Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse developers are trying really, really hard to make sure you know it’s a metroidvania without using the word ‘metroidvania’

Despite the first trailer for Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse looking very much like a classic exploration-focused platformer, the involvement of Dead Cells developer Evil Empire had some folks going into a “Oh god, I hope it’s not a roguelike” panic.

Konami tried to assuage those fears with the label “2D exploration action game,” which only highlighted the awkwardness of being the Japanese publisher behind vania but not the Japanese publisher behind Metroid. Clearly Konami wasn’t going to invoke Nintendo’s famous series in the description of its own game, and a new behind-the-scenes interview from today’s Triple-I Initiative showcase seems particularly focused on getting across that Belmont’s Curse follows the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night school of design.

Here’s everything that I picked up on that was silently screaming “metroidvania!” without actually using the term:

2:36: Matt from Evil Empire calls Belmont’s Curse a “2D action adventure world”

2:45: Lead level designer Sandro says “We wanted to build the world in a way that made you feel that you were exploring a city. It meant taking extra care of the way we created our exterior spaces, leveraging the verticality of the city, exploring from below the streets to the rooftops, making sure you can explore inside and outside spaces. We wanted the game to feel modern but also have the intricateness of the action adventure genre at the heart.”

2:48: Intricate 2D map shown that looks reminiscent of classic Castlevania, though without being broken up into rooms. It shows labels for save rooms and fast travel locations.

6:05: Konami producer Tsutomu Taniguchi says “With our decision to focus on an exploration-oriented design, we drew significant inspiration from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.”

6:40: Sandro calls SotN “a genre-defining masterpiece” and that “it inspired a lot of the game structure.”

8:21: Matt turns to the camera and says “Our last question is, considering the history of Evil Empire with roguelikes, will Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse be a roguelike? No it won’t.”

Well, that’s pretty conclusive, huh?Also, this might sound borderline conspiratorial of me as a final piece of now-unneeded evidence, but the trailer Evil Empire ran earlier in the showcase showed Belmont’s Curse hero Sonia leveling up, a key RPG-lite feature of the Symphony era of Castlevania games.

It’s a little funny how hard Konami’s working to define what type of game its resurrected Castlevania is considering the glut of imitators that have gleefully bandied about “metroidvania” over the last decade. I think there’s an extra layer of irony here in that before metroidvania became such a ubiquitous term, forum-dwellers came up with the term “Igavania,” named after longtime Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi. It was Igarashi’s stewardship in the 2000s that defined the intricate exploration and light RPG systems that defined the later Castlevania games and made them distinct from the more straightforward platformers of the ’80s and ’90s.

But after Igarashi left Konami to make his own blatant Castlevania spiritual successor, Bloodstained—which the 2015 Kickstarter campaign described as an “exploration-focused, side-scrolling platformer featuring RPG and crafting elements”—I guess the term “Igavania” was doomed to be just as off-limits for corporate comms as a Metroid reference.

Despite all that, the message does seem to be getting across where it matters. On Steam, the Castlevania Dominus Collection of 2000s Iga-produced games, Bloodstained, and now Belmont’s Curse all have the user-defined “metroidvania” tag.

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