I’m going to play Order of Ecclesia, probably this October. I have the game already, but I always play Castles vania in the month of spookiness and scariness so I’m saving it. Then I will return to you a learned man
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But the searching is almost incidental! In the games I like, exploration is driven more by narrative or, in Simon’s Quest/Zelda II, NPC dialogue, rather than whatever rooms you can currently get to.
Cave Story in particular is a pretty straight shot, wouldn’t call that search-action
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Need to start a thread for Dragon Slayer-likes and non-Zelda Zelda games
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i know what you mean. it feels like it fits into the same genre, even if that becomes harder to answer the more you try to pin it down.
but regardless, i’ve been really loving games like that and would probably enjoy them more than the typical metroidvania, tho i suppose what makes them so special is their singularity.
this is really what i was looking for all along
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The thinking gamer’s dilemma: do I call them metroidvanias (inaccurate) or use a compound adjective with four hyphens (annoying, feels like rocking the boat)
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Is a non-zelda zelda game not just an action RPG? The archetypal Not Zelda for me is like, Ys or Hydlide, and I would just call those action RPGs.
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You can go by the rule I live by: when given a choice, always be annoying and pedantic
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At this point my question is going to devolve into “what’s your favorite game that’s good?”
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Its true lol. But can we roll occasionally getting new traversal abilities into action-RPG? Is that a standard enough feature of the genre, or does it then become an action-adventure-RPG? And then what the hell is an adventure-RPG
“Action-adventure game with RPG characteristics”
Edit: Isn’t Quest for Glory an adventure-RPG lol
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Now we’re talking.
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This reminds me of when my friend in high school was trying to sell me on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and he was like “it’s a realism-focused squad-based tactical military first person shooter” as if I had any context for all of those words in that order
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Love how that sounds like how a police chief would describe an incident where an officer ran over a dog and drove into an orphanage
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Has anyone here played Ultros?
@Death_Strandicoot looks like you have, how would you slot it into this conversation?
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It’s a vivid, colorful game with some interesting ideas that don’t quite work. It has a time-loop mechanic, so imagine all the backtracking you do in a normal Metroidvania, and multiple it by a factor of five.
Then add in a gardening system where plants you need take multiple loops to grow and the backtracking intensifies.
The movement and combat don’t feel great either.
All in all, it’s visually stunning, but one of the worst-playing Metroidvanias I’ve experienced.
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had a similar experience where a friend tried to sell me on that game in middle school as “you kill mexicans in this one”.
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I think of Zelda games as action adventure games with RPG and puzzle elements. I find non-Zelda Zeldas never hit the same balance. Like Tunic is far more heavily weighted towards combat but still has a lot of those Zelda design traits.
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Personally see it as a good thing but I’ve always found it surprising just how few carbon copies of Zelda there are. Seems like just about every non-Zelda out there either emphasizes arcade action or further incorporates role-playing elements.
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I also said this about it:
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Yeah, the diversity is good, but I’d also love to have more Zeldas to play that aren’t Zelda. Death’s Door scratches that itch pretty well, but it’s light on puzzles and item mechanics (or “tools” as I think of them). At least they can sometimes nail the exploration and rewards via exploration. I need to try out The Plucky Squire. It seems that’s another good one.
These are also all 2d, which is my preferred format for Zelda anyway. I’ve heard that Immortals game from Ubisoft is a decent BOTW like, but it looks like it has too much Ubisoft open world busy work for my taste.
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Racked my brain for more straightforward Zelda-likes and remembered Unsighted. Don’t know if you’ve played it. Pretty solid game, definitely has tools like a Zelda, but it does emphasize combat to an imo annoying degree lol
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