My March Metroidvania Roundup

This year, I've decided to do a monthly post reviewing the MV games I've completed that month. Some of these may be replays of older games, but largely I'm going to focus on stuff with a fairly recent release.

Any review will obviously be subjective, so for some personal context, I tend to prefer games that are close to the Metroid side of things than the Castlevania side of things. I'm also a fan of MVs that shake up the formula, either by adding in a new element (i.e. Yoku's Island Express mixing in pinball) or by focusing on a specific element of the MV formula and taking it to 11 (i.e. Aeterna Noctis being super deep on the challenging platforming, the La-Mulana games taking the puzzle-solving/adventure elements to the stratosphere, etc). But I'm also fond of games that just get the fundamentals right and provide a smooth and enjoyable experience. I'll also try to add objective measures/quantifications on games where I can.

Ender Lilies - Quietus of the Knights: Ender Lilies is one that's been on my backlog for ages. It got a fair amount of positive reaction when it came out, so I picked it up, played past the first boss, and wasn't gripped so moved on to other things. A couple of times since then I've tried picking it back up, but had trouble sticking with it for more than an hour or two (around 6 total across all attempts). But when I asked this sub for recommendations as to which games on my backlog were most worthwhile, Ender Lilies was one of the most common responses. So I picked it up again and decided to stick with it through the end. Ultimately, my opinion hasn't really changed - I think it's not a great game overall, hampered by several questionable design choices - but now at least I can say I'm done with it and won't have it tickling the back of my brain. People tout its combat, but I found the combat both tedious and frustrating. Everything is stacked such that it's incredibly easy to just die in a basic encounter against a couple of normal, at-level enemies. Your attacks have long finishing lag, you get hitstunned and knocked back by every hit, you have basically no damage immunity after being hit, enemies deal contact damage, healing is limited per rest, and at-level enemies will generally kill you in 2-3 hits. Meanwhile, enemies can launch projectiles from off-screen, take ~8-12 hits to kill generally, don't take hitstun unless you break their poise (which takes a bunch of hits), attack with huge hitboxes, have frequent defenses like a shield or being able to fly/teleport away instantaneously, and are generally just annoying. The map makes things even worse, as every room is just a nondescript rectangle on your map/minimap, and you only get to see which room you are in and its connections, not where you are in a room or where you have/haven't been. Level design seems haphazard, with several other posters commenting that it feels almost procedurally-generated. The miserable combat makes exploration difficult, as you have to slog through enemies to try to explore things, and so many of the rewards feel like a pittance - think +5HP when your health bar is ~120 and enemies are dealing 80. Several of the midgame bossfights were major exercises in frustration and nearly had me walk away from the game despite committing to finishing it. Ulv and Julius both have sequences in their later forms that could kill you from full in an instant even if you were doing perfectly up to that point. Ulv fires some wave attacks that are spaced such that if the first hits you, the second will as well, and each did over half my HP. If he started the attack while I was repositioning with a dodge, I just died. Likewise, Julius has an attack on his final form where he shoots a large beam across the screen. It's impossible to block, dodge, or jump over this beam and it hits multiple times to deal well over 100% of my lifebar. The only possible way to escape is to get behind him before he finishes charging it, but depending where you start relative to him this can be literally impossible. By contrast though, the last two bosses felt like pushovers; the penultimate bossfight took me all of two attempts and the final one maybe five. The game was a bit more enjoyable doing the "cleanup" backtracking after acquiring all of the abilities, as the higher level plus all defensive relics plus closer to max health meant that I wasn't just at risk of dying to a stiff breeze. I've seen others criticize the last area as it has poisonous fog over much of the level that constantly drains your HP, but because you're fully equipped and leveled, it's ironically easier to survive and explore a little despite this. It's not an *awful* game, and it has some good positives like art/aesthetics, lore, music, etc, but I'd put it pretty firmly in the C or low B tier and definitely consider it overrated. Timewise it took me just a little over 20 hours to complete.

Side Scape - Side Scape is a fun little game that released at the end of January. The main hook is that it's really two games in one - you start out as a Metroid-style side-scrolling platformer, and shortly thereafter you get dropped into a Zelda-esque top-down game. You quickly find an item that lets you switch between the two protagonists, and in doing so, you switch between side-scrolling and top-down. The game is then built around using these two disparate perspectives to solve puzzles and traverse dungeons. The top down portions in particular feel a lot like the Game Boy Zeldas (Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons/Ages), which are some of my favorite games, but overall it has a very Metroidvania feel as well. The plot is fairly lighthearted and leans into meta comedy, definitely doesn't take itself too seriously. The only major downside is that the map is primarily just notional, you get an idea of the area you're in and how it relates to the others nearby, but there's no room by room breakdown (so similar to something like Imp of the Sun or Aggelos). There's also no fast travel, but the world is compact enough that that rarely feels like an issue. Overall it was about 6 hours, so a decent palette cleanser but definitely not a behemoth.

Vernal Edge - This was a highly-anticipated game that released last month, and unfortunately largely fell short of expectations. It does some things very right: Movement is fast and fluid, combat options are plenty with a moveset that feels like it could be easily ported to Super Smash Brothers, and the world consists of a bunch of different islands that can be explored largely at your leisure. However, it has some issues that hold it back as well. A few movement techniques have awkward timing, like the cloudstep, which takes you out of the fluidity of the rest of it. Combat is bogged down by overly spongy enemies that drag encounters out as you wail on them repeatedly. Most combats are restricted to one-time closed arena type events, meaning that much of the world feels empty after the first time you traverse an area. The islands are largely unconnected, apart from selecting them on the overworld, which detracts from the open-world feeling that Metroidvania games shoot for. Overall, I thought it was decent. It has great pixel graphics, a solid mix of platforming and combat, felt about the right level of challenging, has a lot of stuff to collect and explore with enough hints (X/Y items in this area found) to make it feasible to collect everything without just outright handing you everything. Plot and aesthetics-wise, it feels a lot like Iconoclasts, for better or worse. 100% completion took me around 14 hours.

Sheepo - Islets was one of my favorite games of last year, and so Sheepo has been on my radar for a while. I finally grabbed it after seeing it on sale this past month, and consumed it voraciously. It definitely isn't the full package that Islets is, but it's a damn good game nonetheless. It took me 4 hours to complete 100%, making it a bit on the short side, but it was a delight the whole time so it's hard to complain about that - there's definitely room for minivanias in the landscape of the genre. Sheepo doesn't have combat; there are boss fights, but they largely consist of platforming puzzles or timed survival segments. Each boss defeated awards you an egg, which then lets you temporarily shapeshift into that kind of animal if one is nearby. This grants you abilities like flight, burrowing, or wall-clinging. Like Islets, movement is butter-smooth, which makes the platforming focus feel great. It has the same kind of graphical and dialogue charm that Islets does too. This developer is definitely on my list of ones to watch closely.

Blaster Master Zero - The final game I completed this month, and I just barely managed to get it in under the wire. Blaster Master Zero is a remake/reboot of an NES title, and it definitely shows. There's some really cool Metroidvania stuff going on, but also some things that make you stop and go "yeah, this is absolutely the NES experience". The game alternates between two modes - one is side-view, with you piloting a tank that can jump and fire various weapons. You can also leave the tank, and enter into caverns, which take you to a top-down dungeon. The tank segments feel better than the pilot segments, which are plagued by a low walk speed and a fairly imbalanced weapon system. You pick up weapon energy as drops from enemies and crates, and you lose weapon energy when you're damaged. Each point of weapon energy lets you equip a higher-powered weapon, going from a short range blaster all the way up to a wave beam that pierces walls and enemies and traverses the whole screen. For the most part, if you can hold on to this strongest weapon, the top-down sequences are a cakewalk, with many of the bosses falling in mere seconds. But if you take a couple points of damage and are stuck using a lower-tier gun, the same fights can be next to impossible. A great example of this is a giant crab enemy that can only be damaged on his rear - using the wave beam, you can just hammer him immediately and he'll take damage as the beam passes through him, but with any other weapon it will bounce harmlessly off his face, requiring you to try to maneuver around him, which is very tricky to pull off. It also suffers a bit from not having quite enough collectibles. There's some health-ups, some secondary weapons for both the tank and overhead sections, and a couple of alternate main cannons and maneuvers for the tank. Almost all upgrades are found by defeating a boss, primarily in the overhead sections. Once you've acquired the map of a zone, every single cave with a boss is immediately highlighted on it, and exploring anywhere else is largely fruitless. There's a handful of caves that have nothing but a stock of pickups at the end, and some larger rooms and branches in the sidescrolling portions with nothing in most of the corners except maybe some pickups as well. Ability gating is limited as well. There's a few abilities that have gating, but generally only in a couple areas each, and there's not much in the way of backtracking that you can do except to a couple of inter-zone gates that are ability gated and located on the other side of a previous zone, with most powerups being attainable the first time you're through a zone. That said, overall there's a lot of promise here, and I'm still going to play the sequels in the next couple of months to see if they can improve on the formula. 100% took me about 8 hours.

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Definitely my top picks this month are Sheepo and Side Scape, which were both on the shorter side. Lot of games with promise, but little that fully lived up to it.