The only one I’ve played is Dead Cells, and it’s fantastic. I haven’t even bought any of the DLC, the base game is already endlessly replayable. I also listen to the soundtrack at least once a week.
I definitely want to get around to playing Hollow Knight and Animal Well at some point.
I’ve always thought it was both. I’m definitely no expert on Metroidvanias, since I’ve only played the one (if Dead Cells counts as one). I actually thought the term “Metroidvania” was about the movement and combat – today I just learned that it’s about the exploration and finding things. You do at least have to do that in the bank level, if I remember right. And the castle level.
There are also areas you can’t access until you have beaten a specific boss which gives you exploration abilities for future runs (ground pound, grow vines)
It does have metroidvania aspects, for sure. But if its the only “metroidvania game” you’ve played, then you haven’t really played any metroidvania games, in my opinion.
i can tell you the one that surprised me the most: Yoku’s Island Express! utterly adorable pinball metroidvania. you’re a little dung beetle pushing a big ball around to deliver mail.
i find that there is so much focus on dark and dreary in the metroidvania genre, which makes sense considering the roots of the genre. me, i get enough of that in my daily life. i want colorful and full of curiosity. the ori games are good for that too, as is supraland, but i don’t know of many more.
Its a death by 1000 cuts sort of thing with a few key omissions that fill the grave.
I’m certain there are far more things but I will just list the things I recall being missing/being lacking/being better with potplayer.
Playlists are sooo much better on pot player. I’m sure there are dedicated apps for having some netflix like experience at home like jelly fin etc, but if you just have a loose collection of shows and content, just being able to have simultaneous tabs for playlists where you can drop a whole season and switch with low effort is awesome. The fact that it remembers your place in the playlist and your place in the video (I know VLC does do the latter) is also awesome. You close the app and open it, and everything is like you left it.
VLC has well known, or rather long known issues with image quality where upon starting, seeking, pausing, (and this is a very laymans long memory explanation), pot player would basically go back to the last key frame so that the image looks perfect right away, while VLC will just have a few garbled frames for no good reason. Not to mention, the UI of Pot player makes codec choices for both audio and video extremely accessible.
The UI of Potplayer is lightyears ahead in terms of functionality. You can do so much more, so much more easily with hotkeys, the important controls and menu’d options are faster to find (behind less layers and searching), and its easier on the eyes.
Pot player supports 360 video while VLC does not. It says it does, but the experience is so horrifically bad (or at least was the last time I checked it), that it in practice does not support 360 video, so if you want to just play a 360 video on a 2d screen you are very out of luck. The biggest issue is surprisingly just that there is no fast and easily available method to just tell it to treat a video as a 360 video, nor is it easy to access the relevant 360 video settings (like is it side by side, top down, equa… you get the point). Pot player has all of that immediately available and you can even set whether or not a video is treated as a 360 video via a hotkey. VLC relies on some terrible method that doesnt work the majority of the time to figure out if a video is 360, and I wasn’t able to find a convenient way to just tell it to treat a video that way. Painful doesn’t begin to describe it.
The UI while being nicer to use, also takes up less space and has more sane default keybinds.
Those are just what I thought up in the process of making this comment. I don’t have like PKB for this so I’m sure there is a lot left out and there might be minor errors due to memory, but potplayer not having a linux equivalent at least to me is a big downside.
Also VLC requires you to curate a movie collection. I’m too old to keep doing that shit.
These days I use a Debrid service to steam torrents directly to my TV at gigabit speeds, with Stremio as my frontend to give me a Netflix-like experience. You get all the convenience of a modern streaming service, without the exorbitant fees nor the hassle of managing a Jellyfin server. Just fire up the TV and pick something to watch.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. It doesn’t come up a lot, because only that first game is a metroidvania and Arkham City might be most people’s favorite in the series, but it absolutely counts. I love Arkham combat. It’s better in the sequels due to some slight tweaks in game feel, but that combat in a metroidvania is just excellent, and the game is just so well paced. It’s a shame what WB did to that studio.
I loved the scarecrow sequences in that. I would love to play more games the effectively fuck with player but it’s very difficult to look for without spoiling yourself and then you’re expecting it.
Have you played the Metal Gear Solid series? If not, don’t look them up beforehand. And this might seem strange, but for the optimal effect, don’t pirate them either.
You know, I’ve always thought of Metroidvanias as 2D experiences - but reading your comment and mulling it over, I have to agree: Arkham Asylum is very much a Metroidvania, and a great one at that!
Metroid Prime. It’s the only series I know of that is fully in the genre and is also not a 2D platformer.
It’s insane to me how many Souls Likes could be 3D Metroidvanias if they used special powers to clear obstacles instead of just keys or random triggers to unlock new areas. That’s really the only thing I see that separates the genres.
Sekiro is closer than any other, but it’s mainly just 1 thing you don’t have in the prologue (the grappling hook). I would love a game that is 3D over a 2D platformer, but also has the unlockable traversal tools the way Metroid or Syphony of the Night had.
Batman: Arkham Asylum should count. Maybe not the later games as much, but definitely Asylum. It’s all about backtracking with new gear to unlock new areas and paths.
The Tomb Raider survivor trilogy scratches the itch a bit as well.
You have traversal tools, but also the different guns are used to solve puzzles and progression may be locked behind having the right guns. I only have 2 of the guns so far where I am in the game but I know there’s several more.
have you tried Supraland? it’s weirdly the closest thing to metroid prime i’ve played in a long time, and it’s got completely the opposite tone. it’s hilarious.
as noted in one of the steam reviews, don’t let the looks fool you. on first glance it seems to be a cheap asset flip, but it’s an extremely tightly designed game with something like 20 hours of content and almost everything is original assets. it has a mishmash of styles because it takes place in a kid’s sandbox, so the different kinds of toys don’t match eachother.
I have a list of Metroidvanias I’ve started but never completed. The only one that managed to hold my attention to completion that wasn’t an actual Metroid title was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Which is a shame, because Ori and The Blind Forest is beautiful and Hollowknight is very cute, but neither could really hold my attention.
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. IMO this is where the series peaked, perfected the formula and delivered a game packed with several large maps and three sets of bonus characters to replay the game with.
if you haven’t played Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night you really, really should. It’s made by the creators behind the Castevania games and is REALLY good.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night with Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon? The former is as fluid as SotN, if not more so. The latter is meant to emulate the stiff movement of the original 8-bit Castlevania games.
Edit: I would love for the downvote(s) to say (why/if) they didn’t like dead cells or if they don’t see it as metroidvania. (no discussion about opinions! ☺️)
I always cry internally when somebody doesn’t like the DS and 3DS gimmicks :(
Thanks to you guys we all will only have Steam Deck clones as handhelds from now on! /s
To be honest I think most of the people that don’t like the touch gimmicks are emulating… But I have heard people with stock hardware complaining too :/
The DS is quite literally the only system that I ever sold going as far back as the Atari 2600. I hate, hate , hate how they forced the touch screen gimmicks for it in games that it didn’t belong. It was the only blemish on an otherwise outstanding game in Dawn of Sorrow. It ruined all of the Zelda games made directly for the system IMO.
Yeah, the continued support and extra modes made me so happy to be an early supporter. I also like the more original NES style games of the series and I am very excited for the sequel.
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