Stumbling Ahead

You know a game is good when you can make limited progress but still want to play.  That's my current situation with Hades II--I've hit a Typhon-sized roadblock, but oddly, I'm still having fun.  I think I'm chipping away at him, but it's hard to tell.  (FYI: some Hades II spoilers ahead).

My trip to the top of Mount Olympus in Hades II became much more thrilling when I finally took down Prometheus.  It was partially luck--I just ran around like a dummy while Aeto the eagle swooped down with his fire-attack of instant death and somehow managed to avoid getting hit (I think I had Athena's dodge buff and another one and managed to dodge at least one).  It feels really dumb that I STILL haven't fully mastered avoiding the dang fire attacks!  I've definitely improved and can generally avoid most of them, but I need to come up with a solid strategy for completely avoiding them.  Quite frankly, it's a mechanic that shouldn't feel as difficult as it does--you just have to remember the pattern of attacks...something that we do all the time in video games but for some reason it seems overly difficult.  Maybe our brains really are turning to rot thanks to screens?  I don't know, but I am determined to get it down.

One time I managed to take Prometheus down and still had ALL of my death defiance in place (I think 3).  I made it past the monster minions on the way to the top of the mountain and finally got to face off with Typhon.  The father of all monsters is a giant, looming baddie with another very annoying mechanic--his health bar totally disappears and you have no idea how much you've chipped away.  There are a few indicators--at one point (I'm assuming 50-60%) Zeus shows up and encourages all the Olympian gods to unleash on Typhon. They all zap him and you get the chance to briefly unload on an unconscious Typon.  After his nap, Typhon wakes up and enters into a phase that can only be described as bullet hell chaos--tentacles emerge from random parts of the platform, he launches his wind storm and crashing object attacks, and it's total pandemonium just trying to avoid everything that's going on.  I think I lasted all of 10 seconds during this phase.  I haven't managed to make it this far again, sadly.

Mel's bedroom area is starting to look fancy.

I'm definitely not done though, I'm still putting Melinoë through her paces in an effort to build up her skills and weapons to make up for my own lack of ability.  One aspect of Hades that I thought was conspicuously missing was the ability to add new decorations to your home base.  It's still there, it just takes awhile for it to pop up as an incantation.  Dora, the friendly shade, offers a range of new decorations to spruce up the Crossroads.  You can also perform an incantation that will make bosses drop gems that can be cashed in with the Wretched Broker for the currency to buy decor.  I've spruced up Mel's bedroom area and bought a few decorations for other areas.

Next week I'm hopefully going to be reporting about how I've taken down Typhon and maybe gotten to a truly happy ending.  Fingers crossed.