Awesome / Darkest Dungeon II

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• The Desperate Few, scattered groups of people in desperate need of help, are pointed out by the Academic as being perhaps the most heroic people in the world, merely by still clinging to their sanity while the world goes to hell.
  "Giving in to madness is easier than resisting it. They are heroes."
• Any moment when the relationships trigger a special action that doesn't screw over your crew. Both members of a Hopeful friendship dealing enough damage for a deathblow, a Romantic relationship saving a hero from Death's door, a Respectful friendship riposting an attack, etc.
• Some of the lines the heroes drop when facing the last groups of the Cult before entering the Mountain are incredibly badass.
  • Occultist: "The black-beast and I are aligned; they die here."
  • Vestal: "Straight through evil's heart! Falter not!"
  • Flagellant: “Oh, how I’ve hungered for you…“ ^note If you have more than one hero, then this will also give a unique buff which gives every cultist a Damage token, but gives the Flagellant 2 Crit tokens, which bolsters his effectiveness tremendously provided you can handle the damage tokens .
  • Leper: “Amid ruin, beauty. I have never seen snow until this moment.”
• The hero backstories are mostly a showcase of the mistakes and miseries they went through that scarred them into who they are today, but some of the heroes do still manage some impressive things:
  • For how badly it ended up going, props should be given for the Plague Doctor, who in a world where accomplished necromancers use the dark arts to raise the dead, managed to achieve the same with lab gear and her own scientific knowledge.
  • While the Occultist is performing his ritual to become host to a greater power, he ended up attracting the attention of a Shambler, who then tries possessing him. What follows is the Occultist managing to fight it off by himself with the (unwilling) aid of his congregation’s power.
  • The Flagellant successfully defying Death herself through the power of his suffering after going insane and nearly killing himself by gouging at himself without mercy. His addiction to pain and agony, along with the threat of Death’s numbing embrace taking that away, enables him to tap into his Toxic state for the first time, learning how to use Sepsis, allowing him to fight on even terms with death in his Duel Boss, and he even spouts some rather devious one liners as the tide quickly turns.
  Your reputation is overstated, hm?
  I will endure this - and live forever!
  Begone! Leave me to my morbid delights!
  • The Grave Robber poisons her abusive husband to death. Then, needing to pay off her debts, she ends up robbing graves and managing to sneak away with it. And doesn't even keep it in the end, having found the thrill she got from the experience more valuable than the riches.
  • The Highwayman managing to jailbreak during a prison riot, defeating 4 armed and armoured guards with nothing more than a few rocks and Good Old Fisticuffs
  • The hero shrine for the Jester plays out the massacre of the Decadent Court that abused him for so long, combined with the Awesome Music he shreds while doing so.
  • After being locked up and tortured for a time to the point of nearly crossing the Despair Event Horizon, the Vestal is aided by Divine Intervention from the Light and finds the resolve to fight back against her tormentor and escape.
  • The Leper overhears his councilors planning on overthrowing him to take the throne for themselves, so he kills them as they come for him. Then he exiles himself, remarking on the beauty of the world as he sets off on the path of being a Knight Errant. Notably, he is the only character who is facing the light, staring at it dead on as if daring the universe to claim that his compassion was in anyway shameful or a cause of regret.
  • The Crusader sparing the Warlord after defeating him, an act of mercy he knew his enemy wouldn't return, show that in spite of growing accostumed to the violent life of a soldier, he became a just, holy knight rather than a ruthless zealot who hides behind his faith to justify his cruelty.
• Any time a Hero becomes Resolute. They briefly gain a golden aura coupled with a momentary shot of them looking focused on their foes. Often accompanied by a badass one-liner:
  Plague Doctor: "You would presume to break I who bested death?!"
  Grave Robber: "Torment and I are old bedfellows!"
  Jester: "I've played to tougher crowds than you!"
  Crusader: "The battlefield is my crucible!"
• The entirety of the Final Boss, The Body of Work, is an absolute behemoth of a fight split into three distinct phases.
  • The first is a fight against the Gut of the Coward, a putrid mess of guts transformed into a hydra like creature that barrages your party with blight, only to use an ability that deals all blight as direct damage (much like Plague Doctor’s cause of death, one of the strongest abilities according to the DD2 community) resulting in a balancing act of trying to cure the wave of toxicity before it crashes down on your heroes.
  • The second phase pits you against the Focused Fault’s eye buried within its chest, rechristened as the Infernal Gaze. Every turn the boss marks a party member to be attacked (with a unique “Contempt” token, whose only description is: “You’re Next.”) which after a few turns will unleash a horrendous, unavoidable attack that is guaranteed to crit…unless you can weaken the beast enough to throw off its aim.
  • But those two forms, and perhaps the entire game, pales in comparison to the final phase I of the fight, The Hateful God, the corrupted avatar of your existence, and the physical manifestation your failures. The Hateful God has an absolutely horrid 1000 health, even more if you’ve let Loathing hit max at any point in the run. With it shackling your hero’s moves every turn, constantly summoning upgraded cherubs, horrifying and shuffling your heroes, and even having the ability to invert all your tokens on a hero, How do you take down such a monstrous health pool? Well, After managing to kill the Upgraded cherubs on it’s flanks, the boss will cast "Face Your Failure" and force you to choose a hero, very much like "Come Unto Your Maker" from the first game. Unlike the first game, this move isn't an Instant Deathblow on the selected hero. Rather, the selected hero must face a personal failure of theirs from their backstory, in the form of a unique Spectre that cannot be damaged by any other party members. Upon successfully defeating their failure, the hero is able to cast the ultimate move "Exultation" (Yes, you read that right, the same Exultation that the higher level cultists have been using against you all game.) which deals a whopping 200 damage to the Body of Work, frees them from the Shackle’s effects, heals their body and minds by a significant degree, and raises your torch level…And yet that still leaves 199 health for you to deal with using every last trick in your hero’s books. Manage to pull it all off though and you’re rewarded with the Body of Work crumbling into ash and the Iron Crown, the ultimate villain of the Darkest Dungeon Universe, being banished from this world in an explosion of black and blue flames. All set to a triumphant reprise of The Final Combat from the first game, only serving to make the whole experience that much more grand and Epic.
  • Some of the barks the Heroes can get after defeating their failure can be even more badass, showcasing that they are bound to their past no longer:
  Occultist: "You cannot frighten me. I know you."
  Grave Robber: "Hear me, fortune?! I spit in your eye!"
  Highwayman: "Damn the odds - I'm FREE!"

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