I’m remembering all the details that made me think this was a toxic experience last time. It’s part-roguelike, part-incremental, wholly designed to waste your time. Winning in Hades II isn’t so much about being good at the action. It’s more about maximizing DPS through upgrades both run-limited and across time. If you are making it to the final boss, you are likely spending 90 minutes in that run.
Don’t worry. If you lose, you learned something. If you didn’t learn something, at least you collected enough baubles for a permanent upgrade. If you didn’t collect enough baubles, at least your plants finished growing. If your plants didn’t finish growing, at least you can talk to hub characters and hear them say the same things with different words.
I have made it to one of the final boss encounters, completely jacked. When I went up against his inevitable second form, the screen was full of so much garbage that I couldn’t tell where I was going. I died but I got a special cutscene. 