YMMV / Blasphemous II

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Incarnate Devotion is absolutely impressive and spectacular but most of his attacks are simple horizontal patterns that can be solved by double jumping and air dodging through, with his feather rain just being sidestepped left and right (and he only uses that if the ground is not aflame). He does have damage worthy of a Final Boss, often two-shotting you if he hits you. However, his damage is only elemental, mostly fire and a bit of magic, so it's super easy to stack defensive beads for that. The only problem he may give you is if you are not quick enough to destroy all the 4 flowers that shield his heart while creating a Bullet Hell before one or more of them regenerates, and Veredicto's absurd damage, wide arc and projectile blocking takes care of that easily. After the nightmare that was Eviterno's two fights he is a piece of cake with just one phase with no deviations or changes throughout the fight. He is also ridiculously weak against rapier spam, The weight of Sin (which can be done from the outer platforms with a double jump and takes 10 percent of his health) and the Game-Breaker that is the combo of Veredicto with "Seguiriya to the memory of your eyes". Hitting his stationary heart will give enough fervor while it's active to cast again, so you can keep him in a time syop until he dies. Eviterno is also super weak to this time stop cheese but he is not a stationary target for the whole fight.
• Awesome Art: Once again, the pixel art of the game is breathtakingly gorgeous, and can perfectly exemplify both the exact Spanish Catholic aesthetic the developers were going for while bombarding the player with tons of both Scenery Porn and Scenery Gorn. Standout moments include the beautiful vistas from the Aqueduct of the Costales, the serenity of the Sea of Ink, and the mysterious tranquility of the Two Moons lake visible from the Choir of Thorns forest.
• Awesome Music: Carlos Viola outdid himself with the new music for this sequel. Which again borrows a lot from traditional Spanish music; Of special note are his reinterpretation of the first game's "Coplas de Incienso", titled "Nuestra Madre" in this game, "Corona de Siete Azahares", "Alzada Sobre Los Hombros", "Rostros Ausentes", "Clavada", and the middle-eastern inspired, "Dos Lunas".
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • When first overlooking the chasm that leads to Profundo Lamento in the City of the Blessed Name, a bloodcurdling scream is heard. This is never addressed again at all and is merely a clue designed to help you solve the Curse of the Unforgiven questline.
  • In order to reach the highest parts of the Elevated Temples, the Penitent One must go deep beneath Mother of Mothers to the Beneath Her Sacred Grounds area to obtain the Double Jump ability. In order to claim it, he has to fight his way past...a creepy, long-limbed Afilador? Huh? Not only does Afilaor, Sentinel of the Emery not receive any Foreshadowing in the way that the other bosses do, but Anunciada doesn't even mention him when telling the Penitent One to go to Beneath Her Sacred Grounds, and the encounter with him is never dwelled on again. It doesn't help that Beneath Her Sacred Grounds is practically a Boss-Only Level with only a handful of collectibles, making the spooky encounter with Afilaor feel that much more out of place due to the lack of explanations.
• Breather Boss: Svsona is sandwiched between the hardest bosses in the game and while some of her attacks may be intimidating, they are also slow and predictable.
• Complete Monster:
  • Eviterno, First of the Penitents, is perhaps the first ever follower of the Grievous Miracle. With his Penance of eternal waiting, Eviterno seeks a chance to revive the High Wills and unleash the Grievous Miracle back upon Cvstodia. As the leader of the Archconfraternity, Eviterno slaughters anyone opposed to him, including defeating the Penitent Cristana and provoking her suicide to reawaken the Penitent One before Eviterno can revive the worst age of Cvstodia.
  • Orospina, Lady Embroiderer, is the most sadistic of the Archconfraternity leaders. A vicious Penitent who delights in torture, Orospina lures individuals to her lair and proceeds to torment and murder them with her needle-like blade, keeping them alive until all that remains is a corpse wrapped like in a cocoon, which positively litter her domain.
• Continuity Lock-Out: While the first game's story was by no means easy to parse, this game makes no attempt to have anything make sense if you're not fully aware of all of the plot and characters from the first game. The very first cutscene has Crisanta killing herself, which will mean nothing to anyone who didn't play Blasphemous but is a huge gut punch to anyone who did. In addition, the game expects you to have played the free Wounds of Eventide expansion for the first game which released years after its initial debut and gotten the unlockable secret Golden Ending that came with it as II outright establishes that ending as the canon one, meaning even players who did play the first game may still be confused if they haven't gotten that ending.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Blue Censer Knights. While they all have a lot of health and hit like a freight train at all stages of the game the two other variants, green and red, just create a miasma or fire ground shockwave after the overhead swing. The blue ones create an advancing wall of lightning instead, and it's as tall as them, forcing you to back off completely and having smaller windows to deal damage until you get movement upgrades to jump over them or dodge through the lightning.
  • Dying Saints. The green ones use a miasma eruption under you every few seconds that deals huge damage if you don't move, the red ones shoot slow, extremely hard hitting fireballs at you but can be cheesed by crouching next to them due to their aim. The blue ones though, oh boy, they shoot two barrages of three slow, highly damaging lightning orbs that have good tracking and move slow enough to cover the screen while they fire the next two barrages, and you cannot use the cheese crouching because they aim in a wider arc. When the game feels cheeky it spawns a pair of the same element inside a small room with other enemies to support them, pray it's not 2 blues at the same time.
  • Firebellies are stationary big bellied men with fire guts, sprouting from the ground, walls or ceiling around the Severed Tower. They just spray fire left and right on an arc and pause for a bit in between but they do unreasonable amounts of damage and unlike other attacks you won't get knocked back and you don't get a grace period so they can hit you for half your health or more in two tics of damage in less than one second. To make matters worse they take a lot of punishment for a "turret" enemy, being practically immobile tanks.
  • Golden Armor Knights. The normal bronze variant is not so bad, just alternating between a magic damage pink lightning straight line and a charge slash. The golden ones do the same but instead they cast a fast, very damaging homing barrage of magic orbs that thankfully cannot track you if you are behind them. You will learn to dodge or jump over them immediately and stay at their back constantly. The charge slash hits incredibly hard but it's exactly the same move as the normal, bronze variant. The orbs are so cheap one of them acts as the "boss" of Elevated Temples at the end of an enemy gauntlet room. Eviterno uses the same orbs in his first fight and they are still slower and weaker, with less tracking than those used by the knights.
  • Hoppers, the crouching enemies that just jump at you return from the first game and they are not that challenging...until you get to the Sunken Cathedral and see the stronger variant that spawns leaping from certain ink puddles. Their trigger is so close to the puddle you WILL get hit by them unless you intentionally double jump over every single ink spill just in case. They also learned to short hop through you to do contact damage with knockback over and over. What makes them especially annoying is that, due to their size, they're literally impossible to hit with Sarmiento & Centella unless you crouch and strike or use the rapier's unique slide-charge attack, so you need to switch to a different weapon unless you're very good with the rapier.
  • Infantes. They act like a sort of Castlevania Fleamen jumping around erratically (though thankfully not as much and as fast as the original Fleamen) and spamming spinning attacks on the air and lunges on the ground. They also love to camp on the low ceilings of cramped rooms and when they show up there is always more than one or two around. Due to being the only enemy as small as the Hoppers, they are similarly impossible to hit with Sarmiento & Centella's basic attack.
  • Sacristánes (lit. Sacristans or Sextons) are back, and more plentiful than ever. And they get two upgrades: a new startup hitbox behind them and an elite purple version that can swing twice in quick succession and change direction depending on your location. Get ready to block and parry because Verdict sucks against them and pray you don't get cornered by two of them with different timings.
  • Twinsword phantoms are extremely aggressive, knock you back, usually to a bottomless pit and will teleport around you, specially to your back. Their elite purple variant found in the last area is even more agressive and will teach you they also teleport locked on your current position. They will follow you anywhere inside the huge rooms with small platforms, spikes and bottomless pits and force you to deal with them before taking on the plentiful platofrming challenges in the area.
• Memetic Mutation: "My penance is far from over."^Explanation Eviterno's voicelines, particularly this one, instantly became a meme in the community to express frustration or repetition. In order to re-attempt his incredibly hard second phase, you will be forced to watch the unskippable transition cutscene, just like Escribar in the first game). As such, the words from the cutscene have a tendency to become ingrained in the mind after so many attempts.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The organ melody that constitutes of the background for "De Blanca Mantilla" (the boss theme for Benedicta of the Endless Orison) is very similar to the main theme of the Phantasm film series.
• Tear Jerker: The entire finale of the Secret Ending is a rollercoaster of tears. Devotion Incarnate simply accepts that his presence is unwanted and he dies in solace of that. The Grievous Miracle is dead. The Penitent One then gets taken in both body and soul to his true final rest, going beyond the Dream and into what appears to be the world's version of Heaven. But he isn't alone here. We're greeted with everyone who the Penitent One has aided or helped throughout the games! In particular; Redento, Regula, and Nacimiento has found their rest and reprieve of the Miracle's cruelty. Esdras and Perpetva are together again, and even beings thought to be denied their final rest like Soledad and Tentudia are present as well!
• That One Achievement: "A Sharp Rendevous" is the only challenge-run achievement in the whole game, and on top of that, it's a speedrun. All you have to do to get this one is reach the Boss Room of Afilaor, Sentinel of the Emery within 30 minutes. It's a deceptively simple task, but this speedrun requires the player to traverse three different corners of the map very quickly to grab all three weapons, blitz through Mother of Mothers and then scramble down Beneath Her Sacred Grounds with usually only around five minutes left. Not to mention that grabbing the Wall Jump ability from Profundo Lamento is required to access part of the map, shrinking the amount of time even tighter. Basically, the player will have to not only make very few mistakes along the way and know exactly where they're going, and if they don't feel like putting up with a harsh speedrun then they're locked out of getting the "The Penitent Two" achievement for getting all the game's achievements.
• That One Boss:
  • Benedicta of Endless Orison throws everything but the kitchen sink at you, while you only have two small platforms and a horizontal wrap-around at your disposal. And her attacks are fast and not very well telegraphed, and if they hit you mid-air you're likely to fall to your doom. And at low health, she's destroy one of the platforms to further limit your mobility.
  • Eviterno is hands down the most challenging boss in the game. First you fight against him as First of the Penitents dodging relatively easy magic spells that hit hard if they land, but this fight ends up being a formality with low health. Once he grabs Crisanta's sword and becomes the Last Desecrator the gloves are off. He is absolutely relentless, comboing non stop and only giving you a small window to heal after he jumps to erupt the ground. To make things worse he hits like a freight train, with projectiles shooting both sides of the end of a combo string and can even use mixups and teleport to your back in the middle of a combo or after blocking him. For phase 2 he can start using massive Area of Effect cuts that cover most of the screen and turns the huge lunge to erupt the ground into an aerial combo that chases you before the eruption, shortening the window to get a flask heal. Funnily enough when he enters phase 3 he will do a one time summon of the other members of the Archbrotherhood and while spectacular it is his least damaging move and rather easy to dodge (the bosses seem to do their original damage even)...until he surprises you with a finisher huge slash covering the center of the battlefield. You will be at him for hours. There's a reason ''My penance is far from over'' has become a meme in the community to express frustration or repetition. You will be watching the transition to the second fight and hearing those words every single try as you master dodging through him over and over to avoid his basic combo. After fighting him the Incarnate Devotion feels like piece of cake despite being much more challenging than Escribar.
  • Sinodo, Hymn of the Thousand Voices gets there with the sheer amount of stuff happening in the fight. If the first form's sheer aggressiveness in shifting between patterns doesn't make you sweat, the shift to a bullet hell section with the iron mask probably will. And when it gets low on health, you get to contend with landing on the floor hurting and timing your attacks between hanging from the rings and dodging flame pillars.
• That One Level:
  • The Basilica of the Absent Faces may be small, but the majority is taken up by a long and frustrating series of platforming sections combined with some very annoying enemies and no save point till the very end. And if you happen to need to go back to the city before beating Benedicta, hopefully you've gotten the Prie Deiu teleport upgrade or you'll need to climb again with almost zero shortcuts.
  • Crimson Rains, the last level, a sort of bloody The Hedge of Thorns in the sky evoking Bramble Blast, is chock full of platforming the likes of which has never been seen in Blasphemous before. And you get to deal with an elite purple version of the most annoying enemy in the above mentioned Basilica quite a lot. You'll also learn that those twinsword phantoms follow you everywhere inside a room once aggroed, constantly teleporting around your position, and since the area is just huge screens with bottomless pits or spikes everywhere you cannot ignore them and rush the platforming. After each big room there will be a long enemy gauntlet just to spice things up. Thankfully it's not that long and shortcuts activate at the top of each one of the huge rooms. And your reward for all of that is a fight with Eviterno.
  • The Sunken Cathedral is pretty straightforward zigzag through the inner scaffolding but the enemies here love to zone you out with projectiles and the temple hosts the ever so annoying Hoppers that burst from ink puddles. Whenever you find yourself dodging the summoned water dolphins and the homing targets for lightning you can be sure at least one out of three puddles near you has a Hopper inside.
  • Two Moons is just a straightforward enemy gauntlet after enemy gauntlet on cramped spaces with laser traps, except when it's the enemy gauntlet on the open plaza that throws everything but the kitchen sink at you without using said laser traps. It's the penultimate level of the game so of course enemies hit like a truck too.
  • The Severed Tower (a.k.a. The Inverted Tower) is not as hard as the others but punishes mistakes hard. The stationary firebelly enemies that sprout from the floors, walls and ceilings do absurd damage with their breath, even with fire resistance and you hardly get any kind of invincibilty frames. You also meet the cardinal slugs who, on top of being super tanky, just spam the same fire breath attack in a very wide arc with lots of range.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Curse of the Unforgiven. For starters, many players may not ever realize how to start it, as it requires going into the key items menu and hitting the lore button on the first Sealed Envelope you fin, which is usually reserved for Flavor Text. Then it's Guide Dang It! after Guide Dang It! moment as you try to make heads or tails out of the cryptic clues that the envelopes give on where to go next^note One of them requires you to remember that the very first time you entered the chasm that leads to Profundo Lamento in the City of the Blessed Name, you hear a scream, and another requires you to remember that there's a skull decal above Regina's shop and then walk back and forth under it. The reward from the quest is indeed worth it, being a powerful Chant that allows you to stop time for a few seconds and can trivialize some bosses, but it's an infuriating quest nonetheless.
  • As with the first game's Children of Moonlight, rescuing all the Holy Brothers of the Golden Visage can be quite tedious if you happen to miss a handful, as then you'll either have to comb the entire map looking for them or cross-reference the ones you already have with a guide. Again, though, the rewards are worth it and you have to complete the quest to get one of the golden Altarpiece Figures necessary to unlock ending A.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • One common complaint about the game is the transition from using pixelated cutscenes to 2D animated ones. ^note  The pixel art animator from the first game left the company after Wounds of Eventide was finished so they went with the trailer team for that DLC for future cutscenes in the sequel. While the cutscenes are well done, many people miss the more unique pixel art cutscenes, especially since they were a Kickstarter stretch goal for the first game.
  • Executions on low health enemies have been relegated to a thorn crusher for most basic or human-size enemies. Compared to the first game's update that gave unique executions to almost every enemy, it feels like a step back.

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