Cards on the table: I hate the term 'metroidbrania'. I think many people who _use_ the term seem to hate it, too; as Kate Gray [writes](https://www.nintendolife.com/features/what-the-heck-is-a-metroidbrainia-introducing-the-newest-genre-on-the-block) on a Nintendo Life feature listing some of these games, the word "makes [her] feel like someone with a hobby so dorky that [she] can't talk about it with normal people." I'd put it forth that the term doesn't just sound dorky, and it's not just hard to explain (given that first you have to explain what a metroidvania is – itself a fraught bit of terminology). I'd say it's all but _useless,_ too. If you duckduckgo for 'metroidbrania', the main results are three listicles that'll give you the following corpus of games: