So I’ve been dabbling with a game on my Steam Deck called “Blade Chimera.” No clue why I had it downloaded or who recommended it, but I’m having a grand old time with it. And on Steam, the listed genre is metroidvania. Well, technically it’s the most “popular user-defined tags for this product” but the community has deemed it to be a metroidvania. The term gamers have used for a long ass time to describe games like “Super Metroid” and “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.”
And for some reason, people online just cannot deal.
There’s been pushback to rebrand a jargon term that has been sort of set in stone by now. I hear things like “search action” being tossed around, and that just confuses me. Words are meant to impress upon other people an idea in their heads, and metroidvania immediately tells me everything I need to know about what the game is. I don’t need a new term for that. Nobody does, unless you are a mom buying her son a Christmas gift and you’re stuck at a Gamestop talking to an insufferable employee. But even then, these subgenres are more confusing than helpful.
How would one even define such a nerdy inside-baseball portmanteau like metroidvania exactly? Well, everybody’s favorite collection of knowledge, Wikipedia, says these are “action-adventure games focused on nonlinear exploration and guided progression with a need to acquire key items to enter certain areas.” Other common traits include the constant need to scratch your brain remembering where to backtrack for side quests, hidden items, a shopkeeper, a huge map you fill in, and the game walling you off unless you earn or unlock specific tools, movement tech, knowledge, or abilities.
I can’t get enough of these games (when done right) and I love the advancement of the maps now where you can take photos to remind you of areas to return to. Hell, I wish all games going forward let you warp to literally any corner of the map like in “Blade Chimera.”
I also wish there were more traditional 3D metroidvanias like “Metroid Prime.” Maybe more attempts like “Castlevania 64.” I know the waters have been muddied by “The Legend of Zelda” games, “Dark Souls,” and “Dark Siders,” but those are all great examples too! More of them please!
I’m struck by the new influx of subgenres we’ve been steadily getting over the years. As gaming continues to blend RPG progression and roguelike choices, indies are fracturing into new special snowflakes all the time. Don’t love roguelikes? Try a roguelite! Bullet hell games too tough for you? Try a bullet heaven game! “Vampire Survivors” clones to me are ‘garlic likes.’ There are also roguevania games now, friend slop, soulslikes, soulslites, clickers, incrementals, extraction shooters, and metroidbrainia games now.
In any case, I don’t see a need to pivot to using another name for this subgenre because it’s stuck now. If you know what it means, it works, and if you don’t, then you do a quick Google search and find out. “Search Action” is so terrible to me. What’s next? “Puzzle exploration type games?” “Myst-likes?” “Stranding-type games?”
Wait, that last one might be the next big trend in the industry…
Image Credit: “Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse”
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