Hades 100% Completion

I actually did it. I actually got all the achievements in Hades, and these are some of my random thoughts.

Very rarely do I ever go for 100%. Usually there’s a handful of achievements that I just don’t care about and my backlog also keeps growing, but Hades was just so stupidly addicting that I guess I did it in the end. It definitely had that “just one more run” feel that everyone talks about.

In my opinion, this build is really mediocre compared to other ones I’ve had. Normally I try to at least synergize the gods with one another with their duos, but I didn’t get anything. My main strategy here involved stacking on a lot of debuffs. Weak and Chill provided help with survivability and Hangover is there for some extra damage.

Now technically, I didn’t get a true full 100% because there are some fated lists left, because I haven’t been able to get the RNG for the things I’m missing to show up. At this point, I don’t really care enough to actively try to finish them because of that.

With my play style, I ended up gravitating towards the sword most of the time. Early on, I played a lot of Aspect of Poseidon and tried to get a strong cast and Exit Wounds from Artemis (which damages enemies as the cast bullets drop out of them, and the weapon’s gimmick is that the special dislodges all of them out of the target hit).

However, once I discovered Stygian Soul, it was hard to go back to Infernal Soul. Stygian Soul makes it such that your casts regenerate after a short amount of time. If you use it though, you don’t need to go around trying to pick up your casts if they’ve fallen out of someone that ran away. I especially had trouble in Asphodel or in the Lernie fight because they would end up in the lava and I had to go and retrieve them. In my opinion, Stygian Soul is the lazy option, and I’m very lazy.

I enjoy Aspect of Arthur, but I also find it difficult to play because I’m not used to the slower timing of the sword swings. It looks really cool though.

I also really like the Aspect of Zeus on the shield, especially when paired with actual Zeus boons. The shield aspects are all just sort of ridiculous and fun, but the Zeus one is especially fun because of how strong the disc is and how you can get it to follow you around. That Zeus + Zeus combo is what I used for my fastest time (19:58).

I’ve tried to do some more speedruns but didn’t do a very good job of it. All my friends have had more success in their speedrun strats. It’s fun to watch top tier speedruns on Youtube though.

Though the combat is still my favorite part of the game, the mechanic I’m most fascinated by is how the story works. Not as in the actual story content, but the way the dialogue system works with its queues and flags. Returning to The House of Hades was really fun because of all the parallel story lines I had playing out and the dialogue would be different each time. I wish I could see how it all worked under the hood. I want to see the script or something of that sort.

I’m 120 runs in and I still have new dialogue to read through with some characters in the House of Hades (they have the exclamation point above their head). It’s insane to think about how many conversations there actually are in this game.

I was really sad when I ran out of characters to give nectar/ambrosia to 😦

And now that I’ve more or less finished Hades (I managed to beat Extreme Measures Hades which was the last thing I wanted to do), I have no idea what to do with my life 😦

Maybe I’ll go read Song of Achilles or something.