YMMV / Rogue Legacy 2

• Cargo Ship: At the very least, Tubal cares a lot more for machines than for anything living. He once suggested replacing all of the Kingdom's peasants with his automatons to the Estuaries, apparently unaware that the other Estuaries boink them, though he didn't get too mad when they rejected that.
• Complete Monster: Cain the Immortal King is the founder and ruler of the kingdom of Genesis. In the pursuit of immortality, Cain murders his brother Abel in order to gain the Fruit of the Tree of Life. Using his newfound power, Cain subjugates the underground, creating the Estuaries from his own flesh in order to oversee it. Despite claiming the Estuaries as his adoptive family, however, when they fail to grow another Fruit of Life to extend his power, Cain abandons them to lead his armies on a campaign of conquest on the surface. When Cain finally returns to Genesis, the kingdom has fallen into ruin from infighting, but Cain only desires the Fruit. Using the relic Hestia's Reliquary to reincarnate his brother's soul in the form of successive descendants, Cain manipulates the reincarnations into killing the Estuaries as sacrifices for the Tree. When the descendants instead rebel and bring him a poisoned fruit in order to weaken him, Cain attempts to kill them without hesitation. When he's finally defeated, he merges his soul with the Stygian River, causing it to rise up and flood the underground, attempting to drag the survivors down with him in a final act of spite.
• Even Better Sequel: The first game was great though had some obvious rough edges. Rogue Legacy 2 improves on almost everything. The classes now have unique fighting styles (with each having an alternate playstyle), there are now permanent upgrades to your moveset, magic is significantly more useful, areas are larger and more varied, the game’s difficulty is better balanced without being any easier, and the bosses are a significant improvement over those in the first game. The "Threads" feature also significantly improves New Game Plus and lends the game to massive longevity as a roguelike.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Prior to Version 0.3.2, the Knight's Perfect Block ability was ludicrously effective. Available at any point while walking, jumping, or dashing, it blocked damage and provided a short period of invincibility, neutralized small projectiles, and dealt damage to enemies while knocking them away, and it did all of this with no downsides. With a decent level of timing, you could even run circles through bosses using this skill. Version 0.3.2 balanced it out by giving it a 10-second cooldown between uses, while letting it retain its useful properties.
  • The humble Wooden Spoon is one of the most powerful weapons in the game if mastered, thanks to its ricochets being nowhere near as difficult to nail as you would think they'd be. Just a little bit of practice with it and you have an already strong weapon that you can get easy skill crits on with significantly more range and directional input than you'd initially think.
  • Many consider Vampirism to be a broken trait, with the right setup. It increases the damage you take by 125%, but in return gives your weapon 20% lifesteal. Coupled with various relics that increase weapon damage or increase your invincibility window after being hit, its completely possible to simply stand in front of a number of bosses and facetank their attacks while just pummeling them, and the boss will die long before you do. If you can luck into the Vampire God combo of multiple Ambrosia (each one increases the invincibility window after a hit by 1.25 seconds when default is 1 second invincibility) and multiple Rage Tinctures (each one increases the damage dealt while invincible by 100%), then as long as you aren't 1 hit KOed by a boss attack, you will be back at full health long before your invincibility expires.
• Nightmare Fuel: Death animations are generally not out of the ordinary (including at least one death that is just shrugging and falling over). Die in a trial though? You get to see your character slowly blink out and disappear.
• That One Sidequest: "Full House" requires that you exhaust every allied character's unique conversations over the course of however many New Game + cycles you do, until they give you a bunch of Soul Stones for it. On its own this would be just a matter of time, but the game does not tell you that this includes Ladon the Dragon, which makes this incredibly annoying because it's not even obvious that Ladon has conversations because he goes to sleep until the next run after you defeat Tubal, so unless you get curious and go check on him there's no signposting at all that he has new dialogue, and unlike all of the other characters he's in the castle itself instead of on the docks, and in Pishon Dry Lake at that, so visiting him requires going and finding the boss room in the most lethal area of the game over the course of multiple runs, and at that point it's more likely you're ready to try to enter the Golden Doors to attempt the final bosses, which means you'd have to beat the boss of Pishon on a new run to regain access to his conversations. By the time you finally figure this out, you might be several burdens in and have to turn it into a chore you're trying to catch up while all the other characters have likely long since had their personal dialogues wrapped up.
• That One Disadvantage: With a new game comes a new pool of traits, some of which are almost never worth the risk, even with the gold bonuses you get for using heirs that have them:
  • Algesia completely removes your character's Mercy Invincibility after getting hit. One stray hit from any source, and you'll likely end up ping-ponging and taking major damage, especially against bosses, who often have such large attacks that you won't be able to perform an immediate aerial recovery.
  • One-Hit Wonder causes your character to die in a single hit, from any damage source. To make up for it, this trait has the highest gold bonus out of any negative trait, and some relics such as the Lotus Stem can be a big boon for heirs with this trait, but surviving without taking damage from anything in this game is extremely difficult. You're often better off picking a less-risky trait and gaining more gold from surviving longer.
  • Perfectionist makes your attacks deal no damage if they aren't skill crits. For some classes, such as the Barbarian^note whose grounded attacks always skill crit, since they're slower, and their aerial attacks crit while dashing, this is moot, but for others with more complex skill crit conditions, notably the Bard^note they can only get skill crits after their note projectiles turn gold, which takes three seconds after shooting them out, the game gets much, much harder. It’s especially bad for classes that can only get skill crits from attacking while dashing, making dealing any damage very risky.
  • Vegan makes all health consumables deal damage to you instead of heal you. Unless you're playing as a Chef^note whose class talent, Stew, lets them heal on demand, and can be replenished by collecting mana flasks in lieu of meat and pizza consumables, have the Vampirism trait or have runes activated that heal you by damaging or killing enemies, this means Black Root Tree Rooms are now your only source of healing, and taking Blessings of Life^note an item that causes you to take immediate damage, but increases your max HP from these rooms becomes much riskier.
  • Hypercoagulation regenerates your health, but every time you take damage your Max HP goes down. The amount you lose isn't an amount you can safely ignore either, and you lose any health above your max. It makes exploring for money a death sentence due to reasons mentioned under One-Hit Wonder., and if you can't get to one of the bosses before taking too many hits its only use isn't going to be helpful either. Even worse, it's not considered a negative trait, so you don't even get a gold bonus for taking it.

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