GraillyMeta progression in roguelites was fun for a while, but it's starting to feel unrewarding
Great post.
In addition to your points I would add a frustration of mine is having to fight the same bosses over and over again. Take Hades 2 as an example: you can choose one of two paths at the start of a run but will always have to fight the same boss fights. That sort of repetition in a roguelike is expected, I guess, but I just stopped playing the game because I didn’t want to fight Scylla and Charybdis for the 1000th time just to get to the next boss for the 1000th time.
I suppose Dead Cells spoiled me a bit here: you had route choices and could skip boss fights if they weren’t necessary for you current goals.
You just made me appreciate Slay the Spire more with the boss choices for each act. I didn’t realize until this comment how refreshing that is. Even Hades 1 had some variety in the first two boss fights (which fury was showing up, what kind of heads Lernie had…)
Hades 2 lets you amp up the difficulty to vary the bosses. By the 1000th attempt, you would likely be playing with them on their hardest and most intersting mode.
But Scylla and the Sirens featuring Charybdis doesn’t feel as different to me as say the Collector vs the Champ. I like the randomness and didn’t realize until this comment- though you could argue the music for the Scylla fight is random at least!
I think the harder versions add a lot of variabilty to the fight. The “default” Scylla fight is almost an afterthought after your first dozen times, but the harder version is immensly more complicated. Same goes for prometheous + spoiler, etc.
I think with a hundred more runs, these would also get old hat, but thats true with hades 1 as well. If you run the bosses 112 times there, the occasional “suprise” boss isnt really that intersting, esoecially if you’ve seen them 35 times. Seeing ol “muurrder…” was novel, but only to a point.