Topic: Metroidvania or Search / Action?

The term metroidvania wasn't coined by Jeremy Parish, but through his efforts as an author and essayist of video games, he certainly had a hand in making the term popular. But for some strange reason, some folks are...allergic to the term. Don't ask me why. But I am curious.

Platforming, combat, with a heavy dose of backtracking.

Do you agree with either definition or do you prefer to call these games something else?

I love the term Metroidvania and I am sticking to it It involves 2 of the best franchises in the world!

I don't mind either term being used to describe the genre myself, though I've always liked using 'explorative platformer' to denote them myself as I feel like it covers the widest net between all the games featured under the umbrella of Metroidvania/search-action

search-action sounds awful so I'll stick with Metroidvania. 😅 I don't want a game that sounds like I'm punching Google for giving me the wrong results.

I'm happy with platforming, back-tracking and action as a reasonable definition. It leaves open whether you also require it to be 2D and/or side-scrolling but gotta leave something for people to argue about.

Note that most Metroidvanias are listed in e.g. the eshop as 'action, platformer, adventure'. Although accurate, adventure is just not very descriptive and an 'action, platformer, adventure' game could just as easily be a rogue-lite or a beat-em-up or a collect-a-thon or any number of things.

I would be very happy if Nintendo and other companies did almost anything to consistently make the tags more descriptive. For example non-linear, 2D, side-scrolling, action, platformer would be some reasonable tags for a Metroidvania. Explorative as Fizza said would be good too, although by itself that could include a collectathon so I do like non-linear being in the list.

Action-Adventure is the most vague non-descriptive genre we're stuck with while the vague term of "Character Action" stuck instead of any better option for Devil May Cry-likes, so I'm glad Search Action has never caught on at all. Because it sucks and is bad. We need to stop using the word "Action" in genre names, is what I'm saying.

There's justification to rename Metroidvania to be descriptive beyond literal pre-existing games, which is fair, we don't call FPS Doom clones anymore. But Search Action is a bad name for it and there has to be better names for it.

Steam just made the new category 'Boomer Shooter' for games like Doom.... so at least Nintendo doesn't do that. I would be fine for a new name for Metroidvania, especially since Nintendo itself doesn't use that name, but search-action is neither particularly descriptive nor very nice sounding.

Speaking of steam, it apparently has over 1,000 games listed in it's metroidvania category which is kind of crazy. I'm not necessarily attached to the term metroidvania, but if any fairly specific game genre has literally 100s of games in it including very well known games, it does kind of deserve a special name or at the very least a standardized descriptive term.

The only problem I have with the term Metroidvania is when i'm talking to a casual gamer or someone not familiar with the term.

I have gamer friends who I sent the Metroid Dread trailer and some clips of me playing it and they asked what type of game it is...how do you explain it if they don't know what Metroid or Castlevania are?!