If only that '2' hadn't come at such a prohibitive cost.
Rogue Legacy 2 is the long awaited sequel to 2013's indie darling Rogue Legacy, and it promises to be the first game, but better. The first impression left by the game indeed points to that: it has sharper, more modern visuals; it controls much better, with spin kicks in particular being a much more comfortable maneuver, and it even gives you the dash ability right off the bat, which is important since that was at the center of much of the movement and combat tech in the first game.
The defining aspects of Rogue Legacy are still here, with the same core loop of picking an heir on death, the same NPCs, the family estate screen, Charon, and the randomly generated map. Except now, instead of Castle Hamson, there is an entire kingdom to explore, with all-new areas filled with a variety of new challenges. It sounds like what every RL1 fan could wish for, however, inexplicably at first, the game feels slow, and is rather exhausting compared to its prequel. The reason for that is apparent if you take a step back and analyze RL and RL2 side-by-side.
Rogue Legacy is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated castle and attempts to find and defeat four bosses. During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold and blueprints: gold can be used to both upgrade your characters and build equipment you have blueprints for. Secret bosses that can be fought at the locations where defeated bosses once were. Optionally, after the credits, the player can start NG+, which is the same game with harder enemy placements.
Rogue Legacy 2 is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated kingdom and attempts to find and defeat a number of bosses (ten by my count, depends on whether you count void beasts or not). During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold, red ether, ore, souls and blueprints which, upon death... Gold is used to buy upgrades, Gold + Ether is used to buy runes, Gold + Ore is used to build equipment, Ether + Ore can be exchanged into more Souls, and Souls are used to level up the family estate and upgrade the shops so the stats and items in them can be upgraded further with the respective materials. After finishing the game, the player gains the ability to switch threads, which is moving back and forth between NG+ states with a series of customizable modifiers that change a variety of things about the game's balance, including but not limited to powering enemies up, increasing the map size and unlocking upgraded versions of the game's bosses. Not all modifiers aren't available from the start: most of them must be unlocked by beating higher numbered threads.
To say nothing of scars, mastery ranks, Unity levels, weight classes, Charon's tribute level and so on. A common occurrence when playing RL2 is to ask oneself "why is this here? How does it make the game any better?", and a lot of the time, the answer is "it does not": Many of its additions to the formula feel overdesigned to the point of being bothersome or poorly designed in a way they're plain skippable. The best display of the latter case is the relics, which are an evolution of the mechanic where you prayed for help in the first game and got a boon (or curse). RL2's Relics are items that add passive traits to your character. They're found randomly in certain rooms across the kingdom, and have a whole new stat, called Resolve, associated with them: Resolve is allocated when you take a relic, and having less than 100 Resolve reduces your Max HP to that amount as a percentage.
Relics are, aside from the revamped classes, the reason why RL2's main menu offers a glossary to help the player navigate the specialized vocabulary that comes with item and skill descriptions now. Much of the effects feel like reading TCG cards, and although a departure from the original, that's potentially a good thing: TCGs have these crazy interactions and combos that are part of the fun of playing the game. It must be fun to look for relic combos and... no, in reality, the drawbacks are far too punishing to pick relics up willy-nilly. Their effects seldom compensate the loss of HP, rarely match your class and even less frequently interact with one another. Plus, you can't even swap them out if you find a better set, the only way to get rid of them is to die, and yes, you do lose them on death, so when fighting bosses, unless you're planning to win first try, you can't count on them either.
Ah, yes, the bosses. What should be highlights are actually the most infuriating parts of the experience. The problem with the bosses in RL2 is that, individually, their attacks are fine: there's always a clear window, a clear movement pattern that spares you from the punishment. It's the overlaps of attacks that often leave the player without a place to run to. This almost always happens with bosses that are two or more separate entities that act independently, or those that summon minions, like Tubal, but is a frequent occurrence in other fights as well, where a low recovery period on bosses' attacks, combined with them being randomly picked instead of having triggers or patterns, makes it so they overlap each other and thus cancel their safe spots. Boss fights in RL2 basically force the player into playing classes with long invulnerability periods, and even then, feel less like a test of skill and more like a grind against the RNG.
Mind you, this is not a new issue! RL's bosses had the exact same problem, as anyone who fought against, say, upgraded Alexander will tell you. The difference was that the main bosses' patterns were simple enough that this never became an issue, and upon killing them, you were given enough gold so that the next area and boss's difficulty would be in a comfortable spot in your next run, if you happened to die. As for the upgraded versions, they were easy to unlock, and you could just rematch immediately if you lost, letting you focus on the fight instead of making the trek to the door over and over again.
RL may have been a janky game, but it's impossible to argue that it liked to waste your time. RL2, on the other hand? Upgrades rarely have an impact, bosses barely give any gold, there's multiple currencies whose only purpose is to stall progress... just think about it, the addition of souls is solely so you have to grind to unlock more grind. And to make things worse, the narrative is contrived so that you have to play multiple NG+ to get to the end of it. Take a wild guess at how many playthroughs are needed to get to the true ending. Two? Three? How about eight? You need to go all the way up to NG+7 to see the end of a story that could very effectively be told in three playthroughs, and even then, the pay off would not be worth it. The entire game is designed like it desperately had to justify two years of early access.
Like I said before, RL2 did bring a bunch of improvements with it. The vast majority of the game's issues lie within its balance, which could easily be tweaked; in fact, it seems cutting down on the grind is what most of the game's top mods concern themselves with.. But as much as I'd like to see this dream version of RL2, where its strong points are enhanced instead of its weak ones, that's not the game I played. RL2, as it came out, is a terrible experience, an unbelievably unsatisfying grindfest. I remember playing 30 hours of the original Rogue Legacy when it came out and having a blast: it amused me for a while, then left before it got boring. I played 60 hours of Rogue Legacy 2, all the while waiting for the fun part to begin, and it felt absolutely miserable.
Rogue Legacy 2 is the long awaited sequel to 2013's indie darling Rogue Legacy, and it promises to be the first game, but better. The first impression left by the game indeed points to that: it has sharper, more modern visuals; it controls much better, with spin kicks in particular being a much more comfortable maneuver, and it even gives you the dash ability right off the bat, which is important since that was at the center of much of the movement and combat tech in the first game.
The defining aspects of Rogue Legacy are still here, with the same core loop of picking an heir on death, the same NPCs, the family estate screen, Charon, and the randomly generated map. Except now, instead of Castle Hamson, there is an entire kingdom to explore, with all-new areas filled with a variety of new challenges. It sounds like what every RL1 fan could wish for, however, inexplicably at first, the game feels slow, and is rather exhausting compared to its prequel. The reason for that is apparent if you take a step back and analyze RL and RL2 side-by-side.
Rogue Legacy is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated castle and attempts to find and defeat four bosses. During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold and blueprints: gold can be used to both upgrade your characters and build equipment you have blueprints for. Secret bosses that can be fought at the locations where defeated bosses once were. Optionally, after the credits, the player can start NG+, which is the same game with harder enemy placements.
Rogue Legacy 2 is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated kingdom and attempts to find and defeat a number of bosses (ten by my count, depends on whether you count void beasts or not). During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold, red ether, ore, souls and blueprints which, upon death... Gold is used to buy upgrades, Gold + Ether is used to buy runes, Gold + Ore is used to build equipment, Ether + Ore can be exchanged into more Souls, and Souls are used to level up the family estate and upgrade the shops so the stats and items in them can be upgraded further with the respective materials. After finishing the game, the player gains the ability to switch threads, which is moving back and forth between NG+ states with a series of customizable modifiers that change a variety of things about the game's balance, including but not limited to powering enemies up, increasing the map size and unlocking upgraded versions of the game's bosses. Not all modifiers aren't available from the start: most of them must be unlocked by beating higher numbered threads.
To say nothing of scars, mastery ranks, Unity levels, weight classes, Charon's tribute level and so on. A common occurrence when playing RL2 is to ask oneself "why is this here? How does it make the game any better?", and a lot of the time, the answer is "it does not": Many of its additions to the formula feel overdesigned to the point of being bothersome or poorly designed in a way they're plain skippable. The best display of the latter case is the relics, which are an evolution of the mechanic where you prayed for help in the first game and got a boon (or curse). RL2's Relics are items that add passive traits to your character. They're found randomly in certain rooms across the kingdom, and have a whole new stat, called Resolve, associated with them: Resolve is allocated when you take a relic, and having less than 100 Resolve reduces your Max HP to that amount as a percentage.
Relics are, aside from the revamped classes, the reason why RL2's main menu offers a glossary to help the player navigate the specialized vocabulary that comes with item and skill descriptions now. Much of the effects feel like reading TCG cards, and although a departure from the original, that's potentially a good thing: TCGs have these crazy interactions and combos that are part of the fun of playing the game. It must be fun to look for relic combos and... no, in reality, the drawbacks are far too punishing to pick relics up willy-nilly. Their effects seldom compensate the loss of HP, rarely match your class and even less frequently interact with one another. Plus, you can't even swap them out if you find a better set, the only way to get rid of them is to die, and yes, you do lose them on death, so when fighting bosses, unless you're planning to win first try, you can't count on them either.
Ah, yes, the bosses. What should be highlights are actually the most infuriating parts of the experience. The problem with the bosses in RL2 is that, individually, their attacks are fine: there's always a clear window, a clear movement pattern that spares you from the punishment. It's the overlaps of attacks that often leave the player without a place to run to. This almost always happens with bosses that are two or more separate entities that act independently, or those that summon minions, like Tubal, but is a frequent occurrence in other fights as well, where a low recovery period on bosses' attacks, combined with them being randomly picked instead of having triggers or patterns, makes it so they overlap each other and thus cancel their safe spots. Boss fights in RL2 basically force the player into playing classes with long invulnerability periods, and even then, feel less like a test of skill and more like a grind against the RNG.
Mind you, this is not a new issue! RL's bosses had the exact same problem, as anyone who fought against, say, upgraded Alexander will tell you. The difference was that the main bosses' patterns were simple enough that this never became an issue, and upon killing them, you were given enough gold so that the next area and boss's difficulty would be in a comfortable spot in your next run, if you happened to die. As for the upgraded versions, they were easy to unlock, and you could just rematch immediately if you lost, letting you focus on the fight instead of making the trek to the door over and over again.
RL may have been a janky game, but it's impossible to argue that it liked to waste your time. RL2, on the other hand? Upgrades rarely have an impact, bosses barely give any gold, there's multiple currencies whose only purpose is to stall progress... just think about it, the addition of souls is solely so you have to grind to unlock more grind. And to make things worse, the narrative is contrived so that you have to play multiple NG+ to get to the end of it. Take a wild guess at how many playthroughs are needed to get to the true ending. Two? Three? How about eight? You need to go all the way up to NG+7 to see the end of a story that could very effectively be told in three playthroughs, and even then, the pay off would not be worth it. The entire game is designed like it desperately had to justify two years of early access.
Like I said before, RL2 did bring a bunch of improvements with it. The vast majority of the game's issues lie within its balance, which could easily be tweaked; in fact, it seems cutting down on the grind is what most of the game's top mods concern themselves with.. But as much as I'd like to see this dream version of RL2, where its strong points are enhanced instead of its weak ones, that's not the game I played. RL2, as it came out, is a terrible experience, an unbelievably unsatisfying grindfest. I remember playing 30 hours of the original Rogue Legacy when it came out and having a blast: it amused me for a while, then left before it got boring. I played 60 hours of Rogue Legacy 2, all the while waiting for the fun part to begin, and it felt absolutely miserable.