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dkirschner's Rogue Legacy 2 (PS5)
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[January 23, 2025 08:04:53 PM]
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I got sucked into Rogue Legacy 2 hard. This is a grindy roguelike that's a lot of fun to play. It's got a strong Spelunky vibe. Everything feels good, it's nice and polished, and there is great variety in the levels, layouts, character classes, weapons, spells, and so on. The upgrade tree (a castle that you build by spending gold) is massive. I don't even know if it's possible to purchase all the upgrades. There are even upgrades that add more levels of upgrades, and those upgrades have upgrades. All unlocks and upgrades are persistent; you are constantly putting points in stats and unlocking stuff.
The main feature that sets Rogue Legacy apart is that when you die, you are basically transferred into another character, and you pick from three random ones. So, every run, you have a new character. There are like two dozen classes, each with its own weapon and talent. There are also spells (each character gets one randomly), relics (which are sometimes inherited and which you can find in your runs), and equipment (find blueprints and runes to craft, purchase, and upgrade). And later, you unlock altered versions of each class, which often have different weapons still. The combinations are endless. Since this is a "genealogical roguelike," your "heirs" also sometimes have traits. This is where the real randomness comes in (because classes are fairly consistent). I was 30 hours into the game and STILL seeing new traits; there are tons of them.
Here are some of my favorites, like if I got these, I would usually go with that character:
Cartographer: Map is revealed but you have no position marker. (It's great to know where the chests, special rooms, and boss are.)
Combative: +50% weapon damage, -25% HP. (Some of the best classes for me are the ones that stand and swing sharp objects.)
Compulsive Gambling: Only chests drop gold and chest values swing wildly. +50% gold. (If this is coupled with being able to see the map, you can earn a ton of gold by going straight for chests.)
Exploding Casket Syndrome: Enemies drop an exploding potion when they die. +50% gold. (The gold bonus is great for how easy the explosions are to avoid.)
Hero Complex: 100% more health, but you can't heal, ever. (Great for boss attempts because you aren't healing during boss fights anyway. I almost beat one of the last bosses on one of my first tries by just having a huge health pool.)
One-hit Wonder: You die in one hit. +200% gold. (Okay, this is one that I kept picking because it is usually a couple upgrade points even though you'll die fast.
Pacifist: -60% HP and you can't deal damage. +150% gold. (Same as One-hit Wonder.)
Many of them are tricky. They will seem tempting! But over time, these are some I learned to avoid:
Algesia: No immunity window after taking damage. +50% gold. (This one is brutal. Enemies will just bounce you back and forth hitting you. Normally, you have like a 1.5-second window or something after getting hit before you can get hit again, so you can dodge away or whatever.)
Clumsy: Objects break on touch. (Dangerous. Depending on the level, you'll break platforms that you need to stand on.)
Synesthesia: Everything leaves behind color. +25% gold. (Seems like easy gold, but when every enemy and object leaves behind a rainbow of color, you can't see anything!)
Puritan: Enemies are censored. +25% gold. (Like Synesthesia and several others [e.g., Spotlight], traits that limit visibility or distort what you can see are death, especially once you get to levels with lots of hazards.)
You need to earn gold in runs to purchase skill points, equipment, and so on. Traits are always tradeoffs, risk for gold!
So anyway, that's the loop. Choose a character, enter an area, explore the area. Kill enemies, find treasure chests, win trials, and eventually unlock the area boss by killing minibosses or doing whatever other pre-reqs. Die, choose another character, spend your gold, delve into the dungeons again. The dungeon areas randomize each time, and they always look different, though play long enough and you'll start to see the same rooms repeating. This means that you have to find the boss of the area you're in every single time. But, you can take a gold penalty to "lock" the world so that the map that you just revealed in your last run remains revealed. This lets you go straight to the boss, and is really useful when you are either tired of grinding, want to practice, or actually think you have a shot at killing it.
Bosses are no joke. I think there are six main bosses in the dungeons, plus two more final bosses, plus a bunch of minibosses. Most of the main bosses took numerous tries. At the end of the game, it tells you how many attempts, deaths, and victories you had for each enemy type. So, I saw that two of the bosses took me a dozen tries. It felt like longer because often I was going through the entire dungeon over and over. It would routinely take me an entire afternoon of playing to kill a boss. Learn their move sets and/or farm enough gold to brute force your way through. I think that I generally did the latter, but wish I had realized that's what I was doing earlier, because learning the bosses was a lot of fun.
At some point in the game, you are forced to improve your skills and really learn how to move and attack, using a variety of weapons, talents, spells, and classes. It gets pretty difficult, and you will die over and over and over and over. It didn't tell me how many heirs I had, but it was probably like 100. Maybe 200!
My main complaint is such a small thing. The game keeps track of your heirs--their portraits hang on your castle wall--but it doesn't keep track of any of their accomplishments. For example, I want to know who I killed each boss with! Who did I do the highest critical hit with? Who killed the most enemies? Which one died the fastest? Etc. I do know that it was a chef who killed the first two bosses. I think I used a regular knight for two of the later ones, and a mage for one of them. I almost got one of the last bosses with the bard. It was often surprising which classes I would do well with. Several of my boss kills were like, "oh my gosh, I'm actually winning...I'm going to do it...I won!! With...a chef?!"
There is tons and tons of replay value. Once you beat the game, you can NG+ I read as many times as you want to, adding modifiers, and making the game harder and harder and harder. Apparently there are some more bosses and lore and stuff too. It's a big game. But I think I am done, very satisfied that I beat it! Be warned that the game is grindy. If you're okay with that, and you like a roguelike with devious enemies and traps that requires you to get really good at it, then you should find a lot to enjoy here.
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dkirschner's Rogue Legacy 2 (PS5)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 11 January, 2025
GameLog closed on: Thursday 23 January, 2025 |
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