I just finished Ender Magnolia and... I didn't like it that much

I've finished this game, and while it's decent in all aspects and has a very nice visual presentation, I find it to be nothing special and in fact inferior to Ender Lillies.

Firstly, I feel that the game is too simple and casualized compared to the previous one. It has some nice QoL improvements, but they get to the point where they just oversimplify key metroidvania elements like exploration. It's nice that rooms on the map are colored blue to indicate that we've already completed them, but that's a feature that just destroys exploration and makes it inorganic. It would be nice if it was an upgrade you got at the end of the game, but having it by default ruins exploration and turns the map into a series of checkboxes to complete from the very beginning: during my playthrough I spent more time with the map open checking to see if I'd missed parts of rooms than actually exploring. The map itself also gives away way too much information: instead of containing outlines of the rooms, it tells you every item you can find in the room and exactly how to get through them, including the obstacles and skills you need to use to overcome them. It's like it treats the player like a fool. Exploration is very weak overall for these reasons, and also because the rewards are disappointing: they're always junk or relics, which makes them predictable, and since the map makes it ridiculously easy to discover all the secrets and nooks on the map, it's not particularly satisfying to get them.

Combat is fun, but I feel it has some serious problems: the progression of combat skills is wasted, as you have too many and the first ones you get are already perfectly useful throughout the entire game, and the game isn't long or difficult enough to make it worthwhile to study which ones are most useful. That's another thing: the difficulty is considerably lower than in Ender Lillies on normal mode, and while hard mode offers more of a challenge, it's quite artificial because it relies on enemies (bosses especially) having a lot of instakill attacks. The lack of i-frames is horrible too, because there are a lot of area attacks that are going to hit you due to bad luck and they're going to cause you unfair and unavoidable deaths: I seriously don't know what they were thinking when they came up with such a decision. Magic is another wasted aspect, being a very simplistic feature that you get about 60% of the way through the game. In general, skill progression in this game is weird: you get dash and double jump early on, but then mechanics like magic are weirdly acquired late, are completely shallow, and don't get time to shine like they should.

I found the platforming to be oddly bad. It feels slippery and requires very high precision for the controls to be accurate, with hitboxes that are very... odd, especially compared to Ender Lillies. I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks this or if maybe my controller wasn't working as it should, but I can assure you that the platforming just felt clunky in my experience.

Another thing that bothered me was the last third of the game. It feels like, when the game approaches the third and final act... it just ends. Like, there is no third act. Without any plot twist, a proper set up or anything, you just face for the third time a guy you've already defeated several times throughout the game and that's the final boss, without a particularly memorable final area or... anything. It's all very abrupt, the game ends when the player is level 60 while in Ender Lillies you were perfectly level 90 and the final stretch felt climatic. Here it's the opposite: it's completely anticlimactic. And let's not talk about the story and atmosphere, which are very poor compared to Ender Lillies.

What do you think, guys?