Caution: This article will contain spoilers. I will make note when I’ll be discussing plot details. This will be your warning to stop reading if you want to go in blind.

Before I jump into the meat and cheese of Darksiders 2 I decided to first analyze the story. If I discuss the story and gameplay together then it will probably sound like I didn’t really enjoy Darksiders 2. This is certainly not the case, and you should certainly play it. Whether you enjoy it more than the first will depend on personal preferences, but it is a solid game. There are no gooey bits here, unless we continue with the meat and cheese metaphor. In that case there are deliciously gooey bits aplenty.

Darksiders 2 falls victim to a common problem in many games, though. Having to deal with the traditional three act structure effectively. The first act of exposition and introduction, the second act of conflict, and the third and final act consisting of climax and resolution. Most games are primarily made up of a really long second act. After all, that’s where all the interaction happens. You want the game to get to the interactive fiddly bits as soon as possible, so you dump the exposition and introduction as soon as you can at the start and then push the player into the conflict. This conflict then continues towards the end of the game.

In other media, however, the second act of the story tends to focus on the protagonist(s) developing skills or learning a valuable lesson that will help them resolve the conflict in the climax. In video games this can be represented through abilities and powers. For example, you cannot face the Mother Brain in Super Metroid until you’ve collected all of your powers. In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Link must first retrieve the Master Sword to face Aghanim, and after that he must continuously gain new abilities in order to save all seven maidens in the Dark World before confronting Ganon.

In a game that is light on story, this is all that is necessary. It gives the player a tangible sense of feedback, allowing them to gain new skills and improve so that they can face greater and greater challenges. The idea is the player will reach the climax that shall put all of their abilities learned previously to the test. This typically takes the form of some final lair. In the Mega Man series they tend to have the player fight all the previous robot masters again to emphasize their increased strength, especially when armed with that foe’s weakness. It helps the player reflect on their journey, especially if those foes gave them such trouble once upon a time.

These are all a great way to present these ideas of conflict and climax to the player if your game is light on story. The problem is when you have a game filled with cut-scenes, dialogue and character interactions and yet fail to develop these things in any meaningful manner.

For example, Darksiders 2.

Vigil Studios didn’t exactly write America’s greatest story ever told with the first Darksiders, but it certainly felt more complete than its sequel. War himself may not have developed as a character, but each objective continued to reveal more about the world, the side characters and the mystery behind the conflict. There was a sense of progress, that your actions meant something and were more than just things to do for a few hours.

Darksiders 2 presents Death as a much more interesting character in the first few minutes, revealing parts of his history, his motivations and his many plights. He could be a really interesting character with a lot to discover.

Too bad what you see is what you get. Though the game hints several times that there is something deeper going on, they never really do anything with it. Which, ultimately, describes Darksiders 2 as a whole. With the exception of a couple “twists”, if you can call them that (“developments” would likely be a better word), the story is the same at the start as it remains at the end.

Which just pisses me off.

WARNING! From here on I will be discussing the story and plot in more detail. You’ve gotten the gist of my feelings on the game’s story, and I will be discussing the gameplay in another (probably shorter) post. If you do not want the intricate details of the plot discussed, then move onward now and enjoy your day.

...Gone? Good. Spoilers ahoy.

What makes Death a more interesting character than War on paper are his history and his motivations. He and the other horsemen were once Nephilim, a race that was capable of wiping out all life across all worlds. Heaven, Hell, Earth, Purgatory, what have you. Death and the other horsemen chose to turn on their brethren and slaughter them all in an effort to save the many worlds and their denizens. Death has kept the souls sealed away in an amulet in secret and given it to a character by the name of Crowfather, a keeper of secrets.

Death’s motivation in the game is outlined in this first encounter. He believes his brother to be innocent and visits the Crowfather to discover what really happened and restore humanity to life. All the Crowfather says is that Death must get to the Tree of Life, but it turns out the Tree of Life is corrupted. This is where the “big bad” of the game is revealed. Death must simply fight off a nebulous entity referred to as Corruption, an unstoppable force that will always seek to end all life. What the player discovers is that the Tree of Life isn’t the destination, but a gateway to other worlds that Death must travel to in order to complete his journey. In addition, the Corruption has chosen the form of one of Death’s Nephilim brothers, one that he had slaughtered once, as its champion. The real destination is the Well of Souls, where Death can only revive humanity if he sacrifices the souls of the Nephilim.

This has the potential to be a really good story with a conflicted character. Death is clearly motivated by a preservation of life. Though he is a Nephilim and capable of slaughtering all things, he instead chooses again and again to save what he can. He acts in the efforts of the Greater Good. However, family clearly matters as well, which is why he has preserved the souls of the Nephilim instead of destroying them as well as seeking to find his brother’s innocence.

There are still some unanswered questions, however. Why does Death believe his brother is so innocent, for example? What proof does he have? Again and again Death insists that War did not intentionally cause armageddon too early, yet no justification is provided. No history with his brother is given to describe why he trusts War so much. Is he just that trusting of a person?

Furthermore, the game telegraphs the fact that War will have to sacrifice the souls of the Nephilim in order to revive humanity. Every gate keeper in the game taunts him, saying he won’t like what awaits him at the Well of Souls. Even when he stands facing his brother, whom he has defeated once before, there is nothing but raw conviction on his face. When he stands on the precipice to the Well of Souls, he sighs and complains that he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do (despite being told several times).

Then, when he finally leaps into the Well with the amulet of Nephilim souls embedded in his chest, the game speaks ambiguously on whether Death himself dies, yet he’s seen there standing beside the other horsemen as the game replays the end of the first Darksiders. So humanity is said to revive, but nothing is shown. The player is given no information, really. The game ends with Death leaping into the Well and…that’s about it.

I don’t want the character to beat his breast and cry “Oh Woe for the things that I must do, yet how can I even think to do them?” in some melodramatic fashion. In fact, a face of conviction against his obstacles is certainly in the character’s personality.

Yet it would still be nice to see him feel some sort of conflict. Or to insist on trying to find another way to save humanity. Most of all, it would be nice to hear more thoughts as to why he chose to side with Creation over the Nephilim, what drove he and the other horsemen to rebel. Or why he thinks War is innocent. We know the things he has done and we have enough information to determine his alignment, but we don’t know why he does these things. We know motives without motivation, so to speak.

For roughly twenty hours I played Darksiders 2, and most of the game was dedicated to nothing more than telling Death to go run some errands and how he’d be unhappy how things turn out. Which is a shame as the game’s dialogue is better written than the first game and our protagonist has a much better personality (though part of this is likely due to the excellent performance of the voice actor versus that of War’s over wrought droning of “I will have my vengeance!”). There could have been a lot done here, but every time the player finished an objective you basically got an agitated Death followed by some cackling and mocking by this poorly defined character that serves no greater purpose than to pad on game length.

The game could have easily been improved, story-wise at least, if the entire Kingdom of the Dead was removed. Before this segment the player is wandering the Forge Lands, which is beautiful and is at least feeding the player exposition into things like the Corruption and introducing the basic gameplay. There are also plenty of different sorts of locations, ranging from lush green lands to frozen mountains to subterranean rivers of magma. The Kingdom of the Dead, on the other hand, is made up of old ruins in a gray wasteland. That’s it.

It isn’t until after the nearly ten hour slog that is the Kingdom of the Dead that the player reaches any part of story that might be interesting, but it still doesn’t answer any questions. At most you learn a bit about some of the Angels from the first game that are now trapped on Earth, but it barely develops the setting. There is still nothing learned of Death other than what he has already stated.

Darksiders 2 is an example of a game where the designers wanted to have a lot for the player to do but not a lot of story to tell. Instead of using that time to develop the characters, however, they chose instead to just have nothing happen but poor rationalization for stringing the player along from one errand to the next.

The biggest flaw this method has is that it does not present any sense of rising action. There is no real sense of progress. The experience feels very plateaued up until the very end, where it just drops off of a cliff. There is little sense of resolution as it feels like there was nothing to resolve. Death hasn’t grown as a character as he portrays no conflict to keep the Nephilim souls in tact. Oh, sure, he sealed them away some time ago, but we don’t know his reasoning for keeping them around and can only guess it is for sentimental reasons, and when the choice comes he makes it in the blink of an eye. The only thing to have changed as a result of this journey is that the Nephilim souls are destroyed and humanity is brought back, which itself is treated with as little pomp and circumstance as possible.

By the end of the game the player no longer feels as if they accomplished anything, just as if they ran out of game to play. This is the worst possible feeling a player could have after beating your game (aside from “that was terrible”).

I gladly await Darksiders 3, but God damn do I hope they involve the writing team much more intimately throughout the process in order to deliver a better story.