Super Metroid (Super Nintendo)

Nintendo set the gaming world alight last week with their announcement that Metroid Dread, the ludicrously delayed sequel to 2002’s Metroid Fusion, will finally see release later this year. Right on time to mark the franchise’s 35th birthday. Anticipation is running high, despite the saga’s rocky track record over the last decade or so. Will Dread be another Other M or Federation Force caliber dud or will it be the glorious return to form patient fans deserve? Or maybe it’ll just be kind of okay? Not everything has to be so extreme, after all. All I know is that it’s inspired me to play more classic Metroid, and that’s good enough for now.

1994’s Super Metroid opens with…corpses. The title screen confronts us with a disquieting view of dead scientists littering the floor around a capsule containing the last surviving member of the energy-draining Metroid species. This sinister first impression certainly did its part to reinforce Metroid’s status as the inveterate oddball in Nintendo’s stable of family-friendly offerings. While never gratuitous or self-consciously “adult,” it is a no-nonsense science fiction epic at heart. There’s nothing overtly cute or Happy Meal-ready about interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran’s grim struggles to preserve galactic peace.

Samus’ adventures are odd in another way, too. Most Nintendo properties play fast and loose with matters of chronology and continuity. Nothing about Super Mario World, for instance, appears to flow inevitably from Super Mario Bros. 3. Both come across as essentially self-contained princess rescue escapades. Contrast this with Metroid, where every sequel is a direct continuation of its predecessor. Super Metroid is no exception. Having previously prevented the Space Pirates of Planet Zebes from weaponizing the deadly Metroids (Metroid, 1986) and cleansed the Metroid home world SR388 of all but one of the creatures (Metroid II: Return of Samus, 1991), Super Metroid has Samus leaving the lone larval Metroid hatchling in the custody of the Galactic Federation science team at Ceres Station. Soon after departing, she receives an urgent distress call: Ceres Station is under attack! Doubling back, it turns out to be the Space Pirates and Samus fails to stop them from escaping back to Zebes with the hatchling.

Thus, the name Super Metroid is quite appropriate for this installment. Samus is literally heading back to where it all began, looking to finish the job by putting an end to the Space Pirates and the Metroid threat once and for all. She’s once again tasked with hunting down and eliminating Ridley, Kraid, and the other Pirate lieutenants in order to open the gate to the final area. This iteration of Zebes holds plenty of familiar enemies and locations sporting shiny 16-bit makeovers. We even get to revisit a handful of iconic corridors lifted straight out of the first Metroid. The fact that Nintendo was able to pull off reverent nostalgic callbacks to a game that was then a mere eight years old speaks volumes to its landmark status. Not that Super Metroid is a lazy retread. There’s plenty of all-new territory to explore, including watery Maridia and the eerie Wrecked Ship, and returning zones like Brinstar and Norfair have almost entirely fresh layouts.

Perhaps the most striking changes of all are the ones made to Samus herself. The SNES’s six-button controller was leveraged to the utmost here, resulting in a drastically expanded moveset for our armor-clad heroine. One might actually argue that the developers went a tad overboard with this control scheme. On top of being able to jump, shoot, and roll herself into a ball as before, Samus can now angle her arm cannon up and down with the shoulder buttons, perform a dash and invincible super dash, wall jump, swing around with the aid of a grapple beam, unleash a host of special charged attacks with her various weapons, soar through the air (and clear through some walls) via the finicky shinespark maneuver, and more. Heck, I played for years without knowing that the semi-secret Crystal Flash healing technique existed at all. It’s a lot to throw at a new player for sure, but the seemingly boundless attack and movement capabilities of a powered-up Samus are such a blast when mastered. It’s tough to overstate how much Super Metroid upped the ante on its two-button ancestors in this regard.

I similarly can’t praise Super Metroid’s audiovisuals and sense of atmosphere enough. That aura of dread established at the title screen persists through the entire runtime thanks to some of the most lavish pixel art and potent musical ambience ever to grace the platform. The sheer attention to detail is stunning for the period. Different sections of Zebes aren’t simply cobbled together from the same small handful of background tiles repeated room after room. They have their own distinct subdivisions within the greater environment. The lower reaches of Maridia are trackless subterranean ocean, while the upper portions are sandy and dotted with plant life and Space Pirate construction. Though 8-bit abstraction does have its charms, this is a ultimately a far more credible alien world than the NES or Game Boy were capable of conveying. Getting to experience a setting this rich as a character this fun to control is a recipe for borderline indecent amounts of gaming bliss.

In light of all it achieves and its reputation as not only one of the best games of its generation, but of all time, surely not even a die-hard nitpicker like myself can find fault with Super Metroid, right? Oh, boy. Buckle up, Dear Reader, because things are about to get bumpy. You see, underneath all that brooding atmosphere, Super Metroid is rather a light touch. It dispenses completely with the NES game’s anarchic “sink or swim” design philosophy in favor of what amounts to a lightly obfuscated linear progression. Barriers incorporated into the level design require specific upgrades to pass, meaning that although it often seems like any of the dozens of branching paths on your in-game map are viable alternatives, there’s usually only one true next stop on Samus’ guided tour of Zebes. The effect is subtle enough that you might not notice it at all on an initial playthrough. Once you do get wise to this practice, however, the ever-present puppet strings are hard to miss.

By way of counterpoint, you may be inclined to cite the many helpful glitches and so-called sequence breaks discovered by Super Metroid speedrunners. Surely they allow for a bit of that old school freedom? Well, I’m not buying it. These tricks tend to be obscure, tough to execute, and hardly reflect Super Metroid as its makers intended it to be. The original gave you the option to strike out in virtually any direction from the get-go as a feature, not a bug. In other words, the existence of sequence breaks doesn’t make up for there being a sequence to break in the first place. At least not for me.

The irony is that Super Metroid’s genuinely well-meaning goal of making sure its players never become lost or frustrated for too long is fundamentally at odds with the hands-off approach I value most in an adventure game. Consider that older Metroid entries didn’t provide you with an auto-map at all, instead expecting you channel your inner Dungeons & Dragons nerd and reach for the graph paper if you wanted to figure out how all those crazy tunnels connected. I love that. I also love getting lost and confused, dying over and over, lucking onto untelegraphed secrets in nondescript walls, all that jazz! Super Metroid’s creators made a conscious decision to break with these hardcore conventions in the interest of accessibility and a regimented, theme park ride type structure. Hindsight being 20/20, I can’t fault them for that. As much as I’d prefer every game to cater to me specifically, that’s not exactly realistic, is it?

Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once declared that he could hear the clatter of surgical tools in Vladimir Nabokov’s prose. That’s where I come down on Super Metroid. It’s an absolute masterpiece of an exploratory platformer. A tightly controlled, painstakingly engineered work of genius. If only it would relax a little from time to time and let me put in some work for a change.

Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy)

Now here’s a rare treat! It’s not often that I get to to experience a “new” Metroid outing. I’ve played the NES original extensively, as well as most of its sequels. Like too many back in the day, however, I skipped clear past Metroid II: Return of Samus in favor of its legendary 16-bit follow-up, Super Metroid. What can I say? I fell prey to one of the hobby’s longest-standing prejudices: Treating handheld exclusives as something less than worthy of a true gamer’s time. I like to think I’m getting at least a little wiser with age, so let’s see if I can’t rectify my oversight all these years later.

Story-wise, Metroid II picks up right where the first left off. After foiling a plot to weaponize the energy-draining Metroid creatures, ace interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran is again hired by the Galactic Federation. Her orders are to scour the depths of Metroid home world SR388 and wipe the buggers out once and for all. If you’ve been searching for a Nintendo game to scratch that ruthless genocide itch, you’re in luck.

Throughout the mission, a handy counter at the bottom-right of the screen keeps you apprised of how many Metroids remain alive. In other words, it’s your progress indicator. When only 19 of the initial 39 are left, for example, you know you’re roughly halfway there. The Metroids themselves serve as bosses, since they now come in a variety of increasingly vicious forms that make the simple floating jellyfish of the last game look like protoplasmic pussycats.

Between each of these Metroid battles are the expected claustrophobic corridors stocked with lesser foes and the occasional equipment upgrade for Samus. That said, the layout of SR388 is very different from what the majority of Metroid fans are likely accustomed to. The freewheeling “go anywhere” spirit of other entries is largely absent here. Instead, impassable pools of damaging liquid conveniently prevent you from accessing more than one small section of uncharted caverns at a time. Once you defeat all the Metroids in the immediate area, an earthquake will trigger that lowers the liquid and reveals the next parcel of terrain. In essence, this breaks the journey up into a chain of discrete levels, thereby automating much of the usual exploration process.

These two defining features—Metroid variants as recurring bosses and a more straightforward structure—are ironically what makes Metroid II a bit of a black sheep title. Facing off against a new Metroid type is awesome…the first time. By the third, it’s become routine. By the fourth or fifth, obnoxious. Not having any unique opponents before the final bout with the (admittedly quite cool) Queen Metroid detracts from the game’s memorability. This is only compounded by the linear nature of the whole affair. The intent may well have been to streamline things for a handheld audience that might be prone to tackle an adventure of this length in short bursts rather than one or two marathon sessions. Even in that case, though, I’d argue that the sacrifice just wasn’t worth it. A Metroid installment without a wide-open branching maze to get yourself lost in comes perilously close to being just another routine sci-fi zapfest.

On a less dire note, Metroid II also does a lot of things well. For starters, it introduced numerous elements to the series canon that were destined to become cherished staples. Samus’ signature yellow spaceship makes its debut. So do the Spider Ball, Spring Ball, Space Jump, Spazer, and Plasma Beam power-ups. The most welcome additions of all, for me anyway, would have to be the health and missile refill stations that remove the need to “farm” hundreds of enemies at a stretch to top off your reserves.

The visuals got a real shot in the arm, too. Samus’ iconic suit actually looks like itself here. It’s made of multiple distinct armor plates and sports an overall bulkier profile that puts her noodly-limbed NES sprites to shame. Applying this same degree of extra detail to the scenery results in some potent environmental storytelling. Imposing artificial structures below the surface of SR388 hint at a lost civilization presumably destroyed by the Metroids ages ago. It’s as intriguing as it is ominous. Finally, the soundtrack by Ryoji Yoshitomi does an admirable job nailing the classic Metroid formula of an adventuresome opening theme that gives way to chilling alien ambience as you delve deeper into unknown territory.

Given its pedigree and redeeming features, it should come as no surprise that Metroid II has been remade several times. Both Milton Guasti’s unofficial AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake) in 2016 and Nintendo’s own Metroid: Samus Returns in 2017 were hailed as largely successful stabs at addressing the lackluster boss encounters and stifling linearity of their source material. I can’t comment in depth on either of them, but I can say that I generally enjoyed the plain old Game Boy iteration. While it’s clearly far too simplistic and repetitive to rate among the franchise’s best, it’s still a work of first-party Nintendo quality and plenty of fun on a moment-to-moment basis. It turns out that being a step down from Super Metroid really isn’t so damning in the grand scheme of things after all.

Metroid: Rogue Dawn (NES)

As I made abundantly clear last week, I quite enjoyed my most recent playthroughs of Nintendo’s immortal Metroid. So much so that I was left craving more NES Metroid goodness. The only problem? There isn’t any! Unlike fellow iconic heroes Link, Mega Man, and Simon Belmont, sci-fi badass Samus Aran never saw another outing on the system of her “birth.” The second and third Metroid adventures were reserved for the Game Boy and Super Nintendo, respectively, leaving NES fans to wonder for decades what might have been.

Until 2017, that is, when a large team of talented collaborators (Grimlock, Optomon, snarfblam, Parasyte, Kenta Kurodani, DemickXII, M-Tee, MrRichard999, RealRed) released Metroid: Rogue Dawn, by far the most ambitious ROM hack of the original game to date. The bullet points here should pique the interest of any veteran space hunter: Entirely new art, sound, and story elements, added power-ups, a save feature, a Super Metroid style auto-map, and more. I’m pleased to say that while it’s not without its minor hiccups, the end result is tremendous fun and does indeed feel like a genuine lost sequel.

I say sequel, but Rogue Dawn actually goes the prequel route and bases its events on the backstory detailed in the first Metroid’s instruction manual. The player controls the mysterious Dawn Aran, a figure the developers hint has some close connection to Samus. Whether she’s supposed to be a long-lost relative, a clone, or something else entirely is left deliberately obscure. A good call, if I do say so myself. Ambiguity is highly underrated. What we do know for sure about Dawn is that she’s no angel. She’s a space pirate operative acting on orders from none other than recurring series antagonist Ridley. Her mission: To acquire a Metroid specimen from the Galactic Federation research team on planet SR388 by any means necessary. This “play as the villain” angle holds much appeal for me. It goes places no official release from Nintendo ever would while still remaining true to the established narrative.

Experienced players should be able to dive right in and start plumbing the depths of SR388 with ease, as Dawn runs, jumps, and shoots just like Samus. Mostly. One notable difference is that she starts out equipped with the Maru Mari (Morph Ball) and Long Beam. No more having to make due with a pathetic stream of gunfire that hardly extends more than an arm’s length in front of you. The total number of additional power-ups you can eventually attain through exploration remains the same, however, as the Morph Ball and Long Beam pickups have been replaced by Metroid II’s Spring Ball and Super Metroid’s Wall Jump! These two new movement abilities alone have massive implications for the overall flow of the action. Being able to rebound off any wall in particular makes negotiating vertical passages a cinch. A final inventory tweak I really love: You’re no longer forced to choose between the Ice Beam and Wave Beam. You can now equip both simultaneously and their effects stack.

Rogue Dawn’s level design has also been infused with fresh ideas. There’s a much larger number of unique screens here than in Metroid proper and they tend to connect in more intricate ways. It’s common for a given screen to be divided up by walls, creating two or more distinct routes through the same section of map, a technique almost never seen in the original. SR388’s environments aren’t all cramped underground tunnels linked by doors, either. You’ll traverse portions of the planet’s surface (some of which sport gorgeous weather effects), underwater areas with modified movement physics, the interiors of your own pirate spaceship and the Federation research vessel, a Metroid hive, and possibly even some downright strange hidden zones if you’re fortunate enough to stumble onto them.

In profiling Metroid, I repeatedly stressed that, for better or worse, the game has a rather stern 1986 vintage mindset and eschews any sort of overt player guidance. Rogue Dawn opts for a more modern approach. Your general goal is still the same: Defeat two sub-bosses in order to open the way to the final area and boss. The difference is that the presence of an in-game map with major equipment upgrades and boss encounters already pre-marked makes it borderline impossible to get yourself lost for any significant period of time. I’m already on record as being no fan of such developer hand-holding. I prefer to figure things out on my own. That said, even I can’t claim to have found all of Rogue Dawn’s “quality of life” updates so unwelcome. Being able to save your game at any time through a menu is much less cumbersome than relying on a password system, for example. Better still, you start each new play session here with full energy and the recharging stations seen in most official sequels that top off your health and missile supply are scattered liberally about the map. Endless enemy farming to refill your reserves is now a thing of the past.

I found the new graphics and music to  be superb across the board. The high degree of visual detail reminds me more of Super Metroid than its 8-bit ancestor and the neon-like effect produced when splashes of bright color pop out out from the stark black backdrops recalls Sunsoft’s first NES Batman game. High praise indeed. The score by Optomon really took me by surprise in the best possible way. I came down against his compositions in Castlevania: Chorus of Mysteries, judging them too dainty for the furious on-screen action, but there’s no denying that he gets what makes a Metroid game tick. These tracks are tense, eerie, and, above all, atmospheric. Eat your heart out, “Hip” Tanaka!

What about those “hiccups” I mentioned above? Well, I have two primary issues with Rogue Dawn. One relates to an especially quirky aspect of its level design and the other to its boss battles. While I adore the layout of the game world in general and even consider it an improvement on the source material in some respects (like the larger, more exciting final area), there are several locations where passages inexplicably wrap around themselves in an endless loop if you don’t pass through them in just the right way. The effect is similar to The Legend of Zelda’s Lost Woods or the escape tunnels on either side of a Pac-Man maze. While this sort of surreal navigation gimmick can work just fine in the context of a fantasy world with magic or an abstract single-screen arcade game, it’s fundamentally at odds with the more grounded feel and sense of place vital to a Metroid title. It’s so jarringly video gamey, in fact, that it instantly shatters any sense of immersion I’ve managed to cultivate each and every time it crops up.

My disappointment with the boss fights stems simply from the realization that they’re same as they ever were, for the most part. Sprites have been re-drawn, of course, but the distinctive attacks and behaviors of Kraid, Ridley, and Mother Brain are unmistakable. There is a fourth boss unique to Rogue Dawn and I certainly commend the team for that. It’s just a shame that the enemies you face are the one aspect of the base game that’s seen the fewest changes.

Leaving aside those few out-of-place warp corridors and recyled bosses, it should be clear by now that Rogue Dawn is a most extraordinary fan game. It’s easily the current high water mark for NES Metroid hacks in general and seems likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. If you’re the type that considers the game it’s based on to be too difficult or confusing, you may well find it superior to Nintendo’s own work. While I wouldn’t go that far, I can’t deny that this is one case where going rogue paid off big. Make like Dawn Aran and pirate yourself a copy today.

Metroid (NES)

Space bikini is best bikini!

Sometimes I think I was made to chronicle the arcane oddities time forgot. When my task is to focus on one of the the all-time capital G Greats, I always seem to come down with a vicious amalgamation of stage fright and writer’s block. This is never more true than when tackling one of the Holy Trinity of world-shaking Nintendo titles that came out in that golden year between the Fall seasons of 1985 and 1986: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid. There’s just no way I’m going to say something no one ever has before about a game that immediately became its very own genre upon release and is still spawning acclaimed imitators like Hollow Knight and Axiom Verge more than three decades later. Still, my continuing mission is to review each and every game I complete and I recently wrapped up a couple playthroughs of Metroid, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

In the interest of accuracy, I should first qualify that statement about Metroid founding its own genre. I’m very much aware that space hunter Samus Aran didn’t emerge fully-formed from the Nintendo R&D1 design team’s collective brow like Athena (the goddess, not the terrible SNK game). Pitfall! had introduced the world to exploratory platforming in 1982 and games with shooting combat and persistent character upgrades are older still. Metroid’s genius was taking almost everything that was hot in gaming circa 1986 (running, jumping, shooting, exploration, character progression) and synthesizing it all into one exceptionally palatable dish served with a garnish of slick graphics and house composer Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka’s brooding score. It felt so fresh to so many that any retroactive quibbling over whether it really was or not is ultimately petty.

Metroid opens in the vague future year 20X5. A ruthless band of space pirates led by an entity known as Mother Brain have attacked a Galactic Federation research ship and stolen samples of a newly-discovered life form with powerful energy absorption abilities, the Metroids. Left to their own devices, it’s only a matter of time before the pirates succeed at weaponizing the Metroids and bring all of galactic civilization to its knees. In desperation, the Federation sends ace bounty hunter Samus on a last-ditch solo mission to infiltrate the subterranean fortress planet Zebes and neutralize the Metroid threat. It won’t be easy. Zebes is a sprawling maze teeming with hostile creatures and Samus starts out with very little in the way of equipment. Its deadly corridors must be scoured with care in order to acquire the many power suit upgrades necessary to eliminate the two space pirate lieutenants, Ridley and Kraid, which will in turn open the way to Mother Brain’s inner sanctum.

Of course, no discussion of Metroid’s story would be complete if it didn’t address the big twist. Reach the end in under five hours and the mysterious masked hero Samus is revealed to be…a woman! This is hardly big spoiler material 33 years on, but the most interesting thing about it for me personally is that I have no specific recollection of discovering it. I certainly owned the game back around the time of its North American release. I sank so much time into it, in fact, that I was still able to track down every item within a couple of hours during my most recent play session despite not having touched it in decades. Combing through all those detailed memories, however, there’s nothing remotely approximating the standard anecdote about being shocked or blown away by Samus’ gender reveal. Was I just some uncommonly open-minded ten year-old that didn’t see a lady video game hero as all that unlikely? Beats me.

As with the first Legend of Zelda, certain elements of Metroid have proven contentious for fans of its many sequels and imitators. To put it bluntly, this game doesn’t hold your hand. At all. From the instant you hit Start on the title screen, you’re plopped down into the Brinstar, the game’s main hub area, with nothing but a paltry amount of health, a weak gun that can’t hit anything more than a couple inches distant, and your wits. You get no built-in map feature, no helpful NPCs to point you in the right direction, no hints whatsoever really. The manual does an admirable job of detailing the controls as well as all the items you can find and enemies you’ll encounter, but that’s all. Your choices are to either march off and get yourself lost in a perilous environment or to get hold of somebody else’s pre-made map (i.e. cheat).

Compounding the potential bewilderment, level structure here is open to a downright anarchic degree. Most Metroid-likes, while proudly billing themselves as open and non-linear, actually prefer to subtly nudge the player around by gating large chunks of their worlds off behind conspicuous barriers that require specific upgrades to pass. Metroid doesn’t care. Once you acquire the bombs and at least a few missiles early on in Brinstar, you can technically go anywhere and do anything, with the lone exception of taking on Mother Brain herself. If you want to wander into an area filled with ultra-tough critters that can take you out in a few seconds flat, you won’t be stopped. You won’t even be warned.

It’s not hard to imagine how players accustomed to more in the way of so-called signposting could be frustrated to no end by these design choices. Resisting the urge to fly into full-on “kids these days” mode like the crotchety old man I am, I will say that Metroid is a product of its time, made by and for old-school adventure game players. From that vantage point, getting lost and confused, dying a lot, methodically probing each and every dead for secret passages, and creating your own maps by hand aren’t bugs, they’re features. If, like me, you’re the type that gets a major rush from finally finding the correct hidden route to a boss or power-up after what feels like an eternity of fruitless searching, Metroid’s a game for you. If you’d prefer a handy flashing arrow directing you to your next objective, you’re gonna have a bad time.

This isn’t to say that all of Metroid’s flaws are subjective. Replenishing Samus’ lost health is a major pain. She starts her adventure with a maximum health of 99 and can eventually increase that to almost 700 by collecting energy tanks. For whatever reason, though, every time you continue your game, be it after a death or via password save, you’re only given a measly 30 units of health, barely enough to a withstand a couple of hits. The only way to regain health, aside from locating another of the rare and finite energy tanks, is to farm weak enemies for healing pickups. These drop inconsistently and most only restore five points at a time. It requires the forbearance of an 8-bit saint to sit there and grind all the way back to full energy in the late game.

There are also some instances of cheap damage to contend with. Many areas are linked by doors and Samus is unable to move during the panning screen transition that occurs whenever a doorway is entered. Her enemies have no such restrictions and will continue to move around and deal their damage during these brief interludes. Getting followed through a doorway by a strong baddie while your energy reserves are low is a virtual death sentence. It would have been a small thing to render Samus temporarily invulnerable while she’s immobilized in this way. As it is, it stands out as sloppy.

While these rough patches are very much real and worth noting, I don’t feel they detract in any meaningful way from what Metroid achieved back in the mid ’80s or what it still has to offer the most patient of modern day enthusiasts. Its stark environments, eerie soundtrack, and general lack of clemency foster a profound sense of player immersion. You really do feel like a lone warrior stranded deep behind enemy lines on an uncharted alien world. Every element of the design and presentation supports this singular vision of claustrophobic dread and isolation. This quality is what made Metroid one of the very first truly atmospheric video games and the effect remains as potent as ever when it’s approached as intended today. It’s also what sets this debut entry in the franchise apart from its successors, all of which relied on more linear progression schemes, auto-maps, and NPC hints to soften that hardcore edge some. I can’t say there’s anything strictly wrong with such measures, though I do liken them to adding a net to a perfectly good trapeze act. Crotchety old man, remember?

If you take away one thing from all this, let it be that Metroid is an instant classic, an enduring design landmark, and a must-play game…provided you have the correct temperament for it. Gamer, know thyself.