Medzy wrote...
"I was talking shit about a fantastic and unique game that I've never played
I wasn't talking shit about the game in itself, by all means it might very well be fantastic and unique to some, I never said it was bad, unoriginal or shouldn't be played.
I was making a reference to it's idea of what a Roguelike is, or rather the idea of what a Roguelike is today in general. It seems that any game featuring permadeath feels that it has the right to be categorized in that genre, when it really doesn't. As I was explaining in Skype earlier, there are major core differences between the two games, Rogue Legacy is a platformer with permadeath, dungeoneering and some of the same player character mechanics, but other than that it's a different game entirely. A dungeon crawler? Sure. Is it anything like Rogue? For the most part no.
Rogue is played from a top-down perspective using a frame-based grid action system, this is a core part of what makes Rogue, Rogue. It's what defines the roguelike genre; when you take away those core gameplay elements can you really say the two games are so alike that they should be grouped in the same genre? I don't think so, and neither does most of the Roguelike fan-base. Rogue is a strategic game of dungeoneering chess based off of D&D mechanics, it's not a platformer that features permadeath and procedural generation. Saying that Rogue Legacy is a "Roguelight" is just a marketing ploy, and frankly it's been seen as insulting to a lot of the people who grew up with the genre with games like Nethack and (M)angband. By the same relation, we could just as easily group Diablo into the Roguelike genre because it also features permadeath, dungeon crawling and procedurally generated content.
And yes, I have played Rogue Legacy before. It's fun, but I'm not a huge 2D platforming fan, so it doesn't really push the right buttons.