Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

Think about every typical metroidvania game wherein the ability to navigate through certain parts of the map is acquired after beating a boss.

Now imagine if that ability was locked behind a familiar training and evolving system with 40+ possible familiar evolutions but only a few of them have stage navigation tools and the player isn't told which familiar to evolve for what ability. In order to evolve a familiar a certain way, the player is forced to use a particular weapon type and the resource used to evolve familiars are dropped at random by enemies in a way which favours grinding many weaker enemies. And then to utilise all the stage navigation tools you have to open the menu to swap between different familiars.

Best story and MC in the series but the gameplay kind of felt like a slog even if the innocent devils system was kind of cool. The game really should have ARPG as a primary tag too.