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The story
A thread titled “I put together a lineup of Metroidvania masterpieces, any objections?” took off on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board. Posters weighed in on staple titles like Ori, Hollow Knight, Nine Sols, and Metroid Dread, but pushback quickly followed, with comments like “Nine Sols is weak as a Metroidvania” and “Hollow Knight isn’t Soulslike.” The discussion spiraled further into a debate over the very origin of the term “Metroidvania” — whether it’s “a word foreigners coined to look down on Japanese games” or just an innocent portmanteau. Posters also traded views on Silksong’s difficulty and asked about which titles are available on consoles.
What people said
Rule:
The original Metroid series and the Castlevania series are excluded.
The sequel still looks stale and kind of rough too.
Seriously?
So which Metroidvania would *you* recommend then?
That's just Microsoft being petty and not letting it come to PlayStation.
Played it again after a long break and quit at the part where you beat a boss and more just keep showing up — couldn't get past it.
Personally I don't think it's that bad if you're just going for a plain clear.
Nine Sols is way harder.
Gameplay-wise it's clearly improved over the last game with QoL upgrades.
But atmosphere-wise, I liked the first one better.
Ender Magnolia's minimap design is unbelievably bad.
Atmosphere is more down to taste though.
It got a bit easier.
Overall it's brighter and gentler, which I feel costs it some personality.
Still, it scores well above average across the board.
A game built purely on player skill beats one that's just grinding away your time on leveling up.
I only knew them as the studio behind the horror games Detention and Devotion — surprised they could pull off such a high-quality Metroidvania.
Still nowhere in sight.
Feels like it's been about 5 years since that was announced.
Well, Silksong took forever too.
Come to think of it, even the original Hollow Knight took years from announcement to release.
The fact that it's even on this list shows you don't get it 😓
At least put in that bird game that came out yesterday instead 😅
Nobody's brought up that bird-in-the-well game yet.
Pretty much confirmed it's not a dud though.
I thought it was one of those pretentious "artsy" indie games and skipped it.
Yeah, I get that.
Going off screenshots alone, it could pass for one of those LIMBO-style games.
Despite how it looks, it demands no-death runs in spots and has instant-death traps.
I'd want to squeeze Salt and Sanctuary in there somewhere too — it was the true pioneer of "Soulsvania" before Hollow Knight.
Also, for the Ender series, shouldn't you pick Lilies over Magnolia?
Before Hollow Knight???
Hollow Knight isn't Soulslike to begin with.
but the media mistook it for "Look, foreigners are praising us!" and spread it around.
And now OP goes and uses that very term to start this thread without even knowing that. What a sorry state of affairs.
Aren't you confusing it with "JRPG"?
Originally it was a name slapped on Castlevania as an insult — basically "this is just Metroid."
Though hardly anyone knows that origin story.
What are you even talking about 🤔
If anything it's practically made of pure respect.
"Too hard" complaints are usually just a right-after-launch thing that dies down.
It's just bad players rushing for bragging rights who make noise about it.
No way, nothing tops that.
If you skipped the Circus and White Palace and only saw the "Sealed Siblings" ending, then sure, maybe you get to call Silksong hard or unfair — about that level.
I know #1, #3, #4, and #5, but the rest are names I'm hearing for the first time.
I think everything except #6 is out on consoles.
#6, Environmental Station Alpha, is an earlier work by Hempuli, the creator of Baba Is You and Noita — probably PC-only.
Wasn't it that people started calling these games "Castlevania-like," then someone pushed back with "no wait, Metroid was the real pioneer of exploration-based side-scrollers," and that's how "Metroidvania" came about? That's why there are surprisingly few games that are actually "Metroid-like."
Either way, it's not like the name is meant to mock the genre the way people claim "JRPG" does.
Originally it was a term coined specifically about Symphony of the Night.
but since most games directly homage the "vania" side of things, we ended up with this oddly-named genre label.
That's because Metroid itself is pretty light on RPG elements.
Yeah, there does seem to be more "vania"-style games out there (Timespinner is a blatant example), but Axiom Verge is definitely Metroid-style.
Also, Environmental Station Alpha is one of the rare ones that homages the original Metroid specifically.
Huh?
There's basically no Metroidvania out there with actual level-grinding mechanics.
Being this obsessed with genre-splitting sounds like some kind of sickness.
"Why it's fun" and "who it's fun for" differ from person to person and game to game,
and genre labels are useful as a rough sorting tool for that.
"As long as it's fun" doesn't help much if you hand someone a BL game that's a blast for yaoi-loving fujoshi but not for them.
Background and Key Points
“Metroidvania” is a colloquial term for exploration-based side-scrolling action games, said to be a portmanteau of Nintendo’s “Metroid” and Konami’s “Castlevania” (particularly “Symphony of the Night”). It started out as fan-community slang, and only became an established genre name relatively recently. The thread floated the theory that it’s “a term foreigners coined to look down on Japanese games,” but this is just one persistent bit of folklore, and its truth has never been settled. In fact, several replies in the thread pushed back on that very theory, making the term’s origin itself a point of dispute. It was also pointed out that most games labeled “Metroidvania” actually lean toward Castlevania-style design, while games truly in the Metroid mold (exploration-focused, light on RPG elements) are a minority — highlighting a mismatch between the genre label and what it actually describes. What’s easy for readers to miss is that the term isn’t just “Metroid-like” — it’s a compound word pointing to the fusion of two distinct lineages.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “I put together a lineup of Metroidvania masterpieces, any objections?.”
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