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Lasting Legacy
The upgrade tree is exhaustive, and there's three of these.
Long before games had the ability to contain voice acting or coherent plots, they were only about the joy of exploration. Shigeru Miyamoto has stated that his original inspiration for The Legend of Zelda was the fun he had exploring caves as a child. Games were simple, they were stupid sure, but the were all about letting the player explore the world and piece together what was going on themselves.
This idea has sort of gone by the wayside in favor of deep involved stories and exposition out the ying-yang. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and some of my favorite games in the past few years have been story-heavy. But there is a sort of yearning for a game all about exploration, a return to form and a joyous challenge. A game like Rogue Legacy.
Genre Mishmash
Bosses offer a heady challenge, and taking them down will take time and practice.
The title Rogue Legacy is incredibly apt, as this is a Rogue-like game with a legacy system, that's also paying homage to the legacy of games from the past, and also it's something of a rogue title amidst more mainstream games. Wait! Come Back! It's not as crappy or pretentious as it sounds!
Gameplay wise RL is technically a Metroid-Vania style game, although it's really closer in style to Legend of Zelda 2: Adventures of Link. You move through a 2d world comprised of a castle, dungeon, forest, and a haunted tower. The world is, being a rogue-like, randomly generated every time you re-enter it, although you can lock down a layout for a substantial penalty to gold collection. You'll fight your way through hordes of enemies, jump around, and solve the occasional puzzle. There's bosses to fight, challenges to overcome, and every once and a while a minigame to attempt. It's all fairly standard stuff.
Death to Live
You'll need to choose your character carefully before you attempt the castle.
Where Rogue Legacy sets itself apart is it's use of death. Almost, but not quite, taking a page from Dark Soul's book, death is education and often just what you need to overcome a challenge. After you die you get to choose a new adventurer and spend all of the gold collected on your last run, with the caveat that you'll loose the gold once you start a new run. You'll purchase new upgrades and equipment before attempting the castle again. Can't beat a boss with your mage? Get killed, buy a health and damage upgrade, and spawn in as the much more powerful barbarian.
The other gimmick that sets RL apart is how your characters are chosen. Rather then letting you customize your character, every time you respawn you're given a choice of three potential characters, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and traits. It's this last item that really changes how you play RL. Traits affect gameplay is a variety of different ways, from incredibly minor changes like the bald or gay traits, to completely changing gameplay like flipping the world upside because of vertigo or making you miss-cast spells because you have two left hands. You'll often need to make a hard choice, as traits will be mixed and matched at random, and deciding on what traits to take can make or break a run.
While you can't customize your character, you can customize your gameplay. To do so there's a staggeringly large upgrade tree that allows you to upgrade everything from health and armor, to how much damage your downward thrust attack deals, to even the possibility of cheating death. There's also equipment and runes to buy and attach to your character, each with they're own set of balances. There's a boggling amount of options to play around with and testing out new builds is an interesting experience.
Castle funnies
Traits can affect everything from how you play to how the game looks.
Rogue Legacy is the kind of indie game that makes me happy. There's no pretentious "higher meaning" to it, it doesn't have some hidden message about stupid shit. It's a game that's meant to be fun, whether played for a quick burst on the bus, or for hours on end. It's a love-letter to games long gone without just trying to be a long lost game.
Rogue Legacy is also the perfect example of just using old ideas really, really well. It's not a particularly original game, save for maybe the idea of randomized character traits. But what it lacks in originality it more then makes up for in plain enjoyment. Challenging where it needs to be, yet accessible in every aspect, Rogue Legacy is a legacy worth spreading.
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