I am not going to put much effort into arguing this because I fundamentally don’t actually care all that much but I feel like trying to come up with more descriptive names for genres is kind of pointless and misses the fact that genres are not prescriptive categories but cultural movements that evolve over time.
Like I always roll my eyes in kind of the same way at people making jokes about “is The Wizard of Oz an isekai?”, or hell, “is the story of Oisín in Tír na nÓg an isekai?” because like, sure if you want to make a rigid category of story criteria for what an isekai is, but that doesn’t actually say anything useful or interesting or funny, other than to say that the central idea is a simple one that has existed for a long time. But it doesn’t really say anything about the genre, how it is used, its conventions or the culture around it.
And complaining that metroidvania isn’t really descriptive of what the genre is and it should be called an exporation platformer or whatever is like. The name doesn’t need to be functionally descriptive. Any game in which you play a role is not a role-playing game, because role-playing games are a specific genre with specific conventions and expectations and cultural significance. Metroidvanias are not just a mashup of those series’ games and have evolved over time into their own thing and it is fine that we still call them metroidvanias. It has taken on its own meaning. Adventure games as a genre don’t really resemble Collosal Cave Adventure that much. Roguelikes do not resemble Rogue. That’s fine. They are their own things. What they were originally named for is just etymological trivia.
Or maybe you just don’t like how the word “metroidvania” sounds in which case I dunno get over it.
