Roguelite character action?

I've had this idea about a roguelite game with DMC/Bayonetta/Ninja Gaiden-esque combat: The game progression could be something similar to Hades, where you are trapped in a room with a group of enemies and once you defeat them you go to another room and choose an upgrade, something like DMC's Bloody Palace but with intermediate upgrades. If you die, you go back to the start. There could be 2 different types of upgrades you can find so not all progress is lost:

• Permanent: Once unlocked you can use them in all your runs from the start. This could be used to unlock more moves, like Stinger or Million Stab, or it could unlock new optional moves so you can configure your loadout before every run. For example, instead of Stinger you could link the input to a Devil Bringer-type move. Weapons could also be permament upgrades: Once you find them in a run they're always available.
  
• Current-run-only: These need to be found in every run and are lost when you die. They are small modifiers like making launchers launch even the heavier enemies, or fill the special gauge when parrying an attack, or recover health with Obliteration Techniques, or empower the next attack after switching weapons...The player will get several options to choose from every time, so they can create specialized builds, like one that grants many buffs and special effects with every parry, or another based on finishing combo chains (the last hit in a combo deals AoE damage, the last hit heals you, or it freezes the enemy...), or another that focuses on switching weapons constantly...
  

Now, the most important reason why I like this idea is that you need in-game currency to pay for all of these. And how do you get this currency? With the style rank system! Long combos, technique variety, speed in cleaning encounters and damage taken will all be used to rank you after every encounter and award you currency, so you can use it to buy the permanent upgrades, or to get the most powerful stuff in the shops that appear mid-run. This could be a good way to entice all players, and not just hardcore fans like ourselves, to chase after higher ranks as they will have a lot of weight in the result of their run: if you just beat encounters with C+ ranks you will be getting very little currency and you won't be able to upgrade your character to keep up with the rising difficulty of the run.

Alternatively, for hardcore fans it throws some randomness and variation in each run with the varying encounters and loadouts that you can find everytime, so it adds a bit more replayability to something like DMC's Bloody Palace or NG's challenges that are always the same.

What do you think? Would you like a game like this? Or do you think this idea is somehow flawed? Do you have any cool ideas for upgrades and crazy builds?

I love the feel of gradually building your toolset over the course of a run, or planning upgrades out for a challenge run, and I lament the trend in modern action games to be all about New Game+, so I would be totally down for a game like this.

Following from the above, I want to be rebuilding that toolset every time. In a "roguelite DMC" I would definitely want the core upgrades, your weapons and moves, to be obtained per-run. Permanent upgrades would be secondary modifiers, maybe the style moves or devil trigger stuff.

Rorc wrote:Following from the above, I want to be rebuilding that toolset every time. In a "roguelite DMC" I would definitely want the core upgrades, your weapons and moves, to be obtained per-run. Permanent upgrades would be secondary modifiers, maybe the style moves or devil trigger stuff.

I hadn't thought about it that way, but this would add much more variety between runs. I still can't land on what system would be better, as both have big strengths and weaknesses:

Permanent moves and weapons:

• Pros: You're able to make great combos from the start of each run
  
• Cons: You may end up playing always the same way with little variation as your main moveset is always more or less the same

Run-based moves and weapons:

• Pros: Each run can be wildly different depending on the moves and weapons you unlock
  
• Cons: Your moveset starts in a very reduced state in every run, so every run may get a bit boring until you unlock enough moves. Also, it will be waaaay harder to learn/discover complex combos as your moves and weapons change all the time

I think the best choice would be something in the middle, like allowing you to choose a couple of weapons with a basic moveset at the start of the run and then find more weapons and moves during the run itself....