Back to forming plats and stuff: Rogue Legacy

So a couple of weeks back I finished up my write up on Guacamelee! and I felt kinda bad about it. The game was really charming, and much of the time I really enjoyed it, but it had multiple elements that just made me grind my teeth or get bored. Part of it I wrote off as simply a matter of platformers. I've played a couple here and there over the last few years, with few of them feeling as good as Sonic Classics or New Super Mario on the DS. Was that world? Whatever. Anyway, I did the only sensible thing about uninstalling a platformer I got fed up with - I went through my list of pending card games and immediately installed another platformer.

Rogue Legacy is a delightfully inspired fusion of ARPG, roguelike (or the genre that fundamentally spawned ARPGs anyway) and platformer with beautiful properly retro graphics that settles on basically dying, and passing to your offspring a horrible quest to be maimed horribly in the hopes of eventually, one day, taking down that damn nasty castle. The game really reminds me of Act Raiser, actually, on the visual level. It's a little bit weird since it reminds me of both parts of Act Raiser at once but hey that's cool.

So given I've been frustrated and irritated with platformers since like, 2010 or something, you'd imagine I installed this game, played it for ten minutes then uninstalled after I brutally died three times in very short order, right?

Actually maybe it reminds me of Soulblazer. Maybe it reminds me of 16-bit era games in a general way. In a good way. But not of Super Castlevania, which I played back in 2011 and found did not age quite as well as I'd hoped. Can I go with 'it reminds me of Quintet? Does anyone ever remember who that is?

I think I should say right before I really dig into it that 'avatar strength' as discussed in egoraptor's excellent but short-lived series on sequels and perhaps a legitimate theory elsewhere is heavily at work in Rogue Legacy. The initial run into the game is brutal, with your character getting slaughtered in a room or two, until you begin to scourge up gold and buy your first couple upgrades. There is a parallel growth going on here that tricks the mind a little, you are growing a bit better as a player, but with each upgrade alongside it you are much more capable of weathering the incoming horde of nastiness. However this is, as I said, something of a deception. It's not so much 1+1=2, or 3+3=6, but rather 3x3=9 if you catch my meaning. You feel really awesome and you make swift gains, which is a twist of psychology.

Still, the game is legitimately hard on you. A fair bit of it is from the roguelike experience, which I'll get into, but it is mostly just hard. That all being said, you'll see people with an almost fevered pride in how 'hard' this game is, when really it isn't the best example of legitimate difficulty. The platforming is megaman style, maybe not megaman level, with spikes all over the place and enemy bouncing about. Enemies do not seem to have precise patterns of movement, though they do tend to have precise patterns for fire, which I want to say is very Megamanesque but maybe that's just memory doing poor work since I haven't played a Megaman game in years.

The core gameplay is hitting things with your sword, dodging just about everything that isn't gold or chicken legs and the occasional usage of spells. Spell assignments are random and the spells are generally balanced to their mana cost, so the best spells are hard to use overly much of. You do not initially regenerate health or mana on any sort of regular basis, but do eventually gain access to abilities that help with that. Spells are generally less all that powerful and more or less about offering another dimension to attacking, opening up a direction or allowing you to snipe from cover or distance. Sometimes you'll barely use a spell for an entire life, and then it bails you out of an otherwise extremely taxing situation. Other characters will use their spells very consistently and everything in between. It's a good balance, on the most part, and I like the different spells.

The randomness of the spell system is a little frustrating. The game spawns you three options at the start of each life and each child can have a different class, two traits and then a spell. A couple of the spells are specific class only, and only show up every once and a while. Several hours into the game and I hadn't spawned time stop once since getting my handle on the game. I mean I got it a few times early on where I'd basically go into one room, maybe survive, then die on the next. It took an hour to get much of a grip on the game at all. You also aren't privy to all the spells an archmage kid gets.

Getting away from that, let's talk about Retro for a second here. Let's talk about chiptunes. Rather, let's just say this: God I love Rogue Legacy's score. Music is a bit subjective of course, based around certain experiences, but from my experiences there's few recent games I've played with music that I dig quite this much. There isn't a bad track among there. I wish there were more tracks, just because they are all excellent.

Roguelikes or whatever that term has come to mean are buried in Rogue Legacy's DNA and the game both suffers and benefits tremendously for it. The core roguelike ideal of an extremely randomized, brutally unfair, die at any time experience does a great deal of good here. Rogue Legacy is not that random, the castle's layout is built around rooms which it puts together at each rebuilding. There is some randomness at character selection, but due to the way the trait system works, it doesn't feel like its much of a selection at all.

Also the IBS trait could uh, do with a bit of turn down on farting constantly. If it's just puttering out like a poorly running Chevy the joke doesn't quite work. It works best if you let one rip right when something exciting happens. Kill a miniboss, fart. You get what I mean?

What I don't like about roguelikes is certain points in the experience where the game comes off as "cheap" or moreover unpolished, which is classically written off as a core element of the game's "challenge". Stuff like dead drops with no ability to see what is below you, getting knocked out of a room and resetting the encounter or being hit before you have time to react are not really great elements of a playing experience. The game certainly doesn't bullshit you Castlevania style, but it does feel like it's more than hard enough without stuff like this to grind your teeth. I don't really know if this is a developed intention or just a byproduct of the game's generation system, though, but it is a meh element of roguelikes. The only "intentional" difficult switch I dislike in the game is the ability to take damage from a spike from the side, which looks stupid and aggravates my Sonic the Hedgehog memories. Well, curse of the hedgehog is pretty damn annoying too, on that note.

Well, I guess that's a lie, I kinda really hate taking damage upon touching an enemy in a game where enemies have projectiles. It probably would winnow a great deal of difficulty out of the game but it's amazingly frustrating to tap against what amounts to a floating cloak with eyes, get knocked back and then have to dodge his resulting spell attack before you can even think about going at him again. Maybe that's crucial to the game though.

On the other hand, I am corely not complaining about elements which need to be learned from experience. The puzzling Fairy Chests, for example, which rely on secret paths or a certain combination of skills, traits, whatever - these are fine, if not delightful. I dislike rote memorization because your perceptions have such limited influence on the outcome, but here there's a little bit of memorization that requires paying attention. That's excellent, and I'm not complaining about that randomness. I'm also not complaining about getting stomped the first time you go into the tower or how brutally hard some of the areas can be til you get enemy patterns down. The game punishes impatience, slaughters the reckless and rewards you for being smart on your feet while being observant.

There is a line between tedium and patience, of course, but Rogue Legacy doesn't make you wait around. There are no 'five seconds of waiting the boss to come back' or 'ten seconds of offal smeared on the screen' - there are windows you can attack in and other spans where you need to keep your footwork from flailing. The spans are measured in seconds, and often you should spend a couple seconds watching an enemy's pattern as well.

Enemy selection is both good and bad; there are limited new enemies later on in the game, which are mostly color swapped and or scaled up versions of earlier foes with somewhat different attacks or patterns. The game does abuse the scale feature a little bit too much and sometimes it does lead to some disappointingly off-kilter abuse of the art assets. However the basic designs are really charming to me. Regardless, there's a ton of different enemies and most of them take a couple seconds to learn. I also really appreciate how many of the different enemies make references to later enemies. All of the bosses are upgraded forms of earlier enemies, so the game has conveyed to you the basic idea even before you fight. This is a really good idea for a game about dying 100 times per night.

I do sort of wish there were more middle ground enemies that don't abuse running into you. Wolves and headless horses are introduced in the forest area, and rush you pretty nasty like but otherwise the game has very few enemies who aren't either A) nearly immobile or B) floaters that move through objects. The aforementioned mages can not pass through solid objects, but share with the B class enemies that they don't platform.

One of my favorite things about the game is busting into a large room, realizing there's a huge amount of enemies bearing down on me and just leaving the room or picking off one, then leaving the room again, re-entering, etc. I guess it's just a very old school moment that really tickles my nostalgic sensibilities. It's very NES, and I'm not quite sure how, but it is.

So let's get down to the negatives: As I said, Rogue Legacy does not necessarily have a large enough pool for enemies against the scale of its difficulty. Suffice to say, you will need to attempt, reattempt and grind much of the game unless you're very good at it. I assume most people are better than me, because I'm just about the worst player in the world at this game. But even then you begin to split runs between boss attempts and grinding gold to push ahead on upgrades, which means you will redo the same areas so many times they begin to get very samey. The odds even up, and basically, the game kinda really wears out its welcome if you're not great at it which is an opinion I've seen from a couple people. I'm sure there's people who can do the content at a much lower threshold than others, as I said, I'm awful, but I'm actually not too certain how much that would help with the issue on your first run..

I also feel like room design probably shouldn't have done repeats for the different sections of the castle - there are four, Castle, Forest, Tower, Underworld (or Dungeon?). There's a fair number of unique rooms, I think, to each area but some are just reskinned. Given the huge amounts of possible variety and the relative ease compared to other content creation in doing so it creates kind of a jarring effect to realize you're in a castle room just reskinned with grass. If the reason is lack of time, that's fine, but maybe put a little less effort into doing a million fairy chest rooms? I really liked the fairy chests but there's about a million of them, or so it felt.

Still, I always feel like there's something to be said when your complaint is with the lack of content. That means there's a good game there, and you just want more, which isn't a bad place to be. The team behind it have pushed a couple updates, which are nice, although to be honest the ultra-difficult side bosses just don't really gel with me as meaningful content. I do think the game would have benefited from some content you didn't see every castle iteration, like one or two random side areas that don't spawn very often or the like.

Regardless - For this year, it's been a bit rough gaming and I've been kinda disappointed with most titles. Rogue Legacy really lived up to the hype, it's visually appealing, the audio is excellent and as a rare treat the game offers just enough of a story added in little optional segments that flavor the game juuuuuust enough. I really can't overstate how good the music is though, while the game is excellent, the music was my favorite part. All the tracks accent the zones they're in well, and the boss music really worked with the individual bosses.

In conclusion: Rogue Legacy is excellent, and probably my favorite game thus far this year.