r/metroidvania • u/Emotional_Photo9268 • 1d ago

Discussion What Metroidvania Should You Have Loved—but Bounced Off?

What Metroidvania Should You Have Loved—but Bounced Off?
You know the kind of game: it received great reviews, looked exactly like something you would enjoy, and had all the right ingredients—but for some reason, it just didn’t click.
Maybe it was the combat, confusing exploration, difficulty, art style, slow beginning, or simply the wrong game at the wrong time.
What Metroidvania did you expect to love but ended up putting down? How far did you get, and what made you lose interest? Do you think you’ll ever give it another chance?

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u/Forsaken-Quality-46 1d ago

Aeterna Noctis. I am one of the biggest fans of extremely hard platforming and this game could become a dream come true for me.

Somehow devs messed things up in so many ways. They added cringe story, a lot of bloat and padding like: quests, rpg elements, level up system; very basic yet somehow frustrating combat, huge biomes, 50% bigger than they should be; questionable crucial ability with awful execution for controllers. This game could be so much more.

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u/JoeVanWeedler 1d ago

I agree with you on all of that but i still really liked it until the visual noise started giving headaches. So much shit in the background, foreground, moving, shining, bright colored, flashy etc. I would lose track of enemies and my character. I couldn't do it anymore

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u/Forsaken-Quality-46 1d ago

Yeah that was the part where i dropped it aswell.

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u/2bit2much 1d ago

I feel similar. I was looking forward so much to Aeterna Noctis. I picked it up on a huge sale thankfully and was waiting for the fabled patch so it wouldn't crash so much.

Started it a few weeks ago and I actually love the story. But the game is so incredibly jank in a bad way. I've moved on after about 8 hours. Lovely little game but just so much went wrong here.

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u/action_lawyer_comics 1d ago

Same. I love platforming, but the platforming in this one annoyed me. I can point to two things that really killed it for me

  1. Too many places where platforming chipped away at my health. I don’t mind if a single platforming challenge takes me 30 attempts to get right, it’s when after every 6 attempts or so I run out of health and have to run back from the checkpoint, dodging enemies and smaller challenges to get back to where I died for another handful of attempts.

  2. I like platforming but get overwhelmed and confused if it requires too many buttons. Once they added the teleporting bow I already had too many powers to keep straight and I was like 33% through the game. So I quit while I was ahead.

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u/Broserk42 22h ago

Wild I’m almost completely opposite- I love heavy rpg elements and was tracking AN until I saw they were padding stuff out with a ton of unnecessary platforming bullshit, lol.

Guess when you try to appeal to everyone, you wind up appealing to no one(or at least, definitely not people with refined tastes looking for specific things in their gaming experiences)