I try not to argue exact language much. I try to keep my approach to language as a descriptivist. Language evolves in terrible and funny ways. Metroidvania is an awful term, but it's a term with history I will use long before I use the term Search Action(a genre name that has the same appeal as calling hotdogs Intestined Scraps). Sure, some phrases like Backtracking are too misguided for me to tolerate, but Quality-of-Life isn't like that. So called QoL changes can mean a lot of of...
I can't stop people for using it. I can't even blame them for using it. It's an insidious term, coined by my generation, in the early days of gaming. Because of its age, it's almost inescapable. With its age, it also carries a lot of baggage... Assumptions from an older time. These assumptions weren't ever correct, but they've grown increasingly more misguided as time has passed.
Backtracking is a term that's almost always said with contempt. Even when peop...
Okay so I'm curious! You seem to have a lot to say about the impact of world design, so I'm dying to know if you have Thoughts™ with regards to Classicvania versus Metroidvania. Is one better than the other? Are there different considerations for both??
Obviously you can't quite put one over the other, though... I feel like classicvanias were far more powerful examples of their craft than most of the igavanias (obviously Rondo and SOTN place a lo...
All of your Metroid write-ups recently have been fantastic, and a great insight into some game design choices and thoughts about genres that I hadn't really thought of before (Seriously, "Metroid isn't about blowing up secret boxes" should be on some game dev's whiteboards in the top left corner as a reminder).
Curious thought, though, have you happened to play La-Mulana and or its sequel? I love them, but their design perplex me in a very un...
"We got to the point where Metroidvanias were "Ah yes, I got the GREEN COLORED DASH, which will break GREEN BLOCKS, and I can find all the spots I missed by checking my map. It's an ATTACK and a MOVEMENT OPTION--" and like idk at that point the genre was cooked for like a decade."
As usual, with these posts, I start by going off on twitter(Don't worry about this though, I'm just gonna rehash all of it here), this time about Metroidvania, and as usual it's time to salvage a messy thread from a dying platform.
Animal Well is apparently good(It's Sylvie Lime, but for normies.) and with that, comes the think pieces and opinions on what the nebulous and poorly named genre of Metroidvanias is and how they should be, mechanically.
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