I finally finished Spider-Man 2 over my holiday vacation. I actually finished it so early in my vacation that I forgot that I never wrote about my final thoughts and impressions of it, which feels like a disservice to what was an incredibly memorable game. As I said in my last post about Spider-Man 2, this game has improved on every part of the previous games, not only mechanically but in terms of storytelling and game craft. It feels like a triumph that somehow got overlooked by most of popular media as it somehow vanished incredibly quickly from the public consciousness in the weeks after its release. I honestly don’t think I could recommend any other Spider-Man game after playing this one, except as a way to get caught up on the plot and so the payoff of events from older games can actually hit as hard as they would if you’d spent so much time getting to know the characters. All in all, Spider-Man 2 is definitely one of my top games from 2023 and I think I got more genuine emotional responses from this game than I did from my hundreds of hours playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (which is the only comparison I’ll make since any other comparison of these two wildly different games is a disserve to two stellar releases from 2023). It just delivered on everything I wanted from it and even went so far as to deliver plenty that I didn’t even know I wanted.

I really appreciated the care the game showed to the characters that have been a part of the series for this long. You really don’t see a lot of games that take this much time and effort to include characters from what is currently a trilogy of games, especially when some of them were just bit-part villains from the first series, but the Spider-Man series has had an opportunity to do what even the long-running comic books couldn’t. It allowed multiple characters to redeem themselves. It gave us characters we knew from past exposure to the franchise, built them an in-world history, and then showed us the way that even worst supervillains we’ve encountered might just be people struggling to get on with their lives after a series of mistakes. Not only that, but is also allowed us to see characters who refused to try to be better (sometimes because they didn’t believe they could be and sometimes because they reveled in being the vile people they were) and to see how a hero grappled with the oldest trope in superhero stories. We see Tombstone just trying to get his life together when the latest villains attempt to track him down. There’s a whole side quest involving Mysterio as he attempts to rehabilitate his image and use the advanced technology he developed as a form of entertainment rather than to commit crimes. Hell, we even get to see this process applied to Spider-Man (Peter Parker) as he gets corrupted by the symbiote and eventually is able to reject it thanks to the intervention of the other Spider-Man (Miles Morales).

Honestly, my favorite small touch tacked on to the exploration of the Peter Parker Spider-Man’s character during and after this symbiote saga was how deeply it bothers him that his world suffers from the same revolving door curse on their somehow incredibly extreme but still lax prison system. It gave voice to the dread and exhaustion I’ve largely had to assume most heroes struggle with as their greatest foes escape the systems designed to mitigate their harm again and again and again. We see it literally eating at him, as the remaining traces of the Symbiote attempt to reassert control over him, during a really interesting sequence that explains the strange evolutions of Miles Morales’ powers that feature strongly in this game. It really highlights the reasons Peter might be tempted to throw aside his dedication to justice and the judicial system and why something like the symbiote might prove too powerful to completely resist for someone whose whole identity is wrapped around the loss of so many people important to him.

Despite some early warnings that Miles is maybe following Peter down the path of making Spider-Man a overly-large portion of his life, we actually get to see Miles assert his own balance as he leans on the larger community of supporters he has. He is the one whose stability and willpower anchor not just Spider-Man, but at least one huge villain and basically the entire game. There’s an important sequence where, just having saved Peter from being taken over by the symbiote again, Peter remarks that Miles has done something even Peter was never able to accomplish: redeem a villain. Despite the hatred that Miles still carries for this person, Miles is able to hold true to the lessons his father and Peter taught him about being a hero and second chances and gives said villain the second chance they need to not only help save the day but find their own road to redemption. Sure, this villain was responsible for the deaths of many people, including Miles’ own father, but he was able to recognize that his choices were an unacceptable response to his own grief and pain, and then return to serving out his prison sentence rather than take the opportunity he had to escape and disappear into anonymity.

I really can’t think of a game that has treated all of its characters as well as Spider-Man 2 has. Sure, it has taken them three full games to build to this point (and a a few significant pieces of this latest game just doesn’t hit the same unless you’ve seen the build), but they built to this point and have already indicated that we haven’t hit the peak yet. We got the setup for at least two more villains, along with the potential return of another one, and I genuinely haven’t felt this excited for a heavily foreshadowed sequel since I first played through the entirety of the PS4 God of War game. I can’t wait to see where they go next and hope that the game’s developer, Insomniac, can continue to create stuff this good. On, you know, a more feasible timeline. Honestly, if they had the time they needed to make these games without having a publisher breathing down their neck (which is what its sounds like is the reason the game released with a large number of visual glitches that required me to return to last checkpoint multiple times so I could see anything at all during some cutscenes), I bet they’d be even better and I’d see love to see how they can top this game.