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Oh gently caress yeah bloodstainedlikes ownMode 7 posted:Thank you for succumbing to peer pressure. I don't know if it's short exactly, but I've been picking away at Astalon: Tears of the Earth. It's got metaprogression which is kind of silly but it's pretty good otherwise. For actual bite size metroidvanias, Super Skelemania/Trash Quest are short and fairly sweet. Also I know that most of the in-game time is spent in turn-based battle rather than the platforming but remind me to come back and do a huge megapost on how much I adore Monster Sanctuary
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Sep 30, 2022 02:59
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:44 |
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John Murdoch posted:I've been curious to see how that one actually is. Because on the one hand I love roguelikes and it's captured the look and feel of Metroid quite well, but to me a roguelike structure is borderline antithetical to what I'm looking for in a Metroidvania. (Granted, randomizers have narrowed the gap between the genres, but I feel like those are still a little different? idk) Grain of salt since I haven't played a whole ton, but my impression is that it actually is a lot more along the lines of a mini Metroid randomizer than e.g. your Dead Cells or what have you. Speaking of metroidvanias with procedurally generated elements, Chasm is a solidly mid metroidvania that's pleasant enough but pretty bog-standard, except that each map is randomized per game. You can do Ironman if you really want but the standard mode is just beating it normally, except if you get lost or confused on any of the puzzles you can't look it up easily because of that randomization. It's not egregious and I give it some credit as an idea, but handcrafted areas would have worked way better. (Amusingly enough, iirc the dev thoroughly agrees, only followed through on the procgen bc it was an integral part of the Kickstarter pitch, and is working on another metroidvania that will emphatically not be randomized lol)
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Sep 30, 2022 05:26
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S.J. posted:Question: I was gifted Bloodstained on the switch right after release, but the entire time I was playing it I felt like my character was moving underwater. The controls didn't feel reactive or smooth at all and it was very frustrating, I put it down after not too long. Did anyone else experience this? It's better now on switch than it was and I completed it there (with occasional crashing) but it's the worst platform to play on, and after tooling around in it on my steam deck I can't go back.
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Sep 30, 2022 07:22
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Monster Sanctuary Effortpost First of all, here's an article from Metroidvania Review (a great resource that can go in the OP, imo) that gives a good overview of the game. Monster Sanctuary, in a nutshell, is a cross between a metroidvania and a turn-based monster battler (think something vaguely along the lines of Pokemon triple battles). It sounds like a ridiculous combination, and if you actively dislike turn-based battles then I'll say upfront this isn't the game for you, but I think that it works better than it sounds like it would on the surface. Also, this is genuinely my favorite monster battler outside of Pokemon by a long way, and there are several things I think Monster Sanctuary actually does better. The plot of the game is extremely forgettable. You start by picking your guardian (basically your starter) from 4 different choices. From there, you're slowly introduced to both the battle system and the out of battle abilities. Each monster you capture has an ability that helps you access more parts of the world; some of them basically just amount to keys to specific kinds of doors, but you also unlock abilities like gliders and grappling hooks. While you can only have 6 monsters total in your active party, you can keep as many as you like in the wings and keep access to their abilities, so you don't have to worry about switching out your party between battles to solve environmental puzzles. You also unlock some movement abilities as regular metroidvania powerups you find in the world, so you're not just relying on your monsters for a sense of progression. You get new monsters by battling wild monsters. You get a star rating after every battle, and the higher the star rating, the more likely you are to get rare drops including eggs of one of the species involved in the battle. You can choose to hatch an egg at any time, and when you do the new monster will emerge only a couple levels lower than your party so you don't have to worry about level grinding. The battles are 3v3, at the start of each battle you choose 3 mons from your active team of 6. They can act in any order. Most of the moves hit multiple times, whether they're attacks /heals/buffs/debuffs or what have you. Each hit adds 1 to the combo meter, which adds 5% to the damage of the next attack, so the later hits of multi-hit attacks will be stronger than earlier ones. This also means you want to use non-damaging moves early in your turn to build up combo for your big attacks. You choose your moves from a big skill tree that's unique to every monster, and they all look like this:  There's usually a couple archetypes you can build a mon towards, and there's a lot of team synergies you can dive into especially when you're deeper in the skill tree to really break the game over your knee. There's a lot more monster customization to do besides the skill tree. You can equip each mon with 1 weapon and 3 accessories, which will boost different stats and sometimes have additional effects. You'll want different accessories for your assassin types pumping their crit rate and crit damage than for your tanks focusing on healing and shielding, for instance. You can level these items up to level 5 with materials that drop from monster battles and some that can be purchased in the store. You also have different food items you can feed your mons for bonuses, but only the 3 most recent will apply their effects.  Speaking of which, and at this point I realize I'm barely touching on the metroidvania aspects, but there are so many things about the monster battling part of the equation that really show the care they put into the systems: - Every monster is viable. Sure, there's broadly some degree of tiers when you get into hardcore PvP (oh yeah, there's online PvP) but not nearly as much as you might think coming from e.g. Smogon, it's more just the inevitable result of having over 100 of them. - On a similar note, while there are evolution items that transform monsters into different ones, they're not improvements so much as sidegrades or different archetypes. - No EV or IV analogs; there's a mechanic that unlocks partway through the game that gives each monster 2 additional variations, but those variants are clearly visible. If you know a monster's variant, level and species, then you know its base stats. - As mentioned before, newly hatched monsters start out at a level similar to your existing party. Also, while the skill trees can be intimidating at first glance, there's a pretty cheap and easily accessible item you can buy from a store as well as finding in the world that lets you respec at any time. - Monsters fully heal at the end of every battle so there's no equivalent of desperately running back to the Pokémon center. This is admittedly a question of broader game design; one approach isn't necessarily better, but it meshes with their clear desire to laser focus on individual battles being the main challenge. - Just because I didn't realize this for so long: you can speed up battle animations up to 3x. After you beat the game, you can continue to challenge yourself (besides your standard exploration to find what you may have missed) with the PvE arena where you can test your mons against ever-higher leveled teams and get reward boxes that might drop, say, further copies of rare accessories that you can then upgrade. You can also play PvP, which you'll likely want completely different teams for, but if this really interests you then you'll probably want to join the Discord to set up matches. Unfortunately, there isn't the player base to expect to be able to randomly hop into matches (though it has happened to me). Really unfortunately, there's no cross-platform multiplayer, so if this interests you then you'll want the Steam version and perhaps Switch as a backup. It's out for the PS4 as well I believe, but good luck trying to get a game. I could keep on rambling, but given the point of the thread I'm going to try and drag this post to a rough conclusion. You might reasonably ask, given my description, why this needed to be a metroidvania at all when so much of your playtime is spent in a turn-based RPG. I don't know the language of game design enough to give a more concrete answer, which I know is frustrating, but I really do think it is a core part of the experience. Getting excited about catching a new mon not only for a slot in your team but because its improved swimming lets you access new areas with strong currents adds something that your more standard RPG design does not. Oh, they also dropped a free DLC a couple months back, which among other things adds Randomizer, Bravery (basically Nuzlocke's limited mons aspect) and Permadeath (for your mons; if they all get knocked out it turns back into a normal run) options for starting new games. You can enable them individually or combined. I will give some caveats. Like I said before, and this should be pretty clear by now, but if you just don't like monster battlers then you're not going to have a good time with this game. Also, there are a couple bosses in the game where you'll need to retool your team if you haven't been taking advantage of higher level team strategies and really build towards powerful combos. There are multiple difficulty options and they've tweaked the challenge some, but I've heard several people talk about how they found them to be difficulty walls and gave up. If my description of the game resonates with you then I recommend checking it out. It goes for $20 full price (in the US, I don't know about other countries) and given that I poured 60+ hours into it, I honestly think it's worth full price if it clicks. However, it also goes on sale regularly (it's published by Team17) usually for 66% off, which I think is an absolute steal.
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Sep 30, 2022 15:52
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Plebian Parasite posted:What's the best upgrade in a Metroidvania? Getting that pink crystal horizontal flight ability in Hollow Knight was where it finally got its hooks in me after like half a dozen attempts where I'd slowly get further in but kept bouncing off.
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Oct 2, 2022 04:31
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ultrafilter posted:I really liked SHEEPO. It's a short metroidvania with no combat and a heavy focus on platforming. I 100%ed the followup game from that dev, Islets, last week. It's also extremely good, it's longer and has combat but it's fairly forgiving and has a lot of QoL features, and it's generally quite cozy.
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Jan 17, 2023 05:17
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I started playing lone fungus last night and I'm really enjoying it. I've only played a few hours but I've already found a bunch of random bosses that drop neat abilities. I'm not very good at parrying projectiles and especially not at directing them, so the area where there's a bunch of doors you have to deflect shots into to open really sucked, but just when I was getting frustrated I got one spell allowing me to generate a shot myself and then a little bit later I got the ability to just slash the doors with my sword and get through.
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Apr 21, 2023 01:34
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owl_pellet posted:There's a new Humble Metroidvania Bundle out: I have all the games as well as the ones there are coupons for and heartily endorse them all, what a crazy good deal.
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May 31, 2023 22:18
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Mirificus posted:Timespinner 2: Unwoven Dream - Reveal Trailer Hell yeah! Even though the first game was a pretty paint by numbers Igavania I got to the end of the game wanting more, so I'm quite pleased to see this. Hoping it expands its scope significantly.
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Sep 25, 2023 18:41
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Why tf do I have to wait 6 more hours for Tevi to be out Edit: let's gooooooo woke kaczynski fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 29, 2023 20:41
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:44 |
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Honestly it's more that games in general are wildly cheap at least in the US (perhaps unsustainably so tbh). Also I want to support someone who managed to get the whole game to fit in like 40 MB or something wild
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May 12, 2024 21:10
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