Game has a very "Dark Souls 2" feel and not in a good way

[MonochromePrism]

For those unfamiliar DS2 had a bad habit of cheap shotting the player via level and enemy design. Heavy and chunky enemies would snap 180 degrees mid-attack as you rolled by because you mis-timed your roll by a fraction of a second and rolled during their upswing animation and not their downswing, ambush enemy spawns would smack you from behind as you entered a room for the first time, etc. Essentially ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design on the part of the game designer where they looked at the most reasonable player response to a situation and then specifically built the mechanics of the situation to punish the player. Another example is something like timing a secondary aoe or broad swing from an attack to roll catch anyone that didn't dodge in a very specific direction. A game a bit closer to this that does the same is Ember Knights, where circular energy waves given off by certain boss attacks are precisely spaced so rolling towards or away from the first wave guarantees the second hits you (worse, dodge distance varies with character speed so alternative dodge patterns may or may not work depending on whatever random build the rogue-like has bestowed upon you).

I keep coming across these kinds of design decisions in Rogue Legacy 2. Rooms where you walk in and a flying enemy can move into you from an odd angle within a second or where they expect you to ascend or descend vertically and be forced to move into range of unseen enemies with inconsistent behaviors. Some of the worse have been the boss fights though. The first boss was mostly fine outside of the phase transition. The homing fireballs have too tight of a turning radius, making them almost impossible to bait into the floor consistently at close range and fully impossible to hop over or dodge under at long range (I didn't come to fully appreciate how BS they are until the double scar fight).

The second boss, the double gate skeleton? That fight simply felt malicious. A good example is the giant slow rotating projectile. It rotates juuuuust slowly enough that you can't just dodge underneath it as it passes to resume dealing damage because the back swing will catch you. Instead you have to dodge under it and then do something like bounce kick up the boss. Even when you get used to dodging it the attack is so slow and kicks do such terrible damage (and don't even regenerate mana) that waiting for this attack to finish is like having to deal with a mini invulnerability phase over and over again.

There are also some regular enemies that do this kind of thing. The basic red mage is a good example. They shoot the initial two fireballs directly at your character, but the last two have massively reduced accuracy and can travel up or down by as much as 30 degrees relative to your position, automatically punishing anyone that tried to jump over the attack or juke the auto-aiming. These kinds of randomizations in enemy attack patterns make cheap damage happen, and in a skill based game with finite health these kinds of cheap rng chip damage aren't appreciated. Spike balls are another. In most situations they are fine, but for some reason their positioning is weird when returning to a room after visiting it the first time and multiple times I have re-entered the room only to be hit immediately by a spike ball that was inside the "walk into room" animation hitbox. This kind of rng bs isn't something you can avoid by getting good. And don't even get me started on the red teleport rooms when they randomly decide that you have to face a two elite room this time and one is the giant spike ball (an enemy whose bounce pattern around the room isn't consistent at all).

This feeling also extends to the controls somewhat. Hollow Knight already exists, why couldn't they just trigger the air hops with a downwards attack? Instead the default setting is to hold down and press jump, the command that is already used for dropping through platforms, making for awkward inputs when you need to do both of those in close succession, something that a few rooms specifically require. This is also frustrating when being forced to deal with all the homing projectiles that can only be dispelled via a kick, adding this tiresome busywork to the otherwise enjoyable dodge-attack-dodge rhythm of combat.

As an aside, it feels like at least one of the people designing some of those challenge rooms, be they fairy rooms or otherwise, was some kind of sadist. The alternating fire ball and black energy wave room in particular had some outright unfair fireball configurations considering the wave pattern was random and so it should have been designed with the player's position at any point in the room's progression having a viable dodge angle.

[Kona❤Kona]

150h and I don't agree with any of this. Any mistake I've had is my fault for positioning poorly. Learning how your character moves and hitbox sizes are important. Yeah it may take some trial and error to find the best way for you to deal with a situation, but every death should encourage you to try a different way of approaching something.

Don't let enemies put you in disadvantageous positions. Use all of your tools. Reset rooms if you need to. Bait out attacks. Don't empty your Resolve. Go slowly and leave options open if you aren't sure. You aren't being timed in the main mode.

Try different classes to see if you like/dislike certain ones. For instance I cannot stand using the bows so I just don't, and that is okay. Do not forget your Talent as many of them have short enough cooldowns to use often.

Spin kicks can be set to use one key and I highly recommend using it.

[MonochromePrism]

Originally posted by Kona❤Kona:

150h and I don't agree with any of this. Any mistake I've had is my fault for positioning poorly. Learning how your character moves and hitbox sizes are important. Yeah it may take some trial and error to find the best way for you to deal with a situation, but every death should encourage you to try a different way of approaching something.

Don't let enemies put you in disadvantageous positions. Use all of your tools. Reset rooms if you need to. Bait out attacks. Don't empty your Resolve. Go slowly and leave options open if you aren't sure. You aren't being timed in the main mode.

The same defenses were made for DS2, doesn't change that the enemies were purposefully tuned and placed to punish normal play patterns. Ignoring the specifics of complains (like the regular blind corner room designs in RL2 that you likely fail the first time because even using the look command doesn't let you see the bottom of the vertical shaft you have to drop down) to instead spout generic platitudes about "getting good" was also quite common.

Originally posted by Kona❤Kona:

Spin kicks can be set to use one key and I highly recommend using it.

I'm aware of this one, I just don't want to have to relearn what muscle memory I have developed with the basic control scheme (although it's clear at this point that I'm going to have to do so).

[I love Intoner One]

There is a quick drop option mentioned in the tutorial and you can bind the spin kick to some other button, like one of the side mouse buttons. You can look beyond what's on screen by holding alt and a directional key.

The red mage used to shoot straight in the original Rogue Legacy. The added spread helps with making them more dodgeable in hectic situations and is a good improvement. The hitboxes are lenient enough, you can exit then reenter the room to reset them, and so on.
I have never been hit by a spikeball when transitioning between rooms. Either that's a bug or an extremely rare scenario. It's not a big deal.
If you could snap your fingers and make spin kicks strong, the game would be substantially easier. Especially the 2nd boss. A lot of enemies pretty much only attack sideways.

The game is fundamentally a roguelite. I've only played a small bit of the original Rogue, but I'd say it's a safe bet RNG ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is core. Let's compare with other roguelikes/lites:

In Noita, it's entirely possible that you teleport into a holy mountain and immediately a worm digs into it and angers the gods. Or, if you have the nuke spell unlocked, it may spawn on a wand in the snowy depths, an offscreen enemy can pick it up and shoot it and kill you without ever once appearing on your screen, through no fault of your own.
In Pixel Dungeon, you can walk on a fire trap with no water nearby and have your scrolls burn up, through no fault of your own. In the original Pixel Dungeon, that can include upgrade scrolls, which are fairly essential, though Shattered makes those not burn, but remove curse ones still do.
In Everspace, it's entirely possible that you simply do not find any nanobots to repair your ship for too many sectors in a row, or other similar death by attrition situations like not getting good enough weapons. That's why there's upgrades for that.
In both Spelunky HD or 2, it's possible a shopkeeper gets angered because an autoattacking enemy spawned near them/an enemy triggered a trap that ended up hurting the shopkeeper. Angering shopkeepers can easily be a run ender.

If you could beat Rogue Legacy 2 with some skill, no upgrades and no luck, it would not really be a roguelite. At the end of the day, you should be fine with tanking random hits for whatever reason and play around that the same way you play around the random layouts, enemies, relics, trait choice and so on. What happens if the children you get have pacifist on #1, one-hit wonder on #2 and associative agnosia + algesia on #3? It wouldn't be your fault you can't do the scar portals. And in extreme situations like the relics that make you die in 1 hit, you can plan out where you go and be extremely careful. It's a roguelite, you can upgrade your characters and massively improve how strong you are. It's not a soulslike.