about the ending... (spoiler warning, obviously)

[kirbyman8]

so, spoiler warning obviously, but...

i played through the game blind, and i don't think im alone on this, but, the ending where you spar with Shade and end up back before the final boat sequence - is that it? like, i expected more, but i also feel like there should be more, right? i mean, is there more? am i missing something?

[Benji]

That's really it. The game is just a metaphor for our desires for experience and how nothing really mattered. Quite bold of them too. However, if you did end up caring for characters like Bobo or Riley, then the ending really stings. I actually cared for both of them along with the other bros Irvine, Sam, and Raven. I pretty much had my heart broken to see the game basically spit on my feelings.

Still love the game though, but I demand an apology from Foreign Gnomes.

[BeanBoi]

does it feel like there should be more? yes.

is there more? no.

was this the point? yes.

[DAL_nug]

Honestly I'm really disappointed and confused too. I was getting invested in the story and after the first fake out credits scene I was thinking "I knew Foreign Gnomes was better than to leave a serious amount of loose ends untied especially after their first game" then got smacked hard in the face by the actual ending. I even played through the entirety of the ending sequence again just to see if that was really it. What's up with Lucy? What's the details on Dmitri and Bobo and all the stuff to do with slime? Are they related in some way? What about brown mage? Doctor Dump's glitched lab? The Time Police? The zombification of the islanders in Death Mountain? Why was Molly was imprisoned in that robot that caused the red mist? I don't remember anything being left substantially unresolved in the first game. It sort of feels like an inverse of the first game due to that one being about the breaking of a loop and this one ending with the continuation of one. A whole bunch of shorter fragmented stories with few resolutions. The whole alien door part and the motherboard section were probably my favorite parts of the game but all the enjoyment I had feels undermined by the ending. I just feel sort of sad and unsatisfied after sinking a solid 20 or so hours into the game for such an anticlimax. Hopefully there's some obscure secrets lurking in the game that people will crack for more lore to spill out.

[BeanBoi]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von DAL_nug:

Honestly I'm really disappointed and confused too. I was getting invested in the story and after the first fake out credits scene I was thinking "I knew Foreign Gnomes was better than to leave a serious amount of loose ends untied especially after their first game" then got smacked hard in the face by the actual ending. I even played through the entirety of the ending sequence again just to see if that was really it. What's up with Lucy? What's the details on Dmitri and Bobo and all the stuff to do with slime? Are they related in some way? What about brown mage? Doctor Dump's glitched lab? The Time Police? The zombification of the islanders in Death Mountain? Why was Molly was imprisoned in that robot that caused the red mist? I don't remember anything being left substantially unresolved in the first game. It sort of feels like an inverse of the first game due to that one being about the breaking of a loop and this one ending with the continuation of one. A whole bunch of shorter fragmented stories with few resolutions. The whole alien door part and the motherboard section were probably my favorite parts of the game but all the enjoyment I had feels undermined by the ending. I just feel sort of sad and unsatisfied after sinking a solid 20 or so hours into the game for such an anticlimax. Hopefully there's some obscure secrets lurking in the game that people will crack for more lore to spill out.

Quite a few of the things you listed don't really need to be answered. Not everything needs an answer to why, asking why the Villagers are zombies in DEATH MOUNTAIN is like asking why theres any sort of various monsters around the world.

From what we can infer, Dmitri appears to be some sort of entity trying to keep things balanced, and bobo was an associate of his. They seemed to be trying to find a way to defeat Shade, only for Bobo to become corrupted by him and become what he is now. Lucy is implied to be their creation, for what purpose is unknown, although we do know that Bobo is a freak for slimes.

I'm also disappointed by the ending, but my main gripe is that we were never able to give Shade what he deserved. Some things need to be accepted as just happening to happen though

[James]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von DAL_nug:

Honestly I'm really disappointed and confused too. I was getting invested in the story and after the first fake out credits scene I was thinking "I knew Foreign Gnomes was better than to leave a serious amount of loose ends untied especially after their first game" then got smacked hard in the face by the actual ending. I even played through the entirety of the ending sequence again just to see if that was really it. What's up with Lucy? What's the details on Dmitri and Bobo and all the stuff to do with slime? Are they related in some way? What about brown mage? Doctor Dump's glitched lab? The Time Police? The zombification of the islanders in Death Mountain? Why was Molly was imprisoned in that robot that caused the red mist? I don't remember anything being left substantially unresolved in the first game. It sort of feels like an inverse of the first game due to that one being about the breaking of a loop and this one ending with the continuation of one. A whole bunch of shorter fragmented stories with few resolutions. The whole alien door part and the motherboard section were probably my favorite parts of the game but all the enjoyment I had feels undermined by the ending. I just feel sort of sad and unsatisfied after sinking a solid 20 or so hours into the game for such an anticlimax. Hopefully there's some obscure secrets lurking in the game that people will crack for more lore to spill out.

Honestly very fair critique of the game. I personally loved everything and in my opinion the ending is done in such a way very intentionally. I absolutely agree with you on one point - side stories should have been finished and should have been developed more in depth. I really, REALLY love Lucy and very interested in her character. I want to know more about her. Same with red smile girl. But compared to Lucy, who actually had some spotlight, Molly (iirc her name) was just a "she's very strong... that's it" character. It's kinda shame there's so many loose ends on side stories and you can't really explore them more in depth, but at the same time... Dude, this game has SO MUCH content in it. That's probably the reason why we don't have well developed side stories, that would require probably another one year or so in development. Maybe they should really just let us to talk more to characters and to hear their stories or something, without content that requires a lot of work and development. Just some lore and vibe stuff. So, I do agree with you in general and I think what you said is fair.

[DAL_nug]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von BeanBoi:

Quite a few of the things you listed don't really need to be answered. Not everything needs an answer to why, asking why the Villagers are zombies in DEATH MOUNTAIN is like asking why theres any sort of various monsters around the world.

From what we can infer, Dmitri appears to be some sort of entity trying to keep things balanced, and bobo was an associate of his. They seemed to be trying to find a way to defeat Shade, only for Bobo to become corrupted by him and become what he is now. Lucy is implied to be their creation, for what purpose is unknown, although we do know that Bobo is a freak for slimes.

I'm also disappointed by the ending, but my main gripe is that we were never able to give Shade what he deserved. Some things need to be accepted as just happening to happen though

I agree about the Shade part too. Feels like he's the one in control of everyone and everything the whole time no matter what despite our character and them being essentially yin and yang in terms of plot. I guess not everything needs an explicit answer but some more environmental storytelling in a few spots could have been nice. I really do feel like all of the slime characters should have had some sort of resolution because there is zero doubt (through association, design or directly being stated as so ingame) that Dmitri, Lucy, the blue slimes and Molly are connected in some way not explicitly told. It would be really interesting to learn the details of what they are besides vaguely powerful beings and what the true extent of their influence was. I guess that wasn't the intent of the game?

[Aria Kawa]

The motto is explained by the divine mushroom, all of yours choices don't matter and you are just here to enjoy the trip for what it is.

I do have to say that the ending is abrupt af, with Riley basically going SPLAT then ok, roll credits. It wasn't as good as the final of the first game. Tbh, I think this probably mirrors the mentality of the devs, they could had kept going and going, explaining stuff, dumping lore, making character arcs, giving this whole big meaning to all, increasing the scope to no end, but I think those fellas basically went "nah, that's enough let's just release the game and let everyone enjoy it"

It never ends in Everhood is meant to the community and playerbase, from there on everyone can collaborate to give this game no end of content via moddding to add rooms to the hotel, so all can relax and wait for 500 ASMR visual novel inflation mods for lucy and molly. I do wonder how this is going to happen for the console versions.

Plus, considering the development of the previous game, I wouldn't doubt that we may see new content from the dev's part after a couple months, maybe a bit more story, but I think they're just going to cook up some battles to permanently burn the screen of your monitor.

[Gold Ingenium]

Regarding the fights, while they are often better animated and flashier, they feel lacking because we don't have a reason to fight most of them. Many of the fights in Everhood 1 were also like this, but those were not the most climactic battles. Characters like Rasta Beast, Frog and Green Mage were built up throughout the entire game prior to fighting them and this is what made their fights so satisfying. What would be the equivalent here? Bobo? Riley? Dmitri? Shade?

While I do get what the devs were going for, I did feel that this game was severely lacking in comparison to the first one. Everhood 1 had a strong gameplay component, but it was the story that really kept you going. I stumbled into the frog fight on my first playthrough by making what I felt were the correct choices and stuck with it until I beat it. Realizing that I still had a ton of gameplay left made it a really satisfying experience that had me feel for the characters and their conflicts.

Here, the confusing episodic and fragmented nature of the worlds leaves you largely aimless. The start of the game is well-paced and sows quite a few seeds for later on, but as soon as Raven "gives up", the plot completely unravels and leaves you to drive things on your own, only to pick up at the very end of the game.
It's fine to leave the player to move things forward when it comes to challenges and optional content, but here it's very strangely done. I'll probably play a lot more and experiment to try to find more answers through alternate endings, but even if those do exist and bring a lot more answers, they won't shore up the gaps in the structure of the game.

[Groversoup]

Where Everhood 1 was about confronting death, Everhood 2 feels like it's about confronting Nihilism, and Shade seems to represent that. The idea that nothing matters, that it's all vanity because none of your choices will change the ending (you die.) Shade hijacking the narrative and giving you a purposefully bad ending before denying you any conclusion at all is a meta-narrative challenge to the player to refute their ideology, the same ideology that your character has been fighting the whole game in the form of people like Bobo who selfishly use their perceived lack of consequences for actions as an excuse to inflict harm. At least, that's my reading.

[BeanBoi]

The fragmented nature definitely hampers the story, considering how many events can occur in a strange order (for example, I fought Lucy before even freeing her from the lab, obvious wrong order), other small things like that really took me out of it especially when it was clear they were supposed to happen in one way

But again this does feel like the main point. The player is given a wide amount of choice in how they pursue the story but in the end the choices didnt matter. Like Grover said, we spent the whole game doing whatever we wanted and technically harming people, even pursuing Godhood, just like Bobo and eventually Riley.

We could be looking too deep into it, but it seems to make sense to me, even if it was a pretty ass conclusion.

[Harperers]

Conflict, and resolution. You can't have resolution without a conflict, which is what shade is providing for you. There can't really be a better ending because everhood doesn't present a problem deserving of one. (or at least one that wasn't already explored in everhood 1)

Would it really even be a good thing to go around searching for problems to find a better ending?

[Sammy]

I took it in the sense of, kind of like that talk of Duality they mentioned often.
Everhood 1 was about the end, moving on, finality, that sort of thing.
Everhood 2 to me at least was more about, in the moment, enjoying the ride as it is in the here and the now. The journey rather than the destination.

Enjoying what you have and the people you have it with in the moment.

Everhood 1 also push more emphasis on the player being in control of the situation. You basically put a stop to the games world and the constant goings on that surrounded it all.
Everhood 2 is the opposite where, you're given a lot of choice and little details of things can change based on factors, but it ultimately doesn't change much. You're the one along for the ride to everyone else's antics and goings on. You're often told that you're being used by the other characters for their agendas infact.

They also play more into the concept of "It never ends in Everhood." Which, given that the world is basically limbo. I think it makes sense. You can't really END Limbo. You're either there and part of the ride, or you move on from it. It is a constant much like the subconscious level that inhabits it.

Edit: Wanted to also add after some thought but, with this games whole premise is that you're basically in purgatory/limbo and you can't really just, axe something like that out fully. At least in this worlds case, it needs to exist for its purpose. And what it provides is an experience for that many that live in it, and seeks to give you the player who wanders into it a fun ride. And once it's over, it hits you with the "You can stay and continue to bask in what it has to offer (including possible modded worlds which seem to be baked into the setting as a concept of endless worlds to visit in theory.)

Or you can move on from this limbo in a meta sense of just, stop playing the game and moving onto something else.

The concept of Everhood and its limbo exists whether you are in it or not.

[BeanBoi]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Harperers:

Conflict, and resolution. You can't have resolution without a conflict, which is what shade is providing for you. There can't really be a better ending because everhood doesn't present a problem deserving of one. (or at least one that wasn't already explored in everhood 1)

Would it really even be a good thing to go around searching for problems to find a better ending?

Shade did nothing but cause problems the entire time. If that is truly what the game is going for, then its pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ how they can be like "nah jk theres no problems lol" right as we're getting close to Shade. It's like he surrenders but still wins somehow