No, I am talking about both games.
Let me put it like this:
Ori is structured as a video game, Hollow Knight is structured as a journey.
Ori has a lot of hand-holding, quality-of-life features, frequent saves, fast travels on the go, stats, you can get all upgrades on your map.
Hollow Knight drops you into this fallen kingdom, with 0 knowledge of what you have to do or where you should go. It has no objectives, no markers, no stats, no checklists, and even no map unless you buy one.
Just based on this ambiguous description, you can pretty much tell which game is closer to a metroidvania.
Ori is very lackluster as far as interconnectedness go, which is a fundamental and necessary feature for a game to be metroidvania. The map is large sure, but getting from point A to point B remains mostly linear
Hollow Knight is interconnected in such a satisfying way that when you explore the entirety of the map, each area is connected to 3 or 4 different areas. Ori hardly has that. By the way, that makes Hollow Knight's areas memorable. On the other hand, I just finished Ori and I can't name three areas for my life.
Also, I 100%'d Will of the Wisps on hard in 18 hours on my first try. To do that in Hollow Knight, I needed about 70 hours. I am pretty sure most people who are competent in those type of games had similar stats.
Like I said, not for one second I felt lost in both games of Ori. You know exactly what you should do or where you have to go while you get lost all the time in Hollow Knight, and yes that's to the detriment of the former and to the gains of the latter if we are judging them as metroidvanias.
Again, I really, really love Ori. It does so many better things than Hollow Knight, but you can't say it's a better Metroidvania.
It has amazing, bosses. Ori's final bass is more engaging than the Radiance and the Nightmare King. The platforming is deliciously fun, the environments are beautiful, the animation bursts with life. The enemies are more varied and challenging. The escape sequences, the wonderful score, the multi-phased boss fights. Ori never feels boring to control, never feels a chore to backtrack because the moment-to-moment gameplay is so much fun. Bash, triple jump, launch, the whip thing. Ori is amazing to control in the air too.
However, Hollow Knight does also many things very, very well that Ori are honestly abysmal at. Most of the charms are useless in Ori. Ori has almost non-existent lore and non-existent world-building.
Hollow Knight does this thing where the progress, the upgrades, and the world are organically tied together in such a beautiful way. The charms are dead bugs' wishes, the upgrades are tied to the areas and the lore. And God, for a game that wants to add quests, the fact that it only has 4-5 NPC with meaningful interactions is really, really bad. And this blue bird gives you most of the quests. That's honestly very disappointing. Hollow Knight has over, what, 30 different NPCs that you can have meaningful interactions with, and their dialogue differ depending on your progress. It is a very living world. Even on the level of the quality of writing, like the dialogue. Ori's dialogue is simplistic, and it is made by a studio. Hollow Knight's writing, is seriously impressive even more so since it is a game developed, designed, and written by mainly two guys.
