Shifting Priorities

Unfortunately, my scheduling for my posts has been delayed again. This whole week I have to deal with a really complicated move-out process from my apartment near my school as I am graduating. Because of this, I haven't been able to spend time working on the Super Metroid post, my E3 post, or even playing Metroid Fusion. Now today all of a sudden, Nintendo of Japan dropped a whole bunch of new info about Metroid Prime: Federation Force while Nintendo of America has kept silent about it, probably due to the ridiculous amounts of Internet fury that anything they show of the game gets.

Because nobody else appears to be interested (Metroid DB doesn't have a damn thing about Federation Force other than its release date), I'm taking up the duty of translating their webpage to the best of my abilities, only stopping short if Nintendo of America puts up their own website for Federation Force. At this rate, though, I wouldn't be surprised if I finished my translations first.

I really wish I could write all the posts I've promised in a blink of an eye, but these things take a lot of time for me to write. At the very least, if NoA doesn't throw up a website, there'll be some rough translations of the new info on Federation Force out of it. All this might mean that I won't be able to play through Fusion a number of different ways as I originally planned, and so the post I write on it may not be as in-depth. I'll try my best, however, to get everything back on schedule this week despite the real-life stuff I have to take care of. Thank you for understanding.

E3 This Year

UPDATE: I'm falling a little bit behind schedule here. I've finished Super Metroid and I'm about halfway through my post for it. Unfortunately on Friday I woke up late, had a lot of stuff I needed to take care of, and on top of that I felt I needed to run through the game one last time before writing about it. As a result I wound up starting really late into the night and couldn't finish it. Then today my friends met up for what may be the last time I see them in college. It takes me several hours to write those posts, so please forgive the pace this is taking. I should hopefully have it finished by tomorrow.

After that, I'll get on my post about E3. However, it won't be too in-depth, as I only watched the conferences and forgot about nearly everything else. I'll try to take a closer look at the things that interested me, but otherwise don't expect too much. My main focus is right now is working through the Metroid posts. I still need to start running through Metroid Fusion this week. Thank you.

Original Post: Just a small note on how I will handle E3 this year. E3's extremely unusual conference schedule took me by complete surprise, especially since, for some reason, the conference dates were listed as starting on Tuesday. Today, I had numerous things to work on and I had to moderate a IRC chatroom during the EA and Bethesda press conferences. I did not have the time to plan how I would keep notes during each conference. Tomorrow I also have class during the Ubisoft conference. Point is, everything is pretty much fucked for me this year.

As a result of these inconveniences, I won't be able to keep a detailed series of postings as I did for the past couple years or so. Instead, I will post a sort of recap over some of the highlights -- best and worst -- of E3. Hopefully that will still turn out with at least the same level of quality as the previous postings. Until then, enjoy E3!

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.

Metroid (Original Flavor)

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 and some of my views have changed since then, but I still love the NES iteration of Metroid of course. I just don't have the time to go back and rewrite all this.

Inori Says:

Axel-sama says you owe it to yourself if you have any remote interest in the Metroid series to look at the game that started it all and more. Pros Include Originality, set forth a legacy Challenging platforming that moves beyond just jumping. Mixes in with shooting to make it more than just a shooter. Relatively complicated boss fights. Helped establish Metroidvania, the awesome subgenre encouraging exploration of a nonlinear world and searching everywhere for items. Inspiration from Alien Music sets the tone, and kind of the story I guess. Doesn't need a story Some interesting design choices like the amount of detail given to Chozo statues. Can play as "Justin Bailey" Samus. Samus is hot? (The green hair is cool) Note: Not a significant Pro here, but in it goes anyway. Self-destruct sequence, possibly first or one of the first of its kind. Moderately high replay value. Cons Include Getting lost in Norfair. Mirrored rooms, identical down to every pixel. Rinkahs knock you all over the place on Mother Brain. The game's unique challenges, like fighting Metroids or the escape sequence, are really not that big of a deal. The Metroids can be entirely skipped. Whether intentional or not (definitely worse if intentional), enemies can follow you into doors, leaving you to helplessly take damage.

This is actually going to be pretty short.

Naysayers: "WHAT? BLASPHEMY! METROID DESERVES A FULL-SCALE IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS! YOU GIVE ZERO MISSION A TWENTY PAGE ESSAY AND THEN COP OUT ON THIS??? YOU SUCK, AXEL! YOU CALL YOURSELF A METROID FAN??? YOU LIKENED METROID TO HALO, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! YOU ARE HORRIBLE!!! YOU MUST LOVE OTHER M!"

Now that I listed probably every hater's thoughts here, I believe I can proceed to write coherently now. Yes, Metroid is the game that set the legacy, obviously for being the first game in the series. Yes, Metroid is one of the first really big Sci-Fi console "shooters." Yes, Metroid is part of Nintendo's darling and glorious history. However, let's stop idealizing and look at some cold facts: 1) I already pretty much indirectly talked about this game through my post for Metroid: Zero Mission. 2) This is an 8-bit NES game (or Famicon Disk System if you're going to get technical on me). As fun and wonderful as it is, there is just only so much I can talk about, and you'll see as this post unfolds.

I wanted to sort of write a summarized "biography" of the game, but I really can't. I don't know if there is a "story" to how this game came to be, like how Final Fantasy was supposed to be Square's final game ever during a time when they faced bankruptcy and stuff. The only stories I sort of know are how Samus came to be, and I think that is best saved for the look at this game's "interpretation" of Samus at the end (that is to say, if there's much to even have to call it an interpretation).

Okay, since this is going at a painfully slow pace, let's begin. I'm going to mark each topic, unlike in the last post. Ready for it? First up...

The Aesthetics

This includes graphics, audio, art design, and so on. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on all the other NES games of this game's time, so I cannot say how the graphics compare to them. I do know that this game is sort of minimal with backgrounds and such (actually I'm pretty sure every room just has a black background). For the most part, there are hardly any bright rooms or colors in this game. I liked this about the game because it was easy on the eyes, which I don't know for sure but I thought it made the game more comfortable to play. For an NES game, I think most of the sprite images are done nicely, particularly Samus in her power suit, the iconic Metroids, and of course Mother Brain. It's funny though to see Kraid at about the same height as Samus, and my god, if I thought Ridley looked weird in Fusion, this game changes my view of that to something more of fine art. Ridley in here reminds me of people with double-chins, for some reason. In the instruction manual for the game, he also looks horrific and completely different from how we recognize him today. I don't feel like pulling up a picture of him like that, but I can say his head was kind of like that of the Omega Metroids, or Xenomorphs from Alien, but imagine it with rows upon rows of eyes. It was actually kind of horrifying and yet silly at the same time. Not all sprites and stuff are all that great though. If I hadn't played Zero Mission, I would be wondering what the hell those zebetites were. To be fair, I still wonder what those things are anyway.

However, sprite images are sort of the tiniest issue with this game in terms of the graphics department. We may have a lot of pallet swaps of enemies and enemies that are hard to make out what they really are, but those come nowhere near close to this other graphical "theme" of the game that I found truly annoying: rooms that look exactly the same. This probably ties in with level design, but I think of it as a graphical thing too because the developers use the same "blocks" or textures or whatever in a lot of the rooms of Zebes. This is the criminal thing that made me initially hate Metroid II. I don't know why it didn't with Metroid initially, maybe it's because there are colors, but playing through this game again recently I just really looked into that and got kind of fed up with it. I want to give the game the benefit of the doubt and say it was done so intentionally to make you lost, but at the same time, this doesn't feel as meticulously constructed as the Lost Woods from the Zelda series. Hell even in Metroid II, the layouts of places did actually hold some distinctions from each other. In Metroid, in Ridley's Lair specifically, there are three rooms that are almost exactly the same. One of them is the elevator room, so it's just shorter, but by the time I got to the third room, I accidentally made a wrong turn. So when I tried to go back, I sort of forgot which identical room I was in, and this cost me some time in completing the game. And if you wander into Norfair without a guide or any prior idea of its layout, you are pretty screwed.

People like to say things like, "Oh, those graphics haven't aged well at all." Well, of course they haven't, they belong to some of the first video games ever made. So in spite of the same exact rooms and the funny-looking Kraid and Ridley sprites, there's something I like about this game and its pixel blocks, and it's strange because it's not just because they are unique to the NES Era. I can't quite put my finger on it, but if anything this is probably going into the matter of style and art direction, which I'll get to in a bit. First, let's briefly go over audio. I don't have much to say in the line of sound effects (and for the most part, I probably never will for any game), but I do want to touch on the music again. Once again, the music does a nice job of setting the tone throughout the game. I know I said this already in my essay on Zero Mission, but honestly I think most of the music in this game works better in the format of the NES. Right at the title screen, we have an ominous arrangement of notes coming in every couple to few beats or so, immediately fitting for a game where isolation is one of the things it's known for conveying. Then we have the actual title theme, which I think sounds better in Zero Mission since... I really don't know. I really like the title theme, it isn't something I think we really hear beyond the first few ominous notes. It's not upbeat like the Brinstar theme, but, even though I would call it somber, it isn't wholly dark either. I have no idea what to make of it really.

But I do know what to make of the other themes. As I said countless times, the Brinstar theme is a classic tune that welcomes players to the adventure. Seeing as how Norfair is technically the second place you're supposed to visit, we see a stark contrast in the much slower and quieter tune of the zone, which I feel conveys that sense of isolation. Yes, we are on a grand and wonderful adventure through a planet with the badass Samus Aran, but we (or Samus, or you, however you perceive it) are still one of the few lone sentient beings on this planet. The rest of them aren't even on our side, and our life is constantly on the line. This music really suits Norfair for many reasons. For one thing, there is lava all over the damn place. Okay, maybe not really, but really, for me at least. For another, it is so easy to get lost in there and feel like there is no way out. Finally, the enemies there are kind of annoying. Then we have the hideout themes for Tourian, Ridley, and Kraid... I don't have much to say about those that you guys won't expect (read: "They totally fit the tone"). I will say though that I love the Kraid theme, and not simply because I keep saying, "The music in this game sets the tone." I think the most brilliant theme in this game, though, is the "Chozo theme"(?). That tune is so quiet, ominous, and weird, it gives you a perfect sense of the mystery behind the Chozo. Who are these Chozo/statues of birds? Why do they have these helpful items for us? What is their presence on this planet?

Okay so maybe many of those questions are answered in the manual, I don't care.

This is going to lead me into style/art direction or whatever since I also had a point about the Chozo here. It is cool that the Chozo statues in this game have probably, next to Mother Brain, the most detail to their textures. They really draw the player's attention and, if that player is the kind of person to actually think about things, leaves them wondering what's with these bird statues. Not only are these statues present, but they are also always located in rooms where the blocks are textured with more metallic looking details and such, further implying the presence (or former presence) of a sentient civilization. When the game isn't recycling room layouts, we get quite a bit, if I can really call it anything, about the mysteries of this planet we're running through. Here is where I want to talk about Alien, which also runs on mystery and fear of the unknown... Well, rather, I mean I want to talk about the fact that this game is inspired by Alien, one of the greatest Sci-Fi horror movies of all time. The Chozo statues are very much references to the "space jockey" in Alien. For those who haven't seen the movie, basically a space crew has to land their ship on some unknown alien planet, and while on this planet, they run into another space ship, of alien origin, that is completely abandoned and unexplained. The movie never tells or shows where it came from. We just see, as the space crew explores this thing, a sort of facility where the monsters come from, and we see some humanoid lying dead in a chair with this kind of helmet on... Well, I'm bad at describing it, so here are some pictures.

Okay, so maybe not the best comparison, but the similarities ARE there.

The Chozo are not the only references to Alien, either. The Metroids are also pretty much the "Facehuggers" of the Alien series. They both also go through metamorphoses and their later evolutions hold similar appearances to the stuff from Aliens, but that's a topic for Metroid II. Sure, the Facehuggers and Metroids may look completely different, but they are by nature the same thing. Also, the mere fact that Samus is a woman is in itself a reference to Alien's Ripley, especially considering how all the endings of the Metroid games have Samus strip down to undergarments as how Ripley does at the end of Alien (can't remember if she does this in Aliens. I would not be surprised, though, if she did this in Alien3 and Alien Resurrection, seeing as how those last films are considered more fanservice/cash cows than movies. So basically, the fact that this game was born out of love for and influence by Alien is an awesome stylistic choice.

Then we have the design of the enemies and stuff, and namely the Metroids and Mother Brain, which all really bring out the creepy-yet-entrancing Sci-Fi feel of this game. I am not going to get into detail of every sprite in the game... as a matter of fact, this is all I really have to say. The Metroids are weird floating jellyfish-like creatures with fangs, what isn't terrifying about that thought? The end boss of the game is a freaking brain in a jar. What the hell? Again with creepy mysteries (although now it is known that Mother Brain, and the Metroids, were indeed Chozo creations).

All together, while there may not be much to say about the technical aspects of Metroid's 8-bit graphics system, it's a little surprising to see that we can have a whole discussion about the game's style and "art direction" if you can call it that. Still, Samus's character design is.... Well, let's leave that for the end. We still have to talk about the game's "story" (HA HA HA HA HA) and the gameplay. I cannot believe I just used a "we still have to talk about" statement on this game, so let's move on.

The "Story"

Alright, so story in Metroid... Again, what? Well, Zero Mission says this game has a story, but Zero Mission also added details to the game's story. Let's use some quotes, yes? I think the introduction at the title screen is a good place to start.

"Emergency Order: Defeat the Metroid of the planet Zebeth and destroy the Mother Brain the mechanical life vein." - Galaxy Federal Police, M510"

What's M510? Beats the hell out of me. I love all the translation errors here. I have this theory that back in the old days of the NES and possibly earlier days of SNES, nobody knew how to actually translate Japanese. Look at this nonsense, "Metroid." The one Metroid or the multiple Metroids? In Japanese, there is no plural form. People pass it off as Metroid being the original plural form, but I think they're giving the translators too much credit. Let's face it, Japanese translations in those days were, for some reason, terrible. "The mechanical life vein." What the hell is a "life vein?" I thought Mother Brain was, you know, a brain.

Well, putting shitty translations aside, that's the gist of the game. I don't think it ever explains who the hell Kraid and Ridley are, but because there are statues in of them in front of Tourian, I would assume they are in league with Mother Brain. When we beat the game, we get this:

"Great !! You fulfilled your mission. It will revive peace in space. But it may be invaded by the other Metroid. Pray for a true peace in space!"

Actually, more interesting than anything else right now is this is probably one of the few games directly "requesting" players to make some form of religious act. Well anyway, as it's not so important, I love, "But it may be invaded by the other Metroid." Once again, bad translations. What is this "other Metroid"? Oh no, wait, no please don't tell me...

WE WERE WARNED THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!!!!

In all seriousness, it's obviously meaning the other "Metroids" and leaving open the possibility of a sequel. The instruction manual does actually reference that the Metroids came from SR388, so yeah. However, what does any of this say in terms of storytelling? Really, nothing. Samus is super cool mysterious identity "space hunter," Samus comes to mysterious planet on Galactic Police orders, Samus kills bad guys, Samus escapes, Samus is girl, and Samus may be in another game. That is the plot of Metroid.

Does that detract anything from this game at all? Absolutely not. If you're like me and don't stick around the title screens or instruction manuals for too long and jump right into the game, you will be thrown right into the gameplay for Metroid. Literally, the game just starts and off you go, no dialogue boxes or anything. If you stuck around, read that intro, and expected Bleak House, I have no idea what to tell you.

Hey look, I'm starting to talk about

The Gameplay

Here is the core of the Metroid game. This is the meat and potatoes, the bread and butter, the eggs and bacon, the slice and dice, the x and y, the A and B of this game. Like all Nintendo games, and especially of this game's time, Metroid boasts a bountiful gameplay experience. First off, we have it's platforming aspects. The platforming in this game seems a little basic. I mean, we don't have ridiculous platforming challenges for items like we do in Zero Mission. However, let's look at this game in comparison to Super Mario Bros. In Super Mario Bros., we have to run forward, jumping across rows of blocks to ensure we either don't fall or don't get killed by enemies in our path. Even the enemies served as platforms. We could take about as much time as we want, but, unless we're playing as Luigi somehow, we can't go back (I think that was Luigi's key difference if I remember right). In Metroid, we do the same thing of jumping across and over things to ensure we don't die, but there is one key difference: we also shoot things. Sure, Mario and Luigi had the Fire Flower, but that does not make SMB a shooting game. In Metroid, we can't jump on enemies (although we can freeze them and do so). We also have enemies flying at us in all sorts of directions. If none of this makes that much of a difference to you, well, when we get right down to it, the boss fights are straight up shooting... With a bit of platforming mixed in. Given that these threats are constantly around and we constantly have to watch our jumping and stuff, I think this sort of makes it a relatively fast-paced game on the NES, or certainly action-oriented.

However, this is simply just not all that Metroid is. This is one of the games that gave the subgenre Metroidvania its name. I don't think there was anything quite like this game before its time, where we go around finding power ups and then exploring the rest of the world to see what we can do with them. Maybe The Legend of Zelda? Still, Zelda wasn't a sidescroller, nor was it a platformer. The other game that makes up this subgenre is Castlevania, which I have actually never played. I am going to do that eventually though, because I hear these two games are incredibly similar. I think Kid Icarus, the NES game, might also be like Metroid a bit, I'm not sure. I do know, though, that Kid Icarus was made with the same engine the developers used to make Metroid. Getting back to the Metroidvania qualities of the game, though: because every item is out there with the only means of restriction being sometimes needing another item to progress, this is a game that opens up sequence-breaking. The seemingly set path is Brinstar, Norfair, Kraid, Norfair, Ridley, and then Tourian. However, this might just be the hand-holding in Zero Mission engraved into my brain. Metroid didn't come out with clear instructions on how to beat the game, I don't think. Maybe a strategy guide was released, but that does not detract the fact that everybody who played this game may have had their own way of progressing through it, simply because all the items are there and there are many methods to acquire them with. Maybe not as much as in Zero Mission, but it was still something for an NES game.

Anyway, so yeah, we have collectibles and exploring and stuff. This is quite a lot of complexity for an NES game considering other games that existed, like Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Balloon Fighter, etc., where the goal was clear and the means are simple. In Metroid, we have a goal, but we haven't the slightest idea what the means are. Instead, we have an entire series of subterranean caverns to investigate and familiarize ourselves with. Then, when we find there are multiple endings for the game, we realize that Mother Brain is not the only goal of this game. I believe this is probably one of the first, if not the first of them all, games to gain this sort of mania over speed running. The fact that there's a speed running element to this game also pretty much makes it fast-paced as well.

Once again, we have something like Zero Mission when we combine item collection with time trialing. This is pretty much a theme in all the Metroid games, but the thing is that this is the first of all of these games. This is the game that devised the many different ways to play a single game type of thing. While it seems really simple now in comparison to Zero Mission, as we only get such fewer endings, it was something that added many levels of complexity to such a seemingly simple game.

However, Metroid is by no means a perfect game, and this is mostly and sadly due to the limitations of the time. Or at least I'm assuming so. Does making nearly all of Norfair a series of identical rooms sound like a good idea? Does making the transitions into other rooms open for enemies to follow you in and possibly kill you sound like a good idea? These have to be due to the limited resources back then, I just simply cannot accept that the developers would leave things like this happening. The boss fights are nice and challenging, especially Kraid (Kraid seems to have gotten revenge for how hard I laughed at him in Zero Mission), even though at the same time they can be really simple. For this game, that's okay with me since hey we have dynamic boss fights where we need to be moving to some extended degree relative to something like in Mario Bros.

However, Tourian is kind of where the game walks a fine line between screwing up completely and being really cool. So how about we get to Tourian and encounter the Metroids, the title enemy of this game, the menace of the galaxy whom we were sent to kill. You gotta freeze them AND spend some missiles before they unfreeze. If they get on you, they are hard to get off and can drain energy fast. If you run into like three of them, you may be screwed. All of this is true of the Metroids, but none of that is actually anything wrong. It sounds awesome we have challenging enemies that the game is named after, right? Now how about I tell you that you can skip all of these guys, potentially without freezing them, and storm right up to Mother Brain? Doesn't sound so great anymore, yeah?

As grateful as I was for not having to deal with the Metroids, I found it kind of silly that the title enemies of the game could be ignored so easily. Plus, killing them refills a lot of your health and ammo. Oh yeah, part of another issue with this game is that the health and ammo refills are completely random. You could spend hours grinding for missiles and getting energy instead. It is such a massive pain. You know what is a terrible pain? It's not as bad, but I'll tell you right now, Mother Brain is possibly one of the most annoying boss fights in the history of boss fights.

First of all, to get to Mother Brain, you have to get past the zebetites, which are barriers placed around where Samus is standing in the screen. These things take about eight missiles to kill, I think, but with those damn Rinkahs (the red O's in the screen) flying around, it's a little longer than that. Plus you have to avoid being shot by those turrets, which isn't too bad I guess. But then you get to Mother Brain, and do you see how many Rinkahs that guy has to dodge? It's ridiculous and annoying. The way to deal with them is to freeze them, but the thaw out and instantly respawn eventually. They never cease being a problem. If you get hit by one of them, the manual says it's not so bad, and the manual's correct. What the manual doesn't say, is that you'll be constantly getting hit by them repeatedly. Also, if you get hit and pushed off into the lava pit between you and Mother Brain, you can kiss maybe three energy tanks goodbye.

To be fair, I don't think this is anywhere near as bad as Mother Brain in Zero Mission, though. Mecha-Ridley is also significantly more annoying. I guess this is actually great that it's challenging because maybe other NES bosses weren't as difficult, but I don't care. It was really annoying. After killing Mother Brain, though, you can't rest just yet. A self-destruct timer starts counting down, further pressuring you and giving the game its fast-paced feel. The escape is pretty significantly easier than, say, escaping the space pirates on 15% Hard Mode Challenge in M:ZM, but if you're unused to the game, the platforming in a hurry will prove challenging a bit. However, nine-hundred and ninety-nine seconds is far more than you'll ever need to escape. The worst I've ever done was escape with just above six-hundred seconds left.

Still, all of it is a very memorable experience. Plus, this game holds something that makes it truly unique from the others: you can play as Samus without her Power Suit. I'm not talking Zero Suit stealth mode, I mean you can play as Samus in a sort of leotard through the entire game. It's kind of strange, I mean like how does she use her arm cannon, but it's also really cool and it makes me sad it's not in other games. This is the other thing rooted in the game's legacy: Samus's "Justin Bailey" appearance. Metroid is a game that runs on password saves, so to put down the game and pick up again later, you'd need to kill yourself, write down the password you get, and then put it in later. It's really stupid and I hate it, even though I never had a problem beating the game quick enough to not need it anyway. "Justin Bailey," then, is part of a password that allows you to play as Samus this way. There are other passwords that do this too, but this password is the most officially recognized variation. This was also only available for American versions of the game, because in Japan the save system was actually like The Legend of Zelda's. Hey, I liked Zelda's save system! Why did we have to have these long and annoying passwords to memorize? Well, we at least got something truly unique out of it. This, then, leads me to my final discussion point:

Samus's Design

So yeah... Samus in Metroid...

I know, so detailed, my goodness. It's like looking at the concept art for the Prime series, my goodness. Why are her eyes so low? Her hair is so bad Eighties. Is that a bikini or a set of pixels censoring private parts? Well at least she thought to keep her boots on.

To be fair, this is the NES we're talking about. I actually happen to love her depiction in the leotard though, because in this game when she gets the Varia suit with it, she gets green hair. That is just amazing because green is my favorite color. This is pretty much never seen again, which disappoints me because the green hair was just so cool!

Best, most well-detailed depiction ever.

Well, her appearance isn't actually that important (though that green hair is still awesome). What's really significant about Samus's revealing herself in this game is just that: she reveals to be a woman. For one thing, this is a reference to Alien, which is awesome. For another, this subverts both everyone's expectations plus the trope of the male-dominated realm of video games and male heroes. As we come to see, Samus doesn't need to be no guy to be a badass. This was a pretty ballsy move from Nintendo, surprising many people who played this game back in the day for the first time. This supposedly led on to more female characters being featured in video games, although they were still most often in the form of Princess Peach, the "damsel in distress." This is a thing Nintendo should be proud of for doing. Whether or not that pride is still there after witnessing the tragedy to Samus's character that was Other M is a mystery to me, but I still hold out my hopes that Nintendo will quietly forget that game (even if Samus's appearance in Smash Bros. 4 is based off of Other M).

That's about all really. How much more in depth can I go on about a limited set of pixels? I can say that, while Samus runs side to side and shoots, you can make out that she has breasts. "Sideboob" in an NES game. Cool, I guess? Not as much as that green hair.

I'm ending this post with a picture of a sculpture somebody made on DeviantArt that I found was really cool.

Credits to Jenni/"Pixel Ninja." Love the eyes (and hair, of course).

Okay I know Samus's ass is hanging out there, but if you honestly think that's why I picked this out to be the winner of the "Show What Justin Bailey Varia Samus Would Look Like" award, you should stop and reconsider.

That's all for now. Tune in next time for loud screeching noises and really annoying boss battles! And wow, what do you know, I'm the one who turned out surprised by this post's length.