Metroidvania is a subgenre of video games.
 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in 1997 is considered the defining Metroidvania game, incorporating role-playing game elements from The Legend of Zelda series with non-linear traversal within the Castlevania series; most subsequent Castlevania games followed its approach and refined the genre
 While early examples were usually two-dimensional side-scrolling platform games, the term has since been applied to top-down and 3D games

