Saturday Morning Gaming: Metroidvanias

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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4 Responses

  1. Fish
    Ignored
    says:

    I was a massive fan of Castlevania while the vast majority of my friends were into Metroid and Rygar (which, I suppose, was more akin to Ninja Gaiden than Metroid). Not really sure why that was…I suppose it was a combination of not wanting to compete with my friends in trying to beat Metroid and preferring the D&D-adjacency of Castlevania. And I never played Simon’s Quest…

    I, also, believe I have Hollow Knight floating around in my Steam collection. Suppose I should check it out.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Fish
      Ignored
      says:

      Hollow Knight does not hold your hand. I’m not calling it a “soulslike” or anything like that because, so far, I haven’t needed twitch skills as much as mere hand-eye coordination and puzzle-solving abilities.

      But it dumps you into the world and tells you “go nuts” without explaining what nuts are.

      I’m having a blast and have only had to google “what in the heck do I do now?!?” once (the answer involved using a down attack on the purple mushrooms).Report

  2. KenB
    Ignored
    says:

    Hollow Knight is great. It was one of the first non-console games I had played in a long time and one of the first I got from Steam, and the fact that it was cheap and not in shrinkwrap made me assume it was going to be a trivial thing, but it was quite deep. And definitely difficult, at least for an average gamer like me — I did defeat what I assume was the “final boss” but there were other battles available that I knew I had no chance at.

    I struggle sometimes with these game genre definitions though — to me, a “metroidvania” suggests not just the features you mentioned but also a 2-D platformer, i.e. something like original or super Metroid (I never played the “vania” part of the term). I would never have considered any of the Arkham games to be metroidvanias, though they may have some metroidvania-like elements. But I understand my own definition is not the only valid one — I’ve sometimes found that out the hard way by buying a game listed in that category that totally did not feel like an MV to me.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to KenB
      Ignored
      says:

      The “Can a MV be 3D?” debate has resulted in many broken hearts and broken bones, but I think that it absolutely can be.

      That was one of the big eye-openers for me in the first few hours of Arkham Asylum. The fact that they translated it to 3D is one of the (many) reasons I love the game.Report

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