This feels more like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night than most things. Soundtrack is bangin'. Absurdly good pixel art with impressively detailed sprite animations, especially the boss fights which are an absolute spectacle - the art might be the game's biggest selling point. The backgrounds are equally impressive and ridiculously detailed. I can't stress it enough, the game is beautiful to look at.

2D platforming controls and mechanics are what they should be - tight and responsive. There's a small learning curve in using Lux, your sword companion, effectively. But it feels rewarding, and the wall jumping that it lets you perform is malleable enough to go off the beaten path for some light sequence breaking, skipping some puzzles and setting up speedrun tech without making it too obvious or necessary. There is a slight issue with the direction that you roll when you cancel out of a melee attack - I hope this gets fixed.

I was pretty shocked to find an interestingly crafted story, characters and lore that brought me in, which is something that games like this tend to gloss over. I generally prefer the visual storytelling of something like Super Metroid for 2D exploration games, but Blade Chimera manages its dialog and characters tastefully and it doesn't feel like it bogs down the game much (except not being able to teleport out of town).

The map is fairly well designed. It's not very complex and is rather easy to keep track of with the minimap, markers, generally clearly delineated areas, and of course the striking visuals. I find myself constantly looking at the backgrounds spotting easter eggs and crazy details all over the place. This probably enhances the worldbuilding that's laid out with the lore and characters that I mentioned before - which probably heightened my expectations, leading to my only real criticism.

The game isn't long enough. Don't get me wrong, the length alone here is fine for your average metroidvania. But it should be twice as long to do justice for everything that it sets up. Blade Chimera has interesting systems, decent lore and characters, amazingly detailed sprites and animations, and it just doesn't capitalize on it enough. The game's smooth as butter and is not lacking polish at all, but it still feels incomplete. I wish there was an inverted castle like in SotN, or a New Game+ with cranked up enemies and more items. It feels like the devs bit off more than they could chew, hastily wrapping everything up in the back third of the game.

Still worth it for metroidvania fans, it oozes with that quality SotN aesthetic.