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

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Played some more of Beyond the Ice Palace 2, about an hour or so. It's quite weird.
First off the bad:
  • It's extremely rough around the edges. Animations glitch every now and then, very evident when trying to hook a chain near a wall, music loop is VERY obvious. A few minor bugs here and there, was worried I softlocked myself when I was introduced to upgrades and then used the upgrade menu to teleport out to a new area, then teleported back in and was told to upgrade my stuff again when I no longer had any points but it was very easily fixed.
  • Controls and movement is a bit of a handful to get used to and while I really like it, I can see it being one of the major reasons why this game will not stick with everyone.
  • I suspect it's a very short game on account of me playing an hour and having received part 1 of 4 macguffin. It's also marketed as a metroidvania but I'd say it's a lot more like the recent Gal Guns game or Simon's Quest/Lecarde Chronicles 2, levels are all quite linear with a handful of secrets you can come back to. The map more a classic castlevania map(as in it's a painting of the castle and surrounding areas and each "area" is a pip you can go to similar to the level transitions in CV1/3) and I seem to already be a third or a quarter of the way in.
  • Boss cutscenes are unskippable even if you get your ass kicked and return to the boss. Thankfully the chronicle page had a fairly short cutscene but I can see this getting very annoying.
  • Some quirks with contact damage; sometimes you can dodge into enemies even though the perfect dodge effect plays, and with the boss I fought he has a grab attack that you can sometimes escape in the wrong direction, putting you directly into his hurt box and having you take contact damage.
  • More of a me problem but I wish you could hold a button to stay in place and start whipping instead of jiggling back and forth if I want to whip something diagonally up but don't have much room.
  • Upgrade system is a bit meh. It's a load of bars that you fill in using power crystals. Every however many pips of each bar there's a milestone that's an actual upgrade. You have five stats to upgrade and they're all very mundane. An extra health bar extension or stamina bar(I've been rushing stamina), attack power, rage duration and how much health food restores.
  • Stamina system restores way too slow. It's great for bosses where you have to be deliberate in your movement but just getting around and backtracking is fairly slow.
  • More of a first boss problem but giving them an elevated hitbox and then having them launch a projectile attack that can hit you for 23 damage near instantaneously(ranged attacks can be blocked with a chain spin which can only be done on the ground) without any animation buildup is a bit bad.
What's good:
  • I really like the slower classic vania style of gameplay and platforming and it's easily the reason why I'm still playing the game in spite of its roughness. It very much outweighs the bad for me, but I know it won't for others.
  • Music and aesthetics are really damn good if you're into moody organs and righteous vengeance plots.
  • Has some really neat mechanics like fire torch throwing skeletons being able to ignite pitch and leaves around the areas meaning you have to be careful where you step.
  • Chain jumping and dodging in midair for platforming is really nice.
 
I don't know why the animation quality for this specific miniboss dropped off a cliff but I thought it was worth clipping. I know the bitrate's crushed and all but this enemy feels like it has had its placeholder animations shipped.

 
People have already mentioned the Shantae games, and I've just got around to finishing Seven Sirens. Having now played all of the games in the series, if you had to pick one to play I'd say go for Pirate's Curse, its the best in the series in my opinion and the one I had the most fun with.

The original gameboy release is a relic at this point and way too clunky to find enjoyable and best avoided. If you really want to see what its like just look up a video, would not recommend actually playing it.
 
I have finished Beyond the Ice Palace 2.
I'd say play Lecarde Chronicles 2 or wait for Chronicles of the Wolf instead. At best it's an average game.
At worst Beyond The Ice Palace is a short, unremarkable mess with too many bugs to count and that one amateur game "sounds overlap each other" bug that is present in near ear shattering magnitudes near the middle of the game.

The final boss peaked my speakers, and I'm someone who usually plays stuff on a volume of "8".
None of the items or upgrades felt meaningful in any way(I don't think the defense upgrade actually changed anything, I was still eating 30+ damage from all endgame enemies)
None of the bosses had any strategy beyond dodging them when needed and then using the very generous rage mode duration to practically have infinite stamina.
Almost all the platforming challenges were shit and it's one of those games where they give you one movement ability that's so easy to sequence skip with, half the platforming stuff is easily skipped.
It had too few and too spaced away checkpoints.
Just actually fighting enemies is somehow less satisfying than any castlevania game.

Really the only thing that it has going for it is music and the fact that it attempts to be close to the classicvania formula. Everything else is just unremarkable or annoying.
 
Stasi said:
People have already mentioned the Shantae games, and I've just got around to finishing Seven Sirens. Having now played all of the games in the series, if you had to pick one to play I'd say go for Pirate's Curse, its the best in the series in my opinion and the one I had the most fun with.

The original gameboy release is a relic at this point and way too clunky to find enjoyable and best avoided. If you really want to see what its like just look up a video, would not recommend actually playing it.
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Shantae is a funny franchise because it's a platformer about a transforming genie and their best game is the one where it's not a platformer, Shantae is not a transforming genie and it's a 7/10 linear metroidvania overall that would be forgotten if not waifu.

BiggestKai said:
I'd say play Lecarde Chronicles 2 or wait for Chronicles of the Wolf instead.
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I'm still waiting for chronicles of the wolf! I saw the release date come and change to "soon" in real time. idk why it got delayed multiple times.

Regardless beyond ice palace 2 looked fairly mediocre and jank, i'm unsurprised it's not that great.
 
Nine Sols is one of the best games I've played in years, I almost hate to say it's a metroidvania, because the parry mechanic is what makes it shine, not the platforming or getting new skills. Not that those are bad, but once you get it down it is so satisfying. Only complaint is that they introduce a new mechanic very late game that you must master to beat the final boss.

I'm almost done with Afterimage, and that game is something..... Very pretty, but the story is all over the place, and some bosses will hit like a truck, yet you can breeze through the others first try.
 
I have played 70 minutes and refunded Exographer.

  • Barely a metroidvania
  • Has a neat gimmick in that you can take screenshots with a tablet and then reload yourself to that screenshot but it's ultimately a quick save/load system baked into the game
  • Game is focused around puzzles but in the 70 minutes I've played the puzzles were one of two gimmicks
    • Rotating dials which redirect lasers, the lasers can only be seen temporarily after taking a screenshot. the laser redirection is extremely simple.
    • "Analysis", which is you taking an image of a point of interest(for example something called "the source" which is basically a nuclear fission reactor) and then analyzing the rays that are emitted by that point of interest. What this actually means is that you have a few lines, some of them are squiggly and some of them are loopy and some of them are straight, and some(the most I saw were four) cards that may depict a straight line being split into a loopy line or a squiggly line, and you dragging and dropping these cards to the corresponding ray.
      • They later add a couple of "modifier" tools to try to add depth to this but it's extremely simple and quite frankly, really damn boring. You have a tool which reveals if something is actually squiggly or not. You have a tool which shows the flow of time of the rays, and then you have a tool which shows the "spin"(oh yeah the whole puzzle and I assume the game makes reference to quantum physics in a very simple way) of the ray and then you can zoom into specific rays to reveal more rays and it's just bleh.
I admit I'm in the wrong for expecting one of those esoteric puzzle games but I really wanted more.
 
BrunoMattei said:
I saw there was an update that added more teleports to reduce backtracking.
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Reading the patch notes the update apparently added a late item that lets you teleport between save points, which is honestly big help but not big enough since there isn't that many saves anyway and the boss that unlocks it comes veeery late (i think last 3).

Also gave different zones different colors in the map (yes the game map was all completely blue and with no name of where you are so backtracking was awful) and vendors will give you tips, but the vendors are in terrible spots far from saves and warps.

So yeah, it should be less frustrating now, especiially if you want to 100% (i heard multiple people ragequit 100%ing out of frustration) but the save teleport sounds too late and the game needs more warps. The game never explains the vendors can point where to go either, i tried but only happened once, if it happens over the whole game now it's less worse.
 
What are peoples thoughts on Dead Cells?

Personally really struggling to match my enjoyment of it to all the hype. The combat, music and art style are all great but I think I just have a really low tolerance for rogue lites and more often than not they piss me off. It's a cheap artificial way to pad out a game and I can't shake the rogue lite stink off of Dead Cells and really get into it.
 
Stasi said:
What are peoples thoughts on Dead Cells?

Personally really struggling to match my enjoyment of it to all the hype. The combat, music and art style are all great but I think I just have a really low tolerance for rogue lites and more often than not they piss me off. It's a cheap artificial way to pad out a game and I can't shake the rogue lite stink off of Dead Cells and really get into it.
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I love and hate dead cells. Like you said the combat, music, and style and everything is fantastic. There's so much content and so much shit to unlock that you can easily sink hundreds of hours into the game. The problem though is the sheer number of cells you need to unlock some of the upgrades. the grind is frankly ridiculous and absolutely just artificial padding. It really sucks to get a super rare enemy drop and then you can't even use it because you need to grind out 500 cells or whatever to actually unlock it.

The later difficulties are also bullshit hard and you end up having to take the same exact route through the game each time because you need to maximize the number of scrolls and cursed chests you pick up to stand a chance.

Unlocking a lot of the later weapons sucks too. You have to go all the way to specific end game areas on the highest difficulty and just hope that maybe the enemy drops what you want. If it doesn't give it to you? Fuck you, do it again, faggot.

That problem is slightly mitigated by the pokeball item, but it only works once and you're still dragging a useless item all the way to the end of the game and handicapping yourself.
 
Has anyone here played Wario Land 3? It's a metroidvania broken up into many stages for the Game Boy Color. A hugely underrated gem, and I don't hear it talked about much at all.
You can't die in the game, you just lose a bit of progress if you ever get hit, and there's a shit ton of optional stuff to do.
 
I hate that all these games look like Flash games. I like Flash games but c'mon.
 
Siege and the Sandfox has been released today. Based on reviews and skimming steam forums it looks like it's good(or at least starts off good) but is a bit buggy. It's an arabian/prince of persia themed "stealth vania"

I feel like I should mention this since I was looking at the dev's site to see if they've worked on anything I've liked before -
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