Video Game / Rogue Legacy 2

Rogue Legacy 2 is an action-platformer with Roguelike and Metroidvania elements, developed by Cellar Door Games and the sequel to Rogue Legacy. The game entered Early Access on August 18th, 2020, and left Early Access on April 28th, 2022 with the launch of its 1.0 update.

Players once again take on the role of a family of knights and knightesses, who have this time set foot in a kingdom fallen to ruin. With virtually all traces of sentient life long since gone and the kingdom overrun by monsters, the family, guided by the enigmatic Charon, sets out to put to rest the ancient Estuaries that once ruled the land and seek the truth behind the kingdom's downfall.

While the core gameplay remains the same as the original Rogue Legacy, Rogue Legacy 2 aims to be bigger, better, and fuller than the original in almost every possible way: the explorable kingdom is over twice the size of the castle from Rogue Legacy, game mechanics have been refined and expanded upon with elements such as the Spinkick, permanent upgrades called Heirlooms, and Skill Criticals, a wider range of playable classes who all now have their own unique fighting styles, and new Metagame mechanics that allow progression to carry over from run to run have been introduced.

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The game provides examples of:

• 2.5D: The game uses 3D models, although one may not be able to tell at first glance due to the heavy use of shading and stepping technique for animations, emulating the look of 2D sprites. The effect only becomes more noticeable with larger entities such as the Estuaries.
• Aborted Arc: Z/Maria is revealed to be pregnant, but nothing seems to come of it. Due to the convoluted nature of time in this game, she has either given birth long ago or has been pregnant for centuries.
• Ability Required to Proceed: All of the areas and most of their bosses require an heirloom ability from the previous area to proceed.
  • Citadel Agartha's boss door has a timed puzzled requiring the air dash to complete.
  • The area between the Citadel gates and the rest of Axis Mundi is blocked off by a gap that requires the Echo Kick upgrade to pass, which is conveniently hidden at around the same area.
  • The Lilies of the Valley required to get to the boss of Kerguelen Plateau and the intended^note several classes have abilities that can let them enter early, like the Bard jumping on notes from their lute or Astromancers flying with their class Talent way to get into the Stygian Study both require double jump.
  • The Sun Tower requires the Void Dash to get past its first room with the only way up being blocked by a void wall. Void Dash is also required to fight one of the minibosses needed to access the Study's main boss.
  • Downplayed with Pishon Dry Lake. While you can go down there as soon as you find the area, your visibility will be almost nothing which will likely get you killed by enemies you can't see and traps you aren't aware of. Traversing it safely requires killing the Sun Tower's boss, after which the nameless knight gives you a lantern that lets you see.
• Actual Pacifist: The rare Pacifist trait prevents the hero from attacking, indicated by the hero holding a sign with the "peace" symbol on it in place of a weapon in the heir selection menu. They can still Spinkick, but they also can't deal any damage, making it nigh-impossible to kill enemies directly.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Many of the Estuaries that you fight turn out to be very sympathetic characters. In particular, Enoch just wanted to free everyone from their pointless and eternal task but has since been turned Brainwashed and Crazy.
• Alien Kudzu: The Black Roots seem to spring from everywhere. They seem impossible to remove permanently. As you go through the story, you learn that this is because they are an impossibly vast and terrifying network whose reach exceeds reality itself, stretching into multiple dimensions. They also drive anyone they infect insane and suck the virtue, memories, and life out of everything they touch.
• All for Nothing: A tragic villainous example. While waiting for another Fruit from the Tree of Life, Cain feeds important people parts of himself to create Estuaries, uniting them with his immortal life force and giving them parts of his power. However, Cain's Fruit-borne immortality is fueled by all of the souls of the River Styx; and since making new immortals doesn't increase the amount of souls in the River, making the Estuaries simply stretches his immortality thin. The souls also feed the Tree, so he can't get another Fruit while he and the Estuaries are all alive; killing the Estuaries gives their Stygian souls back to the Tree, allowing the Tree to finally yield another Fruit, but him eating it would only make him just as immortal as when he ate the first one. On the other hand, he knows this by the time you face him with the Fruit, but he thinks you don't know that and offers you the next Fruit if you take the Estuaries' place.
• Animate Inanimate Object:
  • The Living Safe, which hangs out at the docks in an innertube upon purchasing the Offshore Bank Account, is exactly that; a safe which is capable of talking to you.
  • Lady Quinn and the Sage Totem are training dummies who can gesture, talk, and even date.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You can opt to switch to a newly unlocked class as soon as you purchase the upgrade for them, rather than having to wait for the class to show up during heir selection to give it a spin.
  • The very first upgrade you're allowed to to buy on the Skill Tree grants a Gold multiplier for playing heroes with debilitating traits, with the effect scaling accordingly with more severe effects like Pacifism or One-Hit Kill. This makes it so you can get rewarded for playing heroes with bad traits effectively as opposed to bad traits being a straight downside.
  • Gold drops that would risk being impossible to get (fallen into the stygian waters, the ash clouds in the sun tower, or in a wall from a flying enemy dying to a status effect) will automatically magnetize to you no matter how far away they are, preventing them from being lost.
  • Relics are unknown until the first time you pick them up. The only exception that are revealed from the start are the "Cursed" relics which put you into One-Hit Kill mode until you fulfill its criteria, that way you're not abruptly blindsided by a potential run-killer.
  • Maria the Pizza Girl, who delivers pizzas to the dead, will let you buy permanent (for the current timeline) access to teleporters at the start of any area beyond the Citadel. This is immensely useful for jumping around the map on subsequent runs due to the massively increased scale of areas compared to the original game. She also lets you directly rematch the final boss if you die fighting him, though you'll lack the relic and HP bonuses that you'd have by exploring the fallen kingdom first.
    • And if you do decide to explore the fallen kingdom first for relics and HP bonuses, taking the Golden Doors at the entrance room will take you directly to the final boss rather than the Garden of Eden, so the player isn't forced to fight Jonah again for another chance at the final boss.
  • House Rules exist largely for this reason, though they can also be used to make the game more challenginginvoked. Have a boss you're having a particularly tough time with and just want to beat? Want to see the full story without hitting a brick wall of difficulty? You can turn down enemy HP and damage output, as well as negative traits and contact damage with House Rules to help you get through, and all without locking you out of things like further New Game Plus cycles or trophies/achievements.
• Anti-Grinding: All progress is eventually locked behind purchases made with souls. These require you to kill bosses and complete a New Game Plus, or get ore and aether which is also done by killing bosses. Therefore, you are locked into this specific method of play once you get far enough and trying to beat the difficulty curve by grinding results in no power gain because you only get Money for Nothing.
• Arrange Mode: Three additional game variants were added in the Swan Song update to challenge the most skilled Rogue Legacy players.
  • "Thanatophobia" is inspired by the Thanatophobia achievement from the original Rogue Legacy. Just like in the original game, you must beat the entire game within 15 lives, but this time each Class can only be used once per save file.
  • "Thana-two-phobia" is a Harder Than Hard version of Thanatophobia with all enemies and bosses getting Burdens to boost their difficulty, but in exchange all Classes get their Fabled Weapon.
  • "True Rogue" adds even more randomization by also randomizing your character and biome order. Starting from a random biome, beating a boss sends you to a new random biome, with the goal being seeing how far you can get in a single run.
• Apocalyptic Log: The entire game world is clearly in ruins, and journals you find explain why that came to be.
• The Atoner: Jonah screwed up big time, and he seems to be in despair over it. You eventually learn that the bad things apparently caused by his betrayal would have happened anyway, though this gives him little comfort.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Bard's primary weapon, the lute, allows you to dance around acrobatically in the air, dealing significant damage in a large area that goes through walls and enemies. Unfortunately, actually performing those complicated maneuvers in a fluid way requires more skill than most people gain through the course of the entire game. They will also always be more vulnerable than most classes because they need to spin kick off enemies, and that attack has a very short range.
• Balance Buff:
  • Magic has received multiple buffs in the transition from Rogue Legacy 1 to this game, in order to combat the first game's problem of spells regularly being sidelined in favor of melee combat's superior offense. The Spellsword's ability to gain mana by hitting enemies with melee attacks is now something every class can do, spells in general have much greater variety, utility, and damage output, and some spells can be aimed in multiple directions. Additionally, most class abilities are tied to things other than mana, like the Knight's shield and Ranger's Ivy Canopy (use a timed cooldown), the Barbarian's Winter's Shout (requires taking damage), or the Cook's healing soup pot (restores from collecting meat and mana potions), allowing you to save the mana for Magic instead.
  • The "Haggle" upgrade, considered lackluster in the original, now comes in the form of the "Offshore Bank Account" upgrade (literally a metal safe on an inner tube). Not only can it be obtained extremely early, instead of letting you keep 10%-50% of your Gold when you pay Charon, it now transfers 10% of the Gold paid to Charon to the safe, and the Gold in the safe can be expended on future purchases at as if it were still in your inventory. As of 0.2.0, the rate of transfer can also be upgraded via a skill, although it's costly.
  • In 0.1.X, the Mage's normal attack took the form of a burst of fire some distance away from the character. While this was powerful, this also had the drawback of having a dead zone between the staff and the burst, making it difficult to hit some enemies. The Far Shores update reworked this so that the Wizard now shoots a fireball that explodes at the destination, with both the fireball and the explosion dealing damage and the explosion itself inflicting the powerful Mana Leech status on hit, rapidly restoring the user's MP as long as the target is alive.
• Bathos: The Void Beast fight in Axis Mundi would be terrifying, what with it being about corrupted corpses coming to life from the depths of the sea, and lore entries relating them build up the image of a pair of horrifying Undead Abominations that easily slaughtered every soldier in Axis Mundi, the massive piles of their bodies still around as you approach the boss gate, and the gate to the village sealed off to prevent the monsters from going further, abandoning the village to isolation being seen as preferable to being sieged by the duo. And inside the lair...two (admittedly giant) cartoony pirate skeletons with Punny Names that throw bones at you.
• Battle Couple: One of the scars lets you fight Enoch and Naamah, while music appropriate to their deep love and tragic end plays in the background.
• Beef Gate: Pishon Dry Lake combines this with Blackout Basement to discourage early exploration since it can be entered as soon as it is found. Even if you get past the pitch black darkness (of which you need to kill the boss of the Sun Tower to get the lantern that counteracts it), the enemies there will almost certainly tear you apart until you are properly equipped.
• BFS: Lamech's sword-shaped magic blade is much larger than your entire body.
• Blood Knight: Lamech. It's not helped by his tendency to offer a "solution" of killing the rebels before they've actually done anything and his severe issues with the other Estuaries not taking him seriously precisely because they don't like the idea of slaughtering everyone as much as he does. His plan for dealing with the rebels during the Ceremony of Return is basically "kill everyone who isn't seated".
  • It turns out to be a tragic example, ultimately. Lamech was nominated specifically to head the Genesis military...except thanks to Cain's conquests, Genesis has never had any conflict outside of the odd rebellion. Lamech can't even get the properly glorious death he yearns to finish his time with.
• Body Horror: The Black Roots can infect people and cause some pretty bad effects. Tubal's entire head has been replaced by a Root, which you can see when his mask falls off after his defeat.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • One of the strongest classes is the Valkyrie, whose weapon can attack in four directions and is notable for its long reach... but nothing else. This allows them to easily kill enemies through walls and stay at a safer distance from bosses. They stop being boring in the later game when you have enough air dash runes, as those let you dash back and forth stabbing everything in a pretty dramatic way.
  • The Sword moveset is pretty much unchanged from Rogue Legacy 1, being a simple swing that hits in front of and above you. It also does amazing damage even on non-crit attacks without requiring any kind of setup or unique interaction with class mechanics, making it a perfect weapon for when you just want to slap things around without worry about being fancy.
• Boxing Battler: Boxers. They forgo any sort of held melee weapons in favor of using a pair of boxing gloves to dish out quick blows and Knockout Punches that will send enemies flying, possibly even into each other.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Rangers never run out of arrows, no matter how far they delve into the kingdom.
  • The Gunslinger similarly lacks ammo limits, though unlike the Ranger, they need to reload after 22 shots.
  • The Bag of Spoons gives you unlimited spoons to chuck at your enemies.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The description for "Nostalgic":
  Remember the good ol' days? Naps in the park, ice cream socials, and the Plague.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: During the beta, the "Shy Artisan" - later "Shy Geologist"- was named as such because its position on the manor screen placed it behind one of the HUD elements.
  Awww... It looks like he's trying to hide behind the labour costs sign.
• Broken Bridge: Several obstacles require specific skills to bypass, which are gained by going into some sort of alternate dimension and completing a challenge to get an heirloom.
• Cain and Abel: After defeating the optional "Prime" version of the Final Boss in a New Game Plus, you learn that they had this relationship with their sibling. It's a literal example, too, as they were actually named Cain and Abel, and Cain struck down Abel to gain a Fruit of Immortality from the Garden of Eden.
• Caltrops: Although cut from the 1.0 release, the beta had a relic that allowed you to dispense caltrops on the ground for every fourth Spinkick you do. These lay on the floor for a while and apply poison stacks to enemies that walk over them.
• Censored for Comedy: The Puritan trait places a mosaic over every enemy because apparently everything is lewd.
• Central Theme: Betrayal. The number of characters who attack, trick, or deceive their supposed allies is incredible. Family is another recurring theme.
• Cessation of Existence: Dying in an Heirloom trial triggers a unique death animation where your hero blinks out of existence.
• Challenge Run: Rather than a New Game Plus similar to the previous title, beating the game allows you to combine challenge modifying "threads" to enter a new reality "weave", in a manner reminiscent of the Pact of Punishment from Hades.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: Later on in the game, you have access to many ways to increase the power of your skill crits. You need to stack those in a big way to keep up with enemy health. This results in skill crits, which are caused by using your weapons and spells in a specific way, becoming far more important.
• Chekhov's Gun: At least two-thirds of the bosses on the Golden Doors are afflicted with the Black Roots, with only one of the afflicted (Irad) seemingly not reduced to an undead state by them. You later use the Roots to make the Final Boss killable.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Upon first entering the ruined kingdom, you'll encounter a Nameless Knight warning you of the danger ahead. He then appears at various other points throughout the game to offer advice. Additionally, throughout the game, the player may come across old letters between two rebels named "Z" and "J" trying to fight the Estuaries themselves. These two things ultimately lead to the Knight revealing himself as "J", aka Jonah, the guardian of the Garden of Eden, and fighting the player as the penultimate boss. Adding on to this, in the Golden Ending, "Z" turns out to be Maria the Pizza Girl.
• Chest Monster: Mimics return from the previous game, still found in the "upper" area - in this case, the Stygian Study instead of the Maya. They have new attacks, including dashing back and forth and spitting out poisoned coins when they're defeated. True Estuary Enoch escalates this, being a mimic of the post-boss loot chest.
• Civil War: A major event in the background is the war between the rebels and loyalists. In the end, the winner was nobody, since Tubal's automatons ended up slaughtering everyone and then he was seriously messed up by people he had previously betrayed. The entire kingdom is in ruins, with nobody achieving any kind of victory.
• Combos: Striking enemies as the Boxer grants grants the "combo" status buff, increasing their damage by 2% per stack, capping at 30 stacks, AND granting Skill Crits at 15+ stacks.
• Conspicuously Light Patch: Doomvas, the fake painting monster, occurs in the Stygian Study (and Citadel Agartha after a certain Burden is chosen), both of which feature paintings in the background to better hide their form. They can be told apart from the background in both cases: in the Study because they don't float up and down like the background paintings do, and in the Citadel because they're a different color.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Crippling Intellect trait reduces several of the user's other stats, including HP and physical attack damage, but causes them to regenerate MP almost instantly.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted with the Encumbrance system added in 0.2.0. In addition to Max Weight limiting how much equipment the hero can carry, the hero also gains an added buff or debuff depending on their actual current Weight relative to their Max Weight stat. Early in the beta, having a Weight stat close to maximum induces the "Heavy" status, which reduces MP gain, while the inverse occurs with low Weight, which boosts MP gain. Currently, however, lower Weight values increase bonus Resolve instead, which allows you to acquire more relics without penalty.
• Critical Hit: Two kinds! Various upgrades give a chance for any attack to upgrade to a critical hit, and most spells and weapons allow you to get a critical hit if you use them in a certain way, for example hitting with the very tip of the Ronin's blade or striking while dashing for many classes. If you manage to land two crits at once, whether a random and a skill crit or two skill crits at once, you'll deal a Super Critical hit as well. Two different runes allow you to expand your Super Crits; Lucky Roller lets you possibly turn Skill Crits into Super Crits, while High Stakes increases the damage of Super Crits. Late in the game, crits start doing incredible damage, to the tune of triple damage for a skill or random crit and sextuple damage for a super crit!
• Critical Hit Class: A few, and not always who you would expect. The Assassin relies on critical hits, as one would imagine, but the real kings of critical hits are the Barbarian and Ranger, who if played a specific way can get critical hits 100% of the time. As the game goes on, skill crits start doing so much more damage than regular attacks that every class needs to start getting skill crits regularly.
• Crutch Character: The Chef is one of the better classes for pre-NG+, boasting incredible sustain with their Stew class talent which allows them to consume food to replenish their health and mana gauges on-demand, with Meat and Potion drops replenishing talent charges up to a maximum of 3, and their melee weapon, while a bit slower than other melee attacks, sets enemies on fire for damage over time and reflects mid-size projectiles, with every projectile reflected granting Skill Crits. At higher levels of NG+, however, you're likely to have enough on-hit life and mana-stealing runes to make the Stew talent redundant, and due to Changing Gameplay Priorities, Skill Crits become much more valuable at higher levels of NG+. While many enemies possess mid-sized projectiles, higher-level enemy variants start appearing more frequently with larger projectiles that can't be reflected by the frying pan, making the Chef's Skill Crit requirements fairly situational compared to other classes.
• Damage Reduction: This is how armor works in Rogue Legacy 2. Each point of armor absorbs a point of damage, and there are two limits to the amount that can be blocked. The first is the numerical value of your armor, and the second is the "block cap", which determines what percentage of total damage from an attack can be blocked. The lower of the two is the limit for how much damage armor can block, and both can be raised considerably through the course of the game.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Charon returns, and he still taxes you for your entire fortune to allow entrance into the kingdom, however this comes into play in some dialogue. Jonah muses how all of the Cthonian Gods are supposed to help and love humanity, yet Charon seems like the exception in how he behaves. Jonah then muses aloud that what Charon's toll really does is initiate What You Are in the Dark; after paying his toll, even the poorest beggar and the richest king are on equal footing, so what comes after paying their toll speaks to their true worth.
• Darker and Edgier: Despite the gameplay focus and a lot of the writing being Denser and Wackier, the backstory itself is much bleaker and more depressing than the first game. It involves the Estuaries' fall from grace and squabbles as each of them seeks something, be it pride, glory, love, honor, loyalty or freedom, and how their pursuit of all of these things eventually led to a brutal rebellion, civil war and ultimately the fall of Genesis and the death of everyone in it besides the Estuaries (who are all in some situation where death may be preferable), Jonah and Maria.
• Dash Attack: Some melee weapon-wielding classes have the ability to attack while dashing, which is denoted with the weapon glowing orange and leaving an orange trail instead of the regular white trail. Attacks executed while dashing deal slightly more damage than a regular standing/walking attack, and there's even an upgrade that can increase this damage. Starting with the v0.6.0 version onwards, these Dash attacks now are Skill Crits, which are modified by critical damage upgrades instead.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Varies from class to class.
  • Played straight for Valkyries, who can stab with their spear in the four cardinal directions only, and Duelists, who can only thrust their rapiers forwards.
  • Averted for Rangers and Gunslingers, who can aim in a full 360° range if you're using an analog stick or mouse.
• Denser and Wackier: While the first game had its humorous moments, it generally kept them contained to early in the main plot. This game cranks up the humor quite a bit. Most Skill and Trait descriptions have some sort of joke, your allies at the docks include a sentient safe, two sentient mannequins (one a Large Ham and the other a Shrinking Violet), and a pizza delivery girl, and one mini-update centered almost exclusively on adding more pizza to the game. Curiously, the Toilet Humor is also increased, such as the Super IBS trait, one of the skills mentioning Squidpoop and J saying that one of the Heirloom keepers said her butt smelled.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Each of the "Alternate" weapons available from the Keres, Blessing Shrines, or through Contrarian control VERY strangely and usually have more situational criteria for skill crits and higher base damage, giving them the potential to be far more powerful than the class' default weapons if you use them well.
  • Knights get the Pizza, a Battle Boomerang that crits when it reaches max distance before it boomerangs back to you. You can spinkick off the pizza for extra height, and if you dodge it on its return path you can have it circle around you (think Ninja Gaiden's fuuma shuriken), creating a whirling torrent of death for as long as you keep maneuvering around it.
  • Rangers get the Mobile Ballista, a massive bow with an equally massive arrow, that can't be used in midair and takes much longer to reach full charge, but trades its lack of any mobility for intense damage which only gets more excessive if you can afford to wait for it to charge its crit window, which stays open longer than the bow's does to make up for the longer charge time.
  • Bards get the Electric Lute, which trades off their ability to create notes in favor of a weapon that attacks directly for a decently high chunk of damage. However, it only has one charge, and to recharge it you need to spin kick off of anything, which also grants it a very small skill crit window. If you can handle this odd change of tact for the bard, you can quickly stack up damage by spin kicking, shooting off a skill crit, and repeating the process. Also while the bard can no longer make notes with their instrument, they can still spawn them with their class ability, so if you pin an enemy behind a bunch of notes with the guitar, you can kick the note, skill crit them with the guitar, and repeat as many times as you can over the next few seconds for a severe level of hurt.
  • Mages get Charon's Scythe, which sends them dashing forward with two massive sweeps, the first of which will skill crit anything above 50% HP, and the second hit skill crits anything below 50%. Used well and with enough damage, this can make for a weapon that can two-tap anything in your way... but if you use it poorly, it's more likely your Squishy Wizard will dive headfirst into the enemy's contact damage box. The trick is to take advantage of the excessive width of the swing to make sure your targets are above and below so the dash doesn't slam you into it.
  • Barbarians get Hephaestus' Hammer, which replaces their ground attack with their air attack at all times. This gives the Barbarian much more mobility at the cost of their high damage slam attacks, which have to be compensated for with good dashing which makes it skill crit, and like the scythe, if used poorly it's more likely you'll dash right into an enemy's hitbox.
  • Chefs get the Wooden Spoon, which is... a spoon. This weapon throws in a wide arc that can only hit things point blank next to you or far away and gains a skill crit after it rebounds off an enemy or scenery, which on paper makes it sound difficult to work with... until you get clever about the ricochets off of walls and ceilings to hit things at seemingly untouchable angles with skill crits, which used reliably can make it the fastest, safest and highest damage weapon in the game.
  • Boxers get the Explosive Fist weapons, which throws out flaming punches that travel in a wide arc, doing massive damage and skill crits after the arc starts falling. These fists can also hurt you, which includes critting yourself if you get into the explosion's path after it travels to that point. Used well, you have one of the highest damage weapons in the game bar none, used poorly, and you'll probably die to your own explosions before the enemies get to you, this turns the KO punch into a spacing tool to get enemies far enough way that you can nail them without fear of friendly fire.
  • Astromancers get the Crow Storm, a staff that can continuously churn out crows that can home in on enemies. You can fly while the staff is activated, giving you dodging power while attacking (and the fact that the crows skill crit at close range can help in hairy situations). Its drawback, like the Astromancer's normal weapon, is the delay in the crows starting, which is a little longer than the Celestial Sceptre.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Unlike in the first game, keeping a castle locked down in this game will increase the money penalty if you hold the same layout for multiple heirs in a row. This can possibly even result in a -70% money penalty if one layout is held long enough.
• Double Jump:
  • The Aether's Wings Heirloom you can find at the Far Shores bestows a double jump. You can get additional double jumps from using the Vault Rune or Aether's Grace Relic.
• Dual Boss:
  • "Estuary Twin-mech" a battle against two copies of Lamech in one of the many Scar challenges you can take on.
  • The giant skeleton pirate Byaarrith calls in his fellow crewmate Halpharrr once he loses a third of his health.
  • The Void Beast Gongheads are a pair of King Mooks to the Spear Maiden series of enemies.
  • In Pishon Dry Lake, there are two sets of two minibosses that need to be defeated to reach the area's boss. All four of them are King Mooks to the floating weapon enemies; one pits you against Cottus the Sword and Briareus the Hammer, and the other pits you against Aegaeon the Shield and Gyges the Axe.
  • Two of the Scars pit you against multiple Estuaries: Bladed Rose has you against Lamech and Naamah, while Two Lovers pits you against Naamah and Enoch.
• Edible Bludgeon: The Pepperoni Pizza Fabled Weapon, which can be rarely found or bought in the Soul Shop as an alternate starting weapon for the Knight. The Pepperoni Pizza improves upon the Chakram from the first game; thrown pizzas can curve to reach you when attempting to return after reaching the end of their initial throw, enabling various Boomerang Comeback strategies, and since the pizzas are your main weapon, they cost no MP to throw. They can also be used as targets to Spinkick off of.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Irad seemingly consists of a sheer mass of flesh with three giants eyes within.
  • Estuary Enoch is a fake, as he's tethered his soul to the boss chest.
• Enemy Roll Call: Similar to its predecessor, the game ends with a series of portraits depicting every enemy you've encountered and how many times each one has both slain you and been slain. Unlike the original game, there are no screen distortions from traits, and there's an addition of roots from the Tree of Immortality growing on the walls and overtop the Final Boss' portrait.
• Escape Sequence: The final sequence of the game is a Load-Bearing Boss followed by one of these, in which you have to find and activate a giant binding stone in the depths of Castle Hamson in order to teleport everyone away from the rising waters. It's incredibly easy to finish in time, as time barely passes during the Heirloom trial to activate binding stones, and you don't even have to re-clear it on subsequent runs, but there's an achievement for waiting for the clock to expire.
• Exact Time to Failure: During the above-mentioned Escape Sequence, a timer appears on-screen that gives the player exactly ten minutes to complete it. This is actually a subversion, as allowing the timer to expire will have it roll over into the negatives and award the "It Was Just an Estimate" achievement.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted. The Gunslinger class uses a “Kinetic Revolver” which, other than being referred to as a futuristic weapon, is treated no differently than any of the other weapons. The Gunslinger is counted as a magic class so presumably that’s how the guns work.
• Fartillery: The Super IBS trait gives your character farts potent enough to be both an attack as well as to boost your character into the sky.
• Farts on Fire: The Super Fart skill (which is gained from the Super IBS Trait and replaces your character's normal Class Skill) ignites any enemy hit by the blast.
• Fighting Clown: Several of the classes have very silly weapons. Highlights include a pepperoni pizza thrown like a chakram and a deceptively powerful spoon thrown in an arc.
• Final-Exam Boss: The Final Boss of the game, Cain, utilizes moves from most of the previous bosses in the game, such as the large crosses thrown by Byaarrith and Halpharrr; the player will need to remember how to deal with each, which involve using the Heirlooms they've been earning throughout the game.
• Fireballs: There is a surface-mounted obstacle that shoots out balls of fire at regular intervals.
• From Bad to Worse: This is the rebellion in a nutshell. Every step of the plan became catastrophically worse due to the rebels' and Estuaries' infighting, turning the castle into a tomb haunted by the insane shells of the Estuaries and a handful of survivors.
• Frying Pan of Doom: Chefs wield a cast-iron pan into combat. While their damage is a bit lackluster and they attack slowly, they hit hard enough to knock back most enemies on contact, and hitting a projectile reflects it as a fireball that deals solid damage and empowers their next attack.
• Gasshole: The IBS trait has your character habitually farting.
• Going Down with the Ship: At the end of the game, while the Pizza Girl successfully gets all of the town NPCs into Castle Hamson before it teleports away from the oncoming flood, Jonah remains by the tree of immortality he's always guarded and sinks along with it. However, in the Golden Ending, Ladon the Dragon rescues Jonah before he sinks and takes him to the rest of the surviving characters.
• Goomba Stomp: In addition to the standard Spinkick, having the Aerodynamic trait replaces the Spinkick with an alternative maneuver that enables plunging towards the ground at high speed. Unlike the Spinkick, this move also deals decent damage, allowing you to kill enemies effectively by simply spamming it on their heads.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • The Universal Health Stair is the first Manor upgrade you have to buy before opening other purchase options. With it, negative traits apply a gold multiplier to a heir for their run, incentivizing players to pick them and work around the detriments.
  • After beating the game, the player is capable of starting a New Game Plus "weave" without any additional Challenge Run modifiers. However, playing with additional challenges increases the amount of gold enemies drop and allows the higher-tier armor blueprints to be found in chests, and defeating harder variants of the Estuary bosses unlocks new lore entries and Scars.
• History Repeats: Both this game and the original Rogue Legacy involve a king willing to sacrifice their own Legacy to attain immortality, and a Rogue that tries to stop them, with the key difference being whether the Rogue is considered heroic (Jonah) or villainous (Johannes).
• Hitbox Dissonance: The Disattuned trait decreases your maximum health by 25%, but also reduces your hitbox to a small heart in the center of your character, similar to a Bullet Hell game.
• Holiday Mode:
  • Halloween 2021 replaced the chicken drops with candy, gave many enemies spooky masks, and added breakable Jack-o-Lanterns in the areas.
  • Christmas 2021 made chicken into cookies and potions into milk, put several enemies in festive hats and masks, and decorated the game's settings with presents and strings of red and green lights.
• Hope Spot: When you find Estuary Enoch's private place, his memory offers a poison that can supposedly kill Estuary Irad, the boss after him. Someone else took it.
  • Incidentally, when J/Jonah/the Nameless Knight ambushed Irad and rang his bell to summon Charon with your first heir, the bell-ringing gave Irad a realization: if he simply killed the other Estuaries himself, he could get a new Fruit for the King, resolving the game's story on his own. And then Irad was a trio of eyes.
• Human Resources: Cain makes Estuaries by having them consume a bit of his own flesh.
• Hyperactive Metabolism:
  • Chicken drumsticks return from the first game, appearing as a random drop from breakables and - with the Body Buffet relic - enemies that can restore health equal to twice your Intelligence value. Pepperoni pizzas have been added as well, which restore more health than chicken.
  • The "Nectar" heirloom, which restores a good portion of your hero's health and mana, takes the form of an apple.
  • Chefs can use chicken and- with the Alchemy Lab manor upgrade- mana potions to charge their ability, a stew pot that restores both health and mana.
  • During the beta, the Haunted Hallows Eve update replaces chicken drumsticks with wrapped candy (as part of the holiday event), which is just as effective for healing. Better yet, characters with the Vegan trait can heal a small amount from it, too.
  • Also during the beta, the Winter Gifts update swapped drumsticks out for cookies and turned mana potions into milk - the classic Leaving Food for Santa combo.
• I Did What I Had to Do: After being cut off from the rest of Genesis for so long, Naamah unhappily resorts to culling the most frail of the Plateau's villagers. It's not clear whether it's just culling, using them to feed the local food forests, or feeding the residents outright. But considering all the gravestones in the level, the situation just never improved...
• Immortality Immorality: Eating of the pure fruit of the Tree of Life grants immortality, but the white tree of life spreads big, black roots that only grow as more Estsuaries (people granted a portion of the king's immortality) are made. The land is stretched thin and becomes more corrupt the more the king is propped up, in a reverse Fisher King situation. The Nameless Knight notes, however, that the player's immortality is a lot less corrupt, because you're really paying it forward by gifting your memories to future generations rather than stealing life from everyone to stay the same forever.
• In a Single Bound: Heroes with the "IIb Muscle Fibers" trait gain massively increased jump height, being able to jump to the ceiling of a normal-sized room from ground level with a single button press.
• Interface Screw:
  • Several traits from the first game return here:
    • Vertigo vertically flips the screen, except for the HUD elements. This one proved to be a bit too much for players this time around however, and was removed in the first update patch after the game's launch.
    • Nostalgic makes the game sepia-toned and markedly lowers audio fidelity.
    • Colorblind renders the game in monochrome.
    • Glaucoma, prior to its removal from the game, made the game much darker.
    • Histrionic is the functional replacement to Hypochondria; it exaggerates the numbers on the damage you take, and unlike the first game, also exaggerates what you deal.
    • C.I.P. removes your ability to see your health.
  • Synesthesia causes rainbow light trails to come out of everything. This includes your character, enemies, and any projectiles onscreen. This can cause problems with multiple enemies as the light trails can obstruct your vision.
  • The Diva trait makes the entire screen pitch black except for a spotlight on the character and enemies.
  • Cartographer makes it so the entire map is accessible at all times, but removes your minimap and prevents the map from displaying your location. This can make it easy to get lost if you haven't been keeping track of what rooms you've been through.
  • Panic Attack (as of 0.2.0) causes nearly the entire screen to turn dark when taking damage, making it nearly impossible to see for a brief few seconds.
  • Puritan pixelates every enemy.
  • Associative Agnosia renders all enemies as black silhouettes, which makes things spectacularly difficult in Erebus bonus areas with their black starfield backgrounds.
  • Alexithymia removes your ability to see the damage you deal, as well as the health bars of opponents.
• Kaizo Trap: True Estuary Enoch spits out three exploding potions when defeated, mimicking how Mimics spill poisoned coins when they die. This turns out to be a subversion, because nothing in any boss arena does damage to you after you kill the boss, including these potions.
• Kill It with Fire: The Burn status effect causes foes to ignite and take damage repeatedly until it wears off. Some Spells are capable of inflicting it, while the Cook can inflict it with their normal attack or reflected projectiles. Heroes with the Amaterasu's Sun Relic can gain the same effect.
• Knockback Evasion: A new core ability is the ability to recover from knockback by pressing the jump button after taking damage.
• Lag Cancel:
  • A special property of the dash ability allows you to dash cancel most attacks or actions, which can be used to get out of harm's way or just move fast.
  • The endlag on Duelist's aerial attack resets whenever they touch the ground, allowing the player to input a grounded attack immediately. This chain can be used strategically to deal double hits in quick succession.
• Legacy Boss Battle: The "Nightmare Premonitions" scar is a combination of Irad's boss battle in this game with the boss battle of Khidr from the first Rogue Legacy. Most of the attacks come from Irad, but a few come from Khidr, while the room layout is based on Khidr's own and the music playing is his boss theme, "Pistol Shrimp".
• Large and in Charge: The Estuaries are massive, with most looking to be well over 15 feet tall.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The spoon is exactly what it sounds like. It has a strange upward arc, and the sound effect is a pathetic little clack. If you hit an enemy directly it does little damage, but if you manage to bounce it off something first it can do incredible damage.
  • The Lute would not be seen as anyone's first choice for a weapon, but its musical note projectiles can block almost every enemy projectile. With the game's bullet hell tendencies increasing with the difficulty, the Lute can come in clutch when it counts.
• Load-Bearing Boss: At the end of the game, Cain's death releases all the souls he's stored within him, releasing them back into the Stygian waters. This causes said waters to rise around the castle to take everything and everyone (including the Garden of Eden) down with him, necessitating an Escape Sequence.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The basic Knight class has a unique Shield as a Talent. It can absorb damage from almost anything and can be deployed at any time; in addition, using your Shield right before taking a hit triggers a Perfect Block, which fully protects from damage and causes a burst of energy to erupt from your hero that destroys projectiles and knocks back foes.
• Macrogame: In addition to all of the stuff that carries over between runs in the original, this game introduces permanent collectables called Heirlooms, which bestow powers such as enhanced dashes and talking to ethereal whispers for clues and remain part of your family forever once earned.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: Upon defeating all of the Estuaries, the player is allowed to enter the door in the main hall, which takes them to the Garden of Eden and a tree that grows the Fruit of Immortality, guarded by the "traitor" Jonah. After proving their worth, the player then receives the (now poisoned) Fruit and takes it to their "Brother", Cain, who congratulates you for succeeding where his own children have failed...before taking a bite and transforming into a plant-human hybrid monstrosity.
• The Man Behind the Man: Every character (except for Ladon, the Nameless Knight, and your harbor friends) serves the Immortal King. Yes, even you.
• Magic Knight: Every Heir (except ones with Masochist) has the function of the Spellblade class from the first game, which gives them MP back for attacking and encourages much freer use of magic spells than the first game where they were often hoarded because mana was harder to come by. After getting enough dialogue from Lady Quinn, she tells you this is because Lamech enforced Spellblade training into every kind of fighting style in Agartha because of its practicality.
• Magikarp Power: Heirs with the "Pacifist" trait start with a rather hefty gold bonus, but deal no damage with any of their attacks and can't use talent abilities or magic. If you get lucky enough to come across a Curio Shoppe carrying a Blessing of Strength, however, they can pick up the weapon, renounce their pacifism and turning the trait into "Pacifier," which still grants the same huge gold bonus while allowing you to attack and deal damage properly again. This makes Pacifism potentially one of the best traits for gaining a ton of gold in a single run.
• Meaningful Name: The Estuary title. An estuary is a body of water that feeds a second one. Cain nominated the Estuaries solely to get another fruit from the Tree of Life for him to eat.
• Metroidvania: The sequel leans more into this aspect, with the introduction of Ability Required to Proceed via permanent upgrades that can be found inside the kingdom, as well as a "Mastery EXP" feature (from Full Metal Furies) that that grants permanent boosts to all of your heroes by defeating enemies with Classes to upgrade them.
• Mirror Boss:
  • The boss of the Citadel, Estuary Lamech, is titled "The First Spellsword", and mostly uses variants of the same attacks that the heroes get.
  • The boss of the Garden of Eden, Jonah the Traitor, utilizes the same abilities as the player, including the Chef's pizza chakrams and the Ranger's bow. The final scar is a match against a character who fights much the same as Jonah, plus another character who casts spells that were previously available only to the player.
• Modular Difficulty: The House Rules are accessibility settings that augment the difficulty. From enabling flight, to disabling contact damage, to cranking up or down enemy damage, etc.
• Multiple Endings: After clearing the game once, the option to start a New Game Plus outright states that a Golden Ending may await in another Thread. In order to actually reach it, the player must play enough New Game Plus runs to receive a Mysterious Key from Jonah and unlock all optional "Prime" versions of the bosses, use the Key on a hidden door in the tutorial to access some lore, and then defeat all Prime bosses. If this is accomplished, then right before the credits start rolling, Ladon the Dragon suddenly flies in from the horizon, lands nearby, and spits a rescued Jonah out in front of the other characters. Maria immediately gives him a big hug despite him being covered in dragon spit, and Jonah is glad to be reunited with his beloved "Z".
• Mythology Gag: The "Nightmare Premonitions" scar recreates the setting of the boss battle against Khidr from the first Rogue Legacy. The room preceding the boss is laid out like the same rooms from that game - ledges on both sides, an indent in the floor in the middle, and the boss door on a floating platform, flanked by two statues that have a food drop and a potion drop. Meanwhile, the boss room itself is a small rectangle with pulse-sensing spike traps and two floating soft platforms, hearkening back to the layout of Khidr's room.
• No Dead Body Poops: Averted for heroes with Super IBS, whose corpses release one last massive fart that's strong enough to push the corpse offscreen.
• Nostalgia Level: A number of rooms in this game have the same layouts as rooms from Rogue Legacy 1, but with the same graphical revamp the rest of the game received. Some of them have received slight alterations corresponding to changes in game mechanics, such as a room with ceiling arrow launchers and Resonant kick platforms above a spiked pit in the Kerguelen Plateau, which mimics a room from the first game that instead used fireball turrets and temporary down-strike platforms.
• Old Master: Lamech, the First Spellsword, is a decrepit old man, but in his prime he was the most powerful of all the Estuaries.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder:
  • The One Hit Wonder trait makes it so you always have 1 HP. On the upside, you also get the highest Gold multiplier of any trait in the game.
  • A handful of relics, such as Charon's Trial and Pandora's Trial, are Cursed Relics, which make any blow to your character fatal until you purify them (the method of doing so being told in their description).
• One-Man Army: Lamech. The rebels were terrified of him inevitably joining the fight, to the point where a large part of their plan consisted of isolating him in a single part of the castle where he wouldn't be able to call on reinforcements and then launching a full-on assault. The plan succeeded, but he killed everyone who encountered him anyway.
• Opposites Attract: The loud and bombastic Sage Totem and the quiet, awkward Lady Quinn eventually look into starting a relationship.
  • Also, the gruff Blacksmith and the smooth and spiritual Enchantress begin a relationship, and plan on heading for the capital (presumably to get married) in the end.
• Pixellation: Parodied with the Puritan trait, which censors every enemy in the game. "Everything is lewd."
• Player Death Is Dramatic: The deaths have been "upgraded" with new death animations, such as a dramatic backflip as they die or the hero clutching their knee in pain before keeling over. There are also some funnier ones such as the hero taking a bow before collapsing or imitating the "Guess I'll die" meme before keeling over.
• Playing Both Sides: Estuary Tubal discretely supplied both the rebels and citadel forces with weaponry to make the rebellion more vicious and bloody than it would have been were it just a bunch of commoners with pitchforks against Lamech and his guardsmen. He then proceeded to clean up both weakened forces with his sky-darkening amount of automaton weaponry, intending to take over Genesis, but he was captured by rebels furious at his betrayal while he was busy controlling his army and fed to Ladon.
• Poison Mushroom: Characters with the Vegan trait take damage when consuming Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat.
• Poor Communication Kills: Poor communication, or an outright lack of communication, gets nearly every Estuary where they are at by the start of the game. Irad doesn't tell any of the Estuaries that their collective stepfather has made replacements for them on the surface; thus, Tubal has to find out on his own, and goes mad from it. Ladon doesn't tell Irad that Tubal was dumped into his mouth, preventing his Ash-Cloud-creating illness from being treated, and making the winter over Kerguelen Plateau permanent. Murmur doesn't tell Enoch when he becomes afflicted with the Black Root poison, ultimately allowing Enoch and everyone else in the Stygian Study to make the same mistake as well. Naamah doesn't tell anyone about the rebellion, despite it being planned out under her very nose and involving her own daughter, which results in Irad blaming everything on her anyway when it does happen and preventing her from leaving her winter-stricken lands. Lamech also doesn't tell anyone about the rebellion, thinking he can handle it all on his own or die trying, and he accomplishes neither.
• Posthumous Character: Mention is made of an Estuary Mehujael from various memories, who was apparently a captain who sailed the Stygian Seas and vanished under unknown circumstances after an incident resulted in the mines under Pishon Dry Lake being flooded by the stygian waters. While he never appears and is likely long since dead, his presence is felt in the form of Halpharr and Byarreth, his first mate and quartermaster who he made "Estuaries of an estuary" to save from the cave-in... which, unfortunately, couldn't prevent the Black Roots from corrupting them into Void Beasts. His power remaining active in them even after his death is the reason his portrait shows up after they're slain.
• Power-Up Magnet: The Magnesis rune makes money, ore, and aether fly towards your character, with more runes equating to more magnet range.
• Properly Paranoid: The "Paranoid" trait makes chests drop an explosive potion when opened. The description's thoughts? "It's not paranoia if you're right."
• Punny Name: The sentient training dummy Lady Mana Quinn's name is a homophone joke on her being a mannequin.
• Quirky Bard:
  • Cooks have significantly reduced stats compared to typical combat classes, but their Frying Pan of Doom has several unique properties and they're the only class with the ability to Heal Thyself with their Talent, which also comes with multiple charges that can be restored with Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat or mana potions.
  • The actual Bard class, and it's just as quirky as one would expect. Their lute sends notes in the direction you play it in; while the notes themselves do little damage, the real blows come from Spinkicking the notes, which causes very damaging explosions. Their talent turns projectiles into roses which behave the same as notes minus the passive damage, and their passive trait lets them increase their damage as long as they keep jumping or kicking off things and don't touch the ground. This is as difficult as it sounds, resulting in most players never choosing the class.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: The Architect tells some pretty wacky and rambling stories, such as a story about a clever circus trainer setting a trap using clever peanuts, ending with him being eaten by a clever elephant. Another is about a turtle named Jiminy Cricket and a hare named Jiminy Turtle, who never interact in any way and then die of old age.
• Recoil Boost:
  • Firing an arrow in mid-air as a Ranger can be used to get a bit of extra distance during a jump.
  • Casting Super Fart (if you have the Super IBS trait) provides enough propulsion to function as a makeshift extra jump.
• Retcon: Byaarrith and Halpharrr were originally just a Void Beast boss in Axis Mundi. Many people were confused about the duo not activating another portrait on the Big Door in Citadel Agartha like the Estuary bosses do, which eventually resulted in them being added as a new second portrait in the Drifting Worlds update. Defeating their Prime variation reveals that they were part of the crew of an Estuary, who had since made them Estuaries of him.
• Retraux: The Nostalgic trait makes the music lower fidelity and puts a beige old-timey movie filter on top of the screen.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory:
  • When the player fights Jonah on a New Game Plus, he admits to being aware you're on a new "Thread", and proclaims he enjoys your company and will be ready to test you every single time.
  • In the Golden Ending, Ladon the Dragon also claims to have witnessed the "changes in the Threads", which is how he was able to rescue Jonah from sinking beneath the Stygian waters.
• Schizo Tech: Despite the medieval setting and most classes using plate mail, medieval weapons, and magic there are classes that use distinctly non-medieval weapons ranging from guns, pirate cannons, a surfboard, and an Electric Lute. Modern style pizza is also extremely prominent.
• Self-Deprecation: One of the traits is "FMF Fan" ("You're probably Korean"), nodding to another Cellar Door Games release, Full Metal Furies. This trait does nothing in terms of gameplay changes, but given that it comes with a +25% gold multiplier, it's evidently seen as a detriment to your character.
• Set Bonus: Equipment has a stat called Unity that increases when wearing multiple pieces of gear from the same series. When Unity reaches a certain value, set-specific bonuses are gained, such as increasing Weight capacity or Armor.
• Shield Bash: A Perfect Block with the shield causes a shockwave that damages enemies and destroys projectiles.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Amaterasu's Sun", which bears a heavy resemblance to the logo for Ōkami.
  • The description for Osteogenesis Imperfecta simply reads "one shot, one opportunity", referencing the opening lyrics of the Eminem song "Lose Yourself".
  • The "IIB Muscle Fibers" trait allows your character to jump much higher. Its pause menu description reads "Reach the jumping prowess of a plumber", in reference to Super Mario Bros.. The "Fun-Guy"/"Fun-Gal" trait also references Mario by turning all health drops into mushrooms that cause your character to grow larger, after which they will shrink back down upon taking damage.
  • The "FMF Fan" trait nods to Cellar Door's previous game, Full Metal Furies.
  • The unique property of the Duelist's attack (listed above under Lag Cancel) is likely an allusion to a similar (though unintended) technique in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
  • One of the poses your character can strike upon dying is, fittingly enough, the "Guess I'll die" shrug.
• Soul Eating: This is what Cain has been using his link to the Tree of Life for, stealing souls as they enter the tree to bolster his own power. They're not destroyed, though, considering his death lets them all surge back into the Styx.
• Space Master: Maria the Pizza Girl is the only person in the entire kingdom capable of predicting the castle's shifting geometry, and can even establish fixed points for faster travel. When the rebellion went awry, Maria, aka Z, saved hundreds of survivors, spiriting them safely out of the kingdom before returning to continue her work.
• Spike Balls of Doom: Floating sphered with spikes on them can occasionally be found.
• Spikes of Doom: Spikes appear commonly on various surfaces as a hazard.
• Spin Attack:
  • A new core mechanic is the Spinkick (replacing the downwards stab now that classes use alternate weapons), a downwards-angled kick attack that allows you to Goomba Springboard off enemies and objects. In Axis Mundi, you can upgrade your Spinkick to the Echo Kick, which enables bouncing off Resonant objects and projectiles and additionally refunds your air dash if it's been used.
  • Barbarians rapidly cartwheel with their axe out when attacking in midair, dealing multiple hits of light damage to anything in their path. However, these hits do not recover mana.
  • The Fury's Hammer Fabled Weapon makes it so your only melee attack is a constant cartwheel just like the Barbarians' midair attack. You'll spin as long as the weapon is toggled on, but move slower than normal while doing so. Unlike the Barbarian spin, you regenerate a bit of mana on hitting enemies with it.
• Spin to Deflect Stuff: The Valkyrie's talent, aptly named Deflect. It can destroy mid-sized projectiles, and it grants mana when successfully done.
• Stealth Prequel: The game initially seems like a standalone sequel with no story connections to the original. Then, after defeating all of the Estuaries, you're tasked with collecting a Fruit of Immortality from the Garden of Eden, and returning to your brother Cain at the castle you've spent the game building up...Castle Hamson, the castle from the first game. After Cain's attempt at becoming immortal backfires and he becomes the Final Boss, the final Escape Sequence leads to the castle getting warped to a forest, and Charon taking toll at its entrance, matching its state in the first game.
• Super-Scream:
  • Barbarians retain their "Fah Ro Dus" ability from the previous game, now renamed "Winter's Shout". In addition to doing everything it could in the original, it now also momentarily Freezes any enemy in range.
  • The Bard's unique class talent is "Crescendo" - "Always end on a high note". When used, your character belts out an operatic shout that turns all enemy projectiles into harmless floating roses, which can be Spinkicked to deal damage in a shockwave.
• Temporary Platform:
  • Citadel Agartha contains wooden platforms that temporarily break when you jump off of them. One of the Heirloom trials lets you exploit this by using it to drop a mob of enemies into a pit of spikes.
  • The Talent of Rangers, "Ivy Canopy", lets them create a platform of leaves while in midair, allowing them to get a better vantage point to snipe at foes if the room's layout isn't conducive to their attack. The Ivy Seed relic lets any character spawn one of these after doing an aerial recovery.
• Theme Naming: The Estuaries all have names given to the Biblical descendants of Cain (to quote a passage, "To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael the father of Methushael, and Methushael the father of Lamech", with the world's first blacksmith Tubal and his sister Naamah being the offspring of Lamech and Zillah. In the end, it turns out they're indeed the offspring of the player's "Brother", Cain.
• Three-Strike Combo: The Assassin class is stated to be specialized in the three-hit combo, and only the three-hit combo. The only attack they execute with their dual blades is to slash with one each, and then both at the same time.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: The Gunslinger's Talent, "Makeshift Explosive", lets them drop a bundle of dynamite that stays where it's placed and explodes in a cross-shaped pattern after a brief delay.
• Toilet Humor:
  • In addition to plain old IBS, there's also Super IBS, which replaces your character's Talent with the Super Fart spell. Super Fart causes the user to emit a large fart explosion, dealing damage and setting enemies on fire. It can also be used as a pseudo-Double Jump due to Recoil Boost. Also, when the player dies, they fart and propel themselves offscreen.
  • Lady Quinn occasionally replaces the word "back" with "butt" due to her nervous stutter.
• Token Evil Teammate: The Estuaries were all over the map in terms of morality, but the most outright evil of the lot was Tubal, who intended to usurp the throne from the beginning and devoted most of his efforts to building an army of automatons that he could use to slaughter whoever survived the rebellion.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Naamah was by far the most benevolent of the Estuaries, a farmer and healer who promoted sustainable agriculture and gave medical treatment to enemies and allies alike. Irad, in a desperate attempt to keep favor with the King, cuts her off from the rest of the kingdom for her "treachery" and leaves her and her followers to starve.
  • It helps that unlike most of the other Estuaries, she's not actually related to Cain.
• Trick Boss: That floating spellcaster is not Estuary Enoch. Upon defeating him and attempting to claim your loot, the real Estuary Enoch is revealed to be the chest itself.
• Underground City: What Genesis actually is. Cain arranged for the place to be constructed and manned expressly to make harvesting the Tree of Life's next fruit that much easier, especially since he'd be free to take over ever more of the surface world in the meantime.
• Undying Loyalty: Irad is full of this where the King is concerned. If the Blight hadn't reshaped him first, he might have gotten all the other Estuaries killed just to supply Cain with a new fruit from the Tree of Life. When Enoch learned about what would make the Tree bear fruit first, he developed his black root poison and let Jonah use it on Irad specifically because of fear Irad would damn the entire kingdom for the fruit.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Duelists have the (aptly-named) Combat Roll as their Class Talent. Rolling allows you to move forward while striking enemies and having complete invulnerability, and you can cancel out of a Roll with a normal attack. While the move is free to use, it has a 2 second cooldown between uses.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It's eventually revealed that much of the game's tragedy can be traced back to the unseen and unfought Estuary Jabal, who was secretly taking credit for Irad's strategies to curry favor with the King. This led Irad to deliberately sabotage the kingdom's defenses against the rebellion and betray Naamah, which in turn led Enoch to develop the Black Briar poison that would mutate several of the Estuaries - all of which helped turn the rebellion into the slaughter it eventually became.
  • On that note, Estuary Jabal's very existence is what destroyed Tubal's loyalty to the King and made him turn on everyone in the first place; seeing that the King had made new Estuaries such as Jabal to conquer the surface world (via sneaking his soul out of Genesis in a Soul Jar), instead of allowing one of the Genesis-bound Estuaries back to the surface to help out, really soured his mood.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Estuary Lamech, the boss of Citadel Agartha. He fights very different than most bosses in the first game, being a large human with screen-filling magic attacks in a small room rather than a simpler King Mook. He also has lots of health and powers up halfway through the fight. The game is set up to teach players how to use the new spinkick and (now required) air dash before reaching him, as both are necessary to avoid his attacks.
• Wallet Moths:
  • The Diogenes' Bargain relic removes all further money drops from your run, but boosts the experience you gain in return. Should you attempt to open a chest that would normally contain money while you have this relic, the nothing you receive is heralded by a handful of moths flying out of the chest.
  • Opening the boss chest after beating Estuary Enoch leaves you with naught but a few moths. That's because it's not the real chest.
• Where It All Began: The Final Boss is fought in the castle you start at at the start of each run and you have spent the entire game building up. Said castle is Castle Hamson from the first game, making it a meta example as well.
• Worf Had the Flu: None of the bosses are fought at their peak, as it's repeatedly driven home that the Estuaries are each a One-Man Army that you normally wouldn't stand a chance against without them having been reduced so severely. Lamech is half-dead after having fought off a literal army and wasting away for who knows how long in the throne room, Naamah is withered from the unnatural winter and famine in the plateau, Enoch has long since turned himself into a mimic with his "real" body being a puppet, Irad has mutated into a gigantic eyeball, and Tubal has long since gone mad from the Black Roots and is fighting on instinct. You end up doing this intentionally to the final boss, as Cain at his true power would be too much to handle, so you poison the Fruit of Life which mutates him into a killable form. The "Burden of X" options for New Game Plus runs somewhat avert this - while they're not at their absolute peaks, this is before the worst effects of their various ailments set in, making them much more powerful.
• Womb Level: The boss battle against Estuary Tubal takes place inside the stomach of a large dragon named Ladon.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: During the game's climax, while you're taking the Heirloom trial to activate the binding stones needed to relocate Castle Hamson, the timer slows down to the point that only a few milliseconds pass for every actual second.

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