As much as I wanna promote Zelda-likes, the Bushiden Metroidvania kickstarter is yet to be kickstarted, so…
btw, uh, is Zelda-like > Flat Metroidvania or…? What is the proper genre name? Action Adventure game?
The Hazelnut Bastille people are using “ARPG”, which is definitely wrong.
“Action-adventure” is a perfect match for pixel art and chip tunes in its twee anachronism.
Overhead Action Adventure? I guess I’d prefer to call Metroidvanias Sideview Action Adventures, so OAA seems right. Also Third Person Action Adventure seems to fit Soulsborne and behind the back Zeldas pretty well too. So.
Isometroidvanias
There’s a special place for me in gamer hell
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I thought ARPG was definitely right? Don’t we call Zelda, Landstalker, Alundra et al. Action RPGs?
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yeah zelda is just an action rpg and I’m never sure why people separate it into its own subgenre niche when it is not differentiable from other ARPGs aside from a simplified advancement system
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For some, that difference is probably huge.
I mean, personally I would call Zelda an action-adventure as distinct from an action-RPG because in my own personal analytical canon “RPG” means interacting asynchronously with numerical systems but I realize that is totally idiosyncratic. I think Zelda is an ARPG in the commonly accepted definition.
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also they’re called zelda-em-ups
but it’s pronounced zelda-mups
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I think Zelda used to get lumped in with RPGs mostly because in the 8 and 16 bit generations, the main things that made the genre stand out were ‘Lots of Stats’, ‘top-down perspective’ and ‘you can talk to NPCs’, and Zelda at least had two of those three.
But when we got to the point that every game has extensive NPC dialogue and the change to 3D perspective, Zelda kinda started looking more like Tomb Raider than Final Fantasy.
This Hazelnut Bastille is looking pretty nice, although I wish all these Zeld-em-ups didn’t feel the need to mimic the HUD design and skewed perspective of LTTP so closely
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I thought “action-RPG” had been completely taken over by Diablo-likes?
I mean, back when LttP came out it was definitely considered an Action RPG.
Arguably most single player adventure games at this point are Action RPGs of some kind.
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RPGs were games for elf nerds, and Zelda was an elf, so
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one of my favourite pieces of vandalism ever was a men’s room urinal that had the “S” and the “F” scratched out at the beginnings of the words “SELF FLUSH”
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Back in the day there were action games, adventure games, and role playing games(plus simulation, puzzle, and other categories not relevant to this discussion). At the time Zelda was released it was probably classified as Adventure by most of the game mags. Definitely not Role Playing.
I’m always slightly amused by these discussions of what video games classify as RPGs. RPGs originated as pen and paper games and in that context there isn’t much ambiguity. So, I propose a simple definition. A video game is an RPG if it is trying to simulate the experience of playing a pen and paper RPG. There is still some ambiguity in this criteria but that is ok.
Personally, I’d still consider Diablo an RPG, but to me Zelda does not seem to qualify. I like the Action-Adventure classification for Zelda because it distinguishes it from King’s Quest, etc.
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the average number number of dialogue boxes per minute is what makes something an rpg
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there are only 3 genres: War, Dungeon, and Puzzle
Zelda is a Puzzle game
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What about my upcoming game, War of the Puzzle Dungeons
It’s a spiritual successor to that cult classic, Sequel 2: The Next Chapter
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that must make open-world Exploded Dungeon
they are insufficiently dungeonlike! Probably the biggest shortcoming of the open world is that they are an oversimplified/flattened dungeon.
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