Metroidvania fans have an expansive genre to enjoy with all sorts of entries, from classics drawn right from the dawn of gaming history to modern Metroidvanias that build on everything that's come before to deliver something fresh and new.
The cool thing about this genre is that its remarkably long and varied pedigree means that some of its games have an unusually long reach. It's fair to say that the Metroidvania genre has had a major influence on modern gaming in areas as diverse as production practices, gameplay systems, design philosophy, and even in the creation of new genres. These Metroidvanias are all weirdly influential in some way, some even more so than players realize.
Faxanadu is a 1987 spin-off game of Xanadu, the second installment of Falcom's RPG series, Dragon Slayer. It's not an especially well-known game. I'll be honest, I had never heard of it before researching this list, but its fundamental influence on the Metroidvania genre is so important — and largely unknown by players at large — that I had to slip it in.
It's more of a proto-Metroidvania than a typical example, since it predates the genre label, but it sits at the intersection of the Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania, and the Japanese action-RPG tradition. In that sense, its hybrid exploration/RPG progression served as a template for later developers who rediscovered it and brought it back to life. Faxanadu is particularly representative of the early tradition that directly led to what we know as the Metroidvania genre, giving this little-known game an outsized influence on the modern landscape.
This 1988 game from developer Sunsoft expanded the Metroid formula into a hybrid of vehicles, different perspectives, and new traversal systems. The Blaster Master series has been rebooted twice, but unfortunately for Blaster Master, its importance is more historical and influential than it is as a currently successful part of modern gaming.
Axiom Verge is widely considered a major factor in the modern Metroidvania revival, but it was significantly influenced by games like Blaster Master. Tom Happ described Blaster Master as a major influence on Axiom Verge, which he developed as an attempt to mash up a bunch of his favorite NES games and systems into a Blaster Master-inspired game. This gives it an unusually long reach, grasping out from the depths of gaming history to spur on a modern Metroidvania proliferation.
The Maze of Galious is another historical example of a game whose early proto-Metroidvania approach inspired later games. It didn't create the genre, since many of its features and approaches were found to varying degrees in other games of the era. But The Maze of Galious was interesting in that it's a very early example of a game showing the core structure of what we expect from a Metroidvania.
A large, interconnected world with non-linear exploration, dungeons embedded within the world, backtracking, progression gates, ability-based access, and environmental puzzle solving. The world itself was a puzzle. The Maze of Galious directly influenced later games such as La-Mulana, and while not technically being a Metroidvania, it's definitely part of the common ancestry that defined the genre and, therefore, shaped modern gaming in a way most players simply don't realize.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.dualshockers.com/metroidvanias-games-that-shaped-modern-gaming-more-than-players-realized/
