I'm in the minority in actually preferring the original Ori game, even if only very slightly. On some level it's a weird conclusion to come to as Ori and the Will of the Wisps is just straight up better in a lot of ways; the movement pool is expanded, reintroduces the old abilities in swift fashion and many of the new abilities are enjoyable too, the chase sequences are much less frustrating due to being quite a bit easier to sight-read than in the first game, the game embraces being a Metroidvania rather than doing the awkward straddling of genres that Ori 1 did, the awful save system from the first game has been scrapped, the combat has been dramatically improved (which is to say it's now pretty good now, rather than so bad you just run past every enemy you can), and the uninspiring skill tree from the first game has been replaced with a badge system seemingly pulled almost directly from Hollow Knight.

And yet, despite the moment-to-moment gameplay just being a more enjoyable, engaging and well-designed experience, Ori 2 sometimes left me with a bit of a hollow feeling whilst playing it. A part of this is the story beats, with the same absence of emotional subtlety that Ori 1 had also, feel a lot more explicitly manipulative in something that often feels like a repeat of the first game's story; it was hard at points for me to take Ori 1's story sincerely, but here it feels just impossible. A part of this too is that I don't think being Bigger is actually necessarily Better in this case; this game has races, side-quests (including an arduous trading side-quest which is made hard to keep track of by all the Moki blending together) and multiple different ways to regrow a town, and while some of this adds to the game at some points an awful lot of the time completing the side content just felt like I was ticking off boxes. Maybe a full-on Metroidvania wasn't what I wanted all along, certainly I feel like the strongest parts of Ori tended to be the more linear, focused sections, or maybe a Metroidvania with all this Content can only really come together for me if the game has as much personality as Hollow Knight does in order to make that content more memorable rather than just going through the motions.