 Inori Says: |
| Super Metroid pretty much defines the series as Metroid fans know it today, and is widely considered to be the best Metroid has to offer. This is a classic game for the Super Nintendo and all fans of video games are highly encouraged to try this game out. Pros:
For further elaboration, please read the full post. Thank you. |
All right, my serious writing here might end up a little rusty. It's been a long time since I wrote a review of anything, I think the last time was Fire Emblem Awakening like a year ago. I might not go as in depth as I used to, which sucks a bit since this is widely regarded as one of the best games in the series. I'll do my best to do it justice, though, by showing how I feel about the game as clear and detailed as possible.
Super Metroid is widely regarded by many in the Metroid fanbase to be the best Metroid game ever made. Some even call it the best game on the SNES, and although I personally think that may be pushing it, the game certainly earns that credit. Super Metroid fully realizes the core gameplay, atmosphere, and replayability that most of the games in the series are known for. This is largely in thanks to the fantastic hardware of the SNES, allowing games to be designed with more detailed character sprites, environments, and better audio quality. As a result, the style of many of such games made during this era still hold up in such a way that newer games, like Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, still use 2D sprites, environments, and animation. Super Metroid remains as no exception to this, and while the later games polish a lot of the things that made Super Metroid a fantastic game, Super Metroid still holds up mechanically and aesthetically to a lot of other 2D games still made today.
Apart from Metroid: Other M and Metroid Prime Pinball (which I still haven't played), Super Metroid, I think, was the last Metroid game I played for the first time. When I wanted to play the game, emulators hadn't really taken off yet. Luckily I had my Super Nintendo, so I got the game off ebay and got to play it. I've always been used to the Zero Mission/Fusion controls, so the game felt a bit clunky to me at first, but for me of course it was an instant classic. Not much else to really say about my history with Super Metroid. Weirdly I don't really play it that often, though I personally don't really enjoy playing it over and over again. I've come to find this week that I don't really enjoy trying to really speed run Super Metroid, though I'm having a hard time figuring out why that is. I think part of it may be that the game is a little bit more strict with the movement controls and boss order, though that can't be the only reason because Metroid II has those same issues and I love speedrunning it. Maybe as I expand on my opinions of the game here, I'll figure out why that's so.
Well I don't see any reason to keep delaying this, so without further ado, let's begin.
Visuals/Sound/Atmosphere
Well, because this is the first game with detailed visuals and sound, a lot of the stuff here set the ground for the aesthetics of the future games in the series. One of the best things this game has going for it is the variety of detail in different environments, bringing to life a world that was once only known through the NES's graphics, as Samus returns to Zebes in this game. I don't know how much I can really say about the art style of the game, since I know nothing of "art" and therefore I suck at talking about it, but I will try anyway. While I wouldn't say this game tries to imitate the art direction of the Alien movies, the art style certainly leans toward creating a sort of creepy alien world, a lot of which is excellently done through the enemy designs. For reference, I'll take a couple of the big bosses of the series
First example I've got is Draygon, one of the big five Space Pirate bosses in this game. Draygon is essentially the mother of all these other weird chubby crustacean monsters found throughout the Maridia zone. As if it wasn't creepy enough already being designed like the ugly monsters that live deep in the ocean in real life, they even added on some freaky skulls that seem to be stretching out the boss's flesh. The boss's animations are also pretty cool, and its distinct feature is that it pukes out these small, sticky organisms that bind Samus so that Draygon can grab her with its pincers/claws/talons/whatever the fuck those things are. Then as it lifts Samus off the ground, it extends its gross tail to whip Samus with it.
Didn't know where to talk about this, so I'll just smack this in the middle of these two bosses here. Another great boss that brings out the atmosphere in this game is Crocomire. First off, the fight is kind of set up like a sumo fight, in that both you and the boss are trying to push the opponent off each side of the room. Your side is a huge wall of spikes, and the goal is to push Crocomire into a pool of lava by firing into his mouth to get him to move back. And once he lands in that lava, you're pretty much rewarded with this awesome animation of the monster trying to escape the lava, only to struggle in vain as its flesh melts off its bones. Then, when things are quiet and you try to find a way out, the game tries a bit of a jump scare with Crocomire's skeleton somehow bursting through the wall of spikes, then falling apart into a pile of bones. The game has several other cool moments of animation during the gameplay, from Draygon being buried away by her babies to Phantoon's bizarre death animation where his "body" stretches and waves back and forth across the room.
Another example of this game's great creepy alien style is inherent in Mother Brain's new form, mixing mechanical parts with seemingly organic stuff as well so that she neither looks either too robotic or too organic, and I think that is a brilliant way of making her appearance so unsettling as you can't exactly figure out just what she is just by looking at her. Since there is not a lot of information given about the stuff in this game, designs like this also leave a lot to the imagination, making my stomach turn as I question just what that fleshy stuff on her body could be. Adding to Mother Brain's great design are her weird-ass cries and roars. I tried to come up with a good metaphor for what she sounds like, but it is just so strange I can't think of anything that even comes close.
Mother Brain is also a great example of how this game uses the SNES's technology to subvert expectations. The fight starts off identical to the way it played out on the NES, although way easier. Then, if you thought you've won, out comes Mother Brain in that new form which, even if it didn't have all those fancy new attacks, probably wouldn't have been possible on the NES Metroid. Kraid is another great example. On the NES Metroid, Kraid was the same height as Samus. In Super Metroid, just before you fight Kraid, you fight a mini version who is about the same height as Samus and gets killed instantly by two missiles, and his inclusion seems like a kind of joke (although there was a fake Kraid in the NES Metroid as well). And if you didn't know they changed Kraid's height and went in expecting Kraid to be a tougher version of Mini Kraid, boy were you in for a surprise! It kind of makes me wish that I had played the NES version of Metroid first and had never known that they changed his height.
Stuff like this happens all throughout Super Metroid, and not just in the boss fights. The game starts off revisiting old locations from Tourian and Brinstar, but as you explore old Brinstar, things are really quiet and ominous as opposed to the cheery music you got in the original Metroid. There are some cameras watching you in the area and a couple of blocks with faces watch you as you come in and out of the area. When you go to get bombs from a Chozo statue, it suddenly springs to life and starts attacking, taking something that let you catch your breath in the previous games and turning it against you. With the changes and additions made to Zebes since its last appearance in Super Metroid, the game takes a familiar world and keeps you from getting too comfortable with it, making the familiar still feel alien and creepy.
I kind of touched on the environments earlier and never really expanded on that, so allow me to do so here. While I still hold Zero Mission as truly the best Metroid ever, and while I'm sure there is some diversity to the environments in that game, I have to concede to Super Metroid for really having such a variety of environments throughout the game. When Samus lands on the surface of Zebes, the weather and environment is very drab, rainy, and I guess foreboding, adding to that ominous sense since for the first couple of minutes there are no enemies around at all. Brinstar is comprised of various different environments, ranging from overgrown caverns to, I guess swampy tunnels comprised of red soil. There's the mysterious wrecked ship filled with ghosts and old machines. Lower Norfair comes off as a pretty hostile environment with its red color scheme, lava everywhere, ominous Chozo statues in both the foreground and background watching over you, and shambling walls and pillars.
I'm guessing since the technology was stronger, there was a lot more room for creating backgrounds in this sidescroller, which mostly add a lot to the different environments in the game. One of the coolest effects this game has is this giant tube in Maridia that spans across several rooms and floors of the zone, which you use to go from a sandy cavernous area close to the planet surface down to some metallic shafts constructed in the depths of the planet. As you navigate through Maridia, you'll run past this tube in the background. Another area with a pretty cool background is the Wrecked Ship's top floor room, with what appears to be monitors displaying images and information of Metroids (I could be wrong though). For a game that spends a lot of time going through rocky caverns, there is just a lot of detail in the various environments that bring Planet Zebes to life.
Then there's the music in this game. Super Metroid houses some classic tunes in this series, most notably being the first game to feature Ridley's theme, which has been used in almost every Metroid game since. A few have been remixed throughout the Prime series as well. I don't have much to say about the music in this game other than almost all of the songs are consistently ominous, which adds to the isolated atmosphere in the game. Only a couple of songs really stand out from this in mind (boss music not included), which are Crateria, Lower Norfair, and to a lesser extent Samus Aran's theme, which is still somewhat ominous. One of the themes for Crateria, mainly being the one that plays when you go back to your ship after some time in the game, is pretty upbeat, but the song pretty much only plays on that area. Lower Norfair is also upbeat, but in tempo only. Lower Norfair is probably my favorite song in the game, it's like a kind of march that retains the hostility of the environment.
Ech, I'm running out of clear things to say about the game aesthetically. I'll just leave off on one last thing, and it's that there are so many details in each environment that leave a lot to the imagination. One that comes to mind is the mysterious body found lying in front of Kraid's room with bugs all over it. It's just cool things like this that add to the atmosphere and world of Metroid.
Story
Super Metroid is where the series starts digging a little deeper into trying to tell a story. There's still nothing particularly deep or complex here, but the game does wonders through how some monsters behave during gameplay. The premise of Super Metroid is as follows: After finding the baby Metroid on SR388, Samus brings it to the Galactic Federation for them to study how it can benefit civilization. Not long after Samus leaves it with them, however, the space station it was kept in fell under attack. It turns out that Ridley is back from the dead and has captured the baby Metroid, and despite Samus's efforts, Ridley manages to escape, leading Samus back to Planet Zebes where the space pirates have returned in flux, planning to use the baby Metroid in their plot for galactic turmoil or whatever they're up to.
On surface value, there's pretty much nothing else to it. Samus goes in, kills some space pirate commanders, finds the baby has been mutated into a monster, and when she goes to fight Mother Brain, the Metroid saves Samus and gives her the power to destroy Mother Brain, destroying Zebes in the process. Oh yeah, and along the way, Samus saves some animals 'cause she's cool like that.
But because of how certain fights play out, the story remains really memorable. Ridley is fought twice and is so ferocious he stands out from the other space pirate commanders in the game. He constantly picks up Samus and even tends to grab her just as he is dying, like he has some personal beef with her (he did kill her parents after all). The latter half of Tourian is also really deep on the interactions between creatures in this game. In the feeding ground for the Metroid, several monsters including a Torizo boss have been drained of life, leaving them as brown husks that disintegrate into dust on contact. And as Samus tries to make her way through, the Metroid comes out and attacks, only stopping when Samus cries out in pain and recognizing her as its "mother."
When Samus fights Mother Brain and gets pretty much wrecked by Mother Brain's new hyper beam, Mother Brain leaves Samus at low energy and pretty much toys with her by attacking her a few extra times before finishing her off, relishing in revenge for being destroyed in the first game. Just before she can attack, the Metroid comes to Samus's rescue, draining Mother Brain of her life and transferring it over to Samus. Mother Brain still survives this, though, and kills the baby Metroid before it could try and attack again to protect Samus, but it does give Samus Mother Brain's hyper beam in the process of dying. All of this happens during the gameplay and all the implications are made abundantly clear through simple animation and sound effects from the monsters in the room, making this one of the most memorable scenes in the entire series.
Apart from Samus's narration in the beginning recapping the events of the previous Metroid games, there is no dialogue or really any point where the game stops to show a cutscene, other than the scene between going from Ceres station to Zebes. Cutscenes aren't necessarily bad in themselves, but it is truly to this game's credit just how much it is able to show without relying on moments the remove control from the player.
Gameplay
Super Metroid is the game that pretty much set in stone the core gameplay of the 2D Metroid games. The NES Metroid was the first steps, but held back by technical limitations. Metroid II feels more of an experiment in what a more boss-oriented game would be like. With the capacity to expand more on how the game plays, how bosses behave, and to a lesser extent how items can function, Super Metroid was able to establish the gameplay most people think of when they talk about Metroid. To understand how Super Metroid handles the gameplay, first I'll remind mostly myself what the main aspects of Metroid gameplay are.
At its core, basic level, Metroid is a hybrid of a platformer and a shooter. This is stripping away everything else -- atmosphere, items, pacing, puzzles, etc. -- to a level that can give a very basic idea of what the game is like. The items in the game are the major catalysts that affect how the game is played. Somebody once put it as this: in each Metroid game you start off just barely powerful enough to survive, and as the game progresses and Samus gets stronger, you become more fully realized in your capabilities. It is the items in the games that allow you to solve puzzles, defeat bosses, etc. Then there is the level or world design, and depending on how the game is laid out, it becomes more like a Metroidvania (Zero Mission, Super Metroid) or less like one (Fusion, Other M). The Metroidvania style in these games is determined by the different means of using items and the opportunities the game presents for you to use them.
So how does Super Metroid fulfill these aspects of the Metroid gameplay? One clear point this game fulfills is the sense of progression in Samus's power from the beginning of the game. When the game starts, you first encounter Ridley, who is strong enough to make short work of Samus and survive a ton of hits from Samus's measly power beam. Then by the time you fight Ridley again, you can actually dodge Ridley's attacks and, if you've developed the skill, take Ridley down in as little as fifteen seconds, all thanks to the items you've acquired throughout the game. Super Metroid even plays with the expectations set up from this during the Mother Brain fight. Being the final fight, you're inclined to assume you have everything you need to take out Mother Brain, only to be brought to the brink of death by her immensely powerful hyper beam. This allows the game to use the baby Metroid to create the memorable sequence it does for the hyper beam.
I am kinda going to just freeform this so bear with me, as I really need to get this thing finished. One major point for this game are the boss fights, all of which are amazingly unique and challenging in their own way. If there's anything I'd really give this game over Zero Mission, which in my opinion is the best Metroid game ever, it's the boss fights. Most of them are a bit more complicated than just dodging a couple things and shooting a weak point. Draygon has this cool hidden strategy where you could use the grapple beam to latch onto an electrical current underwater and shock Draygon to death in seconds. Phantoon's attack patterns change depending on how you attack him (using Super Missiles as opposed to the beam for example). Ridley has a whole complex on his own of shit he does. If Samus drops a power bomb, he'll fly away and strike back with an attack pattern that's a little hard to avoid. When his health reaches zero, he actually won't die and instead go "berserk," attacking with random patterns I think, and while this kind of sucks for speedrunners it's a pretty cool feature of this boss fight that, because it makes it unique from the other bosses, it accents the rivalry between Samus and Ridley in doing so.
Because bosses have complicated attack patterns that present a challenge and keep players on their toes, each boss has a satisfying length to them. If it's anything about Zero Mission that makes me wish it was more like Super Metroid, it's that you can easily breeze by pretty much all the bosses except maybe Mother Brain.
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| These monsters are initially resilient to Samus's weapons, and they are each individual creatures stacked on each other. When Samus gets the Plasma Beam, this room shows its feature of being able to shoot through enemies to kill multiple monsters all at once. |
Throughout Super Metroid, there are rooms that are designed to show you how to use new items without saying anything about how to use them. When you get the speed booster, you first go through a really long hallway with a bunch of blocks that crumble before you as you sprint through the room. If you don't sprint, you'll fall through the floor and have to wait for the blocks to reform. So when you go back through the same room, you'll know you'll have to sprint, and if you didn't know how the speed booster worked, you'll pretty much automatically learn how to use it just by going back the way you came. If that wasn't enough, the room starts filling up with lava, pretty much incentivizing you to start sprinting as soon as possible. And the best part is all of this happens pretty much without the player even realizing it, unless they really stop to notice all these things.
Similar things happen for other items in the game. Space Jump has a huge room meant for getting out with it. The Gravity Suit is placed in a room where the exit pretty much drops you into water. And again, all of this without any text boxes other than rudimentary instructions on how to use the item with the controller.
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| The Crystal Flash is a hidden trick in Super Metroid which allows Samus to restore all her energy at the cost of some ammo. |
One of the best additions to the series with this game which defined pretty much all the future Metroid games to come (maybe with the exception of the Prime games) is the addition of "hidden" tricks like walljumping and shinesparking, as well as infinite bomb jumping. In the previous games, you could only get about one or maybe two jumps while in morphball using bombs, but now, with good timing in the bomb placement, you could use the bombs to ascend a height you wouldn't normally be able to reach by jumping. Or, if a ledge blocks the way for walljumping, you could use the bomb jump to ascend as well. There are other hidden tricks in the game as well, such as charge beam combos with power bombs or the Crystal Flash, which allows you to restore all your energy, though these are more obscure and less useful. Despite that, they are still cool things that can influence strategy on a boss if you so choose to use them.
One thing that Super Metroid significantly improves from the previous games is in showing the secret tricks in the game. One way the game does this is granted a bit awkward, which is showing you things like the Crystal Flash and other stuff in the title screen. I heard that the game doesn't do this until you've beaten it though. But at least in the sense of stuff that matters, like the walljumping and the shinesparking, the game has things in place to show you how to use them without relying on text boxes or anything like that. In a couple of rooms, there are friendly creatures that show you how to get out using either the walljump or the shinespark, eliminating things like Metroid II's problem of, "How the heck is anyone supposed to figure out you are supposed to jump into the Queen Metroid's belly?" Some may groan and complain that this is too hand-holdy, but honestly I think it works wonderfully well as it isn't intrusive to the game's pacing, and it further characterizes the universe. The addition of these animals also later helps establish one of Samus's characteristics, but that's a topic for later. Point is, this "tutorial" on how to use just a couple of Samus's hidden abilities works because it doesn't alter the pace of the game while allowing itself to function as something to expand Samus's character and traits of the Metroid universe.
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| Etecoons showing how to wall-jump. |
Going over items real quick, I'll briefly describe some of the things that become such a core part of the series's item arsenal. The speed booster is like the number one fantastic item implemented in Super Metroid. Not only does this item give speedrunners a great tool to cover a lot of ground with, it also opens up having much larger rooms as well as having interesting puzzles involving shinespark. Super Missiles are pretty self-explanatory as they kill stuff faster (plus they have a nice satisfying explosion to them the normal missiles lack). Power Bombs are another great introduction to this series. Now instead of having to use normal bombs on every damn tile in the game, you could just power bomb to clear away many at once and sometimes even reveal what you need to destroy weapon-specific tiles (like missile tiles, screw attack, etc). There's the charge beam... not really sure it's that big of a deal but it did come with the unique property of giving Samus a "single-use" of screw attack, allowing for more mobility. And of course, while this might not do much for speedrunning, beam-stacking was another great addition to the series that stuck through the future games (aside from almost all the Prime games), as now you don't have to go looking around for another beam if you wanted it, and you could have all the properties of each beam into one. Oh and then there's of course the gravity suit, which comes back in pretty much every game afterward (except Hunters and weirdly enough Prime 3), allowing you to move freely underwater.
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| The Speed Booster in action, allowing the player to cover large expanses quickly. |
Some items though, while novel, never see the light of day again in the 2D games-- mainly these are pretty much the grapple beam, which is made useless through every other movement option in the game, and the x-ray scope, which is made useless by powerbombing but hey it was pretty nice to have for finding stuff. These things come back in some form or other in the Prime games, which interestingly enough they feel more suited to. And while I'm on the issues with Samus's inventory, I have to mention the Number One problem with it, and that's the idea of shinesparking draining Samus's energy. Some people are edgy and say that it's a "cool" thing because it "forces" you to use it "wisely." First of all, I'm playing as Samus who can do whatever the hell she wants when she's fully-powered because she is a badass, she shouldn't be held back by her own arsenal. Second of all this only causes limitations for sequence breakers and speedrunners early on in the game when there aren't that many energy tanks. Doing the grapple beam skip early on or just trying to get to Phantoon quicker makes the fight even more difficult than necessary because you wasted half your energy shinesparking across the whole entrance to the Wrecked Ship. Space Jump is back in this game, but wall jumping is still quicker because for some dumb reason Samus still moves in the air like she is on the moon.
And now for just some brief points that I don't think I can really expand much more on. I guess sprinting in this game is nice to have for control over your movement, which is important for the 2D Metroid games, but at the same time I don't really see why Samus can't just run fast all the time. This game is also the first to implement a map feature, which is incredibly useful for this type of game (metroidvania) and keeping track of the places you've been and the items you've collected. Some people prefer Metroid 1 and 2's way of no maps, and they are crazy. I think most of the "levels" or areas are designed pretty well, even without using the map it's pretty hard to really get lost now since most rooms look different from each other. That being said, Maridia is still a twisting mess thanks to all the overlap and going around in circles in that zone. Not to mention, the sand traps and sand waterfalls are especially aggravating. I don't think people have even figured out how escaping the quicksand works yet, and the game is already over twenty years old.
This is just a minor gripe for me, but I also am not a huge fan of how Ridley is gated from the beginning, as there is a giant pool of lava blocking the way unless you take advantage of a weird glitch in the game, really good at bomb jumping, or if you have the ice beam and either have enough energy or you're quick enough to survive getting out of the lava without the gravity suit. But if that wasn't enough, all of Ridley's lair is completely designed against sequence breaking. Everything is just a complete pain to navigate through without the space jump-- for example, there is a tall room with no platforms and a ceiling that you can break with bombs or screw attack; if you don't have space jump you have to do a painfully long sequence of infinite bomb jumping to get to the ceiling. And Ridley isn't the only point in the game where the it sort of "argues" against sequence breaking. Navigating through Maridia is incredibly sluggish and time-consuming without the gravity suit, as it's an area almost entirely underwater. Doesn't help that the whole layout of that area suffers from such complicated overlap already.
I guess these things aren't that big of a deal, but sequence breaking is just such a weird case with Super Metroid. There are moments where the game encourages it, especially with the new items introduced to the series, and then there are moments where the game steps back on its encouragement and tries to force you to play in one specific way, and that's just no fun to me. I think that is ultimately my main problem with Super Metroid, which is that it can't decide whether it wants to be very open sequentially or keep players on the main path of completing the game. At the end of the day, though, this doesn't matter all that much to me. The game still succeeds at really defining how Metroid is supposed to play, and that is in thanks to the usefulness of the majority of the items implemented (still allowing more options than one for a player to solve things), the fairly complicated and challenging boss mechanics (as well as variety of bosses), and the addition of movement options like sprinting, walljumping, and bomb jumping which allow greater control over the platforming in this game.
That's pretty much my analysis of Super Metroid at this point. And now without further ado, I'm going to have some more fun and shoot bull about my view on this game's depiction of Samus. Nothing from here on out is all that serious anymore.
Samus Is a Girl??? And Other Stuff
All right, Super Metroid's depiction of Samus... not a lot to really say I think.
Oh wait, this is the first game to have Samus lose her clothes when she dies. Some people feel it ruins the novelty of having Samus take her suit off in the endings, but I don't know. It's no surprise she's a woman at this point, so now the endings to me are more about the art they use to depict her than the "surprise" of showing she's a woman. Then again that's not really much of the case here in Super Metroid as that doesn't quite happen until Metroid Fusion. What I find strange though, is that Samus appears to be wearing a tube top(?) in her death animation (which also annoys me, it almost looks like she's wearing a corset. Like why?)... but when she takes her suit off at the end of the game, it covers up to her neck?
And as for how she appears in the ending, I don't know how I feel about it either. I love that she's rocking some serious muscles and a six-pack, but I am not a real fan of the 80's-looking fashion going on here. Her appearance in the game's "middle" ending where she just takes off the helmet is equally as funny to me. Like why is she wearing some sort of pilot's headgear underneath her helmet? That mustn't be very comfortable.
The game continues the use of the familiar Varia Suit design. I don't really have much to say on this either, but maybe I can say more of her interactions with other creatures in the game? Metroid II seems to establish that Samus doesn't just ruthlessly slaughter all creatures and has some affinity with animals. After all, the most dangerous creature in the series follows her around like she's its mother. So in Super Metroid, all of this is pretty much expanded. Ridley's aggressiveness around Samus implicates a rivalry between the two. We have Mother Brain toying with Samus at the end, clearly showing her hatred of Samus. In the baby Metroid's interaction with Samus, Samus's affinity with creatures and its affinity with her as its mother breaks through the monster's feral, mindless feeding off other animals. It actually goes from mindless feeding to feeding off Mother Brain to save and transfer power to Samus, who it again sees as its mother. Then there are the Etecoons and the Drachora, the two creatures which show Samus how to walljump and shinespark. If the creatures' willingness to help Samus wasn't enough to show that Samus gets along innately well with some animals, there's a small option during the escape sequence in Super Metroid to help the animals escape from Zebes.
Side note: It's funny how this small "easter egg" became such a cultural icon in the speedrunning community for this game, to the point where there's a Team Save the Animals and a Team Kill the Animals. Obviously, since the Etecoons and Drachora's escape from Zebes is canon, saving them is canon and therefore is a must in any speedrun. Letting them die is obviously not finishing the game appropriately.
So because this option is there, it pretty much further characterizes that Samus is a hippie animal lover. Er, I mean, to put it more intelligently, that Samus is more than just a killing machine, and that she actual has feelings or empathy for certain things.
There's also Samus's dialogue in the beginning, but is there really much to say here? All she does is summarize the previous events of the series, maybe "confirming" officially that the Metroid followed her around thinking she was its mother (although I still find that pretty implicitly clear in Metroid II), and establish the stage for Super Metroid's story. Well anyway, to sum up all this nonsense, while Super Metroid has a kind of odd physical depiction of Samus (again why is she wearing a tube top/corset when she dies? What's with that bad 80's fashion sense?), it really expands how her enemies and how peaceful creatures interact with her, adding a little more depth to her than just a force to be reckoned with. And for how little this game really does get involved with story at all, a little depth goes a long way in my opinion.
That's about it for Super Metroid I guess, as I'm running out of things to really say. Next up is Metroid Fusion, some of the best atmosphere in the series... and not much else. See you next mission and remember, SAVE THE ANIMALS!
