Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 10

Before I do the overall Persephone strategy stuff, I'm going to point out that this is by far the shortest of my final mission runs. Part of this is the pile of heroes (Even with Faestus having gone missing for no reason -he was fine at the end of the previous mission, you can see him when Victory! pops up, I've no idea why he's not here) that Persephone grants you. Part of this is that Charm makes it much easier to push against Marduk while still pulling ahead on souls. Part of this is that Dragons are fantastic at killing Marduk, keeping your army going, killing all his Guardians and Manaliths, and doing all this stuff at speed with minimal support.

So, oddly enough, a mono-Persephone run is by far the easiest final mission, making for a bit of an anticlimactic capstone to these runs as far as gameplay goes.

Anyway though, Persephone as a 'faction'.

I commented earlier that Persephone is probably meant to be the baseline god and the 'mario' of the gods, versatile and able to do anything. In actual practice, what Persephone is about is her stuff just not dying. She has the second-highest base HP in the game for god stats, her early units can Life Shield themselves to further extend their durability while Ents can impose the effect en mass, she gets unit-based healing and two different spells to heal units in an area with minimal oversight from a wizard and Dragons can outright resurrect the dead. (And I'm ignoring the Mutant-and-possibly-also-Dragon heal-on-death effect for these purposes!) Persephone tends to struggle a bit more on damage output in a direct sense, with Persephone wizards in particular being by far the most pathetic wizards in the game at actually hurting things between Wrath being garbage, Rain of Frogs having probably the worst damage potential of rain spells, Meanstalks being more about area denial than damage, and that's your entire list of damaging spells. Notice that Meanstalks and Rain of Frogs are also problematic to throw into a melee; this isn't too bad in the middling levels, as Persephone is surprisingly ranged-biased for her forces, with massed Gnomes in particular being quite effective, but once you've got Dragons it really stands out that your non-Wrath options don't go well alongside melee combat.

Persephone does in one sense act as a decent entry point into the game in that her forces strongly encourage doing the default 'blob of units following your wizard with little direct oversight' style of play. Other gods tend to encourage more in the way of micromanagement, sending forces to range out separately from your wizard, etc. Persephone's forces stack strength in several ways that reward clumping, and micromanagement isn't worthless but it's not significantly mandatory either.

The result could be said to be 'versatile', but only in the sense that Persephone's forces are blandly effective all-around. Other gods are more prone to needing to field specific unit types to solve specific kinds of problems, but they also tend to be better than Persephone when it comes to handling these specialized problems. Persephone is more reliant on using a blob as a sledgehammer against everything. It's convenient when you're learning the ropes in the campaign -which makes it a bit of a shame her route is the one that straight-up spoils you on the Stratos twist- but it can get a bit repetitive and boring.

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Narratively...

Yeah. That's right. Picking Persephone gets her killed anyway, or more precisely it's heavily implied she died by the previous mission's ending and nobody cares enough to confirm it, and this mission is completely indistinguishable from James' version as an ending. The only reason you can tell I'm not making up nonsense is because I have Dragons instead of Rhinoks.

Seriously?

Let's start from the minor problems and work our way up.

For starters, this is a violation of an otherwise ironclad conceit that when Eldred is picking between two gods his choice favors the one he picked. This is the one and only time in the campaign where Eldred siding with a god does not protect them from death. This is a fairly important conceit of the campaign's design, so even though it's the most minor of the problems with this that doesn't mean it's actually a minor problem. It just means the other problems are much worse.

The next least offensive problem with the ending is that it's mechanically impossible.

It's an explicit rule in Sacrifice that when a god dies, all their wizards go with them. This rule is so strongly held to that the game repeatedly uses the spontaneous death of a wizard as a signal that their god was killed off-screen; it's not some background lore that never crops up in real play, or invoked one time where alternative explanations are available, or otherwise something you can explain away as not really being a rule in the setting. It is an actual rule, no arguing otherwise.

So why isn't Eldred dead?

You can't headcanon up an explanation. The fact that Eldred is cut off from Persephone by being in Stratos' home doesn't matter; in Pyro's route Acheron died on this same map thanks to Charnel's off-screen death, and similarly when Charlotte helped defend Persephone's home in Charnel's route she died when James died. These aren't the only cases, either. Nor is it particularly viable to suggest Eldred's potentially mercenary nature helped protect him; he was on a mission from Persephone at the time she died. There's not really any room to suggest he broke loyalty to her and that protected him.

So this ending can't happen. What should happen is Persephone dies, Eldred dies with her, and Marduk is left to contend with just James, and probably kills him too. Game over. Return of Ganon. Great job ruining everything by siding with Persephone, Eldred!

Then there's the blunt thematic problems with this choice. It's pretty obvious that the devs are trying to say that James' decision to focus on defense was correct and Persephone's decision to focus on offense was incorrect, with her paying for her poor choice with her life. The thing is, though, that the very act of Eldred choosing to side with Persephone should have bolstered her defenses. After all, Eldred is assaulting Thryring alone; the most rational set of assumptions is that if you side with James Persephone has one of Yogo or Shakti defend herself while the other attacks Thryring, whereas if you side with Persephone... she didn't send either of them with you, and there's nowhere else to attack. Logically, she's using both to defend herself, just like James is using both his wizards to defend himself.

So the game is trying to say defense is the correct choice, and then killing Persephone off anyway when she does improve her defenses to James' level.

Only it's worse than that; when you side with James, Charlotte gets sent off to hunt down Marduk, and ends up dead. So either James sent her out to chase down Marduk regardless of James' choice, in which case the entire dichotomy presented of 'James focused on defense and Persephone focused on offense' is a damn lie, or James keeps Charlotte on hand if Eldred runs with Persephone; this latter one is at least slightly thematically coherent, since it would mean that in the scenario where James decides to focus on offense he gets Charlotte killed pointlessly while the scenario he focused on defense didn't get any of his people killed.

But otherwise? The plot is straight-up contradicting its own intent here.

Then there's the wizard issue I touched on in the previous mission's post. How did Persephone die, exactly? Marduk and Stratos only have Jadugarr, Hachimen, Abraxus, and Marduk himself for their wizarding complement. In the James version of events, it's plausible, if irritating, to imagine that Hachimen and Abraxus are attacking Agothera (As we see), Jadugarr is occupied with Charlotte until he banishes her and arbitrarily follows her to Agothera, and Marduk went off and soloed Yogo in Elysium before Shakti could reach Thryring.

But in Persephone's Mission 9, Hachimen and Abraxus are both in Thryring, and Jadugarr and Marduk shortly show up, with Jadugarr sticking around. That leaves Marduk alone to both make a failed assault on Agothera and to simultaneously attack Elysium, punching through both Shakti and Yogo. If I'm generous, I can attempt to assume they split up and each handled one, though frankly the idea of Marduk and Stratos' forces wasting their time attacking Agothera with one non-Marduk wizard is absurd and the idea of Jadugarr effortlessly soloing Shakti and Yogo is even more absurd so the whole thing remains nonsense regardless.

So that's another way none of this can happen!

But the most infuriating thing about the whole thing is how it's almost certainly rooted in blatant sexism. The fact that this scenario is completely impossible on several very obvious levels, and yet the devs did it anyway is strong evidence a biased motive of some kind is at work, and the alternate explanations aren't very probable in context.

There's several reasons sexism is the best-fitting explanation. The fact that Persephone is the only female god is minor evidence, particularly given there's five gods. (At three gods, one of the genders is going to be much more heavily represented than the other if you assume the binary is stuck to, so fair enough. Not so much with five gods) The fact that the game emphasizes her female-ness is a more damning piece of evidence; if it weren't for that detail, I'd be more inclined to think maybe the devs just really hate religious zealot sorts. But, most important of all is that while this is the most blatant evidence of sexism lurking in Sacrifice's narrative design, it's far, far from the only evidence.

There's an abundance of individually innocuous decisions in Sacrifice that collectively paint a sexist picture. For example, every god has at least two wizards associated with them, with exactly one being female and the rest being male. (In Stratos' case, Jadugarr acts as his male representative, being explicitly one of Stratos' wizards until events before Eldred arrived caused him to hate all the gods) Of the five gods, three of them have their female representative quite clearly the junior of the relationship; Shakti is directly inferior to Yogo in wizard stat bonuses, is explicitly his junior in both 'time under Persephone' and 'age in general', and critically Shakti is basically always doing less important things in missions than Yogo does.

Charlotte is never explicitly spelled out to be Grakkus' junior, but where Grakkus handles negotiations between James and Pyro (And note that Empress Sorcha is the Pyro representative there, not Ambassador Buta, implying Grakkus is more or less James' equivalent to Sorcha, socially) Charlotte gets sent out to do gruntwork of various sorts. And of course Acheron is heavily implied to be Charnel's primary champion (The Charnel ending being particularly explicit, but for example we get told that the Ragman was 'the lord of terror before Acheron'), with the Ragman being an old boogeyman people fear far more than they fear Seerix. (And as with the prior two gods, Seerix does a lot of not-terribly-purposeful carnage and chaos while Acheron does things that clearly matter. Even their respective encounters with Lord Surtur get handled differently, with Seerix's presence very possibly coincidental whereas Acheron was explicitly trying to foil the Stratos/Persephone alliance)

This is all relatively minor, but then we get into our two 'exceptions'.

Sorcha is Empress of Pyroborea, and clearly Buta's senior... at the start of the game. In the Pyro route, she ultimately falls out of Pyro's favor and leaves, and worse the assaults on Helios all seem to pretty strongly imply she's already fallen out of favor in those routes as well, with Buta always having the Prime Altar, so that's not some anomalous event exclusive to one route. The only other time in the game where a non-senior wizard has the Prime Altar is when Eldred helps assault Agothera and Charlotte has it, and that's clearly anomalous; of the three Agothera-based missions, one has Eldred alongside Grakkus with Grakkus having the Prime Altar, one has Grakkus and Charlotte on the defense with Charlotte having the Prime Altar... and in the Pyro attack on Agothera, Grakkus and Charlotte defend with Grakkus once again having the Prime Altar. Tellingly, Charnel Mission 4 has Mithras outright tell us that Sorcha is being punished in the form of arriving early with too few forces because she refused to slave-raid, and given all the missions up through about mission 4 or 5 seem to be simultaneously canonical with it only being a question of whether Eldred handled the mission or one of the other gods' wizards handled it, this is probably meant to be uniformly canon. (Similarly, Persephone Mission 4 alludes to Jadugarr 'escaping a trap in Telluria' -that being the map that Charnel Mission 4 took place on, where you fought Jadugarr)

Furthermore, I previously brought up the topic of the game being focused on the love lives of female wizards and not male wizards; not only is that true and moderately disrespectful, but in Sorcha's case Zyzyx's framing of Sorcha's focus on defense first comes in the form of framing it as a negative ("I've heard she can be overly cautious") and then jokingly crediting her talent at defense to having had to fend off Buta's attempts to woo her all these years. Joke or not, the game is outright shifting credit for Sorcha's skills to another wizard, a male one at that; the game never does anything equivalent to any of the male wizards. It would be easy to suggest that, for example, Acheron's skills have been built up in response to Seerix constantly being on the lookout for weakness to take him down and become the new prime champion of Charnel. Yet the game does no such thing.

Abraxus is better at first glance, but... there's the love life thing. There's the part where Abraxus is Stratos' only wizard, which makes her his senior wizard by default, rather than the game actually allowing her to be his senior wizard over some male wizard. (We never get a hint of how she and Jadugarr placed relative to each other when he was a Stratos wizard proper) And there's the part where the plot pretty much outright abdicates responsibility for her own part in the evils Stratos commits. It does a similar thing with Sorcha, where she's only going along with the ugly parts of Pyro's rule because he coaxes her into it, and ultimately gives up entirely, but Abraxus' dialogue in Persephone Mission 6 about how she does what Stratos wishes because he's her lord and nothing more is much more blunt. (And it's not like it's the only time she says this, either) That leaves Seerix as the only 'evil' female wizard the game doesn't try to absolve of their sins -meanwhile, all the 'evil' male wizards are never once suggested to be anything other than fully complicit in the evils of their bosses. Suggesting women are more innocent or otherwise less evil than men is a stock sexism trope, a pure double-standard where the two are judged and presented differently even if they do the exact same things.

More ambiguous are other choices the game makes. Charlotte and Sorcha always end up dead in every ending except maybe the Persephone ending for Charlotte; the Ragman is the only male wizard who always dies no matter what... bar the caveat that Persephone's death automatically takes Yogo with her, but Shakti is also guaranteed to die, so it's just a shift of 2:1 to 3:2 for female wizards guaranteed to die vs male wizards guaranteed to die. Given male wizards outnumber female wizards by just about a 2 to 1 ratio (It depends on whether you're talking 'wizard' as in 'wizard that serves a god in the plot' or 'wizard' as in 'multiplayer-usable wizard model'. It's 8 male wizards if you ignore Marduk, Mithras, and Eldred, and 11 if you count those three, vs 5 female wizards regardless), it's rather eyebrow-raising that female wizards die more consistently than male wizards. I could similarly point out that Shakti is the one who gets assassinated prematurely by the Stratos' Sara Bella plot, rather than a male wizard; certainly, one could try to argue that's a side effect of Shakti being the junior wizard in Persephone's plot, but we know there's a male mercenary wizard available that could've been used instead -Hachimen. Or I could point out that Sirocco is inarguably the most powerful hero in the game, and one of the only female heroes... and she's the only one who ever suffers from what amounts to mind control. Women being 'weak of will' is, again, a stock sexist trope, though to be fair I wouldn't notice this particular case at all if it weren't for the more significant examples Sacrifice has.

Even more subtle is that both 'good' gods in particular have a senior male wizard and a female junior wizard. Apparently the glass ceiling can only be broken through if you serve an evil god in the world of Sacrifice. It gets even more uncomfortable when you start connecting it to other details, like the fact that Pyro is pretty bluntly meant to represent the evils of Big Business. So apparently Evil Big Business is an ally to feminism?

This is particularly hilarious given how the game repeatedly has Pyro employ casual misogyny in an attempt to make us hate him more. But hey, if your boss is verbally a misogynist but still hands over real power to you, that's light-years ahead of a boss who talks like he's a feminist and spends years finding excuses to keep you trapped as his secretary.

Or I could focus on how Charnel is, bizarrely, the only god who seems to have a reasonably accepting and meritocratic society; a strong case could be made that Charnel is the closest to a model to strive toward out of the Sacrifice gods, which is utterly ridiculous given that his entire thing is torturing and killing people for the lulz. I should not be able to earnestly claim Charnel (He of "Yessss, torture also has its merits") presents a fairly good model of what a society should strive to be like!

And wrapping back to this mission itself, we have Eldred's infuriating decision to tell James to remember Mithras as a hero for his bravery with truth and yadda yadda when he's actually Marduk... and meanwhile, the plot totally ignores Persephone. We are literally protecting the 'good name' of a villainous man and totally ignoring the (Inexplicable, gratuitous) death of what the plot seems to intend to be a good woman. I'd still be deeply unhappy with this 'Persephone dies, James lives, no matter which of the two you pick' thing regardless, but if the plot had Eldred wanting Persephone to be remembered as a heroine with none of this garbage of pretending Marduk's human skin was a great person it would be way less offensive.

So yeah. I saved the Persephone route for last because Persephone's ending is an utter disaster and the problems with it can only be properly understood and appreciated in the full context of the rest of the campaign. A player who played through the campaign their first time, got the Persephone ending, and then focused on multiplayer might correctly infer their final choice didn't matter and be irritated by that, but without the rest of the campaign to give proper context that's about as far as it would go.

With the rest of the campaign, though... it's an utter disaster of an ending and I hate it.

There's another layer of frustration to the whole thing, though. I touched on the point that Sacrifice seems to have a bit of an underlying notion that a terrible god is better than no god at all -the explication in Persephone's route that slain gods' territories are outright vanishing being one of the bluntest examples of this in action. I might've been able to tolerate a scenario in which taking Persephone's route gets both Persephone and James killed, and even looked past Eldred's magical survival, if the Persephone choice was handled as the No God Is Better Than Any Of These Gods choice.

Realistically I think it would make more sense for the Stratos ending to have given you the option of killing Stratos, as quite frankly if I were in Eldred's position in the Stratos ending I'd probably be of the conviction that the world would be better off with all the gods dead rather than Stratos ruling alone, but I'd at least be able to accept that the campaign was trying to do something purposeful and interesting if Persephone's ending was the No God Survives And That's A Good Thing ending. Have an ending sympathetic to Jadugarr's position, just with the caveat that Marduk is still terrible and allying with him a dubious choice.

As-is... nope. Hate the Persephone ending. Utterly hate it.

Ugh.

Next time... next time I show off the handful of things that can happen if you do rainbow route shenanigans that are genuinely interesting custom-coded results.

See you then.