In 1994 there was Super Metroid, and it was great. And then... nothing, until Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Or is that really how things went? The mid '90s was an interesting period for the genre, with the 3D (r)evolution and games like Doom, Tomb Raider and Mario 64 having a huge impact on developers as well as players' tastes and expectations. This is also a time when the market had been utterly saturated with linear platformers (often based on cartoon and movie licenses) for years, so it makes sense that the "break" with them when it finally came was fast and hard (with a few notable exceptions like Mega Man and Rayman). 
In the west, certain developers who had played both Ultima Underworld and Id's FPS games went to work and started forging more in-depth experiences within the world of first-person view games, often also incorporating platforming in them, which resulted in a number of titles that any 2D ARPG or Metroidvania (MV) fan ought to at least give a fair chance. ​On the Japanese side, however, several talented developers stuck with 2D for a while longer and some of the best and most advanced 16-bit games got made during these years. This includes within the Platform Adventure genre, so even if nothing can quite compare to Nintendo's masterpiece there are still a few essentials in the bunch here. 

Speaking of Nintendo, when Mario and Zelda went 3D, things changed quite a bit for each series. And not just in the ways you'd expect with puzzles and level designs making use of the added dimension. For Zelda, we did see it coming in the way A Link to the Past was another step towards linearity and more focus on narration and NPC interaction. The latter two would now take up room to the point where they can't basically be skimmed through and this would change the pace and feel to something rather different than what you'd expect from a Platform Adventure up to that point.

"What do you mean? That's not even a platformer!" - Yeah, that's mostly correct. Nintendo chose to make the crucial jumping part of the platforming almost fully automated, and while you can still hop around in a roundabout way in parts, it isn't that useful in Ocarina of Time. Mario on the other hand, took another step towards non-linearity and while he didn't go full Metroid, a new mold was created that other platformer developers would mimic. In both cases though, the way the camera works meant that the player wouldn't have the same kind of overview of their direct surroundings that they had in the 2D prequels. What I'm getting at here is that while it can be argued that Platform Adventure games just transitioned to 3D (and I'll cover that transition as best I can here) it wasn't a full transition as far as the mainstream goes, and so there was a thread left there for later games in the genre to pick up on and develop further. 

To the mainstream collective gamer consciousness, this was basically a dead genre not just in-between Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night, but also between it and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (2001). While it's true that there weren't a lot of games released that perfectly fit the mold (though some of the ones that did are well worth checking out), there were a lot of games that seemed to pull from the best in the genre thus far while leaning more heavily towards a 3D Zelda-, Mario 64- or Open World-style structure, or somewhere in-between.

Then there were games like The Divide: Enemies Within (1996), the most obvious early attempt at a Metroid-style game in 3D, as well as System Shock and Exhumed/Powerslave which also feature elements that may have influenced Metroid Prime a few years later on. 

With the meaning of the MV term becoming broader in recent years and more players considering 3D games as part of the genre, re-examining the subgenre's history through a MV/Platform Adventure lens seemed natural. I hope these pages can provide a more nuanced and informative view of this period in the genre's history. 

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