I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
Skyrim is boring, every sonic game is trash no exceptions and Symphony of the Night and other metroidy castlevanias have awful level design
This is Trans Sonic Megathread slander!
Uh I like several sonic games, soz...
Well, we agree on one of em
I used to think I like metroidvanias but it turns out I actually just like Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion
Dread is good. But yeah, they're mostly like a roguelike that was only randomly generated once.
I really hated Dread. It feels extremely linear with no opportunity for sequence breaking or backtracking. The fact that the EMMI fights are so QTE bullshit that the game gives you autosave points outside of save rooms felt like a tacit admission that they were badly designed. Plus, it kept the dogshit forced melee counters from Samus Returns.
Dread has tons of sequence breaks. Zero Mission is also bad at back tracking chances and Fusion was more linear.
Every single time Dread sent me down one of its little no backtracking sand trap slopes felt like it was spitting directly in my metroid enjoying face.
There's really only one time that Zero Mission locks you out of the whole map, when you get shot down and trapped in the space pirate area. Fusion is very linear on the scale of the whole game but gives you much more free range to explore within each area than Dread.
The melee counters were definitely the worst thing about Dread just like they were the worst thing about Samus Returns though.
I just didn't use em aside from bosses
There are tons of regular enemies that can only be hit after being countered. Plus, a bossfight is the second worst possible place for a mandatory QTE other than a cutscene, which Dread also does.
What do you think of Hollow Knight?
I haven't played it. It looks like it's primarily melee focused which is a minus for me and I've heard it has a dropping shit on death mechanic which is one of my most hated mechanics in all of gaming.
Yeah, it has a Dark Souls dropping currency mechanic, though personally I generally didn't find it too intrusive since it doesn't have instant death anything (also currency isn't that important). In my experience usually it's dropping on death combined with instant death that make it really oppressive.
I just can't jive with the rpg elements in sotn and it similarly ruined my experience with axiom verge 2
Sotn has very clumsy and super maximalist rpg elements and doesn't incorporate them into gameplay in useful ways.
Going off of memory since it's been a long time since I've played sotn but I think it doesn't make for meaningful progression in the same way power ups in metroid do. Like with metroid power ups it substantially impacts how one interacts with and traverses with the map in a way that picking up an item with higher stats doesn't. Same problem with something like borderlands or diablo.
Certain things in sotn do like double jump, turning into a bat and turning into fog and stuff, but the vast majority of pickups are number go up at best and inventory clog most often
Maybe my brain is broken, but at least in AoS I never really interpreted most of the pickups as things that were supposed to be useful, but rather as markers of exploration since the map had exactly one of each item.
AoS had a smaller map and better level design. Harmony of Dissonance is closer to sotn map wise