Are 2D platformers dead as a concept?

Pretty much. Nobody wants to admit it but it is intensely obvious at this point why it has a solid chunk of its fanbase, and it's not because it has particularly good Metroidvania gameplay.

It's one of those franchises where the characters were ambiguous enough that it attracted the lolicon gooners. This led to the designer saying on Limited Run's Discord in 2021 (https://archive.ph/Rvde8) that Shantae was totally an adult the whole time. This of course is despite this in 2009 Nintendo Power from the same exact guy:

View attachment 6879197

And this in 2015 (https://ghostarchive.org/archive/HIA6x):

View attachment 6879234

Meaning he later started basically lying because of how it looks. Which makes some comments in the archived reddit thread hilarious. So yeah. Your options are to attract the gooners or have amazing gameplay. Good luck.
The first Shantae for the GBC was really good. I haven't played any of the other ones, but I really don't like the change in art-style.
 
If waifubait characters are what you mean then that's lazy on the developer's part, but there's worse.

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A lot of the appeal of a platformer is its character imo. Mario, Mega Man, and Castlevania have cool characters. I can't even imagine playing Nigger of Persia regardless of its technical qualities.

I remember when Braid was popular, one look at the character dispelled any interest (I still tried it out of curiosity and think it's massively overrated). Meat Boy was much the same. For some reason Spelunky, despite being kind of offputting looking too, was passable to me (it sure helped that it's one of the best platformers of its kind).


ADHD platformers are a curse unto the genre. Same with autistic precision platformers where you're expected to die a trillion times to get one series of pixel perfect jumps done in one flawless run. No. Just no. Celeste comes to mind as such slop (I hated it before I knew the girl was a tranny too, so it's not bias).


Yeah, Mario Maker proves that.
Dandara is an awful game.
 
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The first Shantae for the GBC was really good. I haven't played any of the other ones, but I really don't like the change in art-style.
Of the few I've played I found it to be the worst personally. Others I played were Half Genie Hero and Risky's Revenge.

Klonoa 1 and 2 were so good. They should make more.
Klonoa was pretty solid. Some areas got a little mazey near the end iirc, some more linearity would be preferable.
 
Platformers aren't dead, but basically an impossible to breach. You have too much competition and backlog to go against. Nevermind that the main consoomers are hardcore Nintendo players.

In general, when making a game the first thought should be "who would play it?". When you do 2D platformers, which is done to death the question is even more important since you have plenty of hacks that also shit out games of this type.

In general the type of audiences to appeal to are:
* Gooners - Gameplay is second, the most important are appealing to fetishes. Generic anime is probably too hard market to break into, but furry is an easier niche. Worse fetishes can make your game successful, but will always leave you as a meme game.
* Trannies - must be a game about depression/horror of working 9-5. Need to invest hard into appealing to speed runners.
* Oldfags - Ape well known franchise that's been dead for at least a decade, but just enough to not be liable to lawsuit. Have a lot of shit referencing NES/SNES games that are unplayable without emulators. Need the game to be unreasonably finicky to make the player think repetition is the same as difficulty.
 
Of the few I've played I found it to be the worst personally. Others I played were Half Genie Hero and Risky's Revenge.
It's very janky but once you get used to its circular Map system and the flow of find town, interact with friend and complete dungeon i find it becomes really engrossing, the zoomed in camera is always a bit of a pain and there's some total bullshit like the rottytops race and having to trek around the entire map if you go to the wrong side of the mountain. It's rough but the good part really shine, I also stand by that it's dance system was the best and am pissed every game simplified it.
If you enjoyed riskys revenge at all pirate's curse is a step up in almost every way and is basically the peak of the series. It's has lots of neat call backs to the first 2 that make it really satisfying and feels like a genuine endcap that kinda fucked the series a bit. Its where the style became more anime but that only really affects the character portraits, everything else keeps the great pixel art of riskys revenge.
 
I think it's because most major developers don't want to make smaller projects with smaller profits. All of the recent successful 2D Platformers have come out of smaller developers like Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Shovel Knight. I'm sure Capcom or Bamco could bang out a Megaman or Klonoa easily with a relatively small budget.
 
I don't really play video games that much these days but I am personally very happy with what we already have available to us, so i honestly couldn't care less if no good platformers ever come out again. There is a huge library of what I would consider "near-perfect" platformers out there already across many systems and generations. Even after all this time I'll still sit down sometimes and play Sonic 2/3/Knuckles/CD, even a newer release called Sonic Mania (it hits all the right beats for me after growing up playing Sonic and I am glad it exists), along with even obscure things like Magician Lord on Neo Geo, my all-time favorite platformer Rondo of Blood on PCengine-CD and a couple of the other good Castlevanias on various systems always get revisits from me. Mega Man 1-9, the Mega Man X games, all titles that I could basically just play forever.

I have tried a couple newer platformers made in the modern era and none of them really did much of anything for me, and none of these newer games usually do. Even this one that I was super psyched about a few years ago called Blasphemous, I followed a little bit the development and teaser videos/screenshots and it just didn't pull me in like I thought it would. It's a neat enough game, but yeah. I feel no passion or happiness about it. I think maybe I just had to be a kid to enjoy games, and so now that I am grown up, I can only really enjoy the ones that were already "locked in". if that makes sense.
I have to wonder if there's some sort of quality or qualities that older games have that make them easier to attach memories to. That is, it's not entirely about encountering the games as a kid or young adult, but something inherent in certain games' design, that is much less common today. I will say that I managed to add Symphony of the Night to my repertoire of games that I look back on fondly even though I didn't play it until 2019. I was surprised that it was still possible for me to do so while being so far removed from my kid years/adolescence. It wasn't even my first Metroidvania or the first Castlevania game that I played that was like that, so I guess it's just something about the overall game design.
 
It's very janky but once you get used to its circular Map system and the flow of find town, interact with friend and complete dungeon i find it becomes really engrossing, the zoomed in camera is always a bit of a pain and there's some total bullshit like the rottytops race and having to trek around the entire map if you go to the wrong side of the mountain. It's rough but the good part really shine, I also stand by that it's dance system was the best and am pissed every game simplified it.
I just couldn't figure out where to go, and the screencrunch/zoomed in camera was a real pain in the ass. Maybe I'll go back to it with a guide, I like everything else.

If you enjoyed riskys revenge at all pirate's curse is a step up in almost every way and is basically the peak of the series. It's has lots of neat call backs to the first 2 that make it really satisfying and feels like a genuine endcap that kinda fucked the series a bit. Its where the style became more anime but that only really affects the character portraits, everything else keeps the great pixel art of riskys revenge.
I got the names mixed up, I think. I played Pirate's Curse and Half Genie Hero, not Risky's Revenge.

I think it's because most major developers don't want to make smaller projects with smaller profits. All of the recent successful 2D Platformers have come out of smaller developers like Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Shovel Knight. I'm sure Capcom or Bamco could bang out a Megaman or Klonoa easily with a relatively small budget.
That's basically what it comes down to. It's unfortunate because there's so many old franchises you'd think they would be happy to milk, but nope.

wat

Lemme guess: some forced SJW "diversity" vidya character from a Current Year game? Also I don't think "waifubait" characters are always "lazy", but can be easy way to fame.
That's pretty much what that nigger is, yeah.

Anyway, I'm not saying every cute anime girl is waifubait or that they're always an indication of laziness, but it does seem like a common crutch imo.
 
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The newest straight up pure 2d platforming games, like not metroidvania or shooter or heavy focus on puzzles other genres, I've played are Celeste, Super Meat Boy and The End is Nigh and Shovel Knight. I liked the first three because they're fast, challenging and easy to pick up and put down. Shovel Knight was just a fun nostalgia game. Realistically though, I'm probably not going to buy and play most new 2d platformers because there's a metric shit ton of them, a lot of them suck and even when they don't suck, they're all kind of the same thing.
 
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I have to wonder if there's some sort of quality or qualities that older games have that make them easier to attach memories to. That is, it's not entirely about encountering the games as a kid or young adult, but something inherent in certain games' design, that is much less common today. I will say that I managed to add Symphony of the Night to my repertoire of games that I look back on fondly even though I didn't play it until 2019. I was surprised that it was still possible for me to do so while being so far removed from my kid years/adolescence. It wasn't even my first Metroidvania or the first Castlevania game that I played that was like that, so I guess it's just something about the overall game design.

That's really how it feels, doesn't it?

And yeah Rondo is my fav but SOTN rules. Even if it wasn't some super popular and widely-acknowledged masterpiece, I would love it and continue to shill the fuck out of it. It was actually the second Castlevania game I ever played, and I picked it from the cabinet at the store because when I was much younger I picked the original Castlevania out of a Toys R Us display counter due to the cover looking so cool and it immediately became my favorite game on the NES by a long shot. When I saw SOTN in the stores again almost 8 years later, I took the same chance on it again and it blew my fucking mind even more. So many hours sunk into that game playing late into the night on school nights...so many memories. Those were the best days. Things were special back then.
 
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None of those have "good gameplay" as first priority? No wonder new vidya seems to suck in Current Year.
If you want a fun game you'll either play an old game that's verified by others to be fun or AAA that's hardcoded to make you feel things that are associated with fun.

For a new IP it's mainly answering some high that people want and can no longer get it from the usual sources.
 
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I feel like pushing the envelope in 2d platformers is harder than it was, but people still do it.
You niggas know Noita? Came out in 2019, which is getting to be a while back, but frankly, six years seems like a flash to me these days.
2d run and gun physics sandbox roguelike/platformer.
I still haven't seen one I'd consider a better balance of fun and sophistication.
Absolutely a worthy specimen, in a genre replete with classics that are easy to emulate, but difficult to better.
 
play an old game
I still play older vidya and haven't gotten into newer vidya that much. There's exceptions, like Space Engine (not a 2D vidya).

Also I can recall the world before 9/11, but that description of vidya that appeals to older people didn't really appeal to me.
 
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Pretty much. Nobody wants to admit it but it is intensely obvious at this point why it has a solid chunk of its fanbase, and it's not because it has particularly good Metroidvania gameplay.

It's one of those franchises where the characters were ambiguous enough that it attracted the lolicon gooners. This led to the designer saying on Limited Run's Discord in 2021 (https://archive.ph/Rvde8) that Shantae was totally an adult the whole time. This of course is despite this in 2009 Nintendo Power from the same exact guy:

View attachment 6879197

And this in 2015 (https://ghostarchive.org/archive/HIA6x):

View attachment 6879234

Meaning he later started basically lying because of how it looks. Which makes some comments in the archived reddit thread hilarious. So yeah. Your options are to attract the gooners or have amazing gameplay. Good luck.

I never got into that particular game but that kind of shit happens with so many other media. I hate little sexual degenerate incel weirdos like that so much. They ruin anything innocent. wasn't too long ago those type of people would be bullied into submission cast out and then ignored by society. nobody stood for that kind of behavior. nowdays they have entire discord servers and you can spot them a fuckin mile away by their avatars, they are everywhere. And young people just joke about that type of degeneracy now, its treated like a meme, it's insane.
 
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