HunterX

Another gem, hidden on steam.
Check this fantastic game and more on Hardcore Reviews! ⚡
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.

Good hack and slash metroidvania. Some difficulty spikes here and there but overall a really good game that deserves more attention.

HunterX is a solid title with Souls-lite elements, good OST and hard-hitting combat. Kinda on the minimalistic side of things when it comes to the story and characters, but no prob, i never play a Metroidvania for these stuff. Definitely recommended to get your Igavania fix.

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.