HunterX

Another gem, hidden on steam.
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Hunter X is a fantastic anime-style 2.5D metroidvania hidden in the Steam store, super fun with tons of exploration and combat. Great pick for newcomers to the genre. Explore beautiful environments and face a wide variety of enemies with unique patterns and challenging attacks.
The distance between save statues is short, so don’t be afraid to explore every corner of the map!
Some boss fights are tough and require real skill, making character progression and gear upgrades essential. Improve your weapons, special moves, passive abilities, and platforming skills to keep advancing. Use the shop wisely, and don’t forget to recover your lost souls when you die, you can always press -TAB- to keep track of your moves!.
While the game shines through its solid gameplay, it also stands out thanks to its charming anime aesthetics and visuals. It may not have peak graphics, but the lovely female characters, the world building and level design, the cool monster and boss artwork combined with a great soundtrack and smooth gameplay mechanics make it a joy to play.
In conclusion, Hunter X is a highly recommended metroidvania: challenging, entertaining, visually appealing, and light on system requirements. With its affordable price and a sequel already available on Steam, it's a hidden gem and a must buy during Steam sales!

First blind run on normal was around 10ish hours in a vain attempt to 100% the game. Found out about New Game+ and working on it, a new difficulty and goals, hope the difficulty continues to crank up, I have enjoyed the game so far.
If I was the rate the difficulty (since a lot of people gripe in the discussions about it) I would say it's not as hard as a Dark Souls/Elden Ring type game, but not as easy as Symphony of the Night. A nice layer between the two. I've only felt like I have had a few cheap deaths so far, but otherwise if I mess up it's on me.

When you have a choice between going to an area where everything two shots you or an area that you are the right level for what do you do? The hard path of course. I got to an area that I shouldn’t be in yet but did it anyways. The boss took over an hour but I got a really good weapon. When I went back to the weaker area, everything and the boss just went down. That was fun.

The controls feel good. Is it the best? No, but it’s not bad.

You level up like a souls-like game but are only 4 stats, HP, attack, stamina, and magic attack.

There’s a weird thing about the skill tree. It’s a bunch of small trees and when you use enough points in one you can do the next one if you have the powerup unlocked. A few of the upgrades are in randomish spots. If you don’t explore everywhere you might have a hard time. The second or third one was down a random path that I just happened to go in. One time I found one that was two skill trees over so I couldn’t access those skills for a while.

Some areas of the game look pretty good. Most of the areas are unique. The enemies have great designs, especially the bosses. The final boss was pretty fun once I got the patterns down.

I found the magic to be a bit useless in combat. You have a number of uses till the next save point. The sword is just better than magic most of the time. There is one really good use for magic and that is to just have it equipped. It adds an elemental damage stat. If your sword has elemental damage like fire and you have fire magic equipped the fire sword will do more damage.

One of my biggest problems is that you can’t use the D-pad to move. It only works for items and you can’t change it. I kept ducking instead of going left. It was mainly a problem in bosses where I was trying to keep moving but was angled down a bit too much. It’s not that bad. I’ve played other games that was a lot more sensitive but it still got annoying at times.

12-13 hours is good for this game. If it was 20 hours I think I would be tired of it and want it to end. If you like Metroidvanias and think it looks good, it’s a decent 6.5/10 if you get it on sale.

Neo Popcorn, now Orange Popcorn (eh, should've stuck with Neo) really enhanced everything about 3000th Duel and made a better game with HunterX. It wasn't as good in some areas, but overall it was a better experience.

Parry is now a feature, removing the swap weapon button from 3000th Duel since you can now only wield one weapon. Parry is awesome and felt really good. The slight downside is that you lose out on a weapon slot. This is where I thought it was a weird choice. 3000th Duel gave you 3 weapon type options, here you only get the one. This made choosing a weapon not as interesting since you continuously get better stuff as you progress. It would have been nice to have options to mess around with the fight mechanics.

The game is also much shorter. I spent 80+ hours getting everything in the last game, this time around it was less than 30 hours to do everything. The difference here is that the level cap is removed. But the achievement is capped at 199. What sucked is that since you have to play through 3 times to unlock everything, I found that I had to keep my xp trinkets on the whole game in order to reach cap. This took away from me using other trinkets until the final zone which is where I could unleash power. Sure I could go and play a 4th time, but at that point I'd have to make my own challenges, which is eh.

The starting zone is completely different from the rest of the game which was odd. Honestly the whole aesthetic is odd. Note bad, just odd. Like in 3000th Duel, the music didn't always match, but it sounded fantastical and I thought it was good again. It's just that short music loop that can start to get annoying. The environment textures are much better this time around, as were the character/monster models. While the chibi style was removed, some things still looked weird.

This is a fun game to waste some time on, I'm hoping the next one is just as good if not better.

Really solid and fun game. Fantastic 3D character and monster designs, and wonderful animations too. I played on Easy, but still found major difficulty spikes in some of the bosses for where I was in the game, which brought down the fun level a bit. I found the exploration really enjoyable, although I think the game could have done a little more to point you in the right direction at times. The game is somewhat souls-like, where if you die you have to reclaim your soul, and there is stat based upgrades using your souls as currency, but the difficulty overall isn't as punishing which is great. I do wish the main character Tsuki spoke, and had a little personality. Game looked and ran great for me, no technical issues. Absolutely worth a play if you're a fan of metroidvanias, especially if you are tired of the extreme difficulty of many of the newer souls-like metroidvanias. To me metroidvanias should be about exploration, progression, and atmosphere- not overwhelmingly punishing difficulty.

Simply a straighforward, good looking and fun to explore metroidvania with gameplay absolutely nailed by the developer.

Please steam give us the mixed review option!

This game is great but flawed. It has some much to love but some things really hold it back. For example the amount of bosses that you have to jump to hit, is in my opinion, way too many! I also feel like too many of the bosses rely to heavily on projectiles with annoying status effects. The level design also felt off at times, like a lot of it just didn't make sense, to me anyway.

Pros
Great combat
Cool skills
Some good bosses
Great music
Movement felt smooth
Good selection of enemies
The exploration was fun (Once you knew where to go)
Good amount of weapons, spells and accessories
Upgrade tree was cool
Upgrade tree stones from levelling


Cons
Bosses rely heavily on projectiles (For most of the second half of the game)
Level design doesn't always make sense
Hitboxes could be better
Final boss and ending were pretty anti climatic
Not a lot of story
Too many bosses need you to jump to be able to hit them.


I think that's about everything. Overall I enjoyed my playthrough but I don't think I'd go for a second playthrough.

I'd rate it as a 6/10

TLDR;
Combat is fun but game has some problems with level design and some issues with boss design IMO