I Do Not Understand Hotline Miami 2

Comments · 3K

• JA

  @JacobGeller · 4 years ago · pinned

  Hello if you&apos;d like to ask me questions about this vid and hear the answers in a Director&apos;s Commentary, or if you simply have too much money, I recommend joining my Patreon! <a href="https://www.patreon.com/JacobGeller">https://www.patreon.com/JacobGeller</a>

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• HO

  @hooray4skeleton · 4 years ago

  Other people in the comments have talked about the sexual assault in midnight animal being a sensationalized reframing of jacket&apos;s relationship with the woman who became his girlfriend, but something that&apos;s only now hit me that makes the entire thing sadder is when you retroactively look at that moment he decided to take her back to his apartment and give her a safe place to recover as a parallel to when beard rescued him in Hawaii. Jacket&apos;s most humanizing moment of the original game echoes the most important act of kindness anyone ever did for him, and it got turned into something so horribly disgusting by the people who saw him as something they needed to exploit as quickly as possible.

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• DE

  @deathgripskaraoke9351 · 4 years ago

  jacob that isn&apos;t an &quot;unreadable font&quot; thats the Russian alphabet

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• AU

  @audiomanwithaudioplan964 · 4 years ago

  One thing that I saw in the video that I thought I&apos;d clear up. Manny Pardo isn&apos;t paranoid about becoming framed for the Miami Mutilator&apos;s actions. He IS the Miami Mutilator. The killings he&apos;s investigating become more grotesque with each one, probably as an attempt to draw media attention to them, to *him*. He wants so desperately to have that, but he still just gets overshadowed by Jacket&apos;s trial.

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• NF

  @nfadaloo · 4 years ago

  My best conclusion is that Hotline Miami asks “what happens when you become completely desensitized to your own violence?” And Hotline Miami 2 says “This. This is what happens.” Everyone dies horrible deaths, loses their identity, sanity, or otherwise, and then the ultimate outcome of violence is a nuke! Great!

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• YG

  @yggdrasilburnes · 4 years ago

  Jacket was actually very human in the first game. He threw up when he murdered the homeless man, his first mark as initiation. He was a soldier, not a murderer, not until then. He rescued the prostitute from the mob, and it becomes clear that they actually get together, and she gets clean, taking care of the house, and eventually sharing a bed. Richter was sent to kill her so that Jacket would remain a broken husk of a man, and while it doesn&apos;t work, he ends up killing the Father and his guard, and finishing his work regardless. His mental interrogations become more and more full of trash and stains as the game goes on.<br><br>He was mute, but you could clearly read his character as he progressed.

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• FL

  @FlorSilvestre12 · 4 years ago

  I had no idea the &quot;Do you like hurting other people?&quot; line was a quote from a chicken head dude in Hotline Miami. I know it as the quote underneath an image of the villain toy collector from Toy Story 2 dressed in his chicken suit. Which is even funnier now.

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• CO

  @corwin32 · 4 years ago

  I suppose one could view the killing of The Fans as the developers’ statement that they aren’t making a second game “for the fans”

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• OC

  @OccuredJakub12 · 4 years ago

  The point of HM1: melancholic nihilism<br>The point of HM2: confused, realistic justifications

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• SL

  @slenderiusmann4178 · 4 years ago

  In my opinion, the opening scene of Hotline Miami 2 did a good job of showing how little everyone outside of the plot had any idea of what was going on with Jacket throughout the first game, because from an outside perspective, Jacket was a mass murderer whose apartment was discovered to contain the corpse of a woman who was shot in the head. &nbsp;With that in mind it&apos;s almost certain that the fact that a murderous psychopath had a dead woman in his apartment would make headlines, and in an in-universe movie adaptation of the first game&apos;s events, it would make complete sense to include sexual violence as a main theme considering the general public&apos;s perspective of the events, especially considering the movie was likely intended to be a shocking grindhouse film.

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• AP

  @apobeekeeper · 4 years ago

  The music cutting out at the end of each level in HM1 is basically the game&apos;s version of Post Nut Clarity.<br><br>Just a moment where you stand there and ask yourself: &quot;I don&apos;t know why I did that, but it sure felt good.&quot;

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• TH

  @TheGlooga · 4 years ago

  Oh boy this video activated my secret obsession. I remember in the last level in The Soldier&apos;s storyline, Casualties, there&apos;s this really beautiful song, &quot;The Way Home,&quot; that kept playing over and over while I just kept dying. I was stuck on this level for so long, and as the song kept looping, I began to felt like the game was mocking me. &apos;Oh,&apos; the game kept saying, &apos;you want your 80s action hero moment? Try and get it!&apos; And then The Soldier dies in a cutscene. This game is so confident in what it&apos;s trying to do, and I&apos;ve been spending years trying to untangle it.<br><br>The way I see Hotline Miami 2, it is a set of short stories, all cut up and scattered, that tries to examine how society reacts to violence, and specifically the events of Hotline Miami 1. The stories are short but each try to showcase a different response to violence. Jake and Martin Brown both use the pretext of 1 to indulge in hurting others, and Martin Brown, Manny Pardo, and Evan Wright all exploit 1 for their own fame. Evan in particular is a mostly peaceful man, but his obsession with the events of 1 can, on a story level, break apart his family and, on a mechanical level, turn him into a murderer. The Henchman and The Son&apos;s stories both compare violence to an addiction, a connection made literal thanks to the gang&apos;s activities. The Henchman keeps going back to violence until it burns him out, and his violent death (which, by the way, is a scene that viscerally affected me, and another reason why I&apos;ve thought about this game so much) happens after the drug leaves him barely able to move. The Son, meanwhile, uses the drug as an escape from his life and his grief, and dies in a blaze that becomes unnerving when you actually play through it. He believes that he&apos;ll die like a warrior and ascend to Valhalla, while in reality he falls to his death and doesn&apos;t even get a mention by Pardo as the detective walks past his body. The Soldier/Beard, as you mention discuss military violence in the same way it frame as the rest of the game, but I think it also does something fairly important: The Colonel is implied to be the founder of 50 Blessings, and he&apos;s portrayed as downright pathetic. He&apos;s often drunk and his grand speech on human nature, which parallels the animal masks&apos; speeches in the first game, is genuinely cringe worthy. The source of all the events of 1 and most of 2, the man behind it all, is someone you&apos;d probably advert your eyes from if you saw him in a bar. This applies to virtually all of the protagonists: when they indulge in violence, they aren&apos;t cool or hyper-masculine or awesome, they&apos;re contemptible and too short-sided to realize they&apos;re walking to their doom<br><br>Around all of this are the events of 1, which are intentionally muddled. Both routes (Jacket and Biker) appear to have happened simultaneously, despite the fact they contradict each other. 1 was already a game that was purposefully vague about its plot and world building, and 2 frames it as inherently subjective, with neither protagonist being wholly lucid through the runtime. This introduces a meta aspect to the plot: the reactions to the plot by the characters parallel the reactions by fans of the game. The Fans (the characters) obviously want a retread of the game, Pardo is a copycat game trying to recreate the original, Evan is a game theorist trying to make sense of the first game (I&apos;m using that term generally, because I don&apos;t believe that Evan is literally MatPat), and so on. Throughout the game, they try to make sense of or recreate the violence of the first game and fail. The Fans and Pardo don&apos;t live up to their standards, for example, and Evan can&apos;t connect the dots before his death. If he&apos;s obsessed with trying to &quot;solve&quot; 1, it comes at the cost of his real world relationships. There is a real sense that this game hates its fans, which is a can of worms I&apos;m not going to open but certainly is there.<br><br>Then there&apos;s the game&apos;s relation to its player, which is characteristically caustic. The soundtrack is banging as usual, but the gameplay is off. 1&apos;s levels are like small puzzle boxes: with thinking, a possible path will show itself, and then it&apos;s a matter of sticking to the script until you manage to get out to the other end. It feels like an elegant action scene; I&apos;m fairly certain a few reviewers compared it to John Woo movies back in the day. 2, meanwhile, feels like a fistfight in an alleyway. You kick and bite and claw with your nails and there&apos;s less a coherent choreography and more a desperate struggle. The impression is less &quot;there&apos;s a way to clear these levels&quot; and more &quot;oh god, fighting 30 dudes is a mistake.&quot; 1&apos;s violence was idealized and smooth, while 2&apos;s feels more situated in the real world, so that even as the body count climbs to absurd lengths, it&apos;s clear that it&apos;s because you were lucky every step of the way, because none of the fights are even remotely fair. 1 had that famous line, &quot;Do you like hurting other people?&quot; The answer is obviously &quot;yeah, it&apos;s fun,&quot; whether that be because of the hyperviolence or the soundtrack or trying to tie in the loose ends of the story. That question is implicit in the second game as well, but there isn&apos;t a clear answer here (besides the soundtrack which still bangs more than should be legal). The gameplay is frustrating, the characters are unlikable, and the story is contradictory. The game takes away what you like about the first game (besides, once again, the soundtrack) and in its place shows a perhaps not objective, but composite view of a city going off the deep end chasing the high of 1. Hotline Miami 2 seems genuinely committed to making a violent game that makes violence feel pathetic, the desperate flailing of people ignoring their own lives. And it&apos;s a prickly, possibly self-defeating thing because of that, but it&apos;s so committed to it that, in my mind, it does have some self-consistency.<br><br>Not mentioned in thus far is Richter, whose actions in the &quot;current&quot; year of 1991 are actually nonviolent, as his levels are all flashbacks told to Evan. He becomes defined not by his relationship to violence, but to his mother, as he wants to get enough money to leave the city and support her through her illness. His death scene uncharacteristically includes a conversation in which he makes peace with his death, presumably because he is finally satisfied with how his life ended up. His ending is uncharacteristically hopeful: Richter was able to break free from the allure of violence and devote the rest of his life to loving and taking care of those he loves, and because of that he dies lucidly and with dignity. Of course, he still dies, and not by his own actions. Hotline Miami 2 is a mostly an introspective work, focused on the damage it does to the perpetrator. Here, it finally looks outward, and the final message is somewhat bleak. Doing good, the game says, could award you with a good death, but the death is still coming, because violence boils over and spreads, whether or not you&apos;re in its crossfire. Do everything right and you still get hurt because other people weren&apos;t as careful.<br><br>That&apos;s right: Hotline Miami 2 was about Climate Change.

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