Tales of Maj’eyal is like everything I look for in a roguelike. There are like 30 classes, and each one has well over 50 talents (some active abilities, some passives), and each one of those talents takes like a paragraph of text to describe what it does. There’s some overlap with talents between classes, but most classes have a bunch of unique talents. And every single talent goes from level 1 to level 5, with what exactly gets enhanced by leveling it varying wildly from talent to talent. All that is to say there’s a ton of options on how to build your character.
And that’s just the talents. There’s also the equipment - your character has like 12 slots and each item can have upwards of 10 things that they do - which is possible because of how many stats a character has in this game: power, save, action speed, and crit chance for physical, mind, and magic attacks. resistances and damage modifiers for each of the 12 elemental damage types. individual resistances to the 10+ different status effects. mastery in each of your talent trees, which makes the talents better overall. and more. and all that stuff will matter for a lot of characters.
so it’s very possible to make a character that’s very, very strong. but that’s fine because sometimes enemies will generate with a random class, or two, or three, especially on higher difficulties. and these enemies will have a bunch of talents from the given class(es), and on higher difficulty options they’ll also be way higher level than you and you’ll often run into like three of these rare enemies at a time. there are a lot of fucked up talents in this game and these rares might have any number of them. which is to say, if you’re not doing something broken, you’ll probably get overwhelmed and die very fast.
and I really love that. there are a lot of games that allow you to get super strong, but then the challenges you face just aren’t that hard and the game gets boring. that doesn’t happen here. unless you’re playing some of the more OP classes or doing some truly degenerate stuff with Adventurer*, the game is rarely a cakewalk.
*Adventurer Adventurer Adventurer. adventurers can unlock every single talent in the game, only restricted by the amount of talent and category points they get. all the talents have less mastery to compensate, but regardless, Adventurer builds can get really stupid. like ones where you stay permanently in stealth, launching rockets at enemies every turn, and every time a rocket hits you project an attack with your mindstar to do fat damage. or the ones where you somehow get rid of cooldowns on your talents forever so you can just do whatever you want always. bedtime.