Metroidvania General - An overcrowded genre with recycled themes and muddled mechanics.

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The first blasphemous had a lot more intact character, but the second one was more fun to actually play imo. Except that means it's a lot more like just a regular Metroidvania.
The second ditched the original pixel-y cutscene style for (I think) standard flash animation which is extremely sad.

Oh and the second one has that nonsense where you need to collect every single one of the little cherub fucks to get the better ending. Dumb.

Overall the genre though feels sort of limiting and immature in a way. The constant progression of collecting things means there's rarely a solid core set of gameplay mechanics to master (like there would be in something like Sekiro, for example), and even being 2D has its limitations just because of the space involved. It's a tough style to take seriously.
 
I liked Salt and Sanctuary. I heard the sequel was ass, though.
 
I am not the biggest Fan of Metroidvanias but i thought Ender Lillies was pretty good. The Atmosphere was very nice i am a sucker for this dreamlike style. Felt like a Grim Fairytale and i love that shit. And despite being Weebshit Tohou Luna Nights had good, fluid Gameplay. But i think i liked Axiom Verge the most, the whole Look just does it for me.

Also i don't know if Carrion is considered a Metroidvania but if it is i can highly recommend it.

I am thinking of giving Blasphemous a try what are your opinions on that Game?
 
Dr. Matthew C. Harris said:
Japanese anime boy Soma and his gf aren't Alucard and Maria. The coolest shit in the game was offscreen, it was Julius fucking killing Dracula for real in 99 with an entire army behind him. At least you get to fight the chaddest Belmont to ever live, and unsurprisingly it's the best fight in the game.
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To me, the coolest part was always Alucard turning up as Genya Arikado (very subtle). It seems dumb now, but back in 2003 that reveal absolutely blew my mind.
Dr. Matthew C. Harris said:
Hollow Knight was good because it's actually difficult while retaining all of the hallmarks of the genre, it blows your mind away. There's not that much build diversity though, and weapon diversity doesn't exist. It's not that replayable.
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I completely disagree with it not being replayable, but it depends why you replay games like this. I find it quite fun to casually speedrun, and with the Godhome update the replay value is endless for challenging the bosses with various inhibitors on your character, although I will never, ever beat that final pantheon.

I wish all Soulslikes would add a feature to let you replay whatever boss you want whenever you want. It's great for practice, if nothing else.
BootlegPopeye said:
I actually think Dawn of Sorrow is the best Metroidvania. It smoothed out some of Aria's rough edges and I liked the more confident Soma. Aria was the innovator, but Dawn perfected it, with better music and graphics.
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Dawn of Sorrow is held back by one major element: the dumbass stylus gimmick. The number of times I would have to replay the final section of a boss because I fumbled getting the stylus ready or because it didn't read my inputs for the glyph was infuriating, and the handful of other ways it is used adds nothing but hassle to the experience.

Switching from Ayami Kojima's iconic art to the most generic anime shit imaginable was also a massive fumble.
Schnoz said:
I am thinking of giving Blasphemous a try what are your opinions on that Game?
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Blasphemous is absolutely amazing, probably one of my favourite MVs, but it has a few caveats thtat make it annoying to new players, especially if you go in blind.

There are a couple of sidequests that you can easily get locked out of without knowing, which only really matter for 100% nerds like me, there are needlessly punishing instant death pits, (but only in a handful of sections of the game,) and some of the bosses are brutal difficulty spikes until you realise certain builds can kill them almost instantly.

My advice is give it a go, but if you find yourself getting frustrated do some googling before you abandon it, because it's very much a game where difficulty hinges entirely on your loadout.
 
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Schnoz said:
I am not the biggest Fan of Metroidvanias but i thought Ender Lillies was pretty good. The Atmosphere was very nice i am a sucker for this dreamlike style. Felt like a Grim Fairytale and i love that shit. And despite being Weebshit Tohou Luna Nights had good, fluid Gameplay. But i think i liked Axiom Verge the most, the whole Look just does it for me.

Also i don't know if Carrion is considered a Metroidvania but if it is i can highly recommend it.

I am thinking of giving Blasphemous a try what are your opinions on that Game?
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Regarding Blasphemous: very good game and it has an excellent story & atmosphere along with a great soundtrack. I highly recommend it.
 
If you really think about it, Terraria technically counts as a Metroidvania:
>wide open world with a heavy focus on exploration & traversal
>various abilities and movement options unlocked over time, allowing you to access areas you previously couldn't get to (Floating Islands, for instance)
I fucking dare any of you to prove me wrong.
 
Oliver Onions said:
I completely disagree with it not being replayable, but it depends why you replay games like this. I find it quite fun to casually speedrun, and with the Godhome update the replay value is endless for challenging the bosses with various inhibitors on your character, although I will never, ever beat that final pantheon.
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That's fair. I just beat the main portion of the game all the way back in 2017, 2018, idk, tried to give it another go recently enough, and... The lack of alternative things to try out just doesn't make me look forward to it. The game feels like an archaeological dig, and I've unearthed everything already. It's not like, say, Bloodstained where I can have some stupid fun figuring out the shield weapon. Or actually trying to use guns for once.

The updates and the boss rush for HK that you've mentioned are more than fine, but yeah.

Kid Named Rocket said:
If you really think about it, Terraria technically counts as a Metroidvania:
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If people call Luna Nights a metroidvania rather than an elaborate sidescroller then I don't see why I should challenge you on that.

BootlegPopeye said:
and I thought the music wasn't quite up to CV level
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Nigga, what? Off the top of my head: Forgotten Jade, Luxurious Overture, Voyage of Promise, Gears of Fortune, Cursed Orphan. This game's soundtrack RIPS, it sounds a fair bit like Lament of Innocence. It's finally unrestricted by the fucking GBA and DS compression and fully employing modern VSTs and HQ recorded instruments not (completely) possible on PS1 and PS2, phew.

Sure you might compare it negatively to, say, Symphony of the Night but yeah. That's just the benchmark of benchmarks. I just wish that Yuzo Koshiro came back to bless us with more of what he did in Portrait of Ruin:

 
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Ultrapenguin said:
The first blasphemous had a lot more intact character, but the second one was more fun to actually play imo. Except that means it's a lot more like just a regular Metroidvania.
The second ditched the original pixel-y cutscene style for (I think) standard flash animation which is extremely sad.

Oh and the second one has that nonsense where you need to collect every single one of the little cherub fucks to get the better ending. Dumb.

Overall the genre though feels sort of limiting and immature in a way. The constant progression of collecting things means there's rarely a solid core set of gameplay mechanics to master (like there would be in something like Sekiro, for example), and even being 2D has its limitations just because of the space involved. It's a tough style to take seriously.
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Blasphemous 2 feels like those unnecessary sequel movies the studios force the original director to make.
It feels like a generic rehash of the first game.
 
I played a bunch of FPS games recently and needed a palette cleanser. Ended up playing a game called Islets that was on an Epic giveaway recently.

Its a decent little metroidvania, not overly complex or too difficult, good game to lie on a sofa and blast through in an afternoon or two. Does have some interesting boss battles that have elements of bullet hell which might not be to everyone's taste but they're not brutally difficult and mix things up a bit. Pretty comfy game overall.
 
The worst Metroidvanias I've played in recent history are Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, The Last Faith, and Timescammer. Of course, they're all bad enough in their own ways, I felt.

Gestalt's problem, as I'd put it, is that it's too easy. You barely have a reason to really use other healing items besides your healing flask until the very endgame where Poison becomes too common, you'll have more upgrade points than you need to fill out everything, and I barely died like three times. Not to mention the gear you get by completing sidequests is pretty broken and it's perfectly fine to be equipped with the EXP boosters over, well, having regular armor.

The Last Faith, on the other hand, is too hard. It went too far into the Dark Souls thing to the point where it's essentially a Soulstroid more than a Metroidvania, with a level-up system that replaces skill - a few bosses required only a couple level ups to beat simply so I could tank better after I got hit, compared to doing a no-counter run of Metroid Dread. The plot was also really dumb and in the end I didn't understand anything, much to my frustration. Really, the worst part of it was how little I came to care about the game, even if the gameplay was decent enough.

Timescuttler is just stupid. It's so bad that I can't even call it by its correct name unless I really have to because of how bad it felt. The GLS lobby-approved supporting cast, including the evil cis straight men who are responsible for everything being bad, the whole 'being a medic instead of a soldier is just the same as being a woman instead of a man' conversation that soured me on the entire thing, the lame-ass 'date' that's a required sidequest if you want 100%, the fact that I just wasn't having fun with the game despite the gameplay not even being bad... it's just terrible. And it's getting a sequel too, which will probably be more of the same awful shit.

Compared to those, Blasphemous 2 is fine enough, even if I don't feel like replaying it until the NG+ update.
 
It's kind of weird that there's so few games that aped Metroid Prime but I can bring up a true cult classic of that genre that managed to predate Metroid Prime by several years: Powerslave (AKA Exhumed):

 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Fucker crashed on me all the time. I even downloaded a pirated release to see if that was better but nope.
Otherwise it seems to be a decent game that actually released years after a hyped kickstarter campaign that promptly went into development hell. It was declared dead at one point. I want to play more of it but it just doesn't work. Can't play it.
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it's a unity game, strange it gives you issues.

anyway, grabbed it in a humblebundle a while back because it look interesting and the demo way back during next fest was nice.
however my opinion soured quite a bit while finishing. can't remember all my gripes with it, but I do remember some like random events - didn't run around enough or read a guide? get ready to start over to 100% or at least see everything (or check youtube). combat was a pinch too finnicky for my taste too. there were also some areas that open via story, not unlocks. if you miss those for not noticing some part of the area looks slightly different, you'll run around looking for it quite a bit. story was ok, although some writing was kinda headscratching.
it also has speedrun/nodeath achievements, combined with the mentioned issues you'll probably break a few controllers doing it.

there were a few more older ones on my waitlist, should check if they've come out by now...

Schnoz said:
The Atmosphere was very nice i am a sucker for this dreamlike style.
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not a metroidvania, but try child of light then.
 
X Prime said:
I didn't mind Gestalt, but I have a high tolerance for bullshit.
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Did you collect the corgis? I felt like I legit was getting memed on when I 4 shot the second to last boss with the gun.
 
Dr. Matthew C. Harris said:
That's fair. I just beat the main portion of the game all the way back in 2017, 2018, idk, tried to give it another go recently enough, and... The lack of alternative things to try out just doesn't make me look forward to it. The game feels like an archaeological dig, and I've unearthed everything already. It's not like, say, Bloodstained where I can have some stupid fun figuring out the shield weapon. Or actually trying to use guns for once.

The updates and the boss rush for HK that you've mentioned are more than fine, but yeah.
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Also absolutely fair. Like I say it comes down to what you personally get out of games like this. I've never been the kind of person who's into build variety, even when I replay games like Aria/Dawn of Sorrow I invariably stick to the same loadout because it suits how I play. It's only really in games like Blasphemous and Ender Lilies where I was constantly changing my build because it wildly affects the difficulty of bosses.

This is probably also why Sekiro is my favourite FromSoft game even though it seems to be the one most people bounce off of. The lack of build variety means I don't need to wonder if I'd be better served trying different builds: I either learn the boss patterns or I'm not progressing. I enjoy that simplicity, but I can see why others would find it restrictive or dull.
 
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