[Game Discussion] Blackguards 2

Do you believe in hauntings? I didn't up until a couple years ago. This game started following me back around 2022, but I didn't notice at first. I saw it in a local used game shop called Chumleighs and thought the name was cool. This probably isn't important, but I first heard the word Blackguard from the character of the same name in James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. It stuck in my mind for some reason. It's really just another word for 'bandit' or 'brigand', but it sounded more poetic, like the opposite of the word 'paladin'. Anyway, I decided not to buy it, and then I started seeing it everywhere. Every game shop I went to for the next year straight had the game in stock. It didn't matter if it was a major retailer like Gamestop or a smaller used game place like Microplay, every location I went to had exactly one copy of the game in stock. Nobody who worked at any of these stores could tell me anything about it. I did a little research and found out the game had come out on consoles in 2017, so why was this game still here on all of these store shelves years later? If it was a more mainstream game, I could understand. In that case, they'd probably have multiple copies in stock and throw another on the shelf as soon as the old one sold, but this was different. Nobody knew what this was, nobody could tell me how long it had been sitting there. If the 'Day One Edition' banner on the front of the box could be believed, then the game had really been there since 2017, hiding in plain sight. I'd been to all of these stores for years, yet I never noticed the game until just after 2022. And before you ask, no, they weren't used copies. The employees I spoke to at each location assured me each time that their copy was brand new, and that they only had the one copy. 

Eventually, I let my curiosity get the better of me in the summer of 2023 and finally purchased a copy for the Xbox One from my local Microplay. Turns out, the game isn't even available through the digital Xbox store. You can find a page for it, but they won't let you actually buy it. The publisher doesn't have any record of it on their website, either for some reason. It sat on my shelf, taunting me for a solid two months until I finally started playing it in August. I'd managed to 100% the first two Dark Souls games because they seemed less scary than dealing with this little cognitohazard I'd invited into my home.

I'd tried finding more info about the game online around when I first started playing it, but came up with almost nothing. Barely anybody had uploaded any gameplay of it, but it kept showing up in little places. It felt like a dogwhistle, always there for me to notice and nobody else. It was almost as if I'd been chosen to carry some sort of dark secret. If that's the case, then the secret is that this game is pretty mediocre. It's got an interesting premise, but the gameplay is pretty slow and the load times are atrocious. It seems like the only place I could find any discussion of the game was on Steam. This made sense, of course. It's a turn based strategy game, so playing it on a computer was likely preferable for anybody willing to try it out. There were a few people talking about it, but not a lot. The only forum posts of any note were the ones debating whether or not some achievements were glitched and how to get the different endings. I should've probably written it off like so many before me, but I kept playing the game, even when I got stuck. I devoted the month of August 2023 to learning as much as I could about the game, and cataloguing what I'd found. Somebody had set up a Blackguards wiki, presumably around when the first game had come out, but the site was completely abandoned by the time I found it. The last edit had been a couple of years prior, but there was barely any site activity between 2014 and now. I decided to start editing the wiki to fill out all the missing info about Blackguards 2. If you go to it now, you can still see the point in 2023 when I started making edits through the site history page. I also reached out to people on Steam who seemed to know more about the game, but they were from other countries, so there was a bit of a language barrier. At one point, I actually reached out to the developers through their Discord server, but nobody still working there seemed to have any useful information. Matter of fact, they suggested I check the wiki since some kind stranger (me) had started filling it out with all kinds of useful info. At this point, I may very well be the foremost expert on Blackguards 2. I'm actually at the top of of TrueAchievements.com's leaderboard for Blackguards 2 achievements, since I'm the closest to completing it out of everybody on the site.

The game itself is kinda interesting, but I won't blame you if you've already stopped reading. My curse is that I'm the last person alive who still cares about it, whether it deserves that care or not. In Blackguards 2 you play as Cassia of Tenos, a noble lady who finds herself thrown into her city's labyrinthine prison/catacombs for reasons unknown. Cassia is bitten several times by the native Corapia spiders during her many attempts to escape, and is slowly succumbing to the venom in her system over the course of the game. Unfortunately for her, Corapia spiders are considered sacred, so curing her condition would be an act of heresy punishable by death. As the venom warps both her body and mind, Cassia decides to assemble a gang of the worst blackguards in the province in order get revenge on Marwan al Anfan, the man who imprisoned her. It turns out he's also usurped the throne and has crowned himself the First Kyrios of the capital city of Mengbilla. Every level has you conquering some territory that belongs to him, and there's even a mechanic whereby you need to defend your conquered territories from his attempts to reclaim them. You get four main party members in each level after the tutorials are done. Cassia herself can be leveled up however you like, but the other three have certain limitations that make them better for certain specialized roles. Takate is a human tribal warrior who's the best melee fighter, Naurim is a dwarf who's also pretty good at melee combat, but seems a little more focused on tanking than dealing damage, and Zurbaran is a mage who's the only party member besides Cassia who can do magic. The magic system is super overpowered in this game. If you level up the frost spell on Cassia and Zurbaran, you can do pretty good damage to every enemy on screen at least twice per turn, plus it slows down their mobility for a few turns. If you can upgrade their MP, you can have your party cast it four times in your first turn and immediately win the level. There's a few other spells, but the only other ones worth investing in are the two fire spells for the enemies that are weak to it.

The game has a lot of interesting ideas, but it doesn't execute them too well, unfortunately. You can have conversations with your party members to influence them, and the all have distinct subplots you can follow over the course of the game. The funny thing is that you you're supposed to get a unique combat bonus for that character at the end of their subplot, but only if you influenced them to be evil. They lean into the idea that encouraging their vices makes them more violent, and therefore turns them into better minions. The problem with that though is that they were programmed incorrectly and thus don't actually change a character's combat stats. You also get a really neat section at the very end after the final boss fight wherein Cassia takes the throne and you get a single day to rule as the First Kyria before Cassia dies in her sleep from the Corapia venom the following night. It gives you the chance to fulfill any promises you made to your party members and make good or bad changes for the people of the capital city. There's a bunch of tiny details about this game that I find intriguing, but I think it's Stockholm Syndrome more than anything.

If you're gonna make the same mistake I did of hunting achievements, it's worth noting that you can play the whole thing on easy mode. It'll make the game a lot easier and less time consuming, so I highly recommend it. The main one you need to worry about is The Monster. Not a single person has ever obtained it on Xbox, so it's assumed to be glitched and unobtainable. I myself tried several times to no avail. I found somebody on Steam at the end of 2023 who figured out an exact breakdown of how the achievement is supposed to work in the game's files, but I still haven't mustered the courage to try it after all this time. I've already spent so many days and nights doing whatever random bullshit I could think of. If I try this one last method and it doesn't work, I might kill myself. If you must know, it's for getting the bad ending and having the lowest possible karma by the end of the game. Every moral choice you make in the game is signposted with a chime sound effect, but it doesn't actually tell you whether the decision was good or evil. It turns out the game keeps a tally of every moral choice as a single variable called CassiaGoodEvil that starts equal to zero. Every good choice adds 1 and every evil choice subtracts 1. According to the Steam guide, the threshold for The Monster is -46, but it's possible to obtain a final score of -50 if you actually make every evil choice. My assumption is that they programed it to require exactly -46 on Xbox by mistake. The devs claim that the achievement should work on Xbox the same way it does on Steam, but these people made that Gollum game from a couple years ago, so I don't really trust them. I'll probably update this blog post whenever I get around to trying out my hypothesis, but I don't plan to do it any time soon.