I really loved the first Blasphemous when I played it years back. While I was excited to hear it was getting a sequel, this was yet another case where a modern game was just far too expensive for me to ever realistically look at picking it up for myself. However, luckily for me, my wonderful partner recently played through both games, saw that I had this on my wishlist, and bought it for me on deep discount so I could finally play it myself as well!
. Having her to talk to about it definitely helped increase my enjoyment of it a lot, so on top of all the thanks I’ve already given to her, I’ll give her one more here as well for being such a sweetie~ ^w^. Doing both of the free DLC expansion thingies that have apparently come out for the game since its release, it ultimately took me around 21 hours to achieve 98% completion of the game with ending B (which I had to use a guide to figure out how to get because, while it ain’t as cryptic as the first game’s good ending, holy heck is that well hidden <w>).
Blasphemous 2 brings us back to both Castodia and the Penitent One, the respective setting and hero of the first game. Eons have passed since the High Wills of the Miracle were vanquished and peace returned to the land, but all is not well. The Miracle has managed to begin a return to the realm of men, and it seeks to birth a new child into the world via a giant heart floating in the sky above the blessed city. Not only that, but it’s also summoned its greatest defenders led by the very first penitent one to guard the heart until the birth is complete. All of this is enough to awaken our Penitent One from his slumber. Donning a new weapon and guided by a helpful angelic woman, he sets out to continue his endless penance and set things right once again.
While on the surface, Blasphemous 2’s story (even with the DLCs alongside it) mirrors the first’s rather meaningfully in a lot of ways thematically (a lot of stuff about how organized religious institutions pervert humanity both figuratively and literally with its self-serving approaches to faith, belief, and worship), there’s a lot more here once you go a bit past just-past-the-surface reading. Despite how full of suffering, sadness, and pain the world of Castodia is, it’s also a place overflowing with stories of hope, kindness, and self-sacrifice for the good of others. It’s a place that refuses to let the pain and horrors of the world, of the Miracle (something explicitly holy and sacred), rob them of their humanity even if it may rob them of so many other things. You, the Penitent One, are an important factor in helping them achieve the end goals of this good will via many of the game’s sidequests, but the fact of the matter remains that the Penitent One isn’t *bringing* positivity to the world: He’s only helping people follow through on the sincerity and good will they already so readily have.
This focus on humanity and how it reacts to catastrophes and how it relates to how they experience faith is what really defines the narrative of Blasphemous 2 for me. From the normal people in the streets to the people setting up these big religious institutions, they are all ultimately just people searching for answers and salvation like any other. Some of these people are self-serving, cruel, or totally wrong-headed in doing what they do, but they’re still a part of this great fabric like all the others are. That isn’t to say what the baddies are doing isn’t wrong (as Blasphemous 2 has no illusions about that), but it’s to say that the story well acknowledges that everyone is, regardless of position, struggling through this same uncertainty and pain of existence together at the end of the day. While the Miracle’s toxic influence was vanquished once before, people’s hope, their wishes for salvation from the pains of everyday living, lived on, and that’s what eventually allowed the Miracle to attempt to come back via this giant heart thing.
Blasphemous 2 is definitely not the kind of story I generally enjoy all that much. It takes a lot of cues from Dark Souls in just how much lore and story are tied up in optional text entries whose relative importance is on the player to deduce. In another note similar to Dark Souls, it’s also not really a character-driven story, and the larger themes are more things you put together after the fact by thinking about the nature of events that have taken place along your adventure. Even still, as much as I might not’ve understood everything the game was going for as I went through it, that’s what talking about it with my partner helped me so much in understanding for myself once I’d finished it. I ultimately really do like Blasphemous 2’s story. Sure, the thematic beats are messages I think are positive and largely agree with, but even just the creepy, weird, and wild superficial aspects of the Penitent One’s journey are enjoyable in and of themselves. Even if you’re someone who isn’t interested in combing through piles of in-game item descriptions or thinking about the larger implications of the story as a whole to try and decode its things, there’s a lot to enjoy and be engaged by in Blasphemous 2, and that’s before we even get to the pretty darn good gameplay.
The mechanical design of Blasphemous 2 is a metroidvania much like its predecessor was, but the moment-to-moment gameplay of this sequel is remarkably different from how the first game was. Something I found really fun and novel about the original Blasphemous is that it eschewed so many established conventions of the metroidvania genre. You never got new movement techniques or new weapons to help you explore. Your tools for both getting around and defending yourself could only ever be altered very slightly by certain, rare passive equipment you could find, but even then, only slightly. For the most part, getting to new areas of the map was just down to beating bosses to unlock the barriers their existence was tied to. While FromSoft’s Souls games follow a formula very similar to this, it makes a lot more sense for them to do it as technical 3D action games don’t really benefit the same way 2D ones do from enhanced movement capabilities like double jumping or phase dashing. While it’d be unlikely to do not on purpose, it was entirely possible to go through the entirety of Blasphemous 1 without picking up a single powerup and still have a very similar experience to a player who went out of their way to collect them all.
Blasphemous 2 takes the series in a completely different direction from the first game, and it has far more of those familiar trappings that other 2D action/adventure metroidvanias use. Not only do you get your choice of three different weapons at the start of the game, but you can even find the other two within the first third of the game and switch between your different weapons mid-combat whenever you like. Each of the two free DLCs even adds their own new weapon to the game, which are both really fun and cool to use. Blasphemous 2 also has a ton of movement tech that you unlock over the course of the game. Some are tied to those different weapons you find (as each has different exploration-related functions in addition to their normal weapon abilities), and some of them just give you whole new ways of getting around, full stop. Each weapon also has a main alternate ability as well as a full-blown upgrade tree to give you new combos, new moves, and even permanent passive upgrades to your weapon damage or natural defensive capabilities.
While you don’t need to engage particularly much with the new combos and such, all of these new options make Blasphemous 2 a very different beast to the original. None of these changes are strictly speaking *negative* evolutions for the series, but they’re definitely going to throw big fans of the original game for a loop, and that’s particularly true for how this sequel handles difficulty. Blasphemous 2 isn’t necessarily an *easy* game, but given just what a ball-buster Blasphemous 1 was (it was easily one of the hardest metroidvanias released up to that point, imo, right up there with Hollow Knight), Blasphemous 2 having such a relatively normal balance to its combat is very strange to get used to. The game does have harder modes you unlock once you beat it once, and I imagine it’s a fair bit harder if you forego a lot of upgrades or do particular sorts of challenge runs, Blasphemous 2 is a game I found shockingly easy for almost its entire playtime. I died maybe 10 times during my time with Blasphemous 2, and while I’m hardly a novice at this genre, Blasphemous 1 had me dying *so* many times against even the first boss that I was routinely surprised at just how many bosses I managed to do in Blasphemous 2 without dying a single time.
Again, I want to reiterate that none of these changes are bad in a vacuum. Heck, it’s not even like I disliked my time playing this game. The combat and platforming both felt great, exploration was fun, and the sidequests felt really rewarding to do as well. It’s just that contrast with what a fan of the first game like myself would *expect* from a sequel and what this sequel actually delivers that I can’t help but use as a warning here. It’d be like someone really enjoying Dark Souls but then finding that Dark Souls 2 had the same gameplay balancing as Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Ocarina of Time is a very good game, but it’s hardly a satisfying mechanical progression from Dark Souls. As long as you’re someone who doesn’t *demand* your action games punish the heck out of you and push you to your very limits, I think you’ll probably have a pretty darn good if not outright great time with Blasphemous 2, but this is definitely a case of “your mileage may vary” if you’re someone with your hopes really set on Blasphemous 2 being a bigger, meaner, flashier version of the first game. While “bigger” and “flashier” are certainly true, you’re going to have to look elsewhere for the enhanced meanness.
“Flashier” is probably not even the right word to use, because this game is *so* darn pretty looking. Blasphemous 1 already looked amazing with all of its gorgeous pixel art, and Blasphemous 2 kicks that up another few notches with how fantastic all the new enemies, environments, and effects look. The only real issue I have is with the game’s frequent, strange desire to use 2D animated, non-pixel art cutscenes as frequently as it does. They’re hardly omnipresent or anything, and they don’t look bad on their own, but they just do not look as good as the pixel art animations do, and I couldn’t stop thinking of how much better so many scenes would’ve looked had they just let them be animated in-engine rather than depicted via these 2D scenes. That isn’t *every* scene, mind you, but it was more than enough of them that I think the game’s aesthetic is more harmed than helped by how many are ultimately in the game.
The music is fantastic, and it brings the “scary Castlevania-y medieval Spain” flair the world has to life in a brilliant way. The oodles of personality that the Spanish dev team bring from their homeland is just as stunning as it was in the first game, and it means there’s once again just no adventure game that’ll give you the same vibe that journeying through Castodia will. I definitely wish I’d realized the game had a Spanish dub when I was playing through it, too. The English voice cast is really good, sure, and I really do appreciate that they employ a large variety of European English accents as well, but it definitely feels strange to contrast the extremely Spanish flair that all of the names, places, and people have with the English-language dialogue coming out of their mouths.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. While Blasphemous 2 definitely didn’t leave quite the impact the first one left on me, it’s still a fantastic game. A well-executed and engrossing story, well-balanced and great feeling gameplay, and a nigh one-of-a-kind aesthetic in a video game make this a metroidvania you really don’t wanna miss if you’re any kind of fan of the genre~.
