I haven't played a ton of Metroidvanias.
I have, however, played a lot of Metroids and Castlevanias, so I'll mostly be comparing this to those, mainly to Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, as it seems to be the one that maps the closest to it.
TBH, the game is already worth the buy on sale for aesthetics alone, but I wanna go deeper than this and focus on "design philosophy".
On "map design" it is kinda weak, around "Dawn of Sorrow" level, in which individual maps aren't particularly interesting or memorable (And I'm pretty sure some are copy-pasted with some slight difference) nor is there any form of environmental storytelling in them.
Is something like SotN, all maps are part of something larger (The castle), so you can see them as parts of a whole, while here regions don't seem to have any relationship with one another. Granted, that could be justified with the whole "Wonder Labyrinth" thing, as technically the final maps of both Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow do the same thing.
Boss battles are hard to balance: The first two bosses are piss easy, though for a different reason as to why the first two bosses of Igavania games tend to be easy. Those tend to be so for being mechanically simple, while here every boss is mechanically complex (In the sense of having A LOT of different attacks), but those first two are balanced by "being too lenient", meaning that you can "screw up a lot" and still beat them in your first or second try... and being able to beat a boss without knowing how to deal with half of their mechanics doesn't sit well with me.
Later on the bosses remain as mechanically complex, but are now so hard that the strategy becomes "rush them down before they rush you down", meaning that you beat a lot of them before they're able to repeat their cycle of different attacks (Because they have A LOT of attacks), hyper-aggressive bosses like Flaus or Pirotess being prime examples of that, so you're less practicing mechanics so you can nail them thrice before the boss dies (Like you would in something like Aria/Dawn), and more so that you don't die right up in your next try. Perhaps it's due to that some negative reviews complain that the game is too easy while others complain that it is too hard?
I chose to never use items and to not abuse spells until way later on, but that some issues on their own: Your bow is pretty good... too good sometimes, to which I even asked myself if all bosses were even balanced to it (Again, for hyper-aggressive ones, being in melee range is a death sentence). The way the button layout works (Though I ended up slightly changing mine to Jump on A, attack on X, bow on B and spell on Y) made me rarely use the backdash mechanic because my brain couldn't associate that, while one of the "dodge" buttons was down+Jump, the other was LB.
Another small issue with the controls being that YOU HAVE TO press down first before downjumping or sliding, rather then pressing them at roughly the same time.
The story requires you to be acquainted with the Lodoss franchise to be understood. Technically you can get the main structure, that being Deedlit reminiscing about her adventures, but you might not feel much if you don't know those characters.
That map is packed tight in a way that makes it easier for you to know where hidden rooms are without having to use a guide (Exception being those at the edges).
The elements system is very well designed (Djinn & Efreet was one of the most fun bosses I've seen), though the issue that for all elements outside of Fire and Wind, the only way to interact with it would be with using spells (Some which might be overkill for normal mobs) or specific bow monster drops.
Speaking of which, it solved the issue of Igavanias of having unreasonable hard drops and too many of them. I know that the original idea was for it to be "So every playthrough you'll have different weapons and be different!", but in practice in most of your playthroughs you'll drop nothing (Unless you go out of you way to farm it). Not here, though: You can get anything with a small farm session, and getting some of them to drop "organically" isn't very rare either.
I did wish the bestiary showed in which maps each mob was located, though.
Technically it has the same issue as SotN/Aria/Dawn in which most weapons are just a different skin with different stats, and while there are different categories of weapons (Throwables come and go and have a lot of range, but only hit a single enemy, spears/halberds have long range, daggers are fast but have very few range, swords are "the good ol' reliable" and greatswords hit the most area), most people will feel that only two exists, as technically the moveset for everything that isn't a greatsword is the same.
I do see value in it's "wackyness": Just like you have wacky stuff in Castlevania games, here you have stuff like the tip for a hidden location being hidden in a diegetic QR Code as well as the game having special lines if it detects your savescumming or AFK farming.
Speaking of which, I ASSUME being overleveled isn't an issue, as I did beat the game around lvl 50, and comparing videos of people at lvl 50 and people at lvl 99 on boss rush gave maybe a 30-40 second difference.
Perhaps my bar is too low because I'm comparing it to something like RetroAchievements, but I liked the achievements here, all of them felt very doable (Even buying all the weapons in the shop costs only like 60k).
The game runs fine at 60FPS and feels very optimized, though I must also say it crashed a few times for me (Usually when spamming buttons after respawning or teleporting) and it even softlocked once after dying for the final boss, with Deedlit being "stuck" in her "respawning" animation (I just solved it by reloading my save).
The game is very good in some QoL like swapping spells and weapons pausing the game, [strike]though lacks in others like a good way to see if you're fire/wind in the heat of battle without having to move your eyes to the top of the screen[/strike] (Apparently your cape changes colors and I just never noticed while playing).
Overall, solid game, a Metroidvania through and through: All the same qualities they all have and all the same issues they all have.
