Zexion is a metroidvania but it is much more “Metroid” than “Vania”. It often times feels like Metroid 1 for the NES, but the possibilities to power up, find new upgrades and backtrack around the map to progressively plink away at the huge world and challenge is also quite modern. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it even if the uneven difficulty and the painful traversal almost turned me off from completing the game.
Starting the game with your trusty peashooter and nothing else on top of an hostile planet, I didn’t know what I was getting into in terms of scope and scale. The first upgrades I’ve got was quite familiar - the missile launcher, complete with its storage upgrades that you have to individually find. The first enemies weren’t too tough and the first boss (a pair of robot cubes if I recall?) wasn’t too frustrating. The game is very nice by letting you restart before a boss when you die there (but if you die exploring, it’s back to the last save with you!)
There’s a lot of exploration to be done; The map is huge and you’ll slowly uncover more areas and regions locked behind specific movement abilities, like being able to phase through walls, destroy certain types of blocks, and more. The game even uses weapon properties (the remotely controlled projectile comes to mind) to lock certain areas, so you need to keep your eyes peeled up for these. After a while of getting abilities like infinite jumps you’ll be able to completely uncover the map, and boy this takes a while. There are some fast-travel stations, but they really are few and far between, and the map sometimes doesn’t make it clear which locations contain items you haven’t picked up but cannot yet, so if you don’t make some mental notes you might have to trek through the whole world in vain.
There are a bunch of challenges at every corner; from bosses to enemies ambushing you to gauntlets of platforming or even stealth - reminding me strongly of that segment in Metroid Zero Mission - and sometimes failure means having to redo quite a large section of the game, but that didn’t detract too much from my experience. The game is surprisingly stingy with ammo recharge stations, which I found really weird. Enemies and blocks sometimes hide missile and bomb pickups, but being on a fully stocked arsenal is quite the rare occurrence. I kinda wish the game would replenish everything when you saved.
The difficulty of the game put me in a hard spot, criticism wise. While I persevered through the early combat encounters, I found most of the end game bosses just plainly too hard, dealing massive chunks of my life every hit (that I couldn’t avoid because of poor playing on my end) while I wasn’t able to deplete their health fast enough with my basic weapons. On the other hand, the game has a really complete difficulty settings menu where you can control exactly how much damage you take, if ailments apply to you, infinite missile ammo, etc. For some reason, this also felt bad. Some bosses I had to set the damage taken to 0, because even at 1/10th I was getting destroyed. I’m not sure what the real issue is here (probably my bad gameplay? Maybe there was something I was missing?) but in this case I kinda wish the game had an option where the difficulty would ramp down by itself if you kept getting defeated by the same challenge over and over. Manually having to go “Yeah I’m bad at this, please deal no damage” didn’t feel great, but otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to proceed… This is kinda where I land with Zexion.
Ultimately I persevered and completed the game. I had a very good time and if I was better at this genre, I probably would’ve loved to complete all the challenge runs and unlock some more tidbits of the story. It’s a great love letter to Metroid, but it also does it’s own thing really well!
