its ok if the bug game was your first metroidvania and your attachment to its means, in your eyes, that it will never be topped but it is nowhere near the greatest of its genre and i’d go so far as to say it’s mediocre. You could probably stack the top 5 solely with various Castlevania and Metroid games, but I won’t do that (although I think Dread and Aria of Sorrow deserve 3/4)
Edit: I feel bad about how pissy my comment is. Ori (and soma) are my gaming sore spots, but I really need to let that go, because who gives a fuck? They’re games I spent too much time with and still ended up hating, but other people like them and that’s fine, I don’t have to be an asshole every time either one is brought up, I know I like games that other people hate, that comes with being humans with different tastes and life experiences
There is no world where Ori is better than Hollow Knight. I despised Ori and the Blind Forest. I hated its story, I hated its movement (I probably could have gotten used to that), I hated its combat (apparently even Ori likers agree that combat is bad), I hated its art style, I hated its map, I hated how checkpoints and healing worked, I hated everything about it. There is nothing good about Ori and the Blind Forest in my mind, and I’m still grumpy, years later, that I spent so much of my time trying to like it.
I think it’s possible I actually don’t like metroidvanias, I just like whatever the fuck Hollow Knight is. True, I’ve never played a Castlevania or Metroid game, so I can’t really say until I do so, but if you, a person who likes metroidvanias, think that Ori and the Blind Forest was a better metroidvania than Hollow Knight, then yeah, I’m not sure I like metroidvanias.
There’s kind of a reason not to play the original NES Metroid, it sucks in a very limitations of 8 bit hardware way. Fortunately, there’s Zero Mission.
Ah fair enough! I’ll skip NES Metroid then! (Thanks for saying it, I have a bad habit of wanting to always start with the first title in a series, even if that’s a really bad idea)
Zero Mission is a remake of NES Metroid for the GBA with an extended ending. If you really want to play the classic Metroid games in order I’d do Zero Mission, AM2R, Super Metroid, then Metroid Fusion.
Nine sols has peak combat, cool character design,and interesting story, but it’s not really a good metroidvania. The exploration and platforming is not great, and the core point of metroidvania where you return to areas and unlock new places with new abilities is pretty minimal.
Hot take, SotN is a fantastic game but it’s also a pretty mid metroidvania since a bunch of the equipment is useless but also some of it is completely fucking broken and also there’s no way in hell you’d figure out the inverted castle shit on your own ever, you’d have to see it online or in a magazine or a game guide or some shit
I will say Dread and Samus Returns both love the parry which is super annoying (i am a parryslop hater, and yes I did just beat Expedition 33 on Hard and hated myself the entire time) but I found them great regardless
I think my breaking point on Dread was realizing the parryslop was so egregious the devs realized they needed autosaves to make the instant-death-unless-you-parry bosses remotely tolerable.
SR also suffers from comparison to the much better AM2R.
In my opinion, there are two major ways to rate something in this context, which are by how much they advance the genre and by how good the end product is in isolation.
If we consider them by advancing the genre (and I believe this is the better way to evaluate games as art), there is a natural bias toward earlier games, where everything from SOTN to even the original Metroid have serious claims even though they don’t hold up great because they nonetheless represented huge advancements. In this category, Dread has very little that it can say for itself and Hollow Knight’s best claim is that it is easily, easily the best take on “navigation at any scale and how that relates to progression” seen in a metroidvania in a long time and maybe the best ever, and this dimension specifically has been mostly lost to modern metroidvanias that aren’t Hollow Knight and I would argue is really the most central element of the genre. On that basis, I think it’s kind of a headache to evaluate because you need to be very aware of the history of things, but Hollow Knight still has a pretty high rank and is clearly above Dread. It’s not top 3 but it might be top 5. It’s safe to say top 10.
If we consider it purely in terms of end product in isolation (the much more treat-brained measurement, but still worth looking at), where the original Metroid is basically in the dumpster because it just fucking sucks to play and its innovations were (mostly) taken up by all subsequent games in the genre and sometimes even improved upon, there is a massive bias toward more recent games and accordingly, Dread does rank pretty high, and I’ll just grant you that Dread is probably top 5. This is, however, also Hollow Knight’s stronger category, because while I personally really love the navigation/progression aspect that I mentioned before (where even HK demake microgrames are fucking better metroidvanias than most normal metroidvanias!), that is only one facet of its success, and the main element of its success is its ability to synthesize many different features, approaches, and trends in a highly cohesive way to make a game that is both very interesting and very fun to play. In this category, Hollow Knight is unquestionably top 5 (along with Dread, and I have no strong opinion about how they compare to each other here).
I’m fully just writing all of this because I’m procrastinating, but also because I don’t get to talk about this subject as much as I like to.
I dont even know if dread is top 5 tbh. its a good game, but it feels so rail-roady and linear. the game needlessly prevents backtracking and most of the ways to obtain items early have such convoluted methods that most players would never figure them out.
comparatively hollow knight just gives you all the tools required to explore 55% percent of the map after the first hour and a half of gameplay, and reaching a new area early is as simple as breaking a couple hidden walls. it has a great sense of freedom
I was kind of trying to be generous with that part because I don’t care to argue to the contrary, but I agree with you. I just thought other aspects were more salient and it’s not like Dread is such an awful game that giving it good status warps the discussion, it’s just that it is a struggle to make it interesting, as you note.
The part that I would emphasize, which you know of course but deserves to be said, is that you can just openly access many branching paths and different tools can often be used to address the same obstacle rather than putting everything behind “blue key for the blue door, red key for the red door” gating like worse metroidvanias use as a structural crutch. There are still hard blocks (mostly requiring crystal dash or shade cloak) that are either overly difficult (crystal) or impossible (shade) to overcome without specific tools, but generally the game is very open and allows for at least two or three solutions accessible even to a very casual player. It’s a dying art to actually have routing like that in a casual game’s playthrough, despite the fact that people never stop talking about it in reference to Dark Souls (especially with the master key).
you can take my account name
its ok if the bug game was your first metroidvania and your attachment to its means, in your eyes, that it will never be topped but it is nowhere near the greatest of its genre and i’d go so far as to say it’s mediocre. You could probably stack the top 5 solely with various Castlevania and Metroid games, but I won’t do that (although I think Dread and Aria of Sorrow deserve 3/4)
Edit: I feel bad about how pissy my comment is. Ori (and soma) are my gaming sore spots, but I really need to let that go, because who gives a fuck? They’re games I spent too much time with and still ended up hating, but other people like them and that’s fine, I don’t have to be an asshole every time either one is brought up, I know I like games that other people hate, that comes with being humans with different tastes and life experiences
There is no world where Ori is better than Hollow Knight. I despised Ori and the Blind Forest. I hated its story, I hated its movement (I probably could have gotten used to that), I hated its combat (apparently even Ori likers agree that combat is bad), I hated its art style, I hated its map, I hated how checkpoints and healing worked, I hated everything about it. There is nothing good about Ori and the Blind Forest in my mind, and I’m still grumpy, years later, that I spent so much of my time trying to like it.
I think it’s possible I actually don’t like metroidvanias, I just like whatever the fuck Hollow Knight is. True, I’ve never played a Castlevania or Metroid game, so I can’t really say until I do so, but if you, a person who likes metroidvanias, think that Ori and the Blind Forest was a better metroidvania than Hollow Knight, then yeah, I’m not sure I like metroidvanias.
Super Metroid is free and runs on anything with a screen and buttons at this point. It’s also an all time great game, play it already.
I don’t have a dog in the Ori v HN fight, having played neither.
Yeah, there’s zero reason not to try the old metroids and castlevanias. I will play Super Metroid
Enjoy!
There’s kind of a reason not to play the original NES Metroid, it sucks in a very limitations of 8 bit hardware way. Fortunately, there’s Zero Mission.
Ah fair enough! I’ll skip NES Metroid then! (Thanks for saying it, I have a bad habit of wanting to always start with the first title in a series, even if that’s a really bad idea)
Zero Mission is a remake of NES Metroid for the GBA with an extended ending. If you really want to play the classic Metroid games in order I’d do Zero Mission, AM2R, Super Metroid, then Metroid Fusion.
Nine sols has peak combat, cool character design,and interesting story, but it’s not really a good metroidvania. The exploration and platforming is not great, and the core point of metroidvania where you return to areas and unlock new places with new abilities is pretty minimal.
I reeeeeally gotta try nine sols huh
yeah this is fair i only put nine sols because i didn’t wanna put a game from like pre-2016 up there lmao
Hot take, SotN is a fantastic game but it’s also a pretty mid metroidvania since a bunch of the equipment is useless but also some of it is completely fucking broken and also there’s no way in hell you’d figure out the inverted castle shit on your own ever, you’d have to see it online or in a magazine or a game guide or some shit
wrong
Worst take I have heard in monthsOkay I will give you that it is a mid metroidvania but only because being a metroidvania isn’t why I love it so much
thank you you’re the only real one in this comment thread
I found Dread to be very disappointing. It doubled down on everything I didn’t like about Samus Returns.
Dread is a doo doo metroidvania because the level design is actively hostile to letting the player get lost and explore
The number of anti-backtracking slides and linear corridors is crazy.
I will say Dread and Samus Returns both love the parry which is super annoying (i am a parryslop hater, and yes I did just beat Expedition 33 on Hard and hated myself the entire time) but I found them great regardless
I think my breaking point on Dread was realizing the parryslop was so egregious the devs realized they needed autosaves to make the instant-death-unless-you-parry bosses remotely tolerable.
SR also suffers from comparison to the much better AM2R.
In my opinion, there are two major ways to rate something in this context, which are by how much they advance the genre and by how good the end product is in isolation.
If we consider them by advancing the genre (and I believe this is the better way to evaluate games as art), there is a natural bias toward earlier games, where everything from SOTN to even the original Metroid have serious claims even though they don’t hold up great because they nonetheless represented huge advancements. In this category, Dread has very little that it can say for itself and Hollow Knight’s best claim is that it is easily, easily the best take on “navigation at any scale and how that relates to progression” seen in a metroidvania in a long time and maybe the best ever, and this dimension specifically has been mostly lost to modern metroidvanias that aren’t Hollow Knight and I would argue is really the most central element of the genre. On that basis, I think it’s kind of a headache to evaluate because you need to be very aware of the history of things, but Hollow Knight still has a pretty high rank and is clearly above Dread. It’s not top 3 but it might be top 5. It’s safe to say top 10.
If we consider it purely in terms of end product in isolation (the much more treat-brained measurement, but still worth looking at), where the original Metroid is basically in the dumpster because it just fucking sucks to play and its innovations were (mostly) taken up by all subsequent games in the genre and sometimes even improved upon, there is a massive bias toward more recent games and accordingly, Dread does rank pretty high, and I’ll just grant you that Dread is probably top 5. This is, however, also Hollow Knight’s stronger category, because while I personally really love the navigation/progression aspect that I mentioned before (where even HK demake microgrames are fucking better metroidvanias than most normal metroidvanias!), that is only one facet of its success, and the main element of its success is its ability to synthesize many different features, approaches, and trends in a highly cohesive way to make a game that is both very interesting and very fun to play. In this category, Hollow Knight is unquestionably top 5 (along with Dread, and I have no strong opinion about how they compare to each other here).
I’m fully just writing all of this because I’m procrastinating, but also because I don’t get to talk about this subject as much as I like to.
I dont even know if dread is top 5 tbh. its a good game, but it feels so rail-roady and linear. the game needlessly prevents backtracking and most of the ways to obtain items early have such convoluted methods that most players would never figure them out.
comparatively hollow knight just gives you all the tools required to explore 55% percent of the map after the first hour and a half of gameplay, and reaching a new area early is as simple as breaking a couple hidden walls. it has a great sense of freedom
I was kind of trying to be generous with that part because I don’t care to argue to the contrary, but I agree with you. I just thought other aspects were more salient and it’s not like Dread is such an awful game that giving it good status warps the discussion, it’s just that it is a struggle to make it interesting, as you note.
The part that I would emphasize, which you know of course but deserves to be said, is that you can just openly access many branching paths and different tools can often be used to address the same obstacle rather than putting everything behind “blue key for the blue door, red key for the red door” gating like worse metroidvanias use as a structural crutch. There are still hard blocks (mostly requiring crystal dash or shade cloak) that are either overly difficult (crystal) or impossible (shade) to overcome without specific tools, but generally the game is very open and allows for at least two or three solutions accessible even to a very casual player. It’s a dying art to actually have routing like that in a casual game’s playthrough, despite the fact that people never stop talking about it in reference to Dark Souls (especially with the master key).