30th January 2024, 5:28 PM
(This post was last modified: 30th January 2024, 5:29 PM by Sacred Jellybean.)
Nah, it's cool. To me, Metroidvania-style games have more been defined by exploration, and getting upgrades to give you new abilities/powers that let you explore further, and defeat more powerful enemies. I could swear that more modern entries to the genre that I've played, like Axiom Verge and Ori and the Blind Forest, at the very least let you keep your map progress, but I might be wrong. For the latter, you can save practically anywhere. So whatever progress I lost might have been so infinitesimal that it didn't stand out to me for more than a moment's frustration.
I did a replay of the first two Metroid Primes last year, and when I died, it was invariably from a boss fight, shortly before which there was a save point. So, funny enough, this is probably more of a staple of the genre than I remember, and it's only far more glaring because I suck at SOTN. From where I sit, Metroidvania has never been about risk/reward and keeping track of save points. Maybe it's been something to suffer in the past, as a vestige of older games, but not something that comes part-and-parcel of the genre.
To give SOTN it's due, it can't be all that terrible, because I've continued to play it for hours. Part of the purpose of this post was having fun with airing petty frustrations, Angry Video Game Nerd style, so I admit, I was playing it up a bit.
I'll also cop to being dumb, because I didn't realize you could drink potions to regain energy, and they are indeed for sale from the sketchy librarian. They're pretty rare for enemies to drop, unfortunately, so you have to bone up on them. On the upside, it seems that enemies drop food more often later on in the game (it might be a matter of leveling up luck points). And re: the save points, there's kind of a rhythm to when they show up. When you arrive at a new area, if you do a "breadth-first search", that is, look through all the adjacent rooms, you can usually find a save room. So that at least made things easier.
To the game's credit, I like how it blends old-school 2D sprites with the occasional 3d object or background. Its soundtrack is better than average, and I can see why it's so popular. I particularly like the Church music. I also like that the triangle button makes you shuffle back. Unfortunately I forgot that it existed most of the time; it's just instinctual to mash on the d-pad in the other direction when you're dodging an enemy.
One thing that got on my nerves is that in order to use any item, namely food or potions, you have to assign it to the square or circle button. It's just a clunky way of doing things. Now that I type it out, I'm thinking the intent was to force the player to use the item during action. During the final boss battle (which, unfortunately, came up far sooner than I was expecting and was easy), it seemed I wasn't able to actually use a potion unless I dodged the Richter Belmont's attacks for long enough. That added challenge makes sense, it's just annoying, because it means you have to pause, swap out your shield and assign the potion, unpause, use it, make sure it takes effect, pause again, re-assign the shield, and continue the game. I think mapping it to a shoulder button might have been better.
I did a replay of the first two Metroid Primes last year, and when I died, it was invariably from a boss fight, shortly before which there was a save point. So, funny enough, this is probably more of a staple of the genre than I remember, and it's only far more glaring because I suck at SOTN. From where I sit, Metroidvania has never been about risk/reward and keeping track of save points. Maybe it's been something to suffer in the past, as a vestige of older games, but not something that comes part-and-parcel of the genre.
To give SOTN it's due, it can't be all that terrible, because I've continued to play it for hours. Part of the purpose of this post was having fun with airing petty frustrations, Angry Video Game Nerd style, so I admit, I was playing it up a bit.
I'll also cop to being dumb, because I didn't realize you could drink potions to regain energy, and they are indeed for sale from the sketchy librarian. They're pretty rare for enemies to drop, unfortunately, so you have to bone up on them. On the upside, it seems that enemies drop food more often later on in the game (it might be a matter of leveling up luck points). And re: the save points, there's kind of a rhythm to when they show up. When you arrive at a new area, if you do a "breadth-first search", that is, look through all the adjacent rooms, you can usually find a save room. So that at least made things easier.
To the game's credit, I like how it blends old-school 2D sprites with the occasional 3d object or background. Its soundtrack is better than average, and I can see why it's so popular. I particularly like the Church music. I also like that the triangle button makes you shuffle back. Unfortunately I forgot that it existed most of the time; it's just instinctual to mash on the d-pad in the other direction when you're dodging an enemy.
One thing that got on my nerves is that in order to use any item, namely food or potions, you have to assign it to the square or circle button. It's just a clunky way of doing things. Now that I type it out, I'm thinking the intent was to force the player to use the item during action. During the final boss battle (which, unfortunately, came up far sooner than I was expecting and was easy), it seemed I wasn't able to actually use a potion unless I dodged the Richter Belmont's attacks for long enough. That added challenge makes sense, it's just annoying, because it means you have to pause, swap out your shield and assign the potion, unpause, use it, make sure it takes effect, pause again, re-assign the shield, and continue the game. I think mapping it to a shoulder button might have been better.