Diablo II
Written September 17 2025
Diablo II still holds a bit of a special place in my heart. Not like Pokémon or Patapon and definitely not like Minecraft (God forbid, I do not want to know how many hours I spent on this game, not because I would be ashamed, but for general reasons of sanity), but I still am a bit nostalgic for it. It was, like many things, given to me by my brother on a flash drive when I was, I don’t know, eleven? I didn’t really understand the game very well, which, honestly, greatly contributed to my enjoyment. I just played through it as a necromancer with a weird skull as a helmet and a unique knife and just spammed skeleton warriors against everything and made corpses explode. The atmosphere just appealed to me. Starting in that run-down camp, fighting through the barren Blood Moor, encountering the big, hairy Gargantuan Beasts. I think I liked Act IV the most. Descending into Gothic hell to slay the devil is just… perfect. There’s nothing to improve.
I didn’t really engage with the game’s community at the time and neither did I play online. I just liked the game the way I played it. I often made new characters just to play Act I over and over again, enjoying the atmosphere, soaking up the rain and the echoey guitar of that first music track. Then I got Diablo III at launch and hated it. Well, I didn’t hate it, but I came to dislike it after the initial sheen had worn off. I started playing with my brother who was, as you might have guessed, big into Diablo, especially III, and interacted with the marketplace and that’s where it fell apart for me. I really liked the atmosphere of II and the – admittedly sparse – RPG-elements; 1 I didn’t really care that much for mindless grinding. I do appreciate grindy videogames (I do like Pokémon and JRPGs in general), but with Diablo III came the expectation that you would grind the same boss for dozens of hours just to get some really rare amulet and then grind dozens of hours more for a slightly better version of that same amulet, because if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t be playing optimally and that’s a crime, apparently. I tried to play the game the way I liked it, started a couple of characters, none clicked for me and I stopped playing. My brother would show me his character, a Demon Hunter, from time to time. He had spent probably upwards of two thousand hours on that character, which is impressive, but, man, I couldn’t do that. All that grinding would just bore me to death. I am glad that people can enjoy these kinds of games, but they’re not for me and I’m glad I realized that pretty quickly.
What really bothers me, though, is that I can’t go back. Not in any ‘you can never regain the joyful levity of childhood because you’ve acquired the expectations placed on an adult in our society’ kind of way; I’ve made my peace with that. No, it’s because Blizzard are POSs and they removed Diablo II from their store and replaced it with the Resurrected version, which costs 40 bucks and doesn’t run on my laptop. That’s a 25-year-old game. Anyway, I gotta get the necromancer pride flag out from under my bed and finally put that one up. 2
[1] By RPG-elements I do not just mean that it has an XP bar and a skill tree. I do actually mean role-playing (game) elements, taking on a character’s role and acting that out, making decisions and exploring the world through their eyes. There is woefully little of that in Diablo II, I will admit that. Most of the role-playing was just me making stuff up in my head, but I do appreciate that the game gave you the space to do that as well. I would have appreciated a bit of role-playing, though. Maybe a couple of sidequests that actually let you make decisions or something. Really revolutionary stuff, I know. Looking back at it, the ‘action’ in ‘action-roleplaying game’ is definitely the dominant part here (and in a lot of modern ‘role-playing games’).
[2] It’s a… it’s a skull and crossbones. Like, the pirate flag. It’s a piracy joke. Please, I tried for ten minutes to come up with something, it’s hard. Diablo and pirates just do not mix vibes-wise.