Tag: metroidvania

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Game Ramblings #221 – Minishoot Adventures

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

Frankly I just needed a break from Pokopia and the new Warcraft expansion and this one was the winner. I’d seen it popping up a lot on social media as something that may be a hidden game of the year with its console releases, so it seemed like I shoudl at least give it a shot. Social media was absolutely right here.

I know that the genres up there and the screenshot don’t make any sense together. Just go with it. This is Link to the Past if Zelda was a twin stick shooter. It jumps back and forth between overworld and dungeon segments like that. Where it gets the Metroidvania aspect is that the upgrades are generally more tuned toward things that aid in traversal that allow you to go back through areas you’ve visited prior for more content in a way that feels more involved than was typical of 2D Zelda.

As an example, early on it becomes pretty obvious that you’re limited by things like gaps and water, both of which are blockers for the player traversal. The first few dungeons give you upgrades straight in this progression. First you get a basic boost to move faster, which you can use to clear gaps with ramps. You then earn a jumpy/teleporty/dodgy maneuver to clear gaps on your own. You then get an upgrade to allow you to hover on water. These are all things that are earned by completing dungeons, but unlike Zelda these aren’t things that you use to complete a dungeon. Frankly, the bosses are all generally able to be defeated without them – although dodging through bullets or using speed boost to get to weak points quicker is certainly recommended. However, the upgrades have their biggest impact in the overworld. Even the biggest direct offense upgrade – a charge-based overpowered set of bullets – is used more to break down walls than really push combat. It’s that use of upgrades as overworld capabilities that makes this feel more directly Metroid than I was expecting.

But none of that would matter if the combat wasn’t fun and that does keeps me drawn in. The combat is constantly fun to engage with. Overworld combat is quick and aggressive with enemies coming from all over as you’re running through the world between dungeons and small little reward areas. Stuff will pop in and come in from off screen, making you stay on your toes. Dungeons have much more controlled room-based segments where waves with specific patterns come in. Some force you to move around in ways to avoid bullet waves, some to avoid enemies charging you, some to force you to kill things fast or be overwhelmed. Bosses then lean full in to the bullet hell where it often becomes less important to quickly kill the boss, and more important to avoid damage as first priority. I could disconnect the Zelda/Metroidvania metagame aspects and this game would still be good and still be engaging to run through as just a straight boss sequence (…which they let you do in the post game!).

However, it all felt fair. I usually enjoy bullet hell style games in pretty small bursts because they are usually exhausting. I finished this one in two seatings. I died a few times here and there, but checkpoints were common so I wasn’t necessarily losing a bunch of progress. Health during fights helps give some padding when I simply couldn’t avoid everything, and health drops were common enough (and could be upgraded to be more common!) to allow dungeon wave fights to feel pretty isolated from each other in a way that allowed them to individually be harder, knowing I would come out the other side with enough drops to be near full again. This is perhaps where the game felt the most Zelda to me in a way where difficulty came out of individual challenges, and not in stringing together a long sequence of simply avoiding damage.

I suppose pleasant surprise is the best way to describe this for me, but frankly it was the breath of fresh air I needed. Pokopia is a ton of fun, but it’s specific and detailed and slow in a way that I kind of jump in and out of it. World of Warcraft is fresh from a new expansion pack but is a game I’ve been playing for near 20 years and something I need to disengage from after a couple hours of play. This fit right in the gap for me. It was fast and exciting and interesting and fair and low friction while still being challenging. It was the break I needed.

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Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.

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Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

More Info from TurtleBlaze

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC

Metroidvanias are usually an easy to pick breather for me in between longer RPG runs, and we were definitely in one of those. After Metaphor and Mario & Luigi back to back I needed a break. This one kind of fell into my lap via my backlog randomizer, but it chose well. This is a compact experience with solid combat and great movement that really hit what I needed out of it.

The thing that really stood out at the start was how fast the game was. This has such a smooth movement set that really just worked and continues to get better as the game continues. Core movement is fast on its own, which prevents the game from dragging. You then get the kunai that act like a typical grappling hook. This adds a bunch of possibilities for vertical movement up walls as well as even faster horizontal movement. You then get double jumps to cover gaps and eventually an SMG that you can shoot down to hover to cover even LARGER gaps. Finally, you get a dash to extend your movement even further.

All of the movement feels like it’s in service to reduce friction in moving through the environment. The unfortunate thing is that despite it improving the main story line, I don’t think it really does much to improve retraversal. Ultimately this feels like more of a problem of the core path than the movement mechanics but there just isn’t that much reason to retraverse most areas. You’ll go into an area, maybe hit a few areas a second time on the wya out, then really not see it again. In a couple of cases you retraverse through old areas late in the game, but for the most part the central hub of the game is so conveniently located that you just go through it instead of old areas. If I wanted to do a 100% run I’d have visited more, but just to complete the game there wasn’t much reason.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how much combat changed over time, but also how naturally the change felt. The first half of the game is entirely melee driven, and it starts that way early. You get a katana and learn to use it both at close range and for deflecting projectiles coming at far range. The use of it opens up more as you get traversal mechanics – for example using the kunai to grapple and reposition. This on its own feels incredibly tight and fun. It’s obviously pretty simple and wouldn’t have had legs to support an entire game, but it’s incredibly effective as the opening half. It’s when ranged starts to come in that things really change.

The first ranged thing you get is a throwing star. Its main use in combat is less for damage and more for its stun capability. Being able to stun larger enemies brings them from things that need at least a bit of thinking to something that you can run over, and as a power curve thing it felt well timed to right around when fighting the larger enemies is becoming a bother. Once the speed of stunning starts to become bothersome, you get the SMG. Besides its traversal hover utility, this is pure damage. This allowed me to start taking out enemies as I moved. In large packs I would still need to slow down a bit, but ultimately I was getting rid of targets quicker. The rocket launcher finished converting the game into something entirely different. Now rather than slowing down I was simply lobbing rockets and watching everything explode. The power curve changes allowed the game to slowly morph into a ranged-centric game in a way that felt entirely natural.

The thing that impressed me about this was that while it made getting through trash quicker, the bosses were clearly designed with this change in mind. Each boss felt like a test of the new things you gained. Early bosses were largely stationary, allowing you to dodge attacks and get in close range for melee damage. As you gained ranged weapons, bosses started requiring those because they were fast or had a lot of movement or just stayed out of range. By the final boss, I was basically using all traversal while lobbing rockets to get splash damage and focusing purely on dodging. It was such a smooth transition that I didn’t think about it, but in hindsight it was handled much better than a lot of games handle the change.

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a game of the year candidate from the year it came out, but it didn’t necessarily need to be. In simply being good at what it did, it provided exactly what I wanted out of it – a breather from RPGs. In being short it also was something easy to run through without growing tired of it. Basically, it made itself easy to play, easy to finish, and easy to recommend.