First and foremost, it has to be said that the improvements this makes on the design of the first Rogue Legacy are not merely additive but exponential. Rogue Legacy, god bless it, a decade old now, holds in its aging, withered helm the perfect ur-example of how the indie sphere developed across the 2010s - a college that, after being let loose by digital distribution, progressed from a ragtag group of games that hit notoriety, flourishing most when either stripping down the mechanical breadth of concurrent AAA games to a more cohesively succinct experience or when revising and iterating on too hastily discarded design ethea of yester-generations coupled modern insight, to a glut of games that had not the editorial spirit to cut on bad humour/interface/reference marring their experiences nor the mechanical know how to convey any consistent emotion across their verbsets, art assets, or writing; Rogue Legacy, which excitingly took the twitch sword and board combat of Castlevania with a mixed in progression system of MMO character building, became a wooly little beast of a game, a game that felt dim and chalky to play, that plodded treacherously through an ill mannered narrative, and which catered to the lowest border of aesthetic dullardry. It was the perfect game to never revisit.
Rogue Legacy 2, much more the germinal remake/refurbishment than prototypical sequel, improves on every conceivable platform that, in hindsight more than with historical circumspection, Rogue Legacy failed on with incredible ability. The movement feels legitimately intuitive, whereas the clunky, phlegmatic platforming of RL1 was ATARI level basic, and is built about plastic boundaries for which the blueprint of dashing, jumping, and talent-ing around the world is joy in motion. The combat, while still quite basic, has shown to be a grand wheel around which many spokes may turn, with each class navigating combat with differentiated schema that make the repetition of the roguelike base much more presently titillating than is typical when transitioning from a senior run to a fresh go at the castle; RL1 much more relied on the back-end change ups between classes, tweaking numbers almost in totality vs augmenting play, leading to a very weak iteration loop - repetitious as opposed to transformative. The enemies are carried over in large scale, but are included in more exciting encounters that play off the dispatch strategies their abilities intermingle amongst, whereas their counterpoints in RL1 almost exclusively occupied the same corridors and presented the same threats in any scenario throughout the game. Of course, that upgrade in quality also comes alongside the vastly improved world design, transforming every environment into not only a thematically distinct stage but stages considering different extensions of the player verbset to limits that were not even hinted at much less explored in RL1. Aesthetically, the improvement is subjective; for my part, I think the time that the devs had to develop and rework the, far too blurry, in my opinion, line between sword and sorcery and Looney Tunes is, at the very least, consistently readable and coherent, and at time even pleasing, when compared to the pixelated and mushy mess of RL1.
On the whole, nothing can be said about RL2 without first glancing at its heights from the comparatively low summit of its predecessor. Having then made that comparison and said my peace about it, there can at least be some enumeration on what doesn’t succeed in this game, and there is still quite a great deal. The narrative framing, and writing that supports that framing, is terribly sophomoric: it balances competing tones of dower agnominity with childish slapstick humour at incongruous, even simultaneous, moments. Oftentimes within a journal entry expounding the entirety of the avatar’s present purpose within the game world, it will have passages explicating the ravages of famine and pestilence on the population, only to follow it up with how an estuary’s hoarding of the nation’s pizza supplies are giving him gas - which in itself is pitiable and weakly conceived, but it every bit of prose is failed as well by its stylistic composition, using the same short, paltry structure and voice. The art, while more holistically cohesive than in the previous games, similarly fails to impress. The only aesthetic marker I can attach to it would be something akin to ‘DnD sticker book’: nothing is impressively rendered or original, and the only small moments of genuine impressiveness come at the improved scale of the game in comparison to RL1. The gameplay, while certainly not bad, does not feel genuinely iterable in the roguelike progression pathing like we’ve seen develop in games like Dead Cells or Gungeon, so while the classes make replayability more titillating, the overall structure of its replayability feels flawed and stultified. If there was less of a scope in the game’s economy, and the meta-progression were instead focused more on the utilization and mastery of the cast of classes available to the player, in a way similar to Prey: Mooncrash, wherein the various abilities of your avatars are implemented so as to further progression for each other, the iterability of the game’s structure would feel more exciting to venture in with continued newness and unknowability. It’s also a bit too long for me, but some people latch onto any roguelike and will milk it utterly dusty, so while this made my time with the game somewhat tedious, I understand the impetus behind prolonging the game’s normal campaign.
Rogue Legacy 2, much more the germinal remake/refurbishment than prototypical sequel, improves on every conceivable platform that, in hindsight more than with historical circumspection, Rogue Legacy failed on with incredible ability. The movement feels legitimately intuitive, whereas the clunky, phlegmatic platforming of RL1 was ATARI level basic, and is built about plastic boundaries for which the blueprint of dashing, jumping, and talent-ing around the world is joy in motion. The combat, while still quite basic, has shown to be a grand wheel around which many spokes may turn, with each class navigating combat with differentiated schema that make the repetition of the roguelike base much more presently titillating than is typical when transitioning from a senior run to a fresh go at the castle; RL1 much more relied on the back-end change ups between classes, tweaking numbers almost in totality vs augmenting play, leading to a very weak iteration loop - repetitious as opposed to transformative. The enemies are carried over in large scale, but are included in more exciting encounters that play off the dispatch strategies their abilities intermingle amongst, whereas their counterpoints in RL1 almost exclusively occupied the same corridors and presented the same threats in any scenario throughout the game. Of course, that upgrade in quality also comes alongside the vastly improved world design, transforming every environment into not only a thematically distinct stage but stages considering different extensions of the player verbset to limits that were not even hinted at much less explored in RL1. Aesthetically, the improvement is subjective; for my part, I think the time that the devs had to develop and rework the, far too blurry, in my opinion, line between sword and sorcery and Looney Tunes is, at the very least, consistently readable and coherent, and at time even pleasing, when compared to the pixelated and mushy mess of RL1.
On the whole, nothing can be said about RL2 without first glancing at its heights from the comparatively low summit of its predecessor. Having then made that comparison and said my peace about it, there can at least be some enumeration on what doesn’t succeed in this game, and there is still quite a great deal. The narrative framing, and writing that supports that framing, is terribly sophomoric: it balances competing tones of dower agnominity with childish slapstick humour at incongruous, even simultaneous, moments. Oftentimes within a journal entry expounding the entirety of the avatar’s present purpose within the game world, it will have passages explicating the ravages of famine and pestilence on the population, only to follow it up with how an estuary’s hoarding of the nation’s pizza supplies are giving him gas - which in itself is pitiable and weakly conceived, but it every bit of prose is failed as well by its stylistic composition, using the same short, paltry structure and voice. The art, while more holistically cohesive than in the previous games, similarly fails to impress. The only aesthetic marker I can attach to it would be something akin to ‘DnD sticker book’: nothing is impressively rendered or original, and the only small moments of genuine impressiveness come at the improved scale of the game in comparison to RL1. The gameplay, while certainly not bad, does not feel genuinely iterable in the roguelike progression pathing like we’ve seen develop in games like Dead Cells or Gungeon, so while the classes make replayability more titillating, the overall structure of its replayability feels flawed and stultified. If there was less of a scope in the game’s economy, and the meta-progression were instead focused more on the utilization and mastery of the cast of classes available to the player, in a way similar to Prey: Mooncrash, wherein the various abilities of your avatars are implemented so as to further progression for each other, the iterability of the game’s structure would feel more exciting to venture in with continued newness and unknowability. It’s also a bit too long for me, but some people latch onto any roguelike and will milk it utterly dusty, so while this made my time with the game somewhat tedious, I understand the impetus behind prolonging the game’s normal campaign.