>>539181764
Maybe if you wanted to help newcomers better understand the genre or more accurately identify which games were roguelikes or not so fans could find them better, this would be a productive discussion.

It's clear you're just focused on asserting some pathetic kind of pedantic redefinition which uses your particular maladaptive phrasing purely for self-aggrandizement, wasting everyone's time so you can feel superior going about beating people over the head with technical discrepancies you claim to be the sole arbiter of.

Once you set the clear category "a roguelike game" and "a game with roguelike-like elements" I doubt anyone has trouble on anything but the most avant garde and experimental edge cases- Which is fucking FINE?? It's ok if a game is truly straddling the boundary line, especially as a deliberate exploration of design space, isn't it??

That's all it boils down to.
Games that are trying to be like Rogue and games that are borrowing the elements of the aforementioned. They'll be "like Rogue" but they're not "trying to be like Rogue"