The term Metroidvania is not a new one. It’s existed since the late 90s and has evolved from a hacked-together mixture of two existing games’ titles to a legitimate subgenre with a hardcore following, regularly breaking into mainstream gaming discussion
Video game genre titles are a total nightmare, but I want to hone in on why this particular one grinds my gears. This is not an indictment of the games themselves, but a critical analysis of the peculiar way in which this term fails to describe the subgenre.
So, what exactly is a Metroidvania? The -vania half is short for Castlevania, a series dating back to 1986 on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Platformers slathered in gothic and horror theming, following the quest of the Belmont clan, cursed to fight Dracula every 100 years he rises. The first ten or so games all follow about the same formula: linear progression through tough as hell levels. Key features of these early games is the player’s limited range of movement and attack. Being hit knocks you back and every jump is in a set arc. The signature weapon of the Belmonts is the whip, which, save for a few exceptions, can only be cracked in a straight line ahead of the player. To deal with threats above, below, or across the screen, there are special weapons like axes, holy water, and boomerang-crosses which consume a limited resource to use.
This was the identity of Castlvania for a good decade, something simple, understandable; you’re fighting ghouls on the way to the Count. A few notable innovations and changes in the formula every now and again, but other than that, just another reliable series of platformers.
Then, 1997 happened.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night drops. An eternal classic, earth-shattering in its design. Every casual discussion of this game you’ll find online will have someone describing their yearly tradition of replaying it, lifting this nearly twenty-five year old game off the shelf like Dracula resurrecting yet again.
What was so crazy about SoTN? The most mind-blowing change was the complete overhaul of the series’ structure. No longer a linear, level-based affair, Symphony of the Night puts you in the shoes of Alucard, the son of Dracula, who fought alongside Trevor Belmont in Castlevania III and has now come to finish his father once and for all. The game opens with him storming the castle, slashing and dashing through hordes of undead and cursed creatures before encountering Death himself, who rips away all of your awesome gear and abilities. At this point, you might think, “Huh, that’s strange, equipment in a Castlevania game?” As you progress to the next screen, you find that you must ascend a staircase and then… back to the left? After that you spill out into a large room with… multiple doors?
Symphony of the Night forsakes the “get to the end of the stage” structure in favor of an open world that requires thorough exploration. The castle is vast and intricate, with close to two-thousand rooms and corridors to discover, complete with hidden passages, optional boss encounters, and extra items.
Alucard can find weapons, armor, and trinkets to equip, increasing or decreasing different stats. There are countless weapon combinations, special abilities, and a myriad of enemies, slaying whom will reward you with experience and character levels.
Clearly, this was unlike any title in the series before; it was unlike any game before (except, maybe, Clash at Demonhead?). Sure, there were games that resembled it, but not all of these elements together. And thus, a new name was needed for the newly-born diehard fans to call it.
That brings us to the other half of the word, Metroid, in reference to Nintendo’s cult series (it’s only cult because they refuse to make more games). Metroid stars Samus Aran, a bounty hunter always dropped into a sprawling alien world she must traverse, collecting powerups and abilities to uncover every corner of the map.
Neither of these games are truly open world, at least not at first. The player is usually only given a few routes to explore at the beginning, and gradually gains access to paths they couldn’t take before by way of the upgrades they pick up along the way. This general structure, what I like to call “linear with extra steps,” is what ties both Symphony of the Night and Metroid together. Add to that the way the map of the world fills in as you explore it, with lots of hidden areas and secrets, and the comparison seems obvious.
So, what’s so wrong with Metroidvania?
Well, I haven’t been specific enough. Everything I just explained is the same thought process that gamers had in the late 90’s, and while it may seem reasonable enough, there are problems here.
Let me take a second to discard some common arguments against this subgenre’s name.
“It’s a mouthful.”
Certainly, but the complexity of video game genres requires terms that may be a little unwieldy.
“It’s too confusing for the layman.”
It’s true that Metroidvania is a portmanteau of two portmanteaus, Metro + Android = Metroid, and Castle + Transylvania = Castlevania, but in many ways, the name has been diluted enough through use that it’s become rather synonymous with the games it describes. If you’re familiar enough with video games to have even heard of any Metroidvania games, you’ll probably get the idea anyway.
You may have noticed a glaring definitional issue with how the term Metroidvania came about. That is, it’s the exploration mechanics of Metroid paired with the aesthetic trappings of Castlevania. If all games inspired by Symphony of the Night had Castlevania’s art design, this wouldn’t be a problem, but if genre titles are going to be useful, they need to describe either the tone or mechanics of the games in question, which is why you often see several tags applied to a single game. Horror, First-Person, Platformer, Simulation, Turn-Based, Strategy. These give you at least some idea of what you’re going to play, the major gameplay ideas and the tone. “Metroidvania” may fit for SotN and the sequels that followed in its footsteps, but it cannot describe the subgenre as a whole.
(When referring to Metroid, I’m going to use Super Metroid as the broad example of the series, because it’s the most relevant entry that I have experience with)
In Metroid, there is a clear marriage between exploration and combat. Every single upgrade serves both your ability to fight enemies as well as gain access to new areas. Case in point, one of the first challenges in most Metroid titles is to acquire the missile weapon. Missiles are, naturally, a strong if ammo-limited alternative to your basic arm cannon, but there are many doors scattered around the world which can only be opened via missiles. This is that “linear with extra steps” structure I mentioned; the player can see the missile door, but is gated off from it until they can find the appropriate item.
With a few scant exceptions, all of the items in Metroid work this way; the morph ball can drop bombs which will dispatch enemies, but also break open hidden pathways. The grapple beam can swing off of special tiles, as well as serve as a short ranged whip attack. The ice beam will freeze enemies, and those enemies can be used as platforms to climb to previously out of reach areas.
Compare this to Symphony of the Night, where exploration and combat are also core elements, but there is a clear divide between them. With, again, a few exceptions, the exploration upgrades are all non-combat. The Leap Stone allows for a double jump (and jump kick that you could go the whole game without using and not realize), the Holy Symbol lets you go in water, the Jewel of Open is just a key to open sealed doors, the Jump Boots let you jump higher. The actual combat-relevant items are relegated to your equipped weapons and armor. These two elements of the game’s design do not interact, with one major exception, that being the forms.
Alucard can obtain three different transformations: a wolf, a cloud of mist, and a bat. The wolf can build up a very fast dash for getting through long corridors, the mist can pass through certain barriers, and the bat can fly. Each of these forms has additional combat abilities in addition to the unique movement options they offer. I really like these inclusions, and I think that where Symphony of the Night can falter for fans of Metroid is in the lack of the same cohesion elsewhere in the game.
Some can love Super Metroid to death, and then play Symphony of the Night, or many other Metroidvanias for that matter, and be completely turned off. Why is that? Isn’t this a Metroid game with a different aesthetic?
Well, this is where the real, glaring problem with Metroidvania as a term comes from. Because, when I said that it describes the mechanics of one series and the aesthetics of another, that’s leaving out a third, crucial piece of the puzzle. The actual other side of the mechanical influences, this is the big one:
RPG elements.
This may sound obvious to you, because of course, right? You hit things, you level up, you have stats, what’s the big deal?
It’s a big deal.
We need to understand what an RPG element is, first. It stands for “Roleplaying Game,” which sounds simple enough; it’s a game where you roleplay as a character. Except, that describes almost every game, but you wouldn’t call Grand Theft Auto or Sonic the Hedgehog RPGs. So the actual meaning of RPG is deeper and a little more complex.
The term stems from Dungeons & Dragons, the original tabletop roleplaying game. There, it’s quite literal, as you are creating a character whom you take the role of, acting as they would based on what traits you’ve chosen for yourself. It’s also an open ended game where you can do just about anything, provided you get the correct dice roll. That open endedness, however, means that the player has to be aware of the game’s fundamental logic, or it’ll fall apart; the Dungeon Master can’t come up with a sword for the player to pick up and wield without also knowing what that sword will do. So, they assign a stat to it: +10 ATK. And this is where we get to the real definition of an RPG as it pertains to video games.
“An RPG is a game where the logic of the player-facing system relies on representing real-world concepts as abstract values.”
Fallout is an RPG; you make a character and roleplay as them through a large, open world, making constant story decisions. But 1987’s Final Fantasy is also an RPG, even though character creation is about as deep as naming your party, the game is generally linear, and you aren’t faced with choices that will impact the narrative. However, in both games, when you pick up a new weapon, that weapon does not kill monsters faster because “it’s the gold sword compared to your copper sword,” it does so because your copper sword is +5 ATK and the gold sword is +10.
To give a more focused example, take Super Mario Bros. When Mario is small, he can only take one hit, but after collecting a mushroom, he grows and can take a second hit. Of course, there might be a series of numerical values behind the health system, but that’s not the player-facing logic. If Mario were an RPG (not talking about the actual Mario RPG), it would be presented as such: Mario has one Hit Point. Collecting/using a mushroom gives him a second hit point. Now you’re working with abstract values; you could remove the visual of Mario changing size and it would make as much sense to the player.
This, I believe, more than anything else, is what separates Symphony of the Night from Super Metroid. The RPG elements completely change the progression of the game by shifting the focus from player growth to avatar growth, or, the shift from mastering mechanics to overcome the obstacle versus increasing your character’s abstract level until you’re beefy enough to overcome the obstacle.
My first few hours in Symphony were spent pitifully weak, using dinky swords with short reach. I was struggling to get a hang of the movement and accustoming myself to the many “dances” you need to learn to fight different enemies appropriately. Suffice to say, it was challenging and a bit of a slog, but I knew from that introductory segment that at some point, I was going to get all of my stuff back and be that overpowered badass once again.
Then, at some point around the four hour mark, the game just… plateaued. Something you must face as a designer when implementing an RPG progression system is that the sooner the player is given the chance to grind their character without much risk, they can and will do so until they’re at least a liiiiiitle too strong. This window of opportunity is where the game’s difficulty curve risks flattening.
Once I reached a high enough level and acquired a good weapon, Symphony of the Night’s difficulty became almost trivial, checking items off of a list and blowing through every enemy the game threw at me with a few strikes. And I’ll admit, it does feel good to meet the green armor guy for the first time, barely eking out a victory as he shaves off two thirds of your health, only to return to the same area and dispatch him in four hits.
This is a double-edged sword, however, because the instant you drop into a new area and you’re faced with enemies who are around your level, the spike in difficulty can be downright frustrating. Spending five hours breezing through the game only to be stopped dead in my tracks pissed me off more than it excited me, because the pacing suffered a dramatic gear change. By contrast, because Super Metroid doesn’t use RPG progression, the difficulty can be tuned with a fair amount of precision by paying mind to what items and weapons the player needs to reach certain areas, and then designing enemies and environments to challenge them at that level.
I don’t want to imply that Metroid is some hardcore skill-based game and Symphony of the Night is just arbitrarily difficult, I’m just trying to illustrate the profound impact that RPG elements have on a game’s design. It has to be approached in almost a completely different way, they take a lot of control from the designer’s hands and put it into the player’s, which can be exciting, but hazardous. If the developer wants to maintain a certain difficulty, they have to pay close attention to what opportunities they’re giving the player. This is why most people don’t play RPGs for challenge as much as they do the other strengths of the genre: story, characters, ideas. Really, these are many strengths of Symphony of the Night. Its ambiance, music, art direction, the intricate world and multitude of dynamic enemies, the sheer size and scope of exploration, and the experimentation that the equipment system offers.
While playing Symphony of the Night, I found myself troubled by the fact that I really didn’t know what to feel about it. For someone who likes challenging games, being overleveled was boring, to be honest. I loved the music, the gothic themes, the gorgeous sprite work, but, still, that confusion was gnawing away at me. What was so perplexing, then, was that I kept playing the game. I was so compelled by it that I finished with a full 200.6% clear, exploring every nook and cranny, seeing every monster, getting every item. And even now, a few weeks removed from that and with much time to digest the experience, I still cannot tell you what I think of it, but I can say definitively that it is a masterpiece.
What was I missing?
In my journey to 200.6, I encountered the game’s optional superboss, Galamoth. A towering, Anubis-like beast with devastating lightning attacks as well as kicks that will throw Alucard to the wall if struck, dealing massive damage. After a good ten or fifteen attempts at taking him down, I finally looked up a guide, thinking that perhaps I was using a suboptimal strategy. The easiest, cheesiest solution was to equip the Shield Rod, which gives a unique effect on hit depending on which shield you have equipped, along with the powerful Alucard Shield. On hitting Galamoth and activating the shield rod’s effect, I simply raised my shield and walked into him, watching my health rocket upwards for a few moments before the strongest boss in the game crumpled in front of me.
“Huh, that’s crazy,” I thought, and I still don’t know how that interaction works. After a little fiddling around against some enemies, I did a move I didn’t recognize. Alucard vanished, leaving a red outline, only to flash forward and perform a sword strike in the direction he came from before teleporting back to the first position.
Confused, I tried messing with the controls until it happened again, and I realized what I’d done. By doing a fighting game-style quarter-circle-forward input, you could do this special move. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, at that point, it hit me.
“Holy sh*t, this game is huge.”
When I say that Metroidvania as a term is undescriptive, I mean that it’s shallow. Super Metroid is a tight, focused experience with wonderful level design, and comparing it to Symphony of the Night is almost a logical folly. The latter is a wide open playground to mess around in, encouraging your creativity with its own range of mechanics, its hundreds of items and foes. The beauty of Symphony of the Night is how free and lackadaisical it is with its core design decisions, that liberty. What, at the time, seemed to me like sloppy implementation of another game’s ideas was just a close-minded view of what it was actually trying to accomplish, what the “Metroidvanias” that follow it are trying to accomplish.
Now, I have to reel it in. I began writing this because I was frustrated with that term, but I can’t justify this article’s existence without offering a solution. Many have tried and failed to introduce something to replace Metroidvania, I’ll throw my hat into the ring.
If two paragraphs ago wasn’t enough indication, I want to make the argument that the comparison to Metroid is not substantial enough. When Rogue was released in 1979, it introduced a powerful formula: a world with a randomized layout, full of secret passages and treasure, RPG elements, permanent death forcing you to start over a completely new world. Those that imitated and iterated on this formula became known as “Roguelikes,” and it remains a popular niche subgenre today. I believe that Symphony of the Night was so unique that it warrants a similar comparison. After all, likening one game to another can often give a player a better idea of what to expect than vague terms like “Action” or “Platformer.”
The problem is that “Symphonylike” is a terrible name. Nightlike? No, that’s stupid. *Sigh*. What about examining the defining aspects of the genre?
- 2D
- Platforming
- Combat
- Exploration
- RPG Elements
Hmm… Platform RPG? That’s not bad. I think it’s fairly descriptive; you need to be familiar enough with games to assume that RPG implies combat, but that’s on par with needing to know what both Metroid and Castlevania are to understand Metroidvania. I can find a few examples of people using this term online, but I doubt it will catch on. The term “Metroidvania” is so ingrained in gaming that everyone just knows what you’re talking about. This entire article was just an excuse to vent my very nerdy, technical gripes with it.
So, that’s alright. We can keep calling them Metroidvanias, or maybe the next time you mention it you can work both in, something like “I was playing this Platform RPG, Metroidvania-type game…”
You know, sneak it in, change the language. Change the world.
Taigen Moon Works 