Ascension 15 on just one character, let alone all three, was enough to make me tired of this game. The the ratio of RNG to meaningful choices is slightly too skewed in favor of RNG + the time investment required to see through the few meaningful choices that you are given (mainly path selection) is far too great to make …
Ascension 15 on just one character, let alone all three, was enough to make me tired of this game. The the ratio of RNG to meaningful choices is slightly too skewed in favor of RNG + the time investment required to see through the few meaningful choices that you are given (mainly path selection) is far too great to make for an incredibly satisfying, "just one more run" type of rogue-lite. As it stands, it's just satisfying, which is by no means a bad thing. Let me get this out of the way, the game is fantastic, no two ways about it.
I realize that my issues may sound somewhat vague, or not like issues at all but rather just a matter of "git gud," but they're hard to clarify without getting into an exhaustive level of detail about the various situations that you're presented with and why, no matter how much you may struggle, and how much you may think really hard, RNG will almost always (at least beyond the first few ascensions) play a bigger role in determining the outcome of your run.
Of course there are strategies to mitigate your losses, but by pursuing them, you end up sacrificing a large amount of what the game has to offer. Essentially, there are a lot of potentially viable builds—aka winnable builds—but some of them require a ludicrous amount of RNG to piece together, but are technically speaking, no more powerful than the less RNG heavy strategies (what I mean by this is that a win is a win, it doesn't matter if you barely scraped by the last boss with only a few HP left while using a "safe" strategy vs. completely destroyed it without getting hurt using a "risky" RNG blessed strategy—when given an unlimited amount of time to think about the very few choices you're given, the less skill matters and the more RNG matters); what all of this does is force you to always go for the same few strategies rather than, say, try and build off of that one potentially interesting relic or rare card synergy that you got early in the game—you're almost always better off ignoring it in favor of the few higher win % strategies, which quite frankly, becomes pretty boring.
Despite all of my whining, I really, reaalllly liked this game. I complain because I care, and because I see this game as having the potential to rival The Binding of Isaac in terms of longevity. Just a few tweaks to the amount of player choice would open up more potentially viable build options without reducing the required skill to clear the game.
