I totally get what you're saying — Doing games like beat em ups on the scale I planned them quickly became confusing piles of stuff that was really hard to follow, especially after a week or two without touching the project. This is why I'm going for such a technically simple game right now.
I too am an artist, so the "big game" I'm talking about is just big on the graphical scale and lengthwise. Lots of animations and characters, large pieces that I use to build the scenes, GL effects, you name it. Technically the game is probably going to be puzzles in form of minigames and physics puzzles. Outside the puzzles it's just a side scroller with a dialogue system and bunch of events to control the characters movement and animations in and out of cutscenes. I even made it so I can use a single object for all the characters to lessen the amount of events, hassling with families and all that could just bloat up the events. After reading the replies on this thread I've come to a conclusion that the game I've planned is possible to do in C2. Maybe after I either finish or scrap this project I'll look into Unity or Unreal 4, or even coding. Right now I have a good grasp of programming logic that I've learned from C2 and hope that it could be of some use in learning programming in the future.