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.
