Mina The Hollower Spoiler Interview: Sequel Talk, Chrono Trigger Homages, And That Ending

Mina the Hollower is full of secrets to discover, and for a game based on classics like Link's Awakening, it's surprisingly story-rich. Yacht Club has a bona fide hit on its hands with 500,000 copies sold. Now that fans have had time to dig in--and even discover a secret ending--we're publishing a spoiler portion of our interview with Yacht Club's David D'Angelo. In the below portion we talk openly about the full story of Mina the Hollower, including its standard canonical ending. If you'd rather read D'Angelo's thoughts on less-spoilery subject matter, be sure to read the first part of our interview. Spoilers follow. GameSpot: The studio has said there's no DLC planned. Shovel Knight had a bunch of DLC, all the expansions, which you gave away for free. I'm not sure, if you went back and did it again, if you would promise that. David D'Angelo: It was a very wise business decision for sure. But you say there's no DLC planned for Mina. The ending is pretty dark, I think is fair to say. Was it a conscious choice to leave players in that place where it's reflective and asking some questions, but also in a pretty dark place? D'Angelo: It was definitely intentional. I mean, we were looking at Victorian stories like Frankenstein and Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There's so many monster-era stories or Edgar Ellen Poe or even Dickens and stuff where they just end in a way that usually it's like, the world is messed up and it keeps being a little messed up.  In Frankenstein, they're both dead at the end, right? It's crazy. It's not like, oh, and he spends the whole book trying to figure out, he's upset that he made this monster and, "What did I do?" And you think reading it that it's going to be like, "Well, maybe he'll come to terms with it. The monster's actually a really nice guy. Why is he so upset about it?" So the way those books are, they want you to wrestle with the facts of how the science or the breakthroughs that are happening in that era affect the world. And we sort of wanted to have that same kind of feeling. We wanted you to finish the game and be thinking about it as opposed to like, "Oh, it all wrapped up cleanly. I'm so happy." From the beginning, it's very clear that Lionel is bad, and the generators are bad. But Mina is still restoring them, bringing about this calamity. It had a feeling of inevitability to it. D'Angelo: Yeah. We had to work really hard [on that]. It sometimes happens in games where you know that and you have to do the wrong thing essentially and you're like, "Oh, that's so maddening that you made me do the wrong thing," and you don't want to play the game again because it's like, "I know I'm not supposed to do that." So we really had to make it clear in order to do the right thing, you have to fix the generator. You have to do the wrong thing, yeah. D'Angelo: And yeah, the Lionel thing was interesting too because we wanted to make it obvious that, especially in today's climate where a lot of people are looking at rich people and going, "Obviously you're messing things up for us poor people."  And Thorne as the captain of the guard, freedom fighter, eco-terrorist. We're obviously supposed to understand that he's doing the right thing out of principle. D'Angelo: Yeah. But we did want to get that feeling that there's things that are very clearly wrong, but everyone's happy about Lionel, right? No one's upset at him. And getting in this confusion that is you as a player might think this is wrong. But when you look at it, no one's upset about what's going on. They are generally happy with everything that's happened and they look up to and aspire to be Lionel, right? And they're all happy with this technology, which Mina invented. Her hands aren't clean in this. The generators are doing a lot of harm and they're bad, but they're also good and people enjoy modern life and they can't give it up that easily and it has real costs. D'Angelo: And that's the kind of stuff that in the Victorian era they're wrestling with, right? Every Dickens story is about how industry is crushing [people]. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Oh, poor Oliver, he has to steal to get by, or Scrooge is not giving any of his money away. The people are writing those stories because it's hard to not take advantage of progress. The benefits of progress are very clear. Everyone can use AI and go like, "Oh, I can see why this is going to be helpful or I can see it could be even better one day and be even more helpful." But also it's hard to wrestle with the fact that, "Oh, maybe it's going to result in 5 billion data centers getting built and ruining some rural area." That's the struggle of it all. Mina The Hollower And I think it also sort of ended on such an interesting note of the way the public perceives heroes and villains. They do not hail you as a hero. They are pissed. They chase you out of town. D'Angelo: Yeah. I mean, we wanted one component that's like, of