Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 (PC, PS3, 360)

[Yoshi]

Dark Souls is the Metroidvanias; Demon's Souls is the originals. I can barely argue that, now that you mention it.

[A Robot Bit Me]

They'd be perfectly analogous if their music weren't so sparse.

[Space Pirate Roberts]

The primary activity in every real Castlevania game is combat, which makes it an action series. Absolutely no one called any action game a platformer in the 80s or 90s. That is revisionist idiocy from the same stupid kids who now write for garbage sites like IGN.

The primary activity is getting to the end of the stage. Enemies are obstacles to be gotten past by the method most appropriate to the situation at hand, whether that be combat or avoidance - sometimes the answer is fighting, sometimes it's waiting for them to jump, running under, and moving on. In this regard, they are often little different from environmental obstacles, traversal of which is of course the defining feature of the platformer. ...Interesting how this describes Mario games just as well as it does early Castlevanias, no?

In LoS, combat is everything. Rarely do you even have the option to bypass enemies without killing them. (And when said combat is a slightly improved imitation of the worst game of note in the genre, this is a problem - but that's a value judgement, nothing to do with genre classification.) Enemy behavior focuses on killing you, not following a script that often takes only perfunctory notice of your presence, so avoidance becomes impossible.

[Yoshi]

I want to see a video of you waiting for an enemy to jump so you can run under in a real Castlevania game.

[A Robot Bit Me]

I do that in the face of fleamen all the time. Medusa heads are more easily dodged than whipped, too.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Good lord this debate is still going?

Pretty much everyone has brought sound, well-supported arguments to an important (as videogames go) discussion. But if you'd rather it stop, then okay.

Despite the bad reviews so far I want play it just to see how the story turns out.

Cool. The games I'd like to play are the games I want to play, too!

Open Question: Are the games you like to play the same games you enjoy playing?

[kingoffighters]

Fun with words. Next, what is a role playing game.

[MechDeus]

Shenmue.

[NeoZeedeater]

It always blows my mind that Yoshi was born in 1976, read gaming magazines in the `90s, and insists on using the same definition of platformer as people that started gaming in the 32-bit era.

[Chux]

I just want to delete all this dumb horse shit in the CASTLEVANIA thread, not the 4 assholes discuss minutiae about video game genres for the x time.