Cardinal Quest II
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Cardinal Quest II is a "Coffee break" Roguelike Flash game hosted on Kongregate. You play as one of six character classes, and embark on a series of three quests to slay fiends.
Tropes used in Cardinal Quest II include:
- Anti-Frustration Features: In my Roguelike? It's more likely than you think.
- You can sell equipment instantly, either by trading it for new equipment or trashing what you find. No need to haul unused armor around, waiting for the next scavenger to show up!
- Found a piece of equipment which is equal or inferior in all respects to what you currently have? The new equipment will automatically be converted to money without prompt, so that you don't have to bother with constantly making tedious decisions to trash obviously-junk equipment.
- Anti-Grinding: Go too many turns without fighting enemies or revealing unexplored tiles, and enemies will begin to randomly spawn near you and harass you. These enemies, naturally, will not award XP on death (since that would defeat the purpose of being an anti-grinding measure). All in all, a far more lenient method of keeping the player moving than the dreaded Wizard Needs Food Badly approach.
- Bare-Fisted Monk: Pugilists cannot equip weapons, but they can wreck the enemy just fine without them.
- Blood Knight: The Pugilist's motivation for brawling their way through dungeons is the simplest of all classes -- they just love fighting, and want to fight really strong things.
- Dumb Muscle: The Pugilist. In early versions this was less obvious, but with the introduction of Tomes, it becomes evident that they are illiterate. When any class besides the Pugilist uses a Tome, they gain a permanent stat boost for the rest of the run. If a Pugilist uses a Tome, they simply throw it at an enemy for moderate-heavy damage.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: You have very limited room for equipment, items, and skills.
- On your person, you can equip exactly one weapon (zero, if you're the Pugilist), one set of body armor, one pair of gloves, one pair of boots, one necklace, and one ring. When you find a new piece of (non-inferior) equipment, you are shown how your stats will change by swapping your old piece of equipment for the new piece. If you want to equip the new piece, you must sell the old piece (no take-backs). You can also sell the new piece if you don't want it, or leave it if you're not ready to decide yet (you'll have to decide before you move on to the next area, though).
- You can also carry up to five items and know up to five skills at any one time. Unlike equipment, items and skills cannot be sold; if you run out of room, you'll have to leave an item or skill behind. (Never mind how skills can be discarded in physical locations.)
- Poison Mushroom: Averted, thankfully. All items are beneficial, and are up-front about their effects.
- Technical Pacifist: One of the starting perks you can choose for your Paladin is "Noncombatant". It eliminates XP earned in combat, but at the end of each stage, all enemies you leave alive award double their XP value. You are still only a Technical Pacifist because you may harm enemies and still get the end-stage bonus for not killing them. You are also not actually forbidden from killing enemies, so you can always slash your way out of any enemy encounter if there's no other way of escape. And then there's the fact that, like all non-Wizard classes, the only way to complete an Act is to kill the Boss at the end.