Reddit: The Metroidvania Wars

Personally, I like to consider Metroid Prime as well as Echoes & Corruption to be metroidvanias in their own right.

Sure, they're in a fully-3D world, and they're FPS's... but they're also exploration-focused platformers that require you to collect special power-ups in order to explore more of the world.

How patient were we with the need to constantly switch weapons and the load times required to do so? Man.

BUT NO ABILITY-GATINGGGGGGGG

The joke I'm getting at is that the closer you look at it as a 'genre' the more vague it gets. Because genres are vague and the etymology of the word 'genre' merely means 'style' or 'kind'.

What is the feeling you get when you play the game? Metroidvanias are noted for platforming and needing increased capabilities to reach a previously unreachable place. This is termed as 'exploration', but then isn't Dark Souls also a game with 'exploration', where the player's own skills and/or abilities determine the ability to move to a new area (I'm looking at you, skeletons next to the bonfire at Firelink...).

Game creation is an art form. It uses hard concepts (mechanics, etc.) in the same way an artist uses paints and a brush. There simply is no hard definition for such a thing, as it's an experience to be enjoyed.

The whole idea of 'genre' is to help in describing the experience of the art, not solidly define the art.

Got Paper's Please when it was free (legal). I maybe deleted it, or its on a disc somewhere. Later that same year it got exposed and were sold. Very strange. Same with some other games I came across. Undertale was one of those games younger generations enjoyed so I figured I wouldn't so I never bothered.

I agree on Hollow Knight. Everything looked the same, and I wasn't very interested in the NPC, Story or the enemies. Huge shame.