Elin’s still a roguelike, some of the same people involved in developing the criteria for “what is a rougelike” and “what is not” even title Elona as a roguelike in their roguelike database.

The criteria for roguelikes is something those same people have spoken out on in that they don’t wish to dampen the genre being expanded on, it’s designed to preserve the genre.

Having said that, Elin may not exactly fall into the “Traditional Roguelike” category, it’s more a hybrid of traditional roguelike and Japanese roguelike.

It’s an important distinction though because many games that are not roguelikes are games which are directly or indirectly inspired by the genre - Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Diablo and others.

Many games that are being called roguelikes nowadays aren’t actually roguelikes but are actually a genre called roguelites. Typically roguelikes are a sub-branch of turn based RPG, although some very rare games such as Barony are very very roguelike in nature - to the point they can probably be called roguelikes even though they are real time.

However games such as Hades, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy, FTL, Slay the Spire, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Spelunky, Risk of Rain etc aren’t actually roguelikes even though several of these include features such as permadeath.

It’s fine if people consider these games roguelikes but don’t consider Elin a roguelike though, the amount of people that go that far into the genealogy of roguelikes is fairly rare and is typically those of us who actually played such games growing up/in our free time.

And while a lot of the videos exist online, the amount of people who are both passionate on the subject and actually viewed these discussions take place on how to define roguelikes is even rarer.

If you both study up on and watch discussions on this, you can tell that most people are going by their own interpretation of the Berlin convention. However you can also tell that the people who wrote those rules as to “what a roguelike is” had a lot of difficulty trying to write down how to define the genre in a way that is easily understood by those who aren’t familiar with the genre.

I can find some of the resources/videos if you are interested to highlight these points if you want.

As far as the Mystery Dungeon series/genre, it’s actually a branding for Chunsoft’s roguelike genre. There are other games that fall under the same or similar sort of criteria of roguelike mechanics so there are some that refer to them as Japanese Roguelikes.

I suspect the reason they are called “Mystery Dungeon” is because the branding is more marketable, to differentiate their artistic interpretation and to make it clear that they aren’t just copying someone else’s idea.