I Do Not Understand Hotline Miami 2

Visual Media Used: Hotline Miami, Hotline Miami 2, Boomerang X, Slay the Spire, Drive, Thirty Flights of Loving

Music Used (Chronologically- all songs from Hotline Miami 1 & 2 unless otherwise noted): She Swallowed Burning Coals (El Tigr3), Remorse (Scattle), Hydrogen (M.O.O.N.), Horse Steppin’ (Sun Araw), El Huervo feat. Shelby Cinca (Daisuke), Sneaky Driver (Katana Zero), Crystals (M.O.O.N.), Unfathomable (INSIDE), Bloodline (Scattle), Run (iamthekidyouknowwhatimean), Fahkeet (Light Club), Keep Calm (Endless), Coming Down, Silhouette (Katana Zero), You Are The Blood (Castanets)

[hoorayskeleton]

Other people in the comments have talked about the sexual assault in midnight animal being a sensationalized reframing of jacket's relationship with the woman who became his girlfriend, but something that'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'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.

[yggdrasilburnes]

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'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.

He was mute, but you could clearly read his character as he progressed.

[nfadaloo]

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!

[audiomanwithaudioplan]

One thing that I saw in the video that I thought I'd clear up. Manny Pardo isn't paranoid about becoming framed for the Miami Mutilator's actions. He IS the Miami Mutilator. The killings he'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's trial.

[slenderiusmann]

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. With that in mind it'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's events, it would make complete sense to include sexual violence as a main theme considering the general public's perspective of the events, especially considering the movie was likely intended to be a shocking grindhouse film.

[TheGlooga]

Oh boy this video activated my secret obsession. I remember in the last level in The Soldier's storyline, Casualties, there's this really beautiful song, "The Way Home, " 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. 'Oh, ' the game kept saying, 'you want your 80s action hero moment? Try and get it!' And then The Soldier dies in a cutscene. This game is so confident in what it's trying to do, and I've been spending years trying to untangle it.

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's stories both compare violence to an addiction, a connection made literal thanks to the gang'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'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'll die like a warrior and ascend to Valhalla, while in reality he falls to his death and doesn'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's portrayed as downright pathetic. He's often drunk and his grand speech on human nature, which parallels the animal masks' 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'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't cool or hyper-masculine or awesome, they're contemptible and too short-sided to realize they're walking to their doom

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'm using that term generally, because I don'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't live up to their standards, for example, and Evan can't connect the dots before his death. If he's obsessed with trying to "solve" 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'm not going to open but certainly is there.

Then there's the game's relation to its player, which is characteristically caustic. The soundtrack is banging as usual, but the gameplay is off. 1's levels are like small puzzle boxes: with thinking, a possible path will show itself, and then it'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'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's less a coherent choreography and more a desperate struggle. The impression is less "there's a way to clear these levels" and more "oh god, fighting 30 dudes is a mistake." 1's violence was idealized and smooth, while 2's feels more situated in the real world, so that even as the body count climbs to absurd lengths, it's clear that it's because you were lucky every step of the way, because none of the fights are even remotely fair. 1 had that famous line, "Do you like hurting other people?" The answer is obviously "yeah, it's fun, " 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'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's a prickly, possibly self-defeating thing because of that, but it's so committed to it that, in my mind, it does have some self-consistency.

Not mentioned in thus far is Richter, whose actions in the "current" 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're in its crossfire. Do everything right and you still get hurt because other people weren't as careful.

That's right: Hotline Miami 2 was about Climate Change.

[deathgripskaraoke]

jacob that isn't an "unreadable font" thats the Russian alphabet

[chuck_duck]

I’ve always seen the sexual assault scene’s purpose as to shock, but then make you question why that shocked you when the ruthless violence didn’t. Also to show how much the truth behind Jacket’s story was misunderstood or misinterpreted by the public in-universe.

[abeldelatorre]

I think the first one is "do you like hurting other people?" and the second is "can you deal with the consequences?". The violence jacket started, made every other character to follow him, resulting in the annihilation of all of them, the fact that violence only results in more violence, that is what I think the game is trying to say.

And the sex scene is another jab at the player, like "huh, you dismember people, and SA is too much for you?" basically another moment for the player to introspect, now about where they draw the line

[WobblesandBean]

29:50 It's Alex and Ash. They're twins, he's hallucinating the brother/sister duo as the "duck dragon". And they're swans. Not ducks. I should know. I am a duck.

...Quack.

[botbtquarrel]

29:05 I guess I need to go and rewatch the epilogue, because my impression was that Beard died in the 80s in Hawaii, and the reason Jacket kept seeing him working at every convenience store/pizza place/video store - despite how improbable that would be - was because he was deep in the fugue state, seeing the face of the guy who saved his life on every helpful clerk.

[angeltearz]

In my opinion the reason the sexual violence scene is there is because it adds to the message that jackets story is being warped to this crowd appealing horror story, and how misunderstood jacket is

[TheLiutsik]

As one of reviewers in my country wrote upon release:

"Hotline Miami is a magic trick, Hotline Miami 2 is a magician's explanation of how the trick works"


For me, finishing both games several times, it is a well-rounded explanation till this day.

[kaloofy]

What I love the most about this video is that in Gellers pursuit of trying to understand this game, it’s opened up this little space for everyone here to express an understanding of interpretation of Hotline Miami that are all similar but a little to very different, and I think it really does bring an excellent point about the subjectivity of art and how art is understood. Like, the ephemerality of the concept, the vague way in wish it expresses itself leaves so much open to the viewer to interpret and understand and come to their own personal conclusion based on their own life and experiences, no one has to tell you what it means, partly because there is no distinctive clear meaning. Idk there’s just a lot of short little essays in this comment section all about this one game and everyone’s understanding of it and I think that’s a little bit beautiful.

[FlorSilvestre]

I had no idea the "Do you like hurting other people?" 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.

[magnificmango]

Hotline Miami 2 is about miserable people doing miserable things, trying to convince themselves it isn’t miserable. If the first game is about reaching the realization that you’re a bad person for enjoying the violence, then the second game is about the denial of that truth.

The characters who deny this to the end meet horrible fates, while characters like Jacket and Richter, who come to accept that they’re terrible people who have done horrific things, are met with relatively merciful fates, burned away in a brief moment by a nuclear blast. Richter even gets to enjoy a brief period of time where he and his mother escape from all of it.

At least, that’s my take.

[scooterpatrollin]

You said it yourself. Hotline Miami 2 is cruel. It's relentlessly difficult, most of the characters are creepy, pathetic, and overall unlikable as actual people. And chasing the violence only ends up with them dying in increasingly brutal, unsympathetic, and unremarkable ways.

If the question of Hotline Miami is "Do you enjoy hurting people?" I think the question of Hotline Miami 2 is "Why do you keep hurting people? In this miserable, exhausting, frustrating experience? Is the violence really enough?"

[doddy]

"The actor accidentally shot someone for real, the gun had live ammo"

The timing on this release dude. Like when Jontron featured Notre Dame the week the spire burned down

[festinuz]

Jacob: "I dont need to be spoon-fed plot points, i've got it all figured out"

Also Jacob, but later: "So it turns out that the level where you literally kill double swan monster is SAME event where these twin guys in swan masks die. Didn't think of it before!"

I mean the video is amazing and i love it, but that's just hilarious. I remember first playing this level and thinking "man, what an amazing and imaginative way to visualize other side of the event, a real blast of a level!". I'm really surprised to find that the connection was not obvious for everyone

[timbomb]

Love when companies are just like "No. No more sequels. Just play the game again if you want more."