izigame.me

It's flawed but pretty good. You love metroidvanias? Get it, it's nowhere near close to being bad.
It's very rare for a game to ensnare me nowadays. I usually start something, play a couple minutes, think "Neat, I'll continue later." and never play it again, but I finished this one almost 100% in one sitting.
The pixel art is beautiful. The setting gives me huge SMT vibes with the whole "Japan overrun by demons". The music really complements and enhances the atmosphere. Movement is tight and responsive (excluding some wonky interactions with your companion and some prompts to interact with the world when you were actually trying to attack the demons instead of activating a platform), and most of the weapons are fun to use.
Some minor complaints, the way guns work makes them, in my opinion, pretty useless. They do more damage the closer you are to the demons. Which I get it, it's supposed to discourage you from just sitting halfway across the room and cheesing out everything. The thing is, at that point, why use it to shoot the demon for 40 damage while we're hugging, when I can just slap them with my comically big anime sword and do 150 damage instead? On top of that, some enemies are outright invulnerable to gunfire. It wasn't until I found the grenade launcher that a gun actually felt useful. And nerfing them like this didn't even solve the issue, you can still camp out the monsters if you want, it's gonna take twice the amount of time as shooting them at close range, triple the amount of time as slapping them with your sword, but since ammo is infinite there's no downside aside of it just being boring. The game tells you you should carry both a gun and a sword, but honestly swords are so much better, I wish guns were more useful and fun since they looked like a huge part of the game in the trailers.
The side-quests are incredibly repetitive. I don't remember how many there are in the list, but at least 60% of them are "Kill X amount of Demons in Y Area". Even as quick as the demons die, this gets old pretty quick. But the ones that are good, man they're good. There's some that allow you to fight some extra bosses or some special demons like this one in a movie theater which freezes you up and kills you, with a simple but pretty clever solution. I would have loved more of that, and less fetch quests or demon killing padding. Definitely wish they had gone with quality over quantity on this end of things.

Most of my issues with the game come from the fact that progression is gated by keys you get by progressing the story, instead of powerups or abilities like it's common in the Metroidvania genre. How then do you get more powerful if not by collecting sacred knickknacks across the realm? By leveling up. It might seem inconsequential at first but this leads to some weird interactions with the map exploration.
There's this mechanic where you can use your companion as a makeshift platform, and boy can you get creative with it. Some crazy animation cancelling shenanigans allowed me to explore most of the map, except for 3 story gated areas, before finishing the second story mission. This led me to killing enemies I wasn't supposed to face yet, which gave me a bunch of XP, which got me some stupid levels, which allowed me to get the double jump, air dodge, and teleportation abilities pretty early on. Which led me to collect these secret puzzle pieces which let you open some doors that hold some very powerful weapons early on. I got some stupid weapons that made me instantly delete everything on my path without much through or effort. And the bosses, while definitely more challenging than the generic demons, were not really challenging. The only bosses I actually had difficulty with were the two secret post-game bosses which were pretty fun.

You might think: "Well, yeah. You exploited the game and you broke progression. What did you expect?" But the thing is, the more you play it, the more you realize those aren't exploits. The clever animation cancelling you through you were exploiting. They're actually conscious design choices, the game wants you to do this. All I did was get a bit ahead, but the way the upgrade system is handled, means you're bound to get all this "game breaking, endgame abilities" pretty early on.

What's the problem then? I believe the biggest offender here is the teleportation. Normally, being able to teleport to any part of the map you've previously explored, without any requirements, drawbacks, or consequences would be given to you until you're about to fight the final boss. You know, so you can go back and look for anything you might have missed, complete side-quests, and all that jazz. And, while you can definitely use it as such, since it made getting the last 2 puzzle pieces I had missed to fight the final secret-boss, and finishing up the side-quest list way less monotonous, in here you can get it as your third ability for about 4 skill points if I remember. Which is honestly pretty early in the game.
Which causes this ability to completely derail any sense of progression or difficulty. You're about to die? Literally teleport to any save spot on the map you've previously been to, which regenerates your HP and MP to full, and come back to the room next to the one you escaped from to continue your exploration without any sense of danger. Not that you would need to do that a lot. because as stated earlier, the game has some issues balancing the difficulty. It starts out kinda challenging, and then it just becomes a breeze. Most of the time I died out of pure recklessness and due to not fully paying attention to what I was doing.

Normally in this genre the developers know how to balance enemies in the area you're currently at. Because, assuming you don't sequence break, to get the double jump you must have gone to Area C, which allows you to go to Area D, They know your level should roughly be around so-and-so because the enemies they placed in Area C give out X or Y EXP and they roughly expect you to have killed Z number of them while you travel the area, they know about how much damage and defense you have because they know which weapons and armor they placed in Area C. They can use this knowledge to account and balance the enemies you will face in the next area.

Bladechimera has issues with this, because giving you the choice to get any abilities you want at nearly any point you want, and incentivizing sequence breaking led to some notable difficulties balancing what to expect of the player when roaming a given area. And made it nearly impossible to account for the damage output levels and the amount of punishment the player can take and dish out at that point.

Not to say the game is bad, far from it. I loved every second of playing it and it has become one of my favorite games in the genre. I can definitely see myself replaying this one along SOTN in years to come. But this is the first game in the genre that I've seen uses such an unconventional progression system, and as such, there's definitely some wrinkles to iron out. It's not bad, it's just needs polishing.

If they ever reuse this template, I'm hoping they polish it out. And do more of what works, leaving behind the things that don't. I can't wait for the amazing result that is bound to come out of that. Definitely give it a try.