I agree op, even if i didn't consider it a Metroidvania. Enemies and proyectiles are another element of traversal for Ori. That was cool. Still a 7/10 game for me.
Ori and the Blind Forest is a beautiful disappointment...
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I wouldn't really go in expecting a Metroidvania if I were you. The map is all interconnected and you do gain more abilities over time, but in practice the game always tells you where you need to go and the map stays releatively closed off and linear the whole game so it doesn't necessarily behave like one. Not an objective negative or anything, but definitely a reason why the game feels more like a cinematic platformer than a Metroidvania.
Still absolutely worth a playthrough regardless.
It really is unfair, but it's just the elephant in the room for any game that even approaches the same genre. It's similar to trying to talk about any ARPG without mentioning how great Dark Souls is at least once. When you have a single game that does everything perfectly, it just sneaks its way into discussion subconsciously.
OP
OP
Appreciate you taking the time to read and post in the thread. I have high hopes for WOTW and will hopefully get to play it someday in... Portable form ~_^
The combat was whatever, it was the floaty jump I couldn't get used to. I guess I don't like platformers where the jump isn't like Mario, Mega Man, or even Donkey King Country.
I dropped the game after 2 hours, also found it boring to play.
I dropped the game after 2 hours, also found it boring to play.
Thought it was the best Metroidvania this gen by far, loved everything about it, and cannot wait for the 2nd. This is the great thing about entertainment every one loves different things. I thought Hollow Knight was pure shit but a lot of people would say it's better than Ori for instance.
Those are not the usual metroidvanias, in fact, as someone who loves this genre of games, i barely beat hollow knight and couldn't play more than 2 hours of Ori.
I agree with the OP complaints, but none of that stole away my enjoyment with the game as it did theirs.
Yes, the combat can be awkward and the enemy variety redundant, but the strengths of exploration, platforming, chase sequences, visual and audio delights, and presentation kept me hooked.
Seems that the sequel addresses some of these issues too.
Yes, the combat can be awkward and the enemy variety redundant, but the strengths of exploration, platforming, chase sequences, visual and audio delights, and presentation kept me hooked.
Seems that the sequel addresses some of these issues too.
Someone mentioned that originally it wasn't possible to go back to zones after completing them, but since I first played it on PC I guess this was something that was changed from the original release?
I don't know if I might've preferred it that way, as being locked out of areas can be annoying, but I definitely wouldn't have considered it as a metroidvania if that were the case. I'm a big fan of the genre, so while I like Ori quite a bit, I'm always sort of confused by the praise it gets when compared to those types of games. Looking at it as a platformer gives it a much more favorable light, and I did absolutely enjoy the platforming in it - I just went into it hoping for a more exploration driven game.
I'm looking forward to WotW, especially with the more active looking combat though. If it scratches the metroidvania itch, all the better. If not, that's okay too.
I don't know if I might've preferred it that way, as being locked out of areas can be annoying, but I definitely wouldn't have considered it as a metroidvania if that were the case. I'm a big fan of the genre, so while I like Ori quite a bit, I'm always sort of confused by the praise it gets when compared to those types of games. Looking at it as a platformer gives it a much more favorable light, and I did absolutely enjoy the platforming in it - I just went into it hoping for a more exploration driven game.
I'm looking forward to WotW, especially with the more active looking combat though. If it scratches the metroidvania itch, all the better. If not, that's okay too.
Same here. The floaty jump is killing me. I bought the game twice (Steam, Switch) and couldn't enjoy it because of the controls. The combat annoyed me more than you unfortunately.
I'm steadily working my way through this since picking it up last month. I like it, but I definitely don't feel the same compulsion to keep playing like I did with Hollow Knight. It's more of a platformer and although the controls are really fluid and the movement options are really cool I just personally don't find it as engaging. The world feels more like an obstacle course than a place, if that makes sense?
Also spamming projectiles does get really tedious. I get that combat isn't a focus but if enemies are meant to be circumvented and used for platforming as a boost rather than confronted you shouldn't even have the fireballs.
Also spamming projectiles does get really tedious. I get that combat isn't a focus but if enemies are meant to be circumvented and used for platforming as a boost rather than confronted you shouldn't even have the fireballs.
I think Ori is a very good game that's undermined by people calling it a Metroidvania. I guess it technically is, but it fails in a lot of things that people want from the genre while succeeding in its own unique ways. The game would've been better with no combat at all and having the enemies be platforming challenges instead due to how bad the combat is, and the world design contained such little meaningful exploration or backtracking or anything and those two things disappoint people a lot when they get into the game having only heard about it being one of the best Metroidvania games.
The best things in this game are the beautiful presentation and the platforming, and it's absolutely fantastic in both of these ways. My biggest hope for the sequel is vastly improving the world design. It definitely looks like the developers are trying to greatly improve the combat, as well, given what we've seen in trailers.
The best things in this game are the beautiful presentation and the platforming, and it's absolutely fantastic in both of these ways. My biggest hope for the sequel is vastly improving the world design. It definitely looks like the developers are trying to greatly improve the combat, as well, given what we've seen in trailers.
I didn't really like it but I think I just have reaaaallllllllly quirky taste in metroidvanias. Outside of Super Metroid (masterpiece) I'm always hit or miss with the games others love (Ori, Axiom Verge) and love the games that others dislike (salt and sanctuary).
Great game but I do think it was overhyped and misclassified as a Metroidvania. The major weaknesses are the combat and the double jump, which feels awful. Thankfully bash makes up for it and by the end of the game, your movement options make this game noteworthy. 8/10 but no Hollow Knight.
It's super weird. I would call myself a very good at 2D platform games. For whatever reason, I just could never enjoy 2D platformers with floaty jumps, like Sonic the Hedgehog. I guess it's because I grew up on Mario and Mega Man that's how I expect my 2D heroes to jump and anything outside of that is "off" to me.
Hollow Knight would probably be an exception. He's a middle ground between Ori and Mario. The jump is float-ier than Mario/Mega Man, but also doesn't hang up in there too long like Samus/Metroid and Sonic.
There's a science to this all!
The comment about combat not changing at the 70% mark vs. the first half-hour makes me honestly wonder if OP isn't using some of the main mechanics (i.e., something like launching through enemies or redirecting projectiles). If they're actually at the 70% point, I don't see how that would be possible, but between the comment on only being able to survive 2-3 hits, and not seeing any change in combat from basically the intro makes me ask: Have you been finding the ability unlocks and assigning your points in the three skill branches?
It's possible there was just a mismatch in expectations vs what the game actually plays like, but this sounds more fundamental. Ori is one of my all-time favorite games, but I'll be the last to say "this game is for everyone." These questions sound different from just not digging the style.
It's possible there was just a mismatch in expectations vs what the game actually plays like, but this sounds more fundamental. Ori is one of my all-time favorite games, but I'll be the last to say "this game is for everyone." These questions sound different from just not digging the style.
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It's sold as a metroidvania but really isn't, it's a very linear experience with not so much originality.
It's an ok game, 7/10 seems fair.
It's an ok game, 7/10 seems fair.
I'd say the power ups were pretty original. The ability to launch yourself off bullets isn't something I've seen in the genre before and totally opened up both the combat and traversal possibility spaces, which is exactly what a good Metroidvania ability should do.
It's a beautiful game and I enjoyed it a lot, but the escape sections really hampered my enjoyment by the end. I feel the controls were not as precise as needed to do those sections justice and a lot of the time I felt I was dying more due to the controls than to any mistake on my end.
I'm like the opposite, whenever I play a platformer I think I wish it weren't a platformer lol. I enjoy them enough, it's just not as fun to me to master the platforming as it is finding items and exploring in games. Landing on 3 tiny moving platforms and then scaling a wall and hopping over 5 more pits off the backs of enemies just to do it all again for the 12th time when I miss is my least favorite part of a game. Which is in Hollow Knight too, so meh to that.
My first thought after finishing the game was damn Hollow Knight really ruined this for me, so basically I agree OP.
That's a great way to describe Ori in a succinct way. I think many of its critics either don't see that or dismiss its significance to Ori's game design.
That's how I felt about Hollow Knight. Its world was pretty much entirely static, consisting of mostly horizontal platforms that felt very level-editor. It makes sense because the game was mostly about little arena fights which are fun and varied.
Ori had lots of curves and slopes, moving parts/set pieces, physics and plant life that moves around and characters that do more than just stand in place. Its one of the more alive and natural feeling metroidvanias out there. It even had a swimming mechanic :)
I haven't tried but I actually don't think you can play Ori with the D-pad, it would be weird when some key skills are aimed with the analog stick. But when you get those I can guarantee that you won't mind the analog controls, by the end you're traversing the map in an extremely versatile and fluid way, makes other similar games feel slow and clunky in comparison.
Hopefully OP keeps playing and update the thread after finishing it. I had an interest dip as well mid game at my first play-through but for me it ended up as one of my top 10 favorite games ever. It's incredibly unique. I've finished it three times by now, it even made me cry the first time, they managed to pull so many of my emotional strings. ❤
I just replayed Ori on Switch and loved it as much as the first time on the Xbox. My only regret was on this replay playing it on Normal and not hard since it's incredibly easy after playing it through once.
This is my Game of the Decade. I love it so much.
I like metroidvanias and platformers, and this is like a hybrid of the two with amazing graphics and music. I love every minute of it. I did not love Hollow Knight nearly this much.
Sorry you don't enjoy it OP. The end gets a little tough but never unforgiving. Don't forget - you can just not fight stuff. Just Bash through them.
I like metroidvanias and platformers, and this is like a hybrid of the two with amazing graphics and music. I love every minute of it. I did not love Hollow Knight nearly this much.
Sorry you don't enjoy it OP. The end gets a little tough but never unforgiving. Don't forget - you can just not fight stuff. Just Bash through them.
I'm about 6-7 hours in and I keep playing because I thought to myself, there has to be something I'm missing from all the praise it's getting. The difficulty is so unforgiving to the player, I now understand why they gave you the ability to save anywhere. It also doesn't help that I've encountered occasional glitches to the physics and hit detection, which makes the matter even worse.
Sad to hear the combat doesn't get any better. And the art, while beautiful, makes it hard sometimes to differentiate between what is hazard and what is not. I'll complete it, but from its shallow gameplay to linear levels, hopefully they'll listen to the criticism and make room for improvement for the sequel.
Sad to hear the combat doesn't get any better. And the art, while beautiful, makes it hard sometimes to differentiate between what is hazard and what is not. I'll complete it, but from its shallow gameplay to linear levels, hopefully they'll listen to the criticism and make room for improvement for the sequel.
In Ori it feels like the game is just constantly testing you. There isn't like a break in the platforming challenges - everything is out to kill you. Hollow Knight's world was more "dead" but still evolved over the course of the adventure as characters went on their own journies and the infection spread.
I just get more of a feeling that Ori is a video game meant to test your platforming prowess when stuff like those escape sequences happen. The only time I felt like that in Hollow Knight was in the White Palace and that was my least favorite bit because of it.
Haha yeah even though I love this game I truly truly hate those instant death fleeing sequences. Hope they don't exist in the sequel, they may look cool but they aren't fun to play. And to think that there is an achievement, which I'm sure some Neo type of person actually have unlocked, to complete this game with no deaths...!!!... :o
I haven't played Ori, but the reason I wouldn't criticise Mario, DK or Rayman for having bad combat is because they have fantastic combat. We take them for granted, but Mario has some of the most satisfying mechanics for defeating enemies ever created; there's a reason they're still fun as hell over three decades later. Do not mistake simplicity for bad design; if anything, it's the diametrical opposite.
I think it's the best Metroidvania of the gen and was the best exclusive game to Xbox before releasing on Switch this generation.
This was pretty close to my experience. I couldn't quite see the gameplay hook in the first fifth/quarter of the game and found dealing with enemies quite repetitive. It was only after I'd collected a few more movement tools and could really hop, skip, and bash my way around maps that Ori got its teeth into me. Ended up having a great time.
Yeah it seems they focused on visual spectacle more than playable experience in these and it is one of the sore points of an otherwise excellent game for me.
For whatever reason, Celeste's similar "escape the boss/screen of death" sequences felt better even though they were tough and unforgiving with instant deaths and had EARTHQUAKE LEVEL shaky screen and everything else Ori has going on.
My point was people don't criticize those games for combat because they aren't widely considered to have combat in the first place, since they're 2D platformers. And if you want to argue that they do, then I'd agree with you and say Ori's means of dispatching or surpassing enemies are just as well designed if not more so once you have all the abilities.
Ori was not a disappointment if you played it in the year that it was released, because it was one of the first major-published Metroidvanias and a return to core gameplay focus over cinematic from a major publisher. We've also gotten used to difficulty spikes in games, something that was much less common 5 years ago, and almost unheard of from a major publisher with the exception of a handful of fairly niche games from developers that focus on that.
If you play it 5 years later, when we're in "year 5" or "Year 6" of the Metroidvania Renaissance, sure, it doesn't hold up as well because so many other games have come out in the last 5 years that have been built on the same concepts that Ori was built on. Prior to Ori coming out, I had only played Shovel Knight (not really a Metroidvania, but sharing some concepts) and Guacamelee (one of my favorite metroidvanias ever), but since Ori there's been Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Steamworld Dig 2, Axiom Verge (Released the same year as Ori, but I think Axiom Verge slid under most people's radar until it got added to Games with Gold & PSN+), Salt and Sanctuary, Bloodstained, Celeste, and a huge number of other games sharing similar gameplay elements that make Ori fairly parochial... If you played it before those games, then it really felt fresh especially from a major publisher, but if you play it after those games it doesn't feel as remarkable as it did in 2015.
I played Shadow Complex in 2016 or 2017 at some point and thought "Eh, this game doesn't really match the hype..." but because I was judging it by the last 10 years of Metroid-like 2D action games, as opposed to judging it by 2009 standards when it was a ground breaking "Xbox Live Arcade" game.
The one thing I never liked from Ori was that some zones became inaccessible after completion. It's something that really bugged me, especially given the genre.
*Edit*
Comparing/contrasting Ori's combat to Mario's combat is like comparing Mario's combat to Dark Soul's combat. They're two different genres of games that are trying to do different things.
Not really... Ori is intended to be played with an analog stick. There's a lot of mechanics in the game from combat to traversal that must be played with an analog joystick.
If you play it 5 years later, when we're in "year 5" or "Year 6" of the Metroidvania Renaissance, sure, it doesn't hold up as well because so many other games have come out in the last 5 years that have been built on the same concepts that Ori was built on. Prior to Ori coming out, I had only played Shovel Knight (not really a Metroidvania, but sharing some concepts) and Guacamelee (one of my favorite metroidvanias ever), but since Ori there's been Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Steamworld Dig 2, Axiom Verge (Released the same year as Ori, but I think Axiom Verge slid under most people's radar until it got added to Games with Gold & PSN+), Salt and Sanctuary, Bloodstained, Celeste, and a huge number of other games sharing similar gameplay elements that make Ori fairly parochial... If you played it before those games, then it really felt fresh especially from a major publisher, but if you play it after those games it doesn't feel as remarkable as it did in 2015.
I played Shadow Complex in 2016 or 2017 at some point and thought "Eh, this game doesn't really match the hype..." but because I was judging it by the last 10 years of Metroid-like 2D action games, as opposed to judging it by 2009 standards when it was a ground breaking "Xbox Live Arcade" game.
The one thing I never liked from Ori was that some zones became inaccessible after completion. It's something that really bugged me, especially given the genre.
*Edit*
Comparing/contrasting Ori's combat to Mario's combat is like comparing Mario's combat to Dark Soul's combat. They're two different genres of games that are trying to do different things.
Not really... Ori is intended to be played with an analog stick. There's a lot of mechanics in the game from combat to traversal that must be played with an analog joystick.
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Having played it as recently as last week, I'm not sure this is true. You can direct things like the dash-through-enemies and enemy projectiles using the d-pad. I know the analog stick is faster, but I'm pretty sure it's an option either way? I agree that having the analog stick available is ideal.
Then say "Ori's means of dispatching or surpassing enemies is well designed", and argue your point. Don't cop out with "you're not allowed to criticise combat in a platformer".
I never insinuated people can't criticize combat in a platformer. I never insinuated that those games I listed were badly designed in any aspect. You misunderstood where I was coming from with my initial post and now you're straw manning.
Yeah, it's not a bad game, but it's a bad metroidvania. After the flooded tree chase, everything just becomes meh.
For a game having that much combat, the combat also sucks really bad. Leveldesign is nothing to write home about either.
I has a great atmosphere, visual design and music, but the rest is just...nah. People saying this is the best metroidvania they ever played are wilding. I hope the sequel improves on it in every aspect.
For a game having that much combat, the combat also sucks really bad. Leveldesign is nothing to write home about either.
I has a great atmosphere, visual design and music, but the rest is just...nah. People saying this is the best metroidvania they ever played are wilding. I hope the sequel improves on it in every aspect.
Agreed, the reason I'm not giving out a 10/10. In general it's just a really boring gameplay idea, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider which could've been a great game without the same type of sequences. I don't understand who wants them, I'd rather just watch a cutscene. But that's me.
Anyway, fortunately the rest in Ori is great!
