bruno

Bruno Dias

@bruno

"mr storylets"

writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.

http://twitter.com/notbrunoagain

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bruno
@bruno

It's odd to think that the 'metroidvania' genre is almost like, borne out of a mirage. Metroid did basically just two games that actually have the cross-map exploration that people think of as 'metroidvania', and Castlevania did maybe three of those. And even the ur-metroidvania, Symphony, is a much more directed and linear game than people think it is.

Yet there's a whole lineage of indie and small-studio games that ground their design not really in what those old games were but in the sort of half-remembered dream of what they felt like? And that's fascinating to me.

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in reply to @bruno's post:

TomsGhost
@TomsGhost

That's interesting! It's like what's happening in the TTRPG space right now with OSR. What the modern scene is doing isn't really that much like what was actually happening in the 70s and early 80s but it's similar to the ideal.

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Serbaayuu
@Serbaayuu

Easy answer, because locked-worlds designed to be cracked open and solved by diegetic powerups are the best possible genre of video game out there. It is natural that many people would come to the same conclusion when trying to make the best possible video game.

And so the few "AAA" standouts that did the same in the past are notable even if rare.

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Patchworkearth
@Patchworkearth

I mean, basically every indie developer who claims their RPG is like "Chrono Trigger" or "FFTactics" or some other distinctly idiosyncratic work ends up creating something that suggests they haven't actually played any of those games in years, good, bad, and otherwise, so I don't know why this or any other nostalgia-based development would be any different.

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dante
@dante

you're not wrong but basically this is the formation of "genre", like in broadscope, right? this is how genres are formed -- people half-remembering specific things from seminal works and cobbling them together into a Canon of what makes the genre, to the point where stuff based on those canonical interpretations comes off as something of a bastardization. It feels similar to a lot of this sort of thing in other mediums -- what is "sci fi", what is "cyberpunk", etc etc

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