[It's actually way more lopsided than this in favor of the red naga, the blue one just got a lucky crit and made it seem closer than it was]

Prime 3 has a civilization that folds in between the intro and you visiting them, it's great

I do, however, have plans for door.rpg to do the very similar bit of having something simple/nondescript appear first, and then later having the actual 1:1 representation show up

The distinction matters

Both places do have a mirror/illusory dungeon planned, but there that sort of mismatch is at least vaguely expected

You really need such a gag to happen in an otherwise generic cave for it to really hit

At least the other torment nexuses let them keep their clothes on

Having done a FJ4 twice, it makes actually beating the game a whole lot saner not feeling the urge to master every single job

Unfortunately 2 is the sort of pretentious and weird and atonal I like, so it's going pretty high up on my list of metroidvanias

You could have passives that raise atk/def if a floor's more than half mapped, or have random enemies require different skill loadouts than bosses, or have heavy hitters be really food-intensive to use, or have obstacles/shortcuts only the scouts can clear
but that's getting a bit too explicit tbh

The most I've personally done is a gathering-centric party and a main party in some of the Etrian Odysseys, but that's a bit different

Honestly the thing I'd want to mitigate if I made a full-on dungeon crawler would be the tendency to overprepare, and I feel that'd require more heavyweight mechanics than just the implicit one of 'you can bash your head against a fight you waltzed into without a need to reload every time'

If that's the LP I'm thinking of I remember a lot of reasons why they didn't like the game, but not that
I'm not even sure what they'd be referring to, since there's one part in the first game where you can do two dungeons out or order and the second has a deliberate open structure for a chunk of it

I'm thinking of multiple ways this could happen:
-The metroid prime revision method [the door to the next room is locked until you get the item you're intended to use in the room]
-The event past that item gate just doesn't appear
-The player character goes 'why am I here' and turns around for you

The game also reinforced my feeling on how it's very funny to open a [metaphorical or literal] door to a postgame thing 25% of the way through a game, and just let the player wander in and get vaporized

Yeah, my file time ended up just shy of 27 hours, which is a bit long when I have the other two games in the trilogy yet to play

You can quit out, load your near-the-end save, and see the other endings you unlocked, at least, but I wouldn't call that the most elegant of solutions

game's cute at least

Also I'd imagine a lot of those mechanics involve getting stacks of things and then spending them, and ehhhhh

door.rpg's status effects already hew a bit close to that and I feel that's been extremely well trodden ground in the past decade