Companies like Embracer are a disease. Their leadership are taking any passion out of the art, and continue running the money printing machine with no oil between the gears
Literally the only property of Eidos that I care about, and it was bad enough that the studio wasted so much time on that garbage avengers game rather than finish the deus ex story they left hanging.
You are walking and see a very high place, that you can't reach with your basic jump, so you decide to continue on your way.
Eventually, you get the power of flight. Your mind goes back to that high place, "oh shit, now I can get there and see what's in that place!".
Multiply that several times, with several paths, with different powers/gadgets/abilities/whatever, and that's Metroidvania.
The nature of the obstacles and the tools that unlock those obstacles doesn't matter, if the world is structured around blocked paths and tools that unlock them in non-linear ways, that's Metroidvania or at least Metroidvania-adjacent.
Reading through it, his suggestion seems rooted on the idea that Metroidvania carries implications in terms of setting, perspective or combat, which is a complete fabrication of his mind not grounded in reality. It's 2024, the people that would know and care about the Metroidvania tag know very well what that tag implies; your "revelation" that Arkham Asylum is also a Metroidvania has been commonplace in discussions for a decade.
This addresses a confusion and an issue that don't exist, and the tag is so standard at this point that changing it would not catch on and would create way more problems than it would fix.
The previous section hints at something pretty important, but maybe non-obvious: I assert that MetroidVania is not a genre, it’s a framework - a way of structuring games and most specifically the worlds they take place in.
And
This realization that ‘MetroidVania’ is not a genre helps explain why a game like Batman: Arkham Asylum can be thought of as a MetroidVania where its sequels wouldn’t be, even though almost all aspects of the gameplay are very similar.
Really not convinced that you can’t call something a genre because it wouldn’t describe different games in a series.
I’d argue the Wario Land series has mostly changed genres between 1 and 2. First one is a straight platformer that’s basically Super Mario Bros with different abilities, following games are exploration puzzle game things that have a platforming element, but in which platforming is not the main point IMO.
Resident Evil really forgot it was survival horror for a while.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are almost nothing like the classic Zelda formula. Free-form puzzle solving, free-er movement, almost zero dungeon structures, consumable weapons…
Those are significant, because when it happens it’s very likely some people would be more invested in either the old or new games, which incidentally explains why it doesn’t happen that much in established series.
I know I was initially very disappointed with new Wario, because all I wanted back then was more Mario-style platforming and the intentionally frustrating design of Wario Land 2-3-4 wasn’t for me.
Your example about BoTW is really good. I never played the earlier Zelda games and had near-zero interest in them. Then a friend let me borrow their BoTW cart and I absolutely fell in love with it. Still no interest in playing the earlier ones though.
I happen to like both, but they’re very different. Like a lot of fans of the rest of the series, while playing BotW I missed the classic dungeon experience. A whole divine beast and a dozen shrines stitched together would be maybe like one dungeon in the main series, and it’d have a new item, it would rely on it a lot with clever riddles and it’d have a unique boss, not just another flavour of Ganon.
Of course, a classic Zelda game is also a lot more linear in structure, with a world you can only explore bit by bit, and in a set order (mostly, there is a couple of exceptions).
The worse take i have read in a while, you can say the same about anything, fps, tps, rpg and even visual novels or action adventure, they are more frameworks than genres by their definition, even racing or sports games.
I really enjoyed the story. The battle system was fun at first but then didn’t really offer much depth or player expression as the game progressed. Maybe that’s why you got tired of it?
Yeah perhaps they got bogged down with all the other stuff (graphics, music, settings, etc) and for that the story and mechanics suffered. Now that they have a game engine and experience, a second attempt might leave more time to flesh it out a bit more.
They also perhaps wanted to make it accessible but weren’t skillful at knowing how light to keep it.
This was perhaps the most beautifully crafted jrpg I’ll never finish. While the nostalgia hit me like a truck, after just some 8 hours I just felt I had played it all. The graphics and the music may be the very best in the genre, but the gameplay left much to be desired. Time-based inputs are nice (though they do get tiresome after a while), but there’s just no substance in the gameplay. Progression is slow af, and I didn’t feel there was much to unlock other than higher numbers, which are meh.
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