be the same voice that is ringing in your head in DDII, despite still being Wayne June and also narrating everything. The only true link between the games is the Caretaker from 1 reprising his role as the Hoarder from 2, the implication being that he saw what was coming and looted the crap out of the estate. The various currency items from 1 are depicted in his portrait in 2. But that's all we got. So I think it best to take certain broad beats from 1 and use them in 2 without dragging out the whole kit and caboodle of it. Otherwise we run into some really sticky places with the confession end bosses, whose presence is both grotesquely physical and in no way strictly representational as a physical thing. The world seems to have a dual-nature as physical and liminal space, which is breached at both the beginning and end of any wagon run. This is a solid structure for a cosmic horror story, to reach the mountain is to cross the threshold and pierce beyond the physical. You still had better take a gun in with you, like Clarke at the end of The 100. The veil beyond spacetime is haunted, after all. Within that foundation, the not-ancestor describes the fall of a person referred to only as "you" from cultural academic researcher to cult leader, which plays out in a couple paraphrasings of story snippets at the beginning of each of the five confessions. The end boss of each confession reflects the nature of the degradation that led to the tragic downfall of the antagonist. I refuse to engage with this application being directed out the fourth wall at the player, because I didn't do any of that shit. And my self-insert player avatar is a group of four people whose decisions I govern, and whose backgrounds form a large part of the game's story, more on that later. So I'll be referring to Wayne June's "you" as the antagonist. Anyway, the first confession, Denial, ends with a huge floating brain and four creepy looking locks, metaphorical mental barriers that seal you away from the rest of the game's content, a representation of the antagonist's sealing off of his own morality in pursuit of the power behind the symbol of the iron crown. I like this one the most of the end bosses, it was the one from the beta, and most any party composition can approach it confidently. At the start of the turn, one of the four locks will activate a denial, which prevents the use of either melee skills, ranged skills, physical heals, or stress heals. Each lock has access to only one of those, so you can focus down the one that is giving you the most trouble and leave the more ignorable locks for later. All you really need is characters with combinations of melee and ranged attacks, or buff skills that never get locked down in order to mitigate the lockdown, which you can do with almost anyone. The second confession, Resentment, ends with a...uh...pair of lungs and trachea that erm...represent resentment somehow. I'm really not sure of the calculus on this one and I don't feel like bothering to try all that hard to make it make sense. Certainly not compared to some of the others and their pretty unambiguous nature. I suppose resentment boiled between the antagonist and not-ancestor and they yelled their lungs out at each other or something. It's called the Seething Sigh, and there's a line about rage in there, and it applies burn, so. Sure let's go with that. It's a pretty cool boss, tho. It has a stricter ask of party composition, which wants you to have everyone be able to attack either rank 1 or rank 4, which is not as easy as it sounds. At the start of the round, the lungs will either inhale the front or the back, and a marker gets placed on that part's health meter. If you deal about 10 damage to that part, the marker goes away and it loses its bespoke buff. If you don't clear the buff by the end of the turn, you take a nasty party-wide damage and stress and burn attack. All you really need to do is deal damage, which frustratingly can't be done on the front or back part with dots.nThe third confession, Obsession, represents the antagonists increasing dedication to the iron crown, forswearing all else. It ends with the eyeball zone, which is a boss I could probably write an entire separate thing about because of how many revisions it went through and how and when. At this point, however, the fight starts with four big eyeball stalks. Defeating them makes them regrow as a smaller stalk, and they can regrow back to larger form if they use certain moves. The entire fight revolves around a bespoke and permanent marker they apply to you (most game tokens have a built-in turn life to them, this token does not get removed this way), which is them perceiving you. You do not want to be perceived. After you fight down the four stalks, the real boss appears, and in addition to its other moves, it will use Limerence, which hits any character that has the bespoke token, and deals damage multiplicative with the number of those tokens. One instance of the token can be removed by landing the killing blow on the smallest size of eyeball stalk. Applying blind to the enemy beforehand or dodge to yourself can prevent the token from sticking to you in the first place, dodging a move will remove one stack of the token, and becoming stealthed will remove all instances of the token. But that's it. It is a pretty strict list of asks, and a party without access to stealth tokens, dodge, or enemy blinds will probably lose at least one hero to Limerence in the second phase, if you can even survive it at all. It's the act end boss I dislike the most, even though it is far, far more fair now than it was a year ago.nThe fourth confession, Ambition, represents the antagonist's turn from relentless dedication to uncovering secret knowledge, to using that accumulated knowledge to build a power base and expand into cult leadership. The end boss of this one is the hands, expressing the reach and violence of this ambition. The boss itself is a three-phase affair with moves that shove the front rank away, marks that negate dodges, bleed and damage based on bleed amount, and finally nasty riposte punches. Getting through phase 1 and 2 can be done with most any party, but by the time you get to phase 3, if you don't have a way to mitigate the riposte tokens with token theft or blind, it will probably just punch you to death. This is a pretty strict ask, as those capabilities are limited, and just dodge won't do enough as the boss has a lot of ways of bypassing dodge tokens. It's a fairly nasty one.nThe final confession, Cowardice, reflects the sum total of the journey the antagonist took, and reaches all the way to where he sits. The boss at the end being him atop a throne that is also a grotesque colossus called the Body of Work. As a way of either driving sympathy or turning the question inward on the heroes as a cowardly cop-out from wrecking everything, the antagonist forces you to choose a party member to face their failure. This move creates an add that only the chosen character can damage or interfere with at all. This is a neat callback to the first game, which, in contrast, forces you to select a party member to be killed bypassing all deathblow resists, like an edict spell from Magic: The Gathering. This "chosen sacrifice" is far less cruel than that, and better thematically with the confession of cowardice (the antagonist is trying to foist the bill off to you), and with the nature of the game as a deeper exploration of the heroes as people. All the other parts of that fight are a confusing stall in service of that, which is tolerable up to a point. It can last way longer than battles in this game are really meant to, however, and capping things off with a boring and brutal slog is maybe not the best sendoff for something that overall can be a boring and brutal slog. Overall the bosses are pretty good and neatly thematic (except the lungs) and also challenging and ask some pretty strict questions. I would like it more if their capabilities were a little more clear, since runs spent on "figuring them out" necessarily require the entire hours-long runup for another bite at the apple. Hell, I found myself reviewing stream footage to try to get a closer look at what happened, since a lot of moves can go by in the blink of an eye and you're suddenly dying and don't know what the fuck. I feel like the impulse to review footage is indicative of overtuned and underexplained bosses overall, which I understand as a deliberate choice. Red Hook wants you to be baffled the first time to face them down. The overtuning and underexplanation is a deliberate barb. I get it. But that's not a fair approach, and not in keeping with the themes literally spelled out on the card before the title screen. It's a violation of trust, and ultimately an expression of cowardice: "I didn't know how to make a fair challenge, so I made an unfair one and made it confusing to disguise this." This is ultimately in keeping with the game's final boss. It isn't your cowardice. It's theirs. And I get it. Designing actually difficult puzzle encounters is really hard. I just wish I could play the version of the game where instead of things being obscured and loaded with hidden tricks, I could face down a challenge more like, "here's everything you might want to know, all out in the open, good fucking luck beating it anyway," which is more closely reflected in something like Into the Breach.
But what about those heroes's failures? Across many runs (imo this takes way too fucking long and made me want a Balatro "unlock all" button), you pass Shrines of Reflection, where you choose one of your heroes and learn about their backstory in five parts. Many of these have little gimmicky puzzle battles using many of the same verbs of game combat, and most of those are in an ok place overall. There are a few of these where the stated objective is impossible, and the point is that this was a turning point in that character's life where something broke. Some of the others are near impossible to fail, which is fine for telling a little story through these silly 1D battle mechanics. The remainder are vile, occasionally randomly impossible, which is especially mean considering how long it takes to make it to one shrine. With five chapters for each of 11 characters (13 including the DLC), that's 55 (65) total shrines at minimum. If you're specifically aiming for shrines, I'd generously estimate you can hit 4 across a single run. That's 28-ish (33-ish) hours of playtime to hear them all, which is absolutely unacceptable. Sure I've unlocked them all because I'm a freak, but that amount of devotion being the basic buy-in just to hear all the backstories is cruel and ought to be changed or mitigated in some way. Adding to that the ability to fail means the new skill doesn't get unlocked and you have to find another shrine to try again, meaning the hour overall buy-in can only go up. So you might thank me for my summaries here, even if this further bloats the post.
Plague Doctor reprises her role from DD. Her story goes that she was a student at a university who became obsessed with the nature of life and death. She deliberately stresses out a professor until he has a heart attack, hauls his fresh corpse to her lab (she had been looking for ways to find fresher corpses to experiment on), and reanimates his body as a kind of zombie. When she can't stabilize him, she instead murders him again and dissolves the body in acid. This is a pretty good backstory for a Darkest Dungeon character. The Plague Doctor will face a duplicate of the reanimated corpse as her failure in the final battle.
Grave Robber reprises her role from DD. She was a high society socialite who was married to an abusive husband. She poisons him to death, then discovers he had mismanaged the estate so badly that it was going to be repossessed. She then plunders his grave for all the jewelry he was buried wearing and leaves, never to be seen there again. Another excellent DD character, good at building sympathy while using it to justify unseemly acts and outright crimes. The Grave Robber will face a simulacrum of her abusive husband as her failure in the final battle.
Highwayman reprises his role from DD. He was a convicted felon who broke out of prison in a riot during which he killed several of his jailers. Without a penny to his name, he ate vermin to survive and eventually took to crime again to make ends meet. The highwayman has the best puzzle battles of any of them, which start out with bespoke moves and grow into a prototypical version of his eventual base moveset which you will recognize after playing with him for hours. In another cheeky nod, he's robbing a wagon that looks kinda like your own, stressing how close he is to being on the other side of combat. They are some of the few of these puzzle battles that rather than merely tolerable I consider actively excellent. The Highwayman will face a facsimile of any of the numerous guards he stabbed or shot to get at a caravan's loot in the final battle.
Man-at-Arms reprises his role from DD. He was a battlefield commander who rose through the ranks as a young officer by being good at study and theory. He was given a field command and his first engagement was an unmitigated disaster. His orders were unclear, his men panicked, and ultimately he was routed. He later visited the graves of his fallen soldiers to atone, taking personal responsibility for their deaths. Afterward, he devoted himself to the front lines of any conflict he could find, becoming basically the hardest son of a bitch imaginable, craving warfare as a means to retroactively justify having led soldiers to their deaths, a death wish of his own only not granted because he had gotten too damn good at fighting. He's a perfect DD character. The only thing that weakens his backstory is that he had to share it with the Hellion. He will face one of his own ghostly fallen soldiers in the final battle.
Hellion reprises her role from DD. She was a battlefield commander who rose through the...you get it. It's Man-at-Arms again. They just share the same backstory. Young commander, failed battle, life of violence afterward, got too good at fighting. The only substantial difference is that instead of seeking absolution from the dead, she sought it from the living, her puzzle battle being apologizing to the wives of the fallen and getting pelted with tomatoes. She will face one of the wives of the fallen soldiers in the final battle.
Runaway is a new character for Darkest Dungeon II. As a child, she sought to escape the orphanage full of abusing nuns, and robbed one of the sisters of the keys to let her do so. A remote woodsman and his wife took her in, where she discovered a fascination with fire. She burns their cabin down after playing with fire, running away from the flames as she hears the screams of her two adoptive parents being burned alive. She's a very fitting DD character. She will face a rendition of the sister superior in the final battle. A note on this: I really don't like this as a narrative beat akin to the others. The Runaway's damage and regret should be over burning an innocent adoptive family to death. Getting away from the ophanage should barely even rate next to that. I dunno. It's kinda whack.
Jester reprises his role from DD. He was a wandering bard who came across a haunting melody some fiddler was playing in a graveyard. He has a musical dual with the fiddler, which for some reason results in this man's death. He contemplates the melody in his mind, and when he perfects it, he ends up killing a room full of people because it's some kind of special killing sound like the premise of the manga Read or Die. And now he's a combat clown who can strum the killing sound so that's nice. He's a fitting enough DD character, and after all, who doesn't love a funny little murder jester, classics of video game right there. He will face the image of the fiddler who taught him the killing melody as his failure in the final battle.
Leper reprises his role from DD. He was a benevolent king on a personal mission to visit with the sick of his kingdom, which his ministers tried their hardest to prevent. He, of course, contracted the disease himself. His ministers attempted a coup, but he heard of them coming and cut them all down with a sword. He abdicated the throne and became a battle boy we all know and love. He's a bit of a baffling DD character. Most of them have a pretty sizable pile of regrets, many of which piles include bodies. I don't really rate chopping up murderous traitors on the same level as, like, mistakenly burning your adoptive parents alive or resorting to highway robbery. He just seems too overall noble to fit that well amongst the rest of the cast. He's damaged, sure, but not compromised. He will face a replica of one of his treasonous ministers as his failure in the final battle.
As a break from talking about the specific characters, all of whom I like, to be honest, allow me to explain what I mean when I say someone is a good darkest dungeon character, rather than a good character. For the first darkest dungeon, Red Hook made character introductions by way of single-page wordless comics3 in the same Dark Horse visual style as the game itself, most of which get re-done in Darkest Dungeon II across five shrine of reflection encounters. A darkest dungeon character should be damaged and compromised. They ought to have a backstory full of regrets and be some combination of freak and criminal. They're losers and outcasts. The whole point of the thing is that even a band of people like this can join together to fight back against otherworldly horrors, maybe they're even the only kind of guy who can. "The heroes are human" was also a guiding light behind the design, I believe of both games, and it's a core part of the resonance of them. It doesn't matter how damaged you are: you too can fight back. I think that core identity and message are better than most therapy sessions, hence why I fight so hard for it, and why I'm judgemental and protective of that core identity. For a darkest dungeon character to deviate from that, like the Leper having his greatest flaw be that his treasonous ministers went after him, it weakens the message. I also think this is why Bounty Hunter was relegated to a side-character role, why Antiquarian got remixed as an enemy, and why Abomination, Arbalest, Houndmaster, Musketeer, and Shieldbreaker got booted: all of their backstories suck for this. Bounty Hunter's "backstory" is just him being a bounty hunter, which is fine for a single page comic but baffling for explaining anything. "He's just always been Batman" isn't even good enough for fucking Batman. Antiquarian observed some kind of ritual sacrifice and killed the guy doing it, which is hardly a backstory at all. Abomination got branded as some kind of demonic outsider and, uh, was that, so. I'm gonna be honest and say that I don't know what's going on with Arbalest. I think the story goes that a mob was coming for her dad and he handed her a crossbow and kicked her out of the house before it burned down? They redid it better with Runaway. Houndmaster was a cop whose hound helped him track down some criminals, but he was shocked to see the perps wearing the same badge as him. While ACAB is a fine message, it's hardly a fitting backstory. Musketeer was a contest sharpshooter but one day the target bullseye took on the form of the nameless god and she flinched. This is a fine piece of worldbuilding for the setting, but a crappy character backstory. Shieldbreaker was a sex slave who fought back and killed her captors, sending the wagon into a valley where there were snakes. This would be on par with the Leper as a "damaged but not compromised" character. So overall you maybe can see as I do with respect to the hows and whys of darkest dungeon characters.
Occultist expands his role from DD. I say this because the Occultist of DDII is more expressive, interesting, and useful than his counterpart from the first game, and feels much more realized in a way that is out of step with most of the other characters. The Occultist got into and expanded his knowledge of the occult, eventually conducting a séance with some followers that allowed him to astrally project his consciousness into the outer spheres, where he made contact with The Shambler. He drew on the life essence of his followers to gather the mystical strength to defeat The Shambler. When he re-entered his physical body, he found the whole circle of his followers a mess of charred remains, burned to a crisp by the flames of his unchecked power. He could hear the whispers of void beings, having become now an active conduit and lightning rod for them by his transgressions. He's got a bit of John Constantine to him that way but, he's more likable. He will face The Shambler as his failure in the final battle.
Vestal expands her role from DD. You probably had a lot of vestals in your campaign, and later dungeons of DD are fully designed around your bringing one along. The expansion I mean in this case is kinda minor, as she's only really a bigger person and role by way of having one of the kinds of inns named after her as well as showing up for combat duty. The vestal was tasked with tending some kinda sacred flame, and one day looked out the window at some people having sex in a garden nearby. No idea how that's happening right outside a convent, but whatever. She starts thinking that sex, attraction, and romance are kinda nice, gets found out by the abbot, and gets thrown in a torture chamber. She communes with a divine light from above to fight back against her torturer and escapes. When she makes it back to the dormitory, she discovers that all her fellow vestals have been oublietted Cask of Amontillado-style and she can hear their screams. This is a bit more of a scorched-earth policy than I've heard of from contemporary religions but hey. At some undisclosed time she takes up a mace and becomes a rugged battle maiden (seriously look at how much hp she gets compared to other back rank characters). She's a hard-to-replace DD character, but I would argue not a very fitting one. You need one of these in DD mechanically, but narratively she's not a good fit like the others. Now in DDII you don't need her as much mechanically, and narratively there's these missing pieces where her personal damage, transformation into a battle maiden, and second life as a romance novelist are looming, which is, like, fine for a character but whackadoodle for a DD character. There's also a bit of a missed opportunity for The Flagellent to have been her torturer, which would open the door for more of the characters's backstories to be intertwined. Imagine if Man-at-Arms and Hellion were actually on opposite sides of a conflict and later met up as mercenaries on the same side of one. But that's more fanfiction on my part. The Vestal will face a vestige of her torturer as her failure in the final battle.
Flagellant solidifies his role from DD. I always thought of him as a fringe sort of character in the first game, a sortof tone-signaler more than a real boy. A way to say, "look, see, we got a dark gothic tone, look, look right here this proves it." But in DDII he's a real boy. His story goes like so: he was a ragged vagabond who got accosted in the street one day. The pain felt good and also gave him some kind of supernatural strength, which he then inflicted back on his assailants. He got hired on as a holy torturer (eh, eh? vestal connection fits right in there), but got the boot because the monks thought he was too into it, which he was. He became a wandering confessor, using the pain of his own body as a kind of physical manifestation or transubstantiation of divine grace. He kept at it until he met Death, who became a fixation for him, but he was unable to die because he was too supernaturally tough, and so staves her off because she represents a cessation of the sensation he craves. Flagellant is in the same boat as Jester to the tune of being at a higher narrative magic level than the rest of the cast. That the pain is giving him levels of euphoria that break into the delusional fails to explain how he actually really is still alive and able to do battle. Also Death will show up sometimes as a random miniboss if he's around, so there's literal magic going on there. I guess I should lump Occultist in there as "séances are real" is a bit over the line, but I don't because Occultist's magic feels setting-appropriate in a way that Jester or Flagellant do not. Of course he can commune with outer void creatures, we come across those on the regular here. The Flagellant will face himself as his failure in the final battle.
Crusader returns as a DLC character in II, where he was a normal boy in 1. You have to do a long and complicated quest to unlock him across multiple runs, and you face a bespoke miniboss at the end of it. His story is that he started out as a farmer, but a hard winter left him without the means to feed his family. To make ends meet, he signs up to be a soldier. He meets that one miniboss on the battlefield and defeats him, but ultimately spares the monster of a man. He returns home and regards his wife and child from afar, safe and peaceful in the valley. He leaves his wages by a banner at the edge of the valley and returns, now a changed man, to a life of warfare. Crusader is a fitting DD character. Man-at-Arms and Hellion seek a life of violence out of shame and regret, seeking absolution. Crusader does it out of resignation, feeling he no longer belongs to his previous life. It's fitting that he doesn't show his face, totally hidden beneath the helmet, self-anonymizing. It's weird that you have to do all this rigamarole to unlock him, and I really wish that because of that they could have fast-tracked his shrine unlocks somehow. He will face the warlord as his failure in the final battle.
Duelist is a new character for Darkest Dungeon II. A DLC character unlocked by default once you have the DLC. She was a fencing student, and utterly devoted to the craft in a way that bordered on obsession. A ruthless perfectionist, she went above and beyond in training. She had a tryst with an instructor, and one night after happy lovemaking she asks if he wants to swordfight for real. He agrees and she takes it a step too far and kills him, now convinced that the ultimate form of fencing can only be found in real duels to the death. She's a perfect DD character. Where some of the others like Man-at-Arms, Hellion, or Crusader, as before, seek a life of violence for atonement or because it's the only thing left to them, she seeks it out as a satisfaction of a manic and demented joy. Also her coup-de-grace involves pulling out a gun, which I find really appealing from an Ashina-style-like sensibility of "the only rule is to win no matter what" coming from a formally trained fencer. It's delightful. She will face the ghost of her ex-alive ex-lover ex-instructor as her failure in the final battle.4
To circle back around to my thoughts on the ancestor and how to make a sequel, let me explain why I think this project was cursed from the get-go. Suppose, ignoring what we know of the now fully released and complete game, that you want to make a sequel to Darkest Dungeon. The absolute strongest, most memorable, most memetic part of DD was Wayne June's voice as the narrator chiming in to react to whatever just happened. That voice, and those voice lines, leaked out of DD. You have probably heard someone say variations of them even if they never played the game at all, maybe even if they do not know what it even is. That is powerful, and if you're making a sequel, you need to tap into that power again. You need to rehire Wayne June. Your sequel game needs to have his voice narrating the action. This is a "if you change the price of the hotdog" situation. But there's a problem here. In DD, that voice belonged to a specific character, with a history and even a real (albeit spectral) presence in the final battle. That's not just a voice, that's a guy. So if you want the voice back, you should bring back the guy. But that guy is not compatible with a new story, since he came around to being the penultimate antagonist. If you want to write him into a sequel, you need to write in some way of his ghost breaking good, so to speak, or else continuing to profusely apologize for all that bad shit he did. It's cursed.
What we got was a total rewrite. That's the voice of the Academic, now. The kinds of things that would have been apologetic in DD are instead accusatory in DDII. They made up a guy to be mad at. This isn't completely terrible, it's fine for a story to have a villain, and who doesn't like a tragic downfall of a promising student turned cosmic horror cult leader...but you don't really feel the presence of the antagonist in any way. It's all just told and not shown. If you had this active nemesis hectoring you and always escaping at the last minute or otherwise somehow showing up again after being killed like The Pursuer from Dark Souls 2, that would be a way to show rather than tell the player who they are gonna face off against. In Hades you know that the final boss isn't gonna be just the guy who's sitting behind the desk. I mean it is, but you fucking know he's gonna be a right bastard to get past. When I got to the final boss of DDII, some faceless guy in a chair, it felt like a total let down. All this buildup, for this?
Darkest Dungeon II is not about making the best of a bad situation, despite the pre-title blurb. It's about broken people banding together to overcome incredible odds (even if you sometimes, uh, don't), about found family amidst total prior loss, about failure and regret, about somehow living through what you couldn't imagine the other side of, and finding a way to put something together on the other side of the unimaginable. It's survivor's guilt in video game form. At least...it would be if it weren't so damn lopsided and frustrating and random. It would be if it weren't trying to pin all this on the "you" that is the antagonist. It would be if the heavier focus on the heroes as people with pasts weren't overshadowed by volume of the length of the many runs of mundane tasks required to actually get to the end. This is why I find the game so haunting: enough compelling material and enough flaws to be worthy of fixation. A kind of anti-goldilocks zone where if it were more flawed it would be dismissable as jank, and if it were less flawed I would just call it good and move on.
Anyway I wanted to crystallize my thoughts and spell things out in a way I am not able to express extemporaneously while running the video game. I will almost certainly beg of the game to explain the specific and carefully crafted purpose behind certain things that just happen at me in future.