We Can Do Better Than Calling Zelda-Inspired Games Metroidvanias, Right? (Plus Some Indie Game Recs!)

In my piece about ‘Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ from last year, I originally had a brief digression about the genre name, and I ended up removing it because it kind of destroyed the flow of the piece. But… I can also just write that as its own thing, I don’t actually need to cram every varied idea I have while playing a game into a single article I write about that game. In fact, play your cards right and it can even become a vehicle to discuss other games! Who knew?!?).

Sarcasm aside, whatever the main genre of the 2D Zelda games is, it doesn’t really have a name, or certainly not one that’s caught on with the general public. I actually tried discussing this subject a few years ago, and in the time since, I feel like the style has proliferated even more, with a ton of new indie games falling into that bucket. I think that’s great, as a big fan of the genre, but it would certainly be nice to have an easier way to refer to that type of game, for a variety of reasons.

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So let’s start with my proposed name from a few years ago: Top Down Action-Adventure, or TDAA (I think I’ve been using Top Down A-A in the tags on this site too). In retrospect, I don’t dislike that name. Part of me thinks it’s a little wordy now, but that’s part of why you can just abbreviate it to TDAA. After all, it’s not like people usually spell out “First Person Shooter” or “Role Playing Game”, they just write (and even usually say) “FPS” or “RPG”. It’s fine.

It does feel a little overly specific, maybe, but those are all of the elements that make a 2D Zelda game a Zelda game. Take away the adventure part and there are a whole lot of dungeon crawlers and hack-and-slash games and such that apply; remove the action and you could technically include stuff like the 2D Pokémon games or Sokoban/block-pushing puzzle games in the genre. Those were essentially my arguments last time, and I think they mostly hold true now?

But I have actually played a few games from last year that made me reconsider that, though. Those games were Furniture & Mattress LLC’s ‘Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure’ and Cicada Games’ ‘Isles of Sea & Sky’. Writing reviews that cover a single game really in-depth has been a bit tough for me, so instead, let me work some discussion and recommendations of them into a larger related topic; that might be a little easier.