Metroid II: Return of Samus

Note: I've moved this ahead from when it was posted back in 2014 in order to follow in line with my Metroid countdown to Federation Force. Some of the things I say in here are rather silly. I think my views on Metroid II are the same more or less though.

Inori Says:

While bearing several nice improvements over the original game, Metroid II does have its setbacks that keep it from living up to the original's name. The Pros and Cons are as follows. Pros Include Better-detailed sprites. Introduction of several iconic elements (Varia Suit design, Item Theme, Space Jump) Fewer palette swaps. Great atmospheric design that sometimes even subtly hints at a backstory. Metroids are actually the stars of the game. Alternative boss strategies. Introduction of save points! (Huge deal) Set the ground for future mechanics and design choices. Moderate replay value. Samus is hot cute? References Prometheus years before it was made! (Joking) Cons Include Linear design/progression Objective-based progression as opposed to item-based, which makes it less of a Metroidvania. Once again, too many rooms look too similar, but at least we don't have Norfair again. Completely no hints of secret passages (I'm sure that Metroid even had a couple at least). No hint of alternative boss strategies, save for the Queen Metroid opening her mouth. Who is going to actually think, "Hey, let's jump into the Queen Metroid!" though? Unless otherwise noted/hinted at in the instruction manual, figuring out the secrets of this game (passages, alternative boss strategies) would take hours of work and experimentation, which simply does not work with a portable game. Limited sequence-breaking options (if any). Rather short, and subsequent playthroughs will make the game feel even shorter.

Well, in a certain period of time in which I had nothing to do, I picked up Metroid II and played it over with the intention of finding things to write about for the continuation of this series, just to prove to you all that I can actually count to three and keep a series going past its second installment (or, well, first, as with the case of Kingdom Hearts). So here we are, back at long last after so many weeks!

So next along the line is Metroid II for the GameBoy.

But wait, Axel, I thought Metroid II was Super Metroid? Isn't that what they mean by Return of Samus?

Well, good reasoning, but no. Metroid II is not Super Metroid, which is probably why you don't know about it. It was released in the States in November, 1991, and I'm not sure how it was received back then, but I've read several recent reviews and all of them count it as the "weakest" Metroid game (this was before Other M). So if that's any indicator, most people probably preferred the NES game and didn't think much of this one. To make matters worse, Super Metroid was pretty much immediately released right after, early on in 1994. This game blew everyone's minds, and many praise it as even the best game for the SNES. Sadly, this left this little gem to vanish into obscurity, even though Nintendo acknowledges its existence constantly. We see this in Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and... dear god... Other M. This game, of all the freakin' games Nintendo could've picked, was also re-released on the 3DS's Virtual Console. I don't think there is any referencing of Metroid II in the Prime series, though, which is probably because those games are supposedly before Metroid II.

My history with Metroid II is a mix of love, hate, and obscurity as well. I literally found the game on the floor of my middle school one day, back in the prime (get it?) of my obsession with these games, and I was like what the fuck is that? I heard of the GameBoy Advance games and Super Metroid and of course the NES game and Metroid Prime (Prime 2 had yet to be released I believe), but never Metroid II. Since I was actually excited to see a Metroid game on the GameBoy, I rushed to my GameBoy Advance SP the moment I got home and plugged that baby in. And then... well, then I was pissed.

I hated everything about Metroid II as a kid, just as I hated Final Fantasy XII... point being I was an idiot back then who could not appreciate quality. Everything about Metroid II bothered me, from the level design to the graphics to the sound to the boss battles. Every fight against a metroid pretty much spelled death for me. By the time I reached the queen, I was limping along... Well, not really, since I wasn't too oblivious enough to ignore the energy and missile refills. But when I did fight the queen, I nearly threw my GameBoy at a wall so many times. She starts off fair enough... But then you realize you've blown through about a hundred of your missiles and she's still not dead. Then when you think she's close to dying, she hits you constantly with seeming unavoidable attacks. I actually gave up on the queen for many months, until one day I picked the game up and soldiered through the fight. Then I beat the game, ran around with the baby metroid, saw the credits, and received my record time: five hours and something-ish minutes. Real smooth.

For years, I never even looked at the game again. Whenever I spoke to friends about Metroid, if they asked me about Metroid II, I'd say it was horrible and that nobody should ever play it. Then one day, years later, out of sheer boredom (and with the realization that many of the things I liked and disliked back then were wrongly so), I picked up Metroid II and played through it. I used a guide, since I remembered how often I'd wind up lost. I beat the queen, took the baby metroid, and then, almost seemingly miraculously, I beat the game in two hours and thirty minutes. This is actually probably the first Metroid game I played where I achieved a speed-related best ending. At first I was surprised, but then I realized the true reason: Metroid II is actually probably the easiest game in the entire series.

But that's getting a little bit ahead of myself. My point is, after playing through the game, I realized that I actually did fall in love with it as I have with the other games in the series. There are several shortcomings, yes, but there are also quite a few things to like about the game. However, let not the veil of love obscure my judgment of the game. By itself, it's a fairly decent and fun little game. I have no idea what the series would be like if it started with Metroid II, but honestly I think many would've appreciated it if it was somehow a stand-alone game. Within the context of the other games in the series... well... it's only really better than Other M and maybe Prime Hunters. Metroid Prime Hunters might actually be worse, but I can't really say at this point. I think the main problem with Metroid II is just the fact that it was released on the GameBoy, since so many of its problems just seem to be associated with the limitations of that particular system.

The concept of Metroid II is pretty much this: the Galactic Federation has found that metroids are far too dangerous to remain floating around, so they send Samus to their homeworld, SR-388, to exterminate them. Oddly, this only means killing about forty or forty-five metroids, but fighting them is no easy feat (unless you make it so). Still, this sounds awesome, because as we found out from the previous game, the metroids were never really the star of their own game. Again, you could literally run past all of them in the NES game! What the hell is that! Well, to rectify that, Nintendo made it a requirement to kill the metroids in this game. So really, in point, I think the core thing about this game is really just the fights against metroids. But again, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with gameplay stuff here. First, let's briefly go over the visual and auditory aspects of the game.

The Aesthetics

I was told by a friend that a game's "aesthetics" aren't actually the graphics and other things. However, since that's what it's supposed to mean in English, and since I am an English Major, I am going to define aesthetics as that. Surprisingly, I think I am going to have a harder time talking about this game than I did with Metroid. There are some improvements to the graphics, or character sprites at least. We get a lot more detail out of Samus's suit, and we can see what her gunship is like for once. One thing that is really cool is how they had to change the suit's design in order to show that you've acquired the Varia suit. This became the iconic design that we recognize Samus's suit by today, marking one of the many interesting legacies that this game starts. Same with the gunship, as well. Unlike Metroid, there are several different sprites for enemies and none are palette swaps because... well, this game is in black and white. However, most of the enemies, while having different sprites, seem to function in the same manner.

What is really interesting about the enemy sprites is that most of them are robotic. This is one of the many hints and allusions to the superior Chozo technology and how this planet was originally the site of some form of a Chozo civilization. Because we know this planet was basically the breeding ground for the metroids, we learn that the Chozo are pretty much the ones who created these beings. I'm not sure if it says so in the instruction manual, but there is a lot of implication of this simply in the art design itself. Sadly, the beauty of this art design is mostly limited to the repeated structures and room textures of the Chozo ruins and mechanical enemies. This really shines through, though, when you go to several of these ruins and find them in such incredibly dilapidated states. Some Chozo statue rooms are entirely sealed in, with the only means of passage being through some odd morph-ball tunnel. One Chozo statue is even in pieces, with the head torn off and everything. This shows that the metroids are sentient, and since we know the Chozo created them, we see that they are creations that have gone entirely wrong. They have overrun the planet, and they have clearly either destroyed the Chozo civilization there or forced them to evacuate the planet.

Interestingly, Prometheus, the latest Alien movie, is pretty reflective of this game. Obviously this game can't be referencing that movie since it came out way before that movie. Basically, in Prometheus the main characters go to the planet from which the Xenomorphs were created. They were also made by higher sentient life-forms as a means of some form of military use, but ultimately proved to be far too much than what they could control. Metroid II, though, is actually pretty much a complete reference or homage to Aliens, since both are the exact same premise and follow very identical plot developments. Did I mention how much I love the relationship between these games and the Alien franchise?

Before I move on from sprites, I wanted to mention the thing that Nintendo did that was amazing, and that was the evolutionary cycle of the metroids.

Yay bad Nineties artwork!

Not sure what the deal is with the Omega's tail, but all of these sprites are pretty damn nice for a GB game.

That is pretty damn terrifying

It was such a damn good choice to create an evolutionary cycle for these metroids. Why? Because think about it, you have to fight around forty-five of these things. Would you really want to fight forty-five of just the same enemy where you freeze them and blast them with missiles? On top of the nice variety to these enemies, we also get pretty cool moments where you encounter them as they evolve. The best of this is pretty much when you see the alpha metroids break out of their membranes, which pretty much happens at the best place: right in your first encounter.

Plus not to mention the resemblances to the Xenomorphs from Alien. Always a plus.

This game is essentially a horror game, really. While it's not entirely impressive at doing this, there are times when the game seems to try to "jump scare" you by making a metroid appear unexpectedly. There are again the times when you watch them evolve into their more terrifying forms. The title music is actually very much straight out of a horror movie, with these eerie screeching notes that hit between dramatic pauses. There is also very little to no music in most areas of the game (although I think of this more as to the detriment of the game as a whole). Only two pieces are really not eerie, and that's the "overworld" theme and I think the theme for the interiors of the Chozo ruins. The final area's theme sounds interestingly like a remix of Tourian (if you listen closely enough), and the room before the final boss has the iconic metroid calls in the background. The boss music is also pretty awesome, both for the metroids and the queen. Both themes are pretty dramatic-ish, fast-paced (at least relative to the silence in other parts), and so on. But I really can't dwell on the music here as there really isn't as much to be said, since music holds such a small presence in this game.

The horror elements also pretty much lie in the design of the dilapidated Chozo ruins. But in the end, the game changes the pace entirely when you find the baby metroid. After killing the queen, you run into the baby just as it hatches. This follows the recurring theme of witnessing the metroids transform into their uglier forms... but this isn't actually horrifying. The baby is tiny, already almost like a cuter version of the metroid. And it's call or cry or whatever consists of shorter, higher pitched little bleeps that are just adorable. Then it follows you around, thinking you're (or Samus) it's mother, and it helps clear the way out for you. This is sort of sadly in the place of a timed escape sequence, making this the only Metroid game without an escape sequence (I think, not sure about Prime 3...), but at the same time it is such a nice change of pace from fearing for your life to adoring the very thing that evokes that fear.

Then there are these badly-pixelated boulders. I laugh every time I see these. Ironically, this is one of the only times the game gives you a hint about going through or breaking the walls. And this isn't even for a hidden item.

Unfortunately, the sprites and atmospheric qualities of the game are where the line is drawn. There are once again almost no backgrounds, and I don't think this is a GameBoy thing this time around as I kind of remember some in the Kirby and Mario Land games. Then you have the design of the environment itself. Oh boy, did I think the NES was bad! There are so many rooms that use such similar layouts, that this is pretty much the only thing I was right about in disliking this game back when I first played it. Many textures are reused, and thanks to the GameBoy lacking color, this only makes it harder to differentiate the rooms from others. There are several hidden passages that I probably would've never had any idea existed if I never read about them.

That being said, this still doesn't necessarily make navigating Metroid II hard. You don't even really need to know anything about these secret areas to get through the game, and once you're familiar with the basic layout of each room and where the metroids are, you'll find that subsequent playthroughs are actually incredibly easy. This is because of what I think is another problem with the design of the environment, and that's the complete linearity of SR388. I'll get more into this with gameplay, though.

Well actually, that's about it here. I wasn't kidding when I said Nintendo went all-out with the metroids in this game... because they pretty much did exactly that, saved some room for Samus, and didn't do too much with everything else. Some places are only mildly distinct atmospherically speaking (I mean like certain areas, like the queen's lair, will follow a texture pattern that, while distinct from other general areas, still follow a repetitive use of texturing). So without further ado, I'll go into the game's "story."

The Story

I pretty much said this already. Samus gets sent to SR388 to kill metroids, finds that they have an evolutionary cycle, blows them up, and leaves with a baby for the Galactic Federation to research. Not a whole lot to it. We get some backstory on SR388 just by looking at the Chozo ruins and how the metroids have run rampant, which is really cool in its own right, but that's about it. This game does serve as a pivotal moment, though, as it sets up the events for pretty much every game to follow chronologically. This seems to be leading up to some corrupt Galactic Federation weirdness going on, but none of this has been really explored. Which is funny, because it was one of Other M's biggest plot points.

Like with Metroid, and pretty much every other game save Other M, the story doesn't really hinder the game. Sometimes having a story that's as least intrusive as possible in these kinds of games is actually a really good thing, and this is an example.

The Gameplay

On the surface, much of this looks a lot the same as the original Metroid. However, once you've played through this game, you feel as if you've played something that was kind of substantially different. There are a few factors that play into this:

1. The new and more complicated items.
2. The game's linearity.
3. What seems to be the emphasis on boss fights.
4. The fact that progression is based on the metroids you've killed instead of item collection.

In this game, I don't think you really need much of the items you get for progression through the game, which is interesting for subsequent playthroughs. However, this novelty wears out fairly quickly since regardless of what items you get, you will always be going the same route each time you play the game. Challenge on the other hand has something new brought to the table. For the first time in the Metroid games, you have actual methods of killing most of the bosses. This is no longer freeze projectiles and shoot wildly at the enemy... Although you could play through the game with just shooting wildly. However, you'll find, especially towards the end with the fucking Omega metroids, that shooting wildly will leave you with hardly any missiles. I think the Omega metroids take a whooping seventy five missiles to kill. With two hundred and fifty being the maximum amount, seventy five missiles is basically a third of your missile count. You have to kill, I think, four or five Omega metroids at the end of the game without any missile refills, unless you don't mind spending the completion time to go back and get them refilled at a missile refill station. That will pretty much screw you up.

This is where one of the coolest things about this game comes into play. So yeah, metroids, alpha metroids, and gamma metroids do have a pretty standard killing strategy that doesn't leave you with many options. However beyond those, there are always two ways to kill the higher evolutions. It's not incredibly spectacular, but for the zeta and omega metroids, you will spend far less missiles shooting them in the back than in the front. You might think it is easier said than done, and if you don't know what you're doing, it is. However, if you know when to move and shoot, it is actually fairly easy. It's kind of dumb really, because you will either have no idea about these things (I don't think the game gives you any indication of this strategy), or when you do know about them, huge threats actually become really easy. They're still fun, but don't expect to find yourself wanting to play through the game over and over again to fight these bosses again.

Then there is the queen metroid. Remember when I said I complained she was too fucking hard? Well, she also has an alternative strategy, which I think is actually incredibly clever: morph-ball and roll into her stomach, and then lay bombs. You do this five times, and that is it, the queen is dead. This sounds easy, and it kind of is, but you need to be prepared for it. Being in the queen's stomach kills you at a rate that is nothing to sneeze at, so you would need at least a couple or three energy tanks before even thinking about doing this. Still, on the other hand, if you wanted to just blast her down with missiles, be prepared to unload well over a hundred of them. Either way, you will need to find a decent amount of powerups that lay throughout the planet. Fortunately, about half of these are not too far out of the way. However, many can easily be glanced over once again due to the game's unfortunate lack of any indicators for most of its secret passages or hidden items. The same holds true for the bombing tactic of the queen. The only indicator you get is if you shoot a missile at her with her mouth open. You see, the queen lunges her head at you, and she'll either do this with her mouth closed or open. If you shoot her with her mouth open (that's into her mouth), she'll freeze up for a few seconds. This is supposed to be your cue to go ahead and jump into her belly; however, if you have common sense, like young adolescent me did when I first played this game, you'd figure you'd want to stay away from her mouth.

So really, if you wanted to figure all these things out yourself, you'd have to probably spider-ball along every wall and get yourself killed fighting the bosses several times just in experiments to see what other ways there might be to down them. I honestly think it expects too much of the player, even though I still think it was really cool. If anything, I think these little boss tactics served as the foundation for future boss fights to come, where they truly are more than just shooting at the enemy.

Shit I just realized I mentioned something about the game's linearity. Well, as I mentioned, the design of each environment is pretty repetitive, with the lack of color making it easy for you to get lost if you don't know where you're going. Some places do actually manage to twist around or overlap other rooms, making it feel like a pretty organic environment that could be tricky to navigate. However, once you understand the general sense of where to go, you can decide which rooms are essential, and eventually you find that the game is actually very easy to navigate on subsequent playthroughs. It's not like Metroid where I constantly forget where I'm going in Norfair. I think because of this, this was the first Metroid game that I actually legitimately speed ran and got a nice score (my first time actually trying was 2:35, my best now is around 1:36). It's really possibly the least difficult Metroid game because of this. I suppose you could argue with me on Prime Hunters, but I'm not so sure.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to leave much in the way for sequence breaking since the game is linear and since progression is based on an objective (killing Metroids) as opposed to item collection. I saw some people mention that there is sequence breaking in the game, but I have no idea how this is even possible since every subsequent area you must go to is covered in lava. On top of that, you would never be able to get to the final boss even if you tried to get past the lava, because there is an invisible wall in place along the way. There are still shortcuts in place and stuff, which shows the developers' acknowledging of the player's tendency to speedrun these games. However, it's not like Metroid Zero Mission where you can sort of break the game without really doing so. Like, people come up with these tricks and the developers set up the game in anticipation for that, but it's not like in Metroid II where they clearly lay out shortcuts that were intended for use. It's hard to go back and explain, but hopefully if you read my posts on Zero Mission and maybe the original Metroid, you'll see what I was talking about.

On the items, I'll just go over a few things: items that revolutionized the series and more details on completion challenges. A lot of items that were introduced to this game seem to have reappeared constantly throughout the series, but there are three big ones that nobody can ignore: the Space-Jump, the Ball Jump (don't know the exact name as the game doesn't give one), and, to some extent, the Spider-Ball. With the Space-Jump, players can continuously jump over and over again, and coupled with the Screw Attack, this made progressing the game at a faster rate much easier. The Space-Jump reappears in pretty much every game in the series (although to a lesser degree in the Prime games). It was that much useful. The Ball-Jump was also a wonderful addition, making navigation with the Morph Ball both more complex (as this opened the way for trickier Morph Ball tunnels) and simplified. Last we have the Spider Ball, which seemed to disappear after this game, and I could see why. While it was certainly useful in exploration, it was very slow and made almost entirely defunct after finding the Space-Jump and Ball-Jump. However, this baby makes an incredible return in the Prime series, with tracks in place to set up all sorts of nifty puzzles. If it wasn't for this mostly overlooked game, that iconic element of the Prime series might not have ever been thought of.

So while the exploration is kind of limited, and some of the items really hold little impact on the game, this game is still quite fun to play, and is actually quite a damn good game for its time. The boss fights begin to show new levels of complexity, paving the way for the even greater ones that'll appear in Super Metroid. The new movement options in the Space Jump and Ball Jump really seem to up the pace of the game a bit. I think the larger focus on evasion and such in boss fights play into this as well. The game is certainly more fast-paced than the first Metroid game, which I might've said already. I'll say it again anyway: when I picked this game up right after beating the first Metroid, I immediately noticed the difference in speed just from Samus running. I almost even believed there was something wrong with my 3DS or the game itself.

Also very big and revolutionary that I nearly forgot to mention was the introduction of save points. Not gonna get into too much detail; if you don't know a thing about these games, basically save points are just that: you go to them and save the game. This was an immense convenience as opposed to the original game's password system, where you'd have to die and copy down a password to wind up back in the beginning of the zone you were in.

Samus's Design

About Samus in Metroid II, there isn't much to her here as well, aside from of course one very major thing. I don't remember if I mentioned this already, but thanks to relying on more than color (since the original game was black and white), the developers had to come up with something to show the difference between the normal Power Suit and the Varia Suit. Hence, we got Samus's iconic look, with the shoulders that are just way bigger than her head and leaves many scratching their own head at how Samus moves her arms around in that suit.

Unfortunately, with the removal of passwords, that also meant the removal of having the "Justin Bailey" outfit playable. This is fine, I guess, since it really holds little impact on the game. There were three different endings for beating the game, two of which just shots of Samus in her suit with minor differences. The best ending, which can be attained if you beat the game in the very generous time span of three hours, looks like this...

She's actually so cute! One of my favorite iterations of Samus, and the only one of her without her suit in this game. It's amazing in itself just to see just how much sprite design has improved from the NES. And yes, while she is wearing panties of some form, I feel like this isn't over-the-top at all. This version is possibly most like Ellen Ripley at the end of Alien, which again really makes me like it even more because Alien (if you haven't been able to tell by now, I adore that movie). I find her wrist cuffs interesting, and they come back again in a couple of other instances. I basically love this depiction so much that I painstakingly recreated the sprite as a pixel art design in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. People say she has red hair in this game, but those are unofficial colors that the Gameboy Color just automatically assigns for this game, I think (not really sure how it works). There was a Gameboy Color version of this game in the making, but sadly that had been shelved, and it's quite obvious there's no hope of ever seeing that version. Still, who knows, maybe Nintendo, for some whatever insane reason, will decide to remake this game.

So yeah, that's my Metroid II post everybody. Some information I meant to write may have been lost due to how much I put this off, but I'm just glad I did not leave this post hanging indefinitely. So the next game on the list is the legendary, seemingly instant-classic, SUPER METROID! But before that, I will finish my thoughts on E3, of course. But before any of that, even, I still have the last crappy bits of school to deal with. Oh well. At least after this week, I'll have two to three months of pure freelancing to do whatever the Hell I want, and thank Cthulhu for that.