It'll be very interesting to me to see how people will react to the story this time. We definitely did try to make the world whole and to elevate what we started with Blind Forest to a whole new level. We actually hired Alexander O. Smith (if you don't know who he is, he has his own Wikipedia page ;)) a while ago to help us with the writing process, he's working on Ori and our yet-to-be-announced project. We finished writing the overall storyline last year and at our Team Retreat there's already been lots of tears. We never consciously try to tell sad stories, but since Ori is all about telling these allegorical tales, I think it's easy for people to identify with our characters.
And don't worry about us copying others too much - we always look at what happens outside our team, but I don't think people will make many connections to Hollow Knight and the likes. I was already surprised that some people thought we copied HK simply cause we now have more NPCs in the world that Ori can interact with - HK wasn't really our reference at all when it came to that. I wanted more NPCs even in Blind Forest (mostly cause I loved what ALTTP did with simple characters that gave you some clues and so on), but doing that the Moon Studios way with all the required animations was just way too expensive. But this time we were able to do it and do it in the way we wanted :)
Our combat system for example is much deeper and much more intricate than what any other Metroidvania has done so far and I think people will objectively be able to agree with that. Every single one of our weapons has their own animation set, it's an animation-commit combat system where we control timing based on the actual animation frames. I don't think it's even fair at all to compare what 2d games before WotW did with WotW in that regard since we're obviously using super advanced tools and built everything upon a super strong foundation. Most Metroidvanias including HK trigger a simple animation and spawn a little effect when you press the attack button - we obviously went way further than that. I don't feel super comfortable talking about this stuff since I'm one of the developers and it could quickly sound like I'm downplaying other games that came before, but this is just how art develops: Someone does something and then the next person pushes that even further and further - I still think in terms of platforming Ori is one of the best games out there in the genre and this time the goal was to do the same for combat... and everything else :D
