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. 

Mario Kart World Review: How Do You Follow-Up One of the Biggest Games Ever?

It’s not often that I am (relatively) on top of the zeitgeist in video games, playing the new big-name release of the moment while also having a lot of detailed thoughts about it, so I figured I’d take advantage of it and get out my thoughts on ‘Mario Kart World’, since they’re weirdly complicated.

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: following up ‘Mario Kart 8’ was always going to be a tall order. It feels easy to forget that, given how much the game has become a fixture of the gaming landscape, serving as the most recent mainline entry in the series for over a decade. It’s maybe also easy to lose sight of just how defining a landmark it was that landscape, too; the Mario Kart series has long been one of Nintendo’s blockbusters, but MK8 took it to absurd levels.*

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*It’s not essential to this column, but I love number-based trivia too much to pass some of this up, even if the data is a little less comprehensive than sports stats. MK8 was the best-selling game on two straight Nintendo consoles. On Wii U, it sold nearly 8.5 million copies, which still put it 2.5 million ahead of second place on the console. On Switch, it octupled those numbers, crossing the 68 million mark and landing over 20 million ahead of the second-best seller, the most recent Animal Crossing. It more than doubled the sales of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and ‘Super Mario Odyssey’, the big new entries for Nintendo’s two flagship series. It sold roughly as many copies as every single new mainline Pokémon entry on the console combined (Sword, Shield, Scarlet, Violet, and Legends Arceus). It still regularly pops up on Nintendo’s monthly best-seller lists, despite being a decade old. And combining the two versions’ sales, it appears to be the fifth-best selling video game of all-time. There’s even a chance those numbers will go up for a little bit longer, since the most recent update seems to have been from the end of March.

Even setting aside the crazy objective stats for the more subjective evaluations, as a long-time fan of the series, I think it’s pretty easy to call 8 Deluxe “The Definitive Mario Kart Game”. Even when the original game was released, I was already inclined to that idea; the 32 base-game courses include many of the best tracks in series history, and I think the overall set is easily the best one all-around. The retro levels all feel improved from their original incarnations, the game always looked gorgeous and stylish, the new mechanics are interesting and allow for a whole bunch of exciting course designs, and the racing feels as fun as ever and balanced in a way that not every entry in the series has been. 

The later DLC and Deluxe version only turned things up a notch, adding another 16 strong courses that stood up to the originals, debuting the new 200cc game mode, and fixing some of the original short-comings (the weak battle mode, a thin roster). And the Booster Pass additions of 2022-23 were maybe not as universally strong as the ones that came before, but there were still some standout levels in there. And moreover, it was a full 48 new courses, doubling the tracklist in what was already the biggest game in the series and revitalizing interest in a game that was over eight years old at that point.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels more or less like the perfect version of what the series had been doing up to that point. So the obvious question was always: where do you go from there? I think everyone who liked the series thought that. There was always going to be a next Mario Kart entry eventually, so what would that look like? 

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's Map is a Blessing and a Curse

 

It’s been a little while since I wrote about video games, huh? My most recent one at this point was my two-part review of 'Cassette Beasts'; I’m still pretty happy with that one, and developers Bytten Studio have gone on to some big things with the game since then (including multiple updates, an entire multiplayer mode, some DLC, and even a BAFTA nomination). I’ve actually been working on a lot of video game pieces in the time since then, but it can be slow-going.

It probably doesn’t help that what I’m covering in those pieces are indie games, and those can bring special challenges. Since they aren’t as big, you do kind of have to introduce people to the game to some degree, which is kind of its own art. Some of them are small enough that they won’t have much attention, and I want to do them justice since they might not get all that much coverage outside of that. But even the ones that get more attention, I’d like to do more than just give a recap and a basic recommendation; I want to bring something unique to the discussion, y’know? That in and of itself makes for more effort, and on top of that, I can feel a little out of practice sometimes.

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Instead, I figured I’d do something a little easier, to sort of work my way back up to those pieces. See if I can kind of shake off the rust a little. What if I covered a single, bigger game, something that I didn’t really have to explain or contextualize, and only tackled a few things rather than feeling the need to delve into every part of it?

So to that end: ‘Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ came out last year, and I had a pretty good time playing through it! It’s more or less a perfect attempt to bring the more open-world feeling of “Breath of the Wild” to the 2D Zelda format, which is a wild achievement in game design that breaks the traditional format open in some interesting ways. Nintendo once again tapped Grezzo to develop this one, and they bring back the toybox art style that they used in the ‘Link’s Awakening’ remake from back in 2019. It’s still gorgeous, and I’m so glad that there’s now an original game in the series using that look.

I’ve wanted to see a game with playable Zelda for ages now, but I had always kind of taken Nintendo’s explanation of (paraphrased) “we want a game that stars Zelda to play differently than the games starring Link” to be more of an excuse for why it hadn’t happened yet. But the Echoes system is actually a fascinating choice, and I enjoyed it a lot. Scouring the map for every possible item to copy felt like an interesting twist on the traditional Zelda hunt for items, especially since some of those new echoes ended up granting you movement options that opened up the map.