Story
The original Metroid II's story appears incredibly simplistic: Samus comes to SR388 to exterminate all the Metroids (for some reason, "all Metroids on SR388" equals around forty of them). Apparently, what I didn't know was that the booklet for the game mentions that the Federation tried to study the planet or kill the Metroids themselves, but failed horribly. Beyond just the simple premise, there are some implications of narrative in the environment alone. As I mentioned under Atmosphere, the game's environment, in both the original and in AM2R, progressively reveals a militaristic side of the Chozo and hints at something that has obviously gone terribly wrong on this planet. Otherwise, the Metroids wouldn't be the dominant creatures here.
AM2R does a little bit to expand the story but not too much. By fleshing out the Federation's role on this planet, the narrative of AM2R ties the original game closer to the sort of overall narrative in the 2D series. I am not sure if this was intentionally written, but because there is no mention of the Federation in the game's introductory sequence, the Federation's sudden appearance on the planet without the player's knowledge could potentially imply that the Federation kept the operation a secret from Samus, marking the beginnings of their corruption that later becomes apparent in Other M and Fusion. On the other hand, the Federation on the surface of SR388 doesn't seem to have done much to really hide their operation from being discoverable by someone else. The Research Team has a large ship perched right on the planet's surface, in a location that must have been visible enough for the Rescue Team to have landed so close to them (who also lands in the not so discrete location of the edge of a cliff).
So if the Federation wasn't written to be corrupt or anything like that in here, my minor gripe with the introductory scene would then be their lack of presence in the briefing.
Actually, I just remembered: if you look in the logbook, it will say that the secondary objective is to find the Federation units stationed on the planet. So that, then, just leads me to say that it seems like something that should've been mentioned in the introduction. It's not a huge deal, this game doesn't really have a tremendous story for it to matter, but it would have been neater as a component in the writing that sets up the events to follow. Particularly as something called an inciting incident, it would have given further reason for the story to be taking place at this moment. Yes, of course Metroids are dangerous so that works as reason enough to go down to SR388 to kill them, but why is it happening now is the question raised by the new introduction. Mentioning the disappearance of two groups sent out to the planet makes the stakes much more immediate to the story. Again, it's ultimately not a big deal in the long run as there is not much else story to this game.
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| It was pretty much around here where the wording started to irk me, but it's really tough to say what exactly is the issue here. |
Another small issue I had with the introduction was just simply the wording at one point in it. It wasn't bad, but I strongly felt it could've been cleaned up a bit to sound more natural. It lacked some sort of mechanical quality that is found in the writing of the localizations of the other 2D Metroid games in the series. This is also I guess not a gamebreaking problem or anything, but at the end of the day it's something that would've helped the game's most immediate presentation.
One new addition to this game that is probably worth mentioning is the logbook, which honestly I have only read once in the ten times I've played this game. Before I read the logbook, I read another article that harshly criticized the logbook for sounding like cringeworthy, Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque, pseudoscientific ramblings about different areas and enemies throughout the game. I came into it a little cautious about the whole thing, but none of the entries were really horrible or anything. They were even written more cleanly than the introduction. They weren't too significant either, but I guess it works just fine as fanservice. The real question is, how well does the game do without it?
Well, as I said, I played through the game ten times without even bothering to read it until the very last time I was about to jump into that ship to end the game. Don't mind my double-dipping into the Atmosphere section, but again, the details and progression in the environment were enough to satisfy a sense of narrative. There is a small arc of consequence indicated as each zone, save for the fifth area, gets more hostile and dangerous. The game progressively shows the SR388 Chozo's gravitation toward engineering weapons, ending with the Genetics Laboratory where they created the very monsters that threatened peace in the galaxy. So because AM2R remains true to the environmental storytelling and makes it that much clearer with visual indicators like the priestly statues in the first area or the statue portraying brute strength in the fourth area, it does a fine job communicating the arc of consequence to the player without relying on the logbook to do so.
If there is any real problem that comes close to worthy of criticism, it's the location of the Power Bomb. Why would the Chozo place it right next to a volatile power generator? This is really the first 2D game that did not depend on a present narrative (basically Samus's monlogues in Fusion or interactions with other characters in Other M) that actually made me stop and question how something makes sense in the world. Of course, this isn't a big deal to me or anything, but it quickly became something I laugh at this game for.
Gameplay
I've gone over the atmosphere in AM2R and found it among the best in the series. Atmosphere alone cannot carry this fan remake, so how does the gameplay hold up? I define the two most critical components for Metroid's gameplay as the combat and the progression. And as such, in AM2R, both aspects of the game feel pretty solid, with the experience only feeling at worst lackluster for about as many times as it happened in, say, Super Metroid.
In order to complete the overall picture of how the progression feels in this game, I think it's important to look at how the movement mechanics work. Like Metroid II, Samus moves faster while in Morph Ball than while she is running, only this time the Varia suit doesn't actually improve your speed. While I understand that this kind of makes sense, at the end of the day it only ends up feeling like a bit of a chore to constantly switch in and out of Morph Ball. I got used to it eventually and it became such second nature that I wound up doing that in other Metroid games as well, so it's no longer a pain to me anymore but initially I thought it was kind of silly that they kept such an antiquated aspect of the original game.
On the bright side, everything else about the movement mechanics in this game is great. Samus does not jump slow in the air, the Space Jump still feels as smooth as it did in Zero Mission but they also brought back the ability to wall-jump even after getting Space Jump, the Shinespark has a longer charge time and now you can buffer another Shinespark charge when you aim at a slope. Wall jumping is still as fast as it was in Zero Mission but is now easier to control, and the same goes for bomb jumping. They even improved the Spider Ball in this game! While it still moves incredibly slow, and rightfully so as it makes scaling obstacles really easy, they at least made it fast enough to escape being knocked off a wall by a bomb. In the original Metroid II, sometimes if you were in a bit of a dip in the wall, you wouldn't have enough time to crawl away from the bomb you dropped, knocking you off the wall. I can't remember that happening to me at all anymore in AM2R, even with the faster bomb timer in this game.
There are also the added controls like a button for locking the direction you're aiming as well as a consolidated button for entering Morph Ball, so that's nice. Even better is that the game goes beyond the obvious stuff like wall jumping and brings out some pretty cool movement techniques like mochballing. I always found mochballing weird in Super Metroid for being a pretty obvious glitch, not some thing the developers intended as depth to the game. In here, it seems pretty fair to say it is intentional. First of all, you no longer have to go through a door for it to work. Just do a Speed Boost and, if you morph at about the height of Samus's Morph Ball away from the floor, you'll keep Speed Boosting. This opens up ways to traverse through areas like the series of waterfall tunnels before the last area, which appear at a glance to be impossible to Speed Boost through.
There is also teching in this game, called an "umeki" apparently. If you're not familiar with Smash terminology, a tech is basically a button-input before your character lands on the floor to cancel landing lag. You can use this to cancel the lag from being knocked back by enemies like Zetas. There are probably other hidden tricks in this game that I'm still not aware of, and because they feel as natural as the standard movement options in the game, there was never a point where I felt like I was being prevented by the game from pulling off tricks and progression skips, other than the obvious lava carried over from Metroid II.
At face value, AM2R's progression seems just as linear as it was in Metroid II: Return of Samus. Apparently several have criticized AM2R for being this way and expected the layout to be rebuilt from scratch. To that I then ask, At what point does the game still hold true as a remake? When I first played, I came in expecting to say the game was forever at fault due to being based off of Metroid II, but that is pretty unfair to the developers of this game. Instead, it is more appropriate to judge the game by the lengths the developers took to alleviate the problems with the original game's linearity. Metroid II's problem isn't exactly that it's linear, it's that there are very few ways to replay the game, especially since items had very little impact on the progression whatsoever.
The first immediately apparent feature of AM2R is that there are different difficulty modes, so right off the bat there are already three ways to play the game. Then there are how the items affect the progression, which is where it matters most. What point would there be in a Metroidvania if the items had little effect on the progression? In AM2R, starting off there are already points in the game where you are required to have an item to move forward, something the original lacked with just a few exceptions that made bare minimum use of items. Extending past that, there are several shortcuts in the game that present alternative paths for you to take assuming you skipped an item, as was the case in Zero Mission (although to a much lesser extent in AM2R).
One of the best examples of this is the fourth area of the game. A normal way of going through here would probably be: killing some of the Metroids that outline the area, defeating the Tester to grab the Plasma Beam, then grabbing the Power Bombs after killing the Metroids. At first, it seems like the only way to progress after this area is by grabbing the Power Bombs, but you could also just skip the Plasma Beam and the Power Bombs entirely and use a shortcut with Super Missiles after killing all the Metroids. Or, you can go for one item and not the other, or you can grab the Power Bombs first, after killing the Metroids, and using them to make the Tester a lot easier and to get the Plasma Beam quicker. AM2R might still follow the linear structure of SR388, but it expands on the things that were available for you to explore and navigate through each area, allowing various options for progressing through the game. So because these options are available and the only real thing that halts progression is the lava, the linearity at no point feels unnaturally set up to force you into only one experience of the game.
The item placement is handled pretty well in this game. Most of the main items are located near environments that show you how those upgrades work, as is standard for the 2D games since Super Metroid. Most of the expansions are also placed decently, as none are ever in your way if you are trying to go for a low percent run, and only a few items are in odd places. Like for example, there's a platform in the first area that has a missile tank, but is only accessible by scaling the entire outline of the area with the Spider Ball, or by infinite bomb jumping. Because infinite bomb jumping is a bit of an advanced technique, and because the Spider Ball moves painfully slow, there isn't really much to encourage the player to bother checking out what's up there until later on when they can come back with Space Jump.
Then, looking at the game from a 100% perspective, there's the placement of items relative to the warp points in the game. I am a little disappointed that the only real way the developers figured how to connect the world together was through warp points, as they always tend to make things feel more like a video game. At the very least, it seems like they tried to make the warp points as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. I am still scratching my head, though, as to why the warp point that leads to the second area is placed in the fourth one instead of where the main hub is located. Some items are a bit of a ways off from these warp points, which is a little inconvenient, but at least by that point in the game, you can find pretty much about eighty percent of the items or so, so you don't really spend that much time looking around unless you missed something you could;ve acquired way earlier.
So despite remaining to SR388's linear layout, AM2R alleviates that linearity by amping up the impact that items have on the game, something that seems to be a crucial aspect of any Metroidvania. The game is also fairly open to various ways of replaying it, even if it may not be as much as in Super Metroid or in Zero Mission (but to be fair, it's pretty hard to top Zero Mission's sense of progression). The one caveat is the low percent run, which the game seems poorly balanced toward, especially at the end where the Queen can one-shot you without any Energy Tanks or Varia Suit on Normal.
Like the progression in this game, there are a few mechanics that help the combat as well. So far, that I know of, the standard Charge Attack is kept, the game brings back charged bombs (where you'd launch five bombs at once by morphing with a charged beam), and the game offers a new trick where you can rapid-fire the normal missiles depending on how you time pressing the attack button. I particularly like the return of the charged bombs, which does open up a couple of strategies here and there (apparently the fastest known method of killing the Queen involves the use of charged bombs). What really defines combat in this series are how the bosses play out, in my opinion at least, so I'll look at a few bosses to discuss how the combat stands.
The two-form Torizo battle was an excellent idea. For one thing, it fits very well with the recurring theme of completely distancing you from the familiar in this game. It's also a boss fight that forces you to learn to use the Space Jump to survive, and rewards skilled use of the Space Jump to bring the boss down quicker. The problem I have with the latter part of that is that shooting while jumping has always been pretty clunky in all of these games. It is actually pretty hard to aim missiles with precision while jumping, otherwise something like the Kraid quick kill in Super Metroid would be really easy. While the Torizo has a decent hurtbox for the missiles to land, it still has good mobility and it is almost constantly attacking you, so most players end up just sticking to the platforms which block line of sight with the boss for a good chunk of the fight. It's a fun boss but could've been a bit better had it compensated the awkwardness of keeping yourself in the air and keeping your aim straight at the same time.
Arachnus is pretty great in the fact alone that it's one of the few bosses in the entire series that actually has you use the Bombs. It's like a blend of Fusion's Arachnus with an expanded take on how you originally killed Arachnus in Metroid II, blending both shooting and bombing to take the boss down. While more challenging than he was in Fusion, his patterns are still reasonable to learn and avoid, as there is enough time to dodge each of them once you know what to expect.
The Metroids are, for the most part, pretty great. From the dodgy AI of the Alpha Metroid to the nimble-yet-powerful theme for the Zeta Metroid, fighting each form gets progressively tense and more complicated. While Omega's are really satisfying to take down through their weakness in the back, the problem with them is that they leave way too little room to jump over them, and the other alternative to getting out of being cornered is to wait out their attacks in the nooks that are in each of their rooms. I don't know if they were going for this idea of fighting something so immense you have to hide from their attacks, but I don't think this would be the right way to do it if that were the case as you are then just basically waiting for the boss to stop attacking. If there was more room to Space Jump and less room to hide, I think it would better encourage the idea of dodging its attacks and striking it in its most vulnerable spot in the back. So while I'm glad Omega Metroids keep their weakness in the back, something was lost from veering away from having to face them head-on to avoid their attacks as was the case in the original game (and in Fusion, you had to put yourself in a vulnerable position to be able to attack it).
I'll skim over some other bosses quickly. Serris and Genesis were pretty cool, but also kind of easy and work as just a little more than fanservice. The Tester was kind of fun but there are so many projectiles the game starts feeling like Touhou, and Metroid is definitely not suited to accommodate that, maybe have at least the ice beam that the boss uses as somewhat destructible because it feels like it covers all the space on your screen. The Queen feels almost perfect, I just think she could've used one more attack. Maybe something to keep you from getting too comfortable on the floor when she lunges her head above you.
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| Literally Touhou, the boss. |
One thing I found actually noteworthy involving the combat in this game is the ammo count for Super Missiles and Power Bombs, which the total limit is twenty (ten in Hard Mode). While I still feel like twenty Power Bombs is still way more than you'll ever need, I really like the leash they put on Super Missiles in this game, as going for all of them in Zero Mission and in Super Metroid came at the cost of mitigating a lot of the tension in later boss fights, as missing a few Super Missiles wouldn't be all that big of a deal. In AM2R, it's already hard enough killing things like the Omega Metroids due to very small windows to hit the hurtboxes, so not only is it harder to land hits with Super Missiles, it is also easier run low on them as a result, making Super Missiles more valuable (especially in speed runs) and satisfying to use. Even on Hard Mode, ten Super Missiles feels like just the right amount to get by.
All in all, the combat in this game is pretty decent. Nothing in this game has anything on Fusion's bosses, but I'd say they are comparable to Super Metroid's bosses in terms of the amount and degree of the problems each game has with them, only with more variety in AM2R's favor from what I can remember.
Running through some final points, I want to say that consolidating the recharge stations to the save stations was a good move since fighting Metroids is still a focus in this game. There is one save station, though, that has some pretty poor placement, and that's the one on the way to the first Omega Metroid. The risk of dying on the way to it is really minimal, and the safety net it provides from such a small chance of dying in that tunnel comes at the cost of a long trek back to fight the boss, where you'll be so much more likely to die.
Interestingly, this game does away with map stations, probably due to the map covering the entire planet in one screen, another sort of first for the series (and a pretty welcome one for newer players and for people trying to keep track of all the items). I kinda wish the map listed the items you collected as it did in Fusion and Zero Mission, but it's not too bad. Adding a map to this game really helped modernize Metroid II and make it friendlier to newer players, although some complain it makes it to easy to know where you are going. Personally, I still had feelings of discovery when I'd come across a shortcut in a place I didn't expect to find one or a hidden switch like the one for the first Energy Tank in the first area, and in the original game it was still pretty easy to navigate through anyway once you played through it to the end.
The last thing I'll cover are the couple of gimmicky new gameplay moments that seem to be in the game because in the remake of Metroid, Nintendo added a whole new gameplay segment. The reason it works in Zero Mission, despite the stealth mechanics not really working very well at all, is because you can still feel like you are playing the game normally while still being impacted by the significant change at the same time. The Sidehopper minigame, while adding to the atmosphere of the area being an industrial facility, really slows down the pace for a game that has extremely simplistic mechanics. Then there are the ball puzzles, which drove me crazy. Slowing the game down quite a bit to place a huge emphasis on positioning, these puzzles get pretty annoying especially on 100% runs, as it is a little hard to tell just where the ball is going to end up aside from which direction you are shooting it toward. Even more annoying is that, if the ball goes through an open door, it disappears and you'll have to wait a few seconds to get a new one. I appreciated the idea of switching up the gameplay with some new puzzles, but the ball puzzles would've been better if they depended on mechanics that the player could more reliably control.
So to sum it up, this game fulfills both the combat and progression aspects of Metroid's game play pretty well, and then some. I never thought I wanted a bipedal Zeta Metroid chasing me down rather than the floaty one I could shoot in the back, and AM2R made me love the idea. The movement mechanics, shortcuts, and different item choices have varied my replays of this game considerably more than I expected, and I still feel like there are more things to try that I just don't know about yet. So despite its missteps, like the ball puzzles and the slightly disappointing Omega Metroids, the gameplay still comes out pretty strong, and no Metroid game has ever been perfect in that department anyway, as I have seen so far in each of my posts in the Metroid Retrospective. I feel like there is so much more I can say about this game, too, but I feel I'm already pushing a reader's tolerance for length as it is. If there's anything you'd like to say or any part of this you don't agree with (as I'm sure a lot of people would), feel free to discuss this wonderful game in the comments or messaging me if there is some way of doing that on this site.
Even if AM2R might not really be the best Metroid game ever so much as really my favorite Metroid ever, I still strongly recommend this game. It is exactly the game I hoped it would be, the game that the Metroid community so desperately needed, and then some. For all intents and purposes, this is pretty much the end of my review, so thank you for sticking with me.
Depiction of Samus in AM2R
Not even this review is safe from my moments of self-indulgence. If you are new to this (as I assume you are, being my imaginary WordPress audience), this is the point where I let loose quite a bit and take less accountability for the things I say. Samus herself is just as critically important to the series as any other component of a Metroid game, so of course I dedicate a section of each post to the Lady herself. So how does AM2R expand the depiction of Samus in Metroid II? Well first I say, take the her cute underwear at the end of Metroid II, and throw it out the window. Er... I mean, the idea of depicting her that way.
It's worth noting that Samus in this game was in fact not designed by a Japanese artist, so her appearance does not too closely follow suit with the anime/manga appearance she had in Zero Mission and Fusion. Rather, she was designed by Azima "Zim" Khan, who (I think) strove for a more grounded, realistic approach without doing away too much with the cartoon side of these 2D games. If you don't know who Zim is, she's the artist who did the super cool Anatomically Correct Samus model and made the top post of the Metroid subreddit for over a year. If you still don't know who that is, well, um, she made the promotional art for this game, so yeah. She also gave me permission to use the stuff she made on this post when I'm very clearly not making any money off this (some people, *cough cough "Nintendo" cough,* don't appreciate using something they made when it garnishes no royalties whatsoever), so that makes her even cooler than she already is.
Anyway, as this is about Samus and not really about Zim, I don't really know what else I can say. AM2R offers three endings, one with Samus in her suit, and then the other two show what she looks like. The best ending shows her laid back, drinking a can of... soda? I know Zim is already working on some goofy fun endings, but this ending was also pretty fun to me too. I don't know, it's the first time I've seen Samus kicking back with a soda, okay?
To be more serious about this, I really appreciate that Zim and whoever designed the death sprite for Samus (I think it was the guy named Sabre) went with the orange crop-top and shorts combo that Samus donned at the end of Zero Mission. Making this even sweeter is that Samus's face here even bears some resemblance to her face in the first Metroid Prime, which has so far been, in my opinion, the most unique face she's had in the series. This sounds pretty ridiculous, hence why I am probably the least qualified person to talk about art and graphic design and stuff, but it is true that Samus has been pretty much a woman of many similar yet still various faces throughout time, even between Fusion and Zero Mission.
I wouldn't say that the depiction of Samus ends with Zim's endings though, or at least the things that can be said about it. The other point in the game where it's pretty awesome is, again, the part where she holds up the jaws of the Metroid Queen with her hands and feet. Granted, of course, she was in her Power Suit, whereas she most likely would've wound up in the death animation without it. Still, in a game that really drives home the theme of survival of the fittest, that brief little moment conveys a lot of strength in Samus to turn the most vulnerable position into an advantage for her to triumph over a dangerous monster. That is pretty much all the depiction any of these games ever need of her (though before Zim starts writing an angry comment, I have to be clear the game would lose out on a lot without her endings!) Whoever came up with that idea along with the people involved with making it happen are all brilliant. I just wish the Morph Ball didn't clip through the jaw, ha ha.
And that's about it really. Not much more I can say about how Samus is depicted that's different from her portrayal in the original game, as both establish her empathy for peaceful creatures in the same manner. Sometimes these games don't have to make leaps and bounds to adequately portray Samus, so AM2R pulls it off just fine. I kinda wish those goofy endings came out before I wrote this, though, as those would have been fun to talk about. Oh well.
Thank you for sticking with me through this pretty lengthy post that still doesn't even cover all of the thoughts I have on this game. Now it's time to break out some more of the co-op in Federation Force. Hopefully I will have a post for both Metroid Prime and Federation Force next week (on WordPress, I'll be uploading the previous entries in the Metroid Retrospective as well). Until next time.
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