The gameplay... it's okay I guess. Once the real game starts and you gain the ability to shoot homing shots, I'm thinking this isn't very fun yet, but it'll probably get better as I gain more abilities. I can see on the pause menu that there's quite a lot of new abilities to unlock.
I really like the save system. You can technically save anywhere, but it uses up soul energy, which I think auto-recharges at a slow rate or something? Either that, or you need to collect it from the blue glowy things. There's expansions you can get that let you store more soul energy cells at a time.
There's also a skill tree menu that you can only access at your save points. Once you've created a save point, you can always go back to it and access the skill tree. The stuff that enemies drop is the currency that you use to gain skills. I can't tell whether enemies respawn based on time or on distance, but either way they made it so it'd be really stupidly tedious to grind in the early areas for a bunch of skills.
The first skill I unlocked was the "shoot faster" skill obviously. I bet there'll be a skill to increase the range of the homing shots because right now you really have to put yourself in danger in order to hit anything. Then I got the "pickups float toward you" skill, then the skill that lets you re-use your custom save points infinitely, so you don't need to wait for a soul recharge in order to save again.
So far the gameplay mostly revolves around exploring every path to collect the keys and then going back to unlock the locked door to progress. Also there are map stone things, like the map consoles in Metroid, except you have to find the missing pieces before it'll work.
After getting the wall jump ability, and the warp point at Hollow Grove, I went back to the first area (Sunken Glades) and found a path leading into Black Root Burrows... This area is completely dark... I bet it's probably possible to do some sequence breaking here, but screw that, I'm not exploring this place without some kind of light source.
Oh, and now I see that the charge shot also uses up soul energy... and yeah, you can only recover soul energy from the blue gems that don't respawn very quickly... and now there's a bunch of walls that requires charged shots to destroy and I have to juggle between progressing and creating save points. Also there's doors that require you to simply deposit multiple cells of stored soul energy... which I obviously can't do anything about yet because I only have 1 energy cell capacity.
This game is getting pretty addicting now. Once I got to the Moon Grotto and got the double jump ability, the platforming suddenly got way more intense. I wasn't expecting this game to have Meat Boy style platforming difficulty all of the sudden. This is great.
I now have enough energy cells to open some of those energy doors, but I keep getting screwed by the lack of available energy... this game is so hard that I end up spending my energy on save points instead. I love how this is the game's way of rewarding you for using saves less often.
I'm at 18% total item completion by the time I got the Water Vein. Most of the areas are around 30%, except for Sunken Grove and Moon Grotto which are closer to 70%, and the Black Root Burrows which is only 2% cuz I didn't wanna explore in the dark. This is a good stopping point. The next objective says "Enter and Restore the Ginso Tree", but obviously as soon as I find a warp point I'm gonna want to re-explore everywhere and see what I can get with my double jump and energy capacity.
I like this game a lot so far. The areas feel very seemlessly connected, much more so than the 2D Metroid games are. It feels like it probably won't be tedious to get 100% in this.
I'm playing on hard mode btw... I don't know what the difference is other than enemies doing way more damage, but I like this difficuly level. After 2 hours of playing I've already died 98 times.
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