WMG / Rogue Legacy

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

There is some serious inbreeding going on with the family.

The list of disorders, deformities, neuroses, and other oddities within the family line is too long for much fresh blood to be getting in. And all that's before you start throwing Dragon blood into the mix.

The Line from the Beginning, "My duties are to my family... But I am loyal only to myself..."

...is a quote from the King, not the Prince/Johannes. Given the way he ruined his entire kingdom and reduced his entire family to utter poverty out of nothing but petty selfishness, it'd fit what little we know of his personality perfectly.

The effects of the player forgetting the story motivation.

For most players, the story ends up being forgotten pretty early on. As a result, it turns into an allegory for multi-generational conflicts because the player (and by extension, the descendents) don't know what they are fighting for.

The initial tutorial/cutscene gives you some story, and the journals help keep the story alive in your head. But after you find all the journals and forget their contents, you end up fighting just to fight.

The preset characters used to fight the bonus bosses are the heroes that became the bosses in the first place.

Before the fight with the Prince/Johannes after becoming one with The Fountain of Youth, he mentions the following point:

Johannes: Alexander, Khidr, Ponce de Leon... I was not the first hero to reach the Fountain, but I will be the last!

This implies that, before the heroes reached the Fountain of Youth, they were once bold warriors like the player character's family and Johannes. They got their immortality, but became corrupted by its curse and became giant monsters, forever doomed to either mindlessly kill heroes that enter the castle, or be slain by them, and resurrect. The preset characters used to fight the Bonus Bosses only appear in those fights, and nowhere else. So why are they only there to begin with? Perhaps it is meant to represent the heroes fighting the monster they have become, from their perspective. So from the preset fights, the transformations were as follows...

• Lady McSwordy became Khidr.
• Sir Wagner became Alexander.
• Sir Dovahkiin became Ponce de Leon.
• Lady Echidna became Herodotus.

The Prince/Johannes had slain these monsters and thought nothing of it, yet the monsters slain were the past heroes that reached the Fountain of Youth, and they likely resurrected once more before the player character's family began to set foot into the castle for the first time, hence why they are there despite the journals stating that the Prince had already slain them.

• To add further depth, perhaps these simulated fights are a representation of the heroes internally struggling to fight the monster that they turned into due to the curse, which likely explains why the fights are so difficult to begin with.

The castle was once a person who drank from the Fountain of Youth.

This would mean the castle is just like the bosses (and possibly the other monsters as well) in formerly being human before becoming corrupted by the fountain, which might make the theme of the entire game that immortality corrupts.

Not much evidence for this one, but given The Prince's comment on how he thinks it's alive, the fact that all the previous fountain drinkers have both their minds and bodies corrupted into monsters, and the fact that its name could be human, it seems at least plausible. Naturally, this would have to be one of the very first to drink from the fountain. Someone whose form becomes the castle around the fountain when he becomes corrupted.