Searchlike wrote:Thanks for the recommendations. Roguelikes are way more appealing to me because of permadeath, so I wasn't thinking of those, but if you know about a WRPG that could be played Ironman style or have any other roguelike that you would add to that list of yours in the dungeon crawler thread I'm all ears.
I'm not super concerned with genre boundaries so anything that feels kinda like a WRPG is ok, Star Control II fits my criteria.
I appreciate anyone's help. Ironman friendly JRPG's are welcome too.
Alright here's my list of roguelikes
Shiren the Wanderer might be my favorite video game. It's just so rich, so fast-paced, so exciting. Everything matters.
Brogue is more or less a perfection of Rogue's basic formula. Intriguing and cruel.
Nethack is quite possibly the most complex game ever made in terms of the sheer number of ways things in the game can interact with other things.
Adom is something like a toned down Nethack with more personality and WRPG elements like side quests with multiple outcomes and an aligment system.
Ragnarok is another hacklike. Its open world setting and blatant disregard for balance go well with Nethack-style mechanics.
Cave Noire is a roguelike/puzzle game hybrid by Konami that is well-liked around here.
Incursion is an insanely ambitious attempt to implement D&D 3.5 rules in a roguelike. Like, not just combat revolving around d20s, but with skill checks and diplomacy and everything. All of it. Unsurprisingly, the author gave up before finishing, but what we're left with is still a unique, interesting, and winnable game. Potentially a charismatic hero can simply talk the villain out of trying to conquer the world. Deep, and excessively complex character building like you'd expect out of 3.5.
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress is a sandbox RTS with an alternate roguelike game mode. In the main game you govern a group of dwarves with whom you can do whatever you want. It's terribly complex and has perhaps the most thoroughly simulated world of any game. The game tracks the temperature of each object, what material it's made from, its condition, if it's wet, etc. More importantly, it simulates characters' thoughts and emotional states on a level well beyond anything else in the medium. You might have a dwarf with a fondness for cats who winds up adopting a bunch of strays, and then later on some goblins invade your fortress, and though they are defeated, they kill off all of the dwarf's cats, which causes the dwarf to go mad with grief, which causes them to become a serial killer who ultimately needs to be brutally put down by your guards, with the game simulating things like tendon damage to the dwarf's fingers as the guards rain blow after blow upon the dwarf's helpless body. Maybe a dwarf child witnesses this and is also traumatized with some consequence later on. I remember reading on the Dwarf Fortress forums that after one update players often found their adventurer mode characters' clothes would mysteriously become wet, and it turned out the reason was because the player characters' emotional simulations were still running while under the player's control. The characters were mortified by the terrible and violent things the players inevitably forced their bodies to do, which they were powerless to resist. All they could do is watch and weep, their tears staining their clothing. A thorough description of the game goes well beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say that it is pretty interesting.
PrincessRL and
DDRogue are a pair of roguelikes by the same author which were each made in 7 days. They feature an interesting combat system where special moves can be activated by movement or by interacting with your environment. Like you can learn to do a wall jump that you can use to escape from danger or follow up with a falling attack, or you can learn to attack while circle strafing an enemy, things like that. DDRogue is good but PrincessRL is imo the author's best work. It has Princess Maker-inspired RPG elements and a bunch of different endings. Winning is fairly easy but getting the Great Heroine ending is not.
Mage Guild is a relatively short roguelike centered around wizardry and alchemy that goes for a quality over quantity approach. Spells have multiple uses and potions can be mixed with each other or other items to produce something new. It's something of a hybrid between the seemingly-opposite approaches of hacklike complexity and modern Crawl/Brogue-style intuitive simplicity. According to the author I was the first person to beat the game and ironically I used a melee build to do it, and melee builds have been forever nerfed since then.
Angband is kind of bad but worth mentioning. It has a bunch of problems but the biggest is that it's very long and has no time limit so the safest way to win is to take it easy and advance deeper when you're good and ready. If you push yourself to play aggressively you can have a good time. Ostensibly it's based on Tolkien but really it feels like a generic D&D-derived dungeon crawler. The most interesting thing about Angband is that there are about 8 million different variants based on its code. Most of them just add a bunch of monsters and classes, such as
FrogComposBand where you can play as a SaGa Android who doesn't gain experience points, or a Tonberry Berserker who is slow and can't use magic items more complex than a potion, but also has overwhelming health and attack power. These heroes will face foes such as Bowser, Dio Brando, the Tarrasque, Cthulhu, and Zeus on their quest to slay the Serpent of Chaos. With that said, it's still worth considering the vanilla game over its variants because of the tremendous quality of life improvements it's received over the years. The best Angband variant I've played by miles is
Sil which does not feel like playing Angband at all. It's got much faster pacing, far more flavor and personality, and trickier AI among other things. Its less-is-more philosophy is just what Angband always needed. I've got a soft spot for
ToME 2, which is something of a more focused version of crazier variants like ZAngband and FrogComposBand that still manages to out-crazy them in a few ways. It character building system in particular is very solid. Still has a lot of tedium, it's still Angband, but the cool and crazy characters you can play go a long way to keep things interesting. Like you can play as a thaumaturge who learns randomly generated spells, and the things it can give you are really wild. Maybe you'll get a spell that converts every tile in sight into a solid rock wall. Useful, if inconvenient. Or maybe it'll give you a time element attack which I don't think the player is even supposed to have since it inflicts unresistable damage and a permanent speed debuff, but crazy stuff like that is why you play ToME 2. Protip: choose a class that can use nature magic and choose to worship Melkor at character creation. Put one point into Melkor's Udun skill tree and then max out Nature to get the genocide spell, which is amazingly strong and cuts out 90% of the game's tedium. It still works if you later abandon Melkor to go for one of the good endings. The kids these days are playing this newfangled ToME 4 but I don't care for that one. It adds MMORPG-style cooldowns and those are always shit. Would be interested in hearing about other interesting Angband variants if any of you all know any.
I'm not sure if
Elona really counts as a roguelike since it's a sandbox game and doesn't feature permadeath, but it is at least heavily roguelike-inspired. It takes place inside an extremely wacky and grindy anime world where you can marry your pet bear, "younger sister" is a species, and murdering and cannibalizing someone in broad daylight is nowhere near so serious a crime as failing to pay your taxes. You can become a farmer, a musician, a shopkeeper, or, if you're feeling unoriginal, a fighting adventurer. The appeal is similar to an Elder Scrolls game, but Elona does a much better job of delivering on the promise of letting you do anything you want, and its combat, while below average by roguelike standards, is nonetheless an immense improvement on the F-tier combat in TES. Elona Plus is a popular variant that adds a ton of mostly combat-focused content and smooths out a lot of Elona's tedium. It's pretty good but I prefer Oomsest which feels a lot more like vanilla Elona and focuses more on sandbox features.
One Way Heroics is a roguelite similar to Shiren. You unlock different classes and difficulty levels and things like that for future playthroughs. You can also inherit items from one playthrough to the next, but fortunately, just like in Shiren, you never need to do so, and there's even a difficulty option - maniac mode - that disables it. Maniac mode is better balanced than the default settings anyway so I recommend sticking with that. OWH's central gimmick is that some mysterious, ever-advancing darkness is consuming the world. In practice this means that if you ever touch the left side of the screen you instantly die. This variation on the traditional roguelike time clock allows for some really interesting gameplay. If you see a scary but potentially rewarding dungeon, you can't put it off until you're ready for it. Once the darkness swallows it it's gone forever. Many roguelikes allow you to tunnel through walls, but OWH makes doing so a really interesting tactical option. You can circumvent a lot of danger and access a lot of treasure by punching walls down, but it's slow and if you miscalculate how much time you have the darkness will catch you. Your goal in One Way Heroics is to stop the darkness by killing the Demon Lord who summoned it, but there are actually a bunch of different endings. My favorite thing about the game is how you keep learning different things about the game and its world, which gives you new ideas to try, which then give you further leads to proceed with. Once you fully understand what's really going on you can finally address the heart of the problem, and imo the coolest thing about all of it is that the solutions were always there, you just didn't know how to use them. None of that stuff is tied to unlocks. OWH's world and characters are immensely likable, and its royalty-free soundtrack is outstanding too. There's a DLC add-on called One Way Heroics Plus which I highly recommend. I'm not a fan of everything it changes but the good easily outweighs the bad.