Hellblade 2 diminishes what made Hellblade 1 interesting

[Degenerative a.i.]

Hellblade 1 was intriguing because of the way it integrated mental illness and explored how that impacted perception of self and the world. Hellblade 2 just outright tells the player that the trip to Hel was real, and that the visions are senua being a seer. Severely diminishing the importance of the mental illness angle and making the original game much more of a straight forward action adventure story.

[Demystificator]

Originally posted by Degenerative a.i.:

Hellblade 2 just outright tells the player that the trip to Hel was real.

Wait what ? When ? I've completed the game and nothing tells that.

Originally posted by Degenerative a.i.:

and that the visions are senua being a seer.

It is already in the first game actually.

But imo, its more about suggesting that Seers and Shamans could have been psychotic people and created myths or told their visions who built little by little what we call today : mythology.

The psychosis of Senua is still here in Saga but treated differently as she has "accepted" it, she can "control" it and she doesn't get drown by it anymore.
Moreover its harder to tell where the psychosis kicks in, in Saga. Especially since we hear other people telling weird things too.
But I think we have to remember that part in Sacrifice where she did remember hearing Dillion saying awful things to her. Therefore, we can't be sure if what the people around her say what we hear, or if we hear what she understands.

Imo, Hellblade 2 missed to tell what Senua feels and thinks. In Sacrifice, she was always speaking or you could see her face and read her emotion.
In Saga, people are talking about a lot of things before her and she doesn't say anything and her face has no emotion. You hear the voices telling she's broken or she's understood, but Senua does't confirm and keeps some kind of poker face...
You have to wait for her being alone to get back some emotional bind to her.

Imo, Hellblade 2 dminishes what Hellblade 1 did as (Saga Spoiler) her father shadow is still trying to pull her in some direction and she's still thinking about him, believing her Darkness isn't part of her. So the whole "The dark is part of me" thing looks unnesscary here.

[CrumbleCat]

Forget the Hel storyline, are the dragur and giants real or not? The story can't seem to decide. It all points to yes, they are. But maybe Senua is just imagining everything and shes been sitting in a puddle of piess for years.

[Slimebeast]

Originally posted by CrumbleCat:

Forget the Hel storyline, are the dragur and giants real or not? The story can't seem to decide. It all points to yes, they are. But maybe Senua is just imagining everything and shes been sitting in a puddle of piess for years.

Originally posted by CrumbleCat:

Forget the Hel storyline, are the dragur and giants real or not? The story can't seem to decide. It all points to yes, they are. But maybe Senua is just imagining everything and shes been sitting in a puddle of piess for years.

Hallucinations all of it, man.

[CrumbleCat]

So am I supposed to have the take-away from this story, that she is completely stuck in her delusions, and that shes now even worse off? If the giants and dragur aren't real, then none of her interactions with the characters can be trusted either. What did she solve for them?

She does have a very vivid imagination on the other hand, so maybe the other character's troubles are way less fantastical. Plus, the characters never once react to Senua being a weirdo, which is my big problem with this game. Nobody even gives her a side-eye. How is Senua so stable now that she can hide every single one of her symptoms? Who's her therapist, mate.

[Demystificator]

Rality of things depends on which side you want to be.

Sacrifice Spoiler I mean, Hela was real for Senua but in the objective reality, she wasn't.

About the Giants (Saga Spoilers) They are not real. The confusion comes that other people seem to see them and interact with them but actually, something else happens and Senua sees the Giant instead.
For Illtauga, its clearly an eruption coming ; the men take Senua with them as she probably get dazed looking at a Giant which isn't there.
There's a clue after when Fargrimr says that he saw Senua speaking to invisible spirits. But we haven't seen her talking to anyone, she just ran away.
When the men talk about the Giants its hard to tell if we hear what they actually say or we hear what Senua understands. Remember in Sacrifice, she did remember Dillion blaming her before an other flashback showed it was a lie she told herself.
She also keep saying Giants are others Hel and we know from the first game that Hel was in place in her reality not ours.
And on top of that, at the very end, Senua says it herself : "there's no giants".

The line between psychosis and reality is even more blurred in Saga. As she kinda controls it now, its harder to tell when her brains drifts away.

[Zebedee]

Agree with Demystificator. It's real to Senua because that's how she is perceiving the world, you have other points of reference to doublecheck on whether that is how everyone around her is seeing things. One of the quiet themes of the game is that recovery from severe mental illness often isn't a magical cure, it's about adapting and learning to live with it on better terms, and in this game Senua is beginning to do that (look how much light she can find in the darkness...).

The seer side of it is interesting to me because it's hinting back towards how cultural factors can cause difficulties for those with severe mental illnesses - in the first game, her own father and people see her as cursed, in this one we get hints of a society where the same symptoms are seen as blessings. It also does it while not portraying one society as purely bad and the other purely good etc. It's very nuanced. I loved it.

[Degenerative a.i.]

I find it difficult to both have the giants be in Senua's head AND have all the other characters see and interact with them. If the other characters are also not real, that's fine, but if they are then the entire game is a bunch of characters just playing into Senua's psychosis, which is kinda messed up and to what end? Are we not supposed to think that Senua is the one helping them by the end of the game and if nothing is real, what was the point of any of it?

[Zebedee]

Senua's perceptions of others, and what they do and say - or the meaning given to that, will be influenced by how she is perceiving the world around her. Running alongside is that the line between the (objectively) real and the fantastical is already blurred by cultures which are comfortable with the idea of supernatural forces being behind many things.

[Demystificator]

Saga Spoilers
Maybe it'll be clearer if you think with allegories and metaphors.

Some things, terrible things happen in the objective reality and everyone sees it but for Senua, the brain goes over the top and the terrible thing can take any form or shape.

There is an eruption going on and where the men see fire springing from the ground, Senua sees a giant waking up.
The event is real but its not seen the same way by each one.

So what happens when the others interact with the Giants.
Its just my theory so I might be missing something and be wrong but :

There's always something with a Spear. Illtauga gets a spear in the cheek, the Coastal Giant is attacked by several spears.
You can also see one person getting killed by a Spear at the very beginning of the game but there's no one seen throwing it.
Same goes for the spears used by Thorgestr, like he's hurt, there's no spear around but he found one to throw it ?
Senua can throw spears even if she has never used one (as far as we know, and if you have the chance to throw a javelin once in your life, you'll realize, Senua couldn't make those throws without training).

I feel spears are a litteral way to represent "projections". In Senua's mind, people are projecting their fears, guilts and remorses to that legendary Giant. People talk about Giants as some sort of boogeyman : Illtauga would hunt only at Night and the coastal one only prevents ships from docking. It even works for the Godi : people think there's a giant out there devouring the "slaves". Yet I dont remember any spear when he appears. Probably cause this time, its very real.

Cause yeah, Godi and other humans she meets are real. They have their point of view on the story as the extra run shows. But the Godi fight shows it well, instead of becoming more and more crazy, the fight becomes more and more realistic. At the end, there's no light, no powerful voice, just rain and a man getting beat.

This is the point of Senua's Saga : she "sees" their fears, guilts and grieves. And by fighting it, they show them they can overcome it. They show them, their "giants" their "Hela" can be turned into "stone".
It's very litteral when they get lost in the forest. They all say they have lived strange experiences there but Senua, as she knows how they feel, can tell them to stay focused and to stay with her.

The fight against the Giants the game shows isn't taking place in objective reality but in Senua's mind. In objective reality, she could be performing some sort of chamanic ritual or just telling the others to not be afraid anymore as she's here to reveal their dark feelings.

She's leading them cause she went where they are and she knows how to get out of that dark place.

As people put their faith in her, she feels all their hands reaching for her and at the very end, as the "Dark Senua" appears, she realizes all the power that lies in her hands : she can be worshipped by them but she's afraid to upkeep the circle of fear and violence, so she asks her self if its her fate, if she's doomed to become what she fought (her father and the Godi, both tyrants) or if she can remember to stand righteous as the hiddenfolk trials taught her.

[(ADORA)ble 🌈👊]

Originally posted by Degenerative a.i.:

Hellblade 1 was intriguing because of the way it integrated mental illness and explored how that impacted perception of self and the world. Hellblade 2 just outright tells the player that the trip to Hel was real, and that the visions are senua being a seer. Severely diminishing the importance of the mental illness angle and making the original game much more of a straight forward action adventure story.

Agreed completely. It's not a bad game but so much of what made the original special is missing.

[CrumbleCat]

Demystificator, you are shedding some light on things, but it leaves me with so many more questions. :P For example if we say that its a natural disaster and not a giant, how does Senua solve the issue of an erupting volcano? They stay in place after she fixes it, and they seem very grateful. If we also then say that magic doesn't exist.

Plus, the dragurs. They seem to have no allegiance, attacking anyone. So who/what are they meant to represent? The issue with portraying delusions, is that anything can easily be written off as "it wasn't real". D: But this time it involves groups of people all interacting with her.

[RodroG]

First of all, I'm enjoying the game and must admit its excellence in the visual and sound departs, but in terms of gameplay (especially in combat and puzzle-solving), the first episode seems much better to me. I would also say that this second installment is somewhat below the first on a plot and narrative level.

[Zebedee]

Some of the questions being asked are answered in the alternate narration.

eg draugar

Draugar are violent and greedy undead creatures from Norse myth. Thórgestr names those responsible for the massacre at the village as draugar to Senua and she then sees them as monsters, although the furies hint at the uncertainty about that as she's approaching their camp and even before then as Senua is going round the destroyed village among the corpses and is linking it back to how her own home was destroyed (by men she calls 'monsters' for doing it).

In the alternate narration Thórgestr explains that they are men who have been cast out from Norse society for things like cannibalism as harvests failed and so the other Norsemen called them Draugar, using the name from mythology to describe men who behaved in that way. If you've played the first game, it's echoing what happened there where Druth's tales shape how Senua then experiences the world in psychosis.

[BINARYGOD]

mass hysteria brought about originally by the leader of the strongest clan - the eruption has screwed with the local environment and caused inclement weather and secondary eruption-like activity elsewhere. Once his power has waned because he got people living somewhat normal after the initial eruption, he spun up a tale over after-shocks and other things still negatively affecting people elsewhere (bad weather made worse by erupted material, secondary eruptions, etc). So we have a Salem like mass hysteria where people believe in the giants. This spread to other tribes that were dealing with their own eruption-related issues, wanting to attribute bad weather or secondary eruption flareup as "giants". These people already have backward, old school beliefs about what makes up the world (the eruption meaning the underworld is now opened to the mid world), and with some natural disasters, its not hard to get them whipped up into hysteria.

This causes Senua to get wrapped up into them too and maybe even see more of it than they do, and her actions and talking gets them even more into in return - like a feedback loop. (we also don't know if that ritual that summons the giant doesn't have contain some hallucinogenic stuff being burnt that people back than would not just see as drugs that make you hallucinate)

So everyone is playing along with each others temporary or perm psychosis - but its comes to a head when Senua at the end realizes that there never were any giants, just people thinking there was because of the bad things that happened. Since she has mental illness, that doesn't cause any self reflection about what she saw when she did believe there were giants and what that might mean - its just on to the next concern, which is now her being held up as someone special, someone "touched", someone now put on a pedestal by pretty much everyone she helped.

Also, they didnt confirm she is not crazy - she is still crazy, but other people now interpret this as "touched" and special - in communication with spirits.

I could have written this better, but its 6:30am I have yet to go to sleep. GNight.

[BINARYGOD]

Originally posted by RodroG:

First of all, I'm enjoying the game and must admit its excellence in the visual and sound departs, but in terms of gameplay (especially in combat and puzzle-solving), the first episode seems much better to me. I would also say that this second installment is somewhat below the first on a plot and narrative level.

its not really, I think people have a memory of the first game that a second playthrough will poke hole in. It did for me.