And you fundamentally misunderstand what the game was going for

@Whom
I totally agree with you that from today's perspective there really isn't much reason at all to go back to 7 instead of other games in the series like Wii or 8. But I feel like it's unfair to say that the game "lacks its own identity" because of stuff that a future game did.

I understand liking the game, but what do you have to be smoking to consider the game literally flawless?

@UrLocalBanktoad I think "platform-adventure" is apt because it is a combination of the platformer genre (Mario-like) and the action-adventure genre (Zelda-like), which is what Metroid was specifically intended to be in the first place. You traverse the world by platforming, but the gameplay is structured like an adventure game. Mario and Sonic are just pure platformers that have very little to do with the adventure genre.

I think the term "search action" is kinda dumb sounding because like I said it's just way too ambiguous and isn't specific enough. "Search" and "adventure" imply the same thing, so it is not descriptive at all. Even if certain action-adventure games do not focus heavily on exploration, the word "adventure" still implies exploration to some degree. In my mind there is no better term for the genre than "platform-adventure", since one of the defining features of the genre is platforming and I find it extremely weird to exclude that from the name of the genre. If you wanna find a substitute for "metroidvania", it is baffling to me that the word "platform" would be excluded. We already have "puzzle-platform", so the template works.

But, y'know, since metroidvania is by far the most common term for the genre, and everyone knows what to expect when someone calls a game a metroidvania, to call it something so random and undescriptive as "search action" just feels more contrarian than anything.

@UrLocalBanktoad Couldn't that description be applied to literally any action-adventure game tho? I mean, it's in the name. "action" + "adventure". We already have a name for the Metroid genre, metroidvania. Though I've always preferred to call them platform-adventures, since I feel that's more descriptive and specific.

This is probably a stupid question but what is a "search action game"

Even in its rushed state I like 3 better than 2

I don't think it's fair to give the game a 1/10 just because your copy of the game happened to be glitched

I think Mario Party DS belongs on this list btw