Minoria

Today's game is Minoria. I was quite excited to play this, as it was from the developers of what could qualify as my favorite Metroidvania, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight. For some reason, Minoria was significantly less popular, and also rated lower, but not so much that I'd consider the review scores to be bad.

Minoria is similarly a Metroidvania, with a similar story of some religion-related females going to rid a place of evil. It has a similar length of about 6 hours, and features combat consisting of running, jumping, dodge rolling, melee attacking, and then using various consumables that refresh at save points. The consumables can heal, serve as ranged attacks, melee charged attacks, and more. While most of the game is spent running through the interconnected rooms and beating up little enemies, there are also quite a few boss fights.
What's interesting is that Minoria has very "high-stakes" gameplay. Many enemies will kill you in 2-3 hits, but you're similarly granted very strong basic attacks, and since your dodge roll has no cooldown, you're almost invulnerable while using it. I feel this was not such a good idea, because it would cause the game to either be trivial if you knew how to avoid an enemy's attacks, or lethal, losing you a reasonable amount of progress, if you did not. I rarely found a moment where I felt appropriately challenged.

Maybe I'm comparing Minoria to Momodora too much in my head, but they are by the same developer and have very many similarities. However, I can't help but notice that Minoria seems worse in pretty much every way. Momodora has a gorgeous 2D pixel art art style, whereas Minoria uses 3D with flat shading. This type of shading is very difficult to pull off well, and Minoria certainly doesn't accomplish that. Regardless of that, the 3D, the animations, the feel of combat and platforming - it just ain't that good. The music and sound effects also feel like they're down a notch.
There are also some really questionable design decisions, like limiting the amount of charged attacks you can do per save point, when they already have the limitation of taking longer to execute. Or the map design, which felt really poor. Backtracking is understandable, but there were around 20 locked doors before I had found even a single key. At least put some areas behind other areas, or diversify the methods of progression, rather than having me try my newlyfound key across the entire map.

Overall, Minoria's not entirely terrible, but I'd still have a really hard time classifying it as a "good" Metroidvania. Especially if you've come from playing Momodora, and expect an experience on a similar level of quality, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Minoria is a downgrade in every aspect from a minor difference in music, to a large difference in how enjoyable the combat and level traversal is, to a massive difference in the art and animations. In general, I wouldn't recommend it, but if you're really itching for another Metroidvania to play, then there are a lot of worse options out there.