• Deconceptualist
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    710 months ago

    Help me understand it? The first hour or so was awful. The castle level seems boring AF, the powerups feel grindy, and the random character abilities seem more likely a handicap than a bonus. What changes? Or what could I possibly be doing wrong?

    • @Potatos_are_not_friends
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      510 months ago

      I can’t remember rogue legacy, but I loved it enough to buy Rogue Legacy 2. So my comment is based on that.

      My solution was to turn on handicaps. I honestly don’t know how people play it when you die in 3-4 hits.

      I also play it like a Metroidvania game, trying to get to the next power up or story quest. I also really really really love Castlevania Symphony of the Night, where i’d spend 10-20 minutes running the same rooms for loot drops.

      • Deconceptualist
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        110 months ago

        What do you mean by the handicaps? Like the negative traits your character will roll? I thought that was on by default.

        I love the old Metroid sidescrollers but never played much Castlevania. Farming loot drops over and over in the same room sounds super boring to me. I much prefer to earn my upgrades through exploration or overcoming challenges.

        • @Potatos_are_not_friends
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          310 months ago

          In the options, there’s a setting to turn damage down to like 40%, and turn attack power to 150%.

          I much prefer to earn my upgrades through exploration or overcoming challenges.

          Yeah. Thats Rogue Legacy 2 in a nutshell. You don’t need to, just like in Dark Souls. I just suck as a player and need to grind (and use a handicap)

    • @jacksilver
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      410 months ago

      It’s supposed to be a bit grindy. Like a lot of rouge lites you get more powerful each iteration as you get more gold and can level up. So it becomes a game of trying to progress farther and farther as you level up through upgrading the castle.

      The second one does a bit better job of adding replayability and more interesting mechanics.

      • Deconceptualist
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        110 months ago

        Yeah I appreciate the gold system. IMO grinding against a pure RNG feels awful, but if you can accumulate resources and make progress that way it’s much better.

        The problem for me was more that the first level castle and enemies seem extremely generic. It’s not interesting in the least so why would I want to play it over and over? My #1 rule for roguelikes is that the first level has to be a banger because that’s where the player spends like 80% of their time. Does it improve if you can survive more than a few minutes?

        • @jacksilver
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          310 months ago

          It’s been a while since I played the first one, but I do think it gets a bit better (although enemy variety I think is a weak part of the first). I would really suggest trying rouge legacy 2 as it improves on everything over the first.

          If it helps other rouglites I like and found similar are skul, dead cells, undermine, hades.

    • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
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      310 months ago

      more likely a handicap than a bonus

      Yep, that’s intentional. It’s how you get a variety of challenges from run to run.

      The game is really all about rhythm and timing. Each enemy has an attack pattern and telegraphed moves, and how you progress is to learn those and how yo text to them, then how to do that with multiple enemies, then how to do that with different abilities and handicaps.

      • Deconceptualist
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        210 months ago

        That sounds fine on paper, From Software games have taught me to appreciate learning enemy movesets. But it doesn’t feel fair here when the game rolls 4 characters in a row with some combination of blindness and paraplegia so I literally cannot dodge.

        • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
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          210 months ago

          It sounds like you expect every run to be winnable. That’s just not the game you’re playing. You should expect most runs to fail.

          • Deconceptualist
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            310 months ago

            No, I’ve played enough roguelikes. But I do hope at least half the runs are fun.