10 Metroidvanias That Make Unlocking One New Ability Feel Better Than Beating the Final Boss

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Published Jul 10, 2026, 3:25 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Contributor at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

The general goal of most action-adventure games, Metroidvanias included, is to obtain all the necessary abilities and upgrades that eventually lead you to the final boss so you can plant your boot in their teeth. However, as the old wisdom goes, the purpose of an adventure isn’t always the destination, but the journey leading up to it. Those abilities, in particular, make up the highlights of that journey, to the point that unlocking more combat and traversal tools could be considered more fun and exciting than actually capping off the game.

Beating a final boss in a Metroidvania is usually very cathartic, both in terms of story resolution and testing your skills, but it’s also often a final exam of sorts, a chance to test every ability you’ve already picked up in the game. By that logic, getting those abilities is inherently more important than actually putting them all together at the end of everything. That’s in addition to the fact that just getting new ways to move and fight stuff is fun in general.

Spoilers for the following games!

10 Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

Come On and Slam, and Welcome to the Jam

Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

Guacamelee takes a lot of overt inspiration from the major Metroidvania series like, y’know, Metroid and Castlevania, and that includes bestowing new upgrades and abilities from ancient statues. The chief difference between Guacamelee and its inspirations is that nearly all of these abilities are combative in nature, with any movement or exploration benefits they confer being more of a side-perk.

The three most important abilities in the game, the Rooster Uppercut, Olmec’s Headbutt, and Frog Slam, let you smash red, yellow, and green blocks around the world, respectively. As you progress the critical path, you encounter a lot of all of these blocks, well before you receive the necessary abilities to smash them, so finally getting those abilities and being able to clear those paths is immensely satisfying. Plus, you can use all of them in a fight, and you’ll certainly need all of them when it comes time to fight Calaca at the end of the game.

9 Crypt Custodian

The Afterlife Offers Many Opportunities

As far as Metroidvania upgrades go, Crypt Custodian keeps things fairly traditional, offering new traversal and exploration abilities after defeating bosses. However, the quirk here is that not all bosses reward abilities. This does, unfortunately, mean that you’ll sometimes go to all the trouble of clearing a fight, only to end up with basically nothing. On the flip side, those moments when you do obtain a new ability do become all the sweeter.

Defeating certain bosses around the game unlocks Pluto’s critical traversal abilities, including the Air Dash, Broomerang, and Spirit Split, with some abilities also playing further off your existing ones, like Spirit Jump letting you jump while in spirit form. As I said, not all bosses reward you with tangible upgrades, though on the bright side, just about every fight does provide some kind of tangible benefit, like unlocking new utilities at shops or helping you befriend certain characters.

8 Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

One More Tool for the Pirate Belt

In most of the Shantae games, the titular half-genie’s abilities revolve around her transformation dances, with each one learned within the game’s various dungeons. In Pirate’s Curse, however, Shantae’s magic is unavailable, so instead, her new abilities come from Risky’s five pieces of stolen Pirate Gear, also placed within each of the game’s dungeons.

In a rather Zelda-esque fashion, large portions of the dungeons where each piece of Pirate Gear is found revolve around the piece of gear you obtain. Cackle Tower has many wide gaps to glide over with the Pirate Hat, the Lost Catacombs has fragile footholds and gaps you can only break through using the Scimitar, and so on. It’s in this way that the game both helps you understand what each new piece of Pirate Gear is capable of and, in turn, gives you a healthy appreciation for the fact that you have it now. Since there are only five pieces of Pirate Gear in the game, you also quickly learn how to chain their functions together, like using Risky’s Boots alongside the Cannon to get the widest possible jumps.

7 Blasphemous 2

Make the Most of What You Have

It’s kind of thematically appropriate that Blasphemous 2 doesn’t have that many different upgrades or new movement mechanics to unlock, even after you defeat some bosses. It’s all about penitence and self-suffering, and what’s better penitence than forcing you to get good with your base kit with only an occasional bread crumb for a new ability. Naturally, you will come to appreciate those rare bread crumbs.

Besides getting the other weapons that you didn’t take at the start of the game, the only abilities you unlock through progression are the ability to climb walls, the double jump, the air dash, walking on crystal platforms, and the ability to grab Scion rings. Just five major abilities for the entire game, and they’re nowhere near each other, to say the least. Blasphemous 2 wears its Soulslike influences on its sleeve, so it’s not strange that the game would prefer you just get good with what you have rather than overhauling your whole kit after every region, but that will help you appreciate those scarce upgrades all the more.

6 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Bend the Castle to your Will

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

As a deliberate sendup to one of the grand daddies of the Metroidvania genre, Symphony of the Night, Bloodstained puts a big emphasis on unlocking new combat and traversal abilities. However, it also plays a little coy about some of those abilities, which adds a layer of puzzle-centric “aha” moments to the baseline joy of unlocking new tricks.

Most of Bloodstained's most important traversal abilities are obtained via Skill Shards, many of which are automatically obtained after defeating major area bosses, like Andrealphus and Orobas awarding Double Jump and Invert, respectively. However, some of these abilities don’t come from defeating bosses. The Deep Sinker Skill Shard, for instance, requires you to explore a bit past the boss room and break an object. One of the most important traversal skills of the mid-game, Aqua Stream, doesn’t come from a boss or a hidden room, but is instead randomly dropped by regular Deeseama enemies. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I finally cracked that particular peanut, I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

5 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Good Ol' Adaptable Alucard

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Speaking of Symphony of the Night… Well, Symphony of the Night! Naturally, as one of the forerunners of Metroidvania games, Symphony of the Night knew a thing or twelve about making you appreciate its unlockable abilities. I’d go as far as to say that if it hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t have any of the games on this list.

Whether it’s the fake final boss against Richter or the real fight against Shaft and Dracula, I’ve often felt that just exploring both the regular and reversed castles is more of a highlight of the game than actually reaching its conclusion. Alucard is already a pretty mobile character to begin with, thanks to his signature back dash, but only becomes more so with the acquisition of the double jump, high jump, and wolf, bat, and mist transformations. Compared to newer Metroidvanias, Symphony of the Night was a lot more cryptic about its signposting, so getting new abilities was less a matter of, “oh boy, I can go use this ability here,” and more, “oh boy, I wonder where I can use this ability.”

4 Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Bosses and Abilities Go Hand-in-Hand

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Ender Magnolia’s protagonist Lilac, much like Lily before her, is a literal child. She can’t fight by herself, and she can’t do much in the way of traversal beyond running and dodge-rolling. This is why she needs the help of her various recruited Homunculi to handle all the heavy lifting for her. Of course, in most cases, the only way she can recruit a Homunculus is to defeat one that’s gone haywire and restore it, which is as good a justification for locking major abilities behind bosses as any.

Encountering a major boss in Ender Magnolia is exciting, not just for the obvious reason of getting a new beastie to pit your skills against, but because it almost always means that, upon defeating it, you’re going to unlock a new major traversal ability, such as Lars’ Grip and Motley’s Magic Strands. Not only will you likely be using this new ability shortly to continue progressing, but you’ll also be able to go back and explore all those areas you likely couldn’t figure out before, of which this game has quite a few.

3 Nine Sols

Put in the Work, Show Your Skill

Nine Sols is an outlier amongst many Metroidvania games in how its ability progression works. Barring a couple of bedrock abilities like the Parry, Charged Strike, Air Dash, and Unbounded Counter, you don’t unlock most of your tech just through exploration. Rather, most of it comes from spending skill points on the game’s skill tree, which means not only do you have to chart most of your character progression yourself, but you also get to build out your ideal kit.

Spending skill points unlocks both upgrades to your existing abilities, such as Immortal Dash and Bullet Deflect, and entirely new abilities like Swift Runner, Skull Kick, and Swift Rise. Yes, most of the map progression stuff is blocked by those environmental abilities, but the way your combat style evolves throughout the game is entirely on you, which means your ultimate experience against the game’s final boss could end up being completely different from another player’s in ways both big and small.

2 Metroid Dread

Software and Hardware Update

Like many of the previous Metroid games, Metroid Dread grants Samus new combat and progression abilities from finding hidden upgrades held by ancient Chozo statues, sometimes just hidden on their own and sometimes hidden behind the game's boss battles. However, many of the game’s most important abilities, rather than sticking to this classic format, instead force you to survive an encounter with its signature hunter, the E.M.M.I.

The E.M.M.I. encounters make up some of the game’s most tense moments, as you’re completely incapable of harming them with any of your weapons. You can only carefully navigate their lairs until you find an Omega Beam power-up to finally destroy them, then absorb the necessary data to unlock abilities like the Morph Ball, Spider Magnet, and Speed Booster. Surviving all of these encounters and getting their respective abilities feels like a much more monumental achievement than eventually curb-stomping Raven Beak at the end of the game, which makes you wonder why he thought he even had a shot.

1 Hollow Knight: Silksong

Earn All of Your Upgrades

In the original Hollow Knight, new traversal abilities were given to you at a fairly steady clip, with every major area usually having at least one to offer. By contrast, Silksong is a lot more stingy with its major progression upgrades, which means you need to put a lot more work into finding them.

Many of the most important traversal abilities, like the Faydown Cloak and Clawline, aren’t even accessible until the second act of the story. All you really get in the first act are the Swift Step and Drifter’s Cloak; after that, you’re more or less expected to just make do with those for a hefty chunk of the game, relying more on obtainable Silk Skills and combat changes conferred by the various Crests than anything else. It’s because the major abilities are so spaced out like this that every time you obtain one feels positively monumental, like a massive swath of the game has finally revealed itself after goodness knows how long.

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